Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

by Umberto Eco

  They heard my scream and the awful roar of the gun and the slugs tearing into bone and guts and it was the last they heard. They went down as they tried to run and felt their insides tear out and spray against the wall. I saw the general’s head splinter into shiny wet fragments and splatter over the floor. The guy from the subway tried to stop the bullets with his hands and dissolved into a nightmare of blue holes.7

  I might have been able to carry out the massacre just before I finished reading the passage out loud, but we can be reasonably satisfied. Twenty-six seconds of reading for ten seconds of massacre is pretty good going. In films, we usually have a precise match between discourse time and story time—a good example of scene.

  But now let’s see how Ian Fleming describes another horrifying event, the death of Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.

  There was a sharp “phut,” no louder than a bubble of air escaping from a tube of toothpaste. No other noise at all, and suddenly Le Chiffre had grown another eye, a third eye on a level with the other two, right where the thick nose started to jut out below the forehead. It was a small black eye, without eyelashes or eyebrows. For a second the three eyes looked out across the room and then the whole face seemed to slip and go down on one knee. The two outer eyes turned trembling up towards the ceiling.8

  The story lasts two seconds, one for Bond to shoot and the other for Le Chiffre to stare at the room with his three eyes, but the reading of this description took me forty-two seconds. Forty-two seconds for ninety-eight words in Fleming is proportionately slower than twenty-six seconds for eighty-one words in Spillane. Reading aloud has helped give you the impression of a slowed-down description, which in a film (for example, in Sam Peckinpah’s movies) would likewise have lasted quite a while, as if time had stopped. With the Spillane passage I was tempted to accelerate the rhythm of my reading, whereas reading Fleming I slowed down. I would say that Fleming’s is a good example of “stretching,” in which the discourse slows down in comparison to the speed of the story. Yet the stretching, like the scene, depends not on the number of words but on the pace that the text imposes on the reader. Moreover, in the course of a silent reading one is tempted to go quickly through Spillane, whereas one is led to savor Fleming (if we can use this word for such an appalling description). The terms, the metaphors, the ways the reader’s attention is fixed, force the Fleming reader to look in a very unusual way at a man who receives a bullet in his forehead; in contrast, the expressions used by Spillane evoke visions of massacre that already belong to our reader or spectator memories. We must admit that the comparison of the noise of a pistol’s silencer to that of a bubble of air, and the metaphor of the third eye, and the two natural eyes that at a certain point look up to where the third cannot, are an example of that defamiliarization extolled by the Russian Formalists.

  In his essay on Flaubert’s style,9 Proust says that one of the virtues of Flaubert is that he knows how to render the impression of time exceptionally well. And Proust, who took thirty pages to describe someone tossing and turning in his bed, enthusiastically admires the ending of The Sentimental Education, of which the finest thing, he maintains, is not a sentence but a white space.

  Proust observes that Flaubert, who has spent a great many pages describing the most insignificant actions of his protagonist Frédéric Moreau, accelerates toward the end, where he presents one of the most dramatic moments of Frédéric’s life. After Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état, Frédéric witnesses a cavalry charge in the center of Paris, observes excitedly the arrival of a squadron of dragoons “bent over their horses, with their swords drawn,” sees a policeman, sword in hand, attack a rebel, who falls down dead. “The policeman looked all around him, and Frédéric, open-mouthed, recognized Sénécal.”

  At this point Flaubert ends the chapter, and the white space which follows seems to Proust an “enormous blank.” Then, “without the shadow of a transition, while the measurement of time suddenly becomes no longer a quarter of an hour but years, decades,” Flaubert writes:

  He travelled.

  He came to know the melancholy of the steamboat, the cold awakening in the tent, the tedium of landscape and ruins, the bitterness of interrupted friendship.

  He returned.

  He went into society, and he had other lovers. But the ever-present memory of the first made them insipid: and besides, the violence of desire, the very flower of feeling, had gone.10

  We could say that Flaubert has step-by-step accelerated the discourse time, initially in order to render the acceleration of events (or of the story time). But then, after the blank space, he inverts the procedure and produces a very long story time in a very short discourse time. I think that here we see an example of defamiliarization which is obtained not semantically but syntactically and in which the reader is forced to “shift gears” through that simple but enormous blank space.

  So the discourse time is the result of a textual strategy that interacts with the response of readers and forces a reading time on them.

