The other morning in Madrid, I was at lunch with my king. Don’t misunderstand me: despite my proudly republican allegiance, two years ago I was appointed a duke of the Kingdom of Redonda with the title of Duque de la Isla del Día de Antes. I share this ducal dignity with Pedro Almodóvar, A. S. Byatt, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, John Ashbery, Orhan Pamuk, Claudio Magris, Ray Bradbury, and several others, all of whom share the common quality of being liked by the king.
The island of Redonda lies in the West Indies and measures thirty square kilometers, the size of a handkerchief. It is completely uninhabited, and I don’t think any of its monarchs have ever set foot on it. It was acquired in 1865 by Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a banker who had petitioned Queen Victoria to establish it as an independent realm, which she graciously did—she could see it posed no threat to the British colonial empire. Over the decades the island had been passed down to various monarchs, some of whom had sold the title several times over, causing disputes between the various pretenders. If you want to find out more about its multidynastic history, look up Redonda in Wikipedia. The last king abdicated in 1997 in favor of the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who set about appointing dukes left, right, and center.
That’s the whole story, which of course has a slight whiff of pataphysical folly, though, after all, becoming a duke doesn’t happen every day. The point, however, is another: in the course of our conversation, Marías said something that struck me as interesting. We were discussing how people today are prepared to go to any lengths to appear on television, even if only to be the idiot who waves ciao ciao behind the person being interviewed. Recently in Italy, the brother of a young woman who had been brutally murdered, after the sad privilege of a mention in the crime columns of the newspapers, approached a television celebrity asking to be hired so he could exploit the tragic notoriety—and we know of some individuals who, to catch the limelight in a news story, are prepared to declare themselves cuckolded, impotent, or fraudulent, nor is it a secret to criminal psychologists that what moves the serial killer is his desire to be discovered and hence become a celebrity.
Why this folly? we asked. Marías suggested that what is happening today stems from the fact that people no longer believe in God. At one time they were persuaded that everything they did had at least one Spectator, who knew their every thought and deed, who could sympathize with them or, if necessary, condemn them. They could be outcasts, good-for-nothings, losers scorned by their fellow men. They were people who would be forgotten as soon as they were dead, but who nourished the belief that there was at least One who knew all about them.
“God at least knows how much I’ve suffered,” the sick grandmother abandoned by her grandchildren would say. “God knows I’m innocent,” the person unjustly convicted would say in consolation. “God knows how much I’ve done for you,” the mother would say to her ungrateful child. “God knows how much I love you,” the abandoned lover would shout. “God alone knows what I’ve had to deal with,” complained the wretch whose misfortunes everyone ignored. God was always invoked as the all-seeing eye, whose gaze brought meaning to the grayest and most senseless life.
Once this all-seeing Witness has gone, has been taken away, what remains? All that’s left is the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table. Appearance on the television screen is the only substitute for transcendence, and all in all it’s a satisfying substitute. People see themselves, and are seen, in a hereafter, but in return, everyone in that hereafter sees us here, and meanwhile we too are here. Think about it: to be able to enjoy all the advantages of immortality, albeit swift and ephemeral, and at the same time to have a chance of being celebrated in our own homes here, on earth, for our assumption into the Empyrean.
The trouble is that “recognition” is ambiguous. We all hope that our merits, or our sacrifices, or whatever good qualities we have, are “recognized.” But when we appear on the television screen and people see us afterward at the local bar and say, “I saw you on television last night,” they are merely saying “We recognize you”—in other words, we recognize your face—and that’s a different proposition altogether.
2010