  At this point we can return to the question we asked about Manzoni. Why did he insert those pages of historical information on the bravoes, knowing full well that the reader would skip them? Because even the act of skipping takes time, or at least gives the impression of taking some time in order to save more. Readers know they are skipping (though perhaps they silently promise to read those pages afterward) and must infer or be aware that they are skipping pages which contain essential information. The author is not just suggesting to the reader that facts like the ones he is narrating actually happened; he is also indicating to what extent that little story is rooted in History. If one understands this (even if one has skipped the pages on the bravoes), Don Abbondio’s gesture of fingering his collar becomes a great deal more dramatic.

  How can a text impose a reading pace on a reader? We shall understand this better if we think about what happens in architecture and in the figurative arts.

  Usually it is said that there exist forms of art where the duration of time plays a specific role and where the discourse time coincides with the “reading time”; this happens in music, above all, and in film. In film the discourse time does not necessarily coincide with the story time, whereas in music there is perfect congruence among the three times (except if one wants to identify the story with the theme or the melodic sequence, and both plot and discourse with a complex treatment of these themes, through variations or flashbacks to early themes, as in Wagner). These temporal arts permit only a “rereading time,” since the viewer or the listener can listen or watch over and over again—and today records, tapes, compact discs, and videocassettes have enormously expanded this privilege.

  In contrast, it seems that the arts of space, such as painting and architecture, have nothing to do with time. Certainly they can embody formal evidence of their physical aging over the centuries (they tell us about their history), but they do not seem to allow time for being enjoyed. Even a visual work of art, however, requires a circumnavigational time. Both sculpture and architecture require—and impose through the complexity of their structure—a minimum time to be entirely experienced. One could take a year to circumnavigate the cathedral at Chartres, without ever realizing how many sculptural and architectural details there are to be discovered. The Beinecke Library at Yale, with its four identical sides and its symmetrical windows, requires less time to circumnavigate than does Chartres cathedral. Rich architectural decoration represents an imposition of the architectural form on viewers, since the richer the detail, the more time it takes to enjoy it. Certain pictorial works of art require multiple viewings. Take, for example, a painting by Jackson Pollock: here the canvas is, at first glance, open to a quick inspection (the viewer sees only informal matter), but upon subsequent inspection the work must be interpreted as the fixed trace of the process of its own formation, and—as happens in a wood or in a labyrinth—it is difficult to tell which path is the privileged one, where to start, which way to choose so as to penetrate the still im
age that results from the act of dripping the paint.

  In written fiction it is certainly difficult to ascertain what the discourse time and the reading time may be; but there is no doubt that at times an abundance of description, a mass of minute particulars in the narration, may serve less as a representational device than as a strategy for slowing down the reading time, until the reader drops into the rhythm that the author believes necessary to the enjoyment of the text.

  There are certain works that, in order to impose this rhythm on the reader, make story time, discourse time, and reading time identical. In television this would be referred to as live broadcast. Just think of that film in which Andy Warhol trained a camera on the Empire State Building for a whole day. It is difficult in literature to quantify reading time, but it could be argued that in reading the last chapter of Ulysses you need at least as much time as Molly took to think through her stream of consciousness. At other times all we need to do is use proportional criteria: if you take two pages of text to say that someone has gone a mile, you’ll need four pages to say that he has gone two miles.

  That great literary trickster Georges Perec once nurtured the ambition of writing a book as big as the world. Then he realized he couldn’t manage it, and in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien he more humbly tried to describe “live” everything that had happened in the place Saint-Sulpice from October 18 to October 20, 1974. Perec knew perfectly well that many things have been written about that square, but he set out to describe the rest, what no history book or novel has ever told: the totality of everyday life. He sits down on a bench, or in one of the two bars of the square, and for two whole days writes down everything that he sees—the buses that go by, a Japanese tourist who photographs him, a man in a green raincoat; he notices that the passersby have at least one hand occupied, holding a bag, a briefcase, the hand of a child, a dog’s leash; he even records seeing someone who looks like the actor Peter Sellers. At two P.M. on October 20, he stops. It is quite impossible to tell everything that happens at a certain spot in the world, and when all is said and done, his own account is sixty pages long and can be read in half an hour. That is, if the reader doesn’t savor it slowly for a couple of days, trying to imagine every scene described. At this point, however, we would be talking not about reading time but about hallucinating time. In the same way we can use a map to imagine trips and extraordinary adventures through unknown lands and seas, but in such a case the map has become merely a stimulus and the reader has become the narrator. Whenever I’m asked what book I would take with me to a desert island, I reply, “The phone book: with all those characters, I could invent an infinite number of stories.”

  Congruence among story, discourse, and reading times may be sought for reasons which have very little to do with art. Lingering is not always an index of nobility. I once asked myself how one could scientifically ascertain whether a film was pornographic or not. A moralist would reply that a film is pornographic if it contains explicit and detailed scenes of sexual acts. But in many pornography trials it has been demonstrated that certain works of art contain such scenes for realistic purposes, to describe life as it is, or for ethical reasons (insofar as the sensuality shown is condemned), and that in any case the aesthetic value of the entire work redeems the obscenity of its parts. Since it’s hard to establish whether an author is truly concerned with realism, or has sincere ethical intentions, or attains aesthetically satisfying results, I decided (after examining many hard-core movies) that an infallible rule does exist.

  When trying to assess a film that contains sexually explicit scenes, you should check to see whether, when a character gets into an elevator or a car, the discourse time coincides with the story time. Flaubert may take one line to say that Frédéric traveled for a long time, and in normal films a character who gets on a plane at Logan Airport in Boston will, in the next scene, land in San Francisco. But in a pornographic film if someone gets in a car to go ten blocks, the car will journey those ten blocks in real time. If someone opens a fridge and pours out a Sprite that he’s going to drink in the armchair after switching on the TV, the action takes precisely the time it would take you if you were doing the same thing at home.

  The reason is pretty simple. A pornographic film is designed to satisfy the audience’s desire for sexually explicit scenes, but it can’t show an hour and a half of uninterrupted sexual acts because that would be tiring for the actors—and ultimately tedious for the audience as well. The sexual acts therefore have to be dispersed throughout the story. But no one has the least intention of spending time and money thinking up a worthwhile story, and the spectators aren’t interested in the story either, because all they’re doing is waiting for the sexy bits. The story is thereby reduced to a series of insignificant everyday actions, such as going someplace, drinking a whisky, putting on a coat, talking about irrelevant things; and it makes more economic sense to film someone driving a car than to mix him up in a shoot-out á la Mickey Spillane (which, apart from everything else, would distract the viewer). And so, whatever is not sexually explicit has to take as much time as it would in everyday life—whereas the sexual acts have to take longer than they would in reality. This, then, is the rule: when in a film two characters take the same time they would in real life to get from A to B, we can be absolutely sure we are dealing with a pornographic film. Of course, sexually explicit acts are also required—otherwise a film like Wim Wenders’ Im Lauf der Zeit, or Kings of the Road (1976), where two people are shown traveling on a truck for the better part of four hours, would be a pornographic film, which is not the case.

  Dialogue is often cited as the prime example of perfect congruence between story time and discourse time. But the following is a rather exceptional case, in which, for reasons that have nothing to do with literature, an author has managed to invent a dialogue that gives the impression of lasting longer than a real one. Alexandre Dumas used to be paid by the line for his novels, which were published in installments, and so he was often led to increase the number of lines to add a little something to his income. In Chapter 11 of The Three Musketeers (to which we shall return in another lecture) d’Artagnan meets his beloved Constance Bonacieux, suspects her of unfaithfulness, and tries to discover why she was found at night near Aramis’ house. Here is a part, and only a part, of the dialogue that comes at this point in the novel:

  “Without doubt, Aramis is one of my most intimate friends.”

  “Aramis! Who is he?”

  “Come, come, you won’t tell me you don’t know Aramis?”

  “This is the first time I ever heard his name pronounced.”

  “It is the first time, then, that you ever went to that house?”

  “Certainly it is.”

  “And you did not know that it was inhabited by a young man?”

  “No.”

  “By a musketeer?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It was not him, then, you came to seek?”

  “Not the least in the world. Besides, you must have seen that the person I spoke to was a woman.”

  “That is true; but this woman may be one of the friends of Aramis.”

  “I know nothing of that.”

  “Since she lodges with him.”

  “That does not concern me.”

  “But who is she?”

  “Oh! That is not my secret.”

  “My dear Madame Bonacieux, you are charming; but at the same time you are one of the most mysterious women.”

  “Do I lose much by that?”

  “No; you are, on the contrary, adorable!”

  “Give me your arm, then.”

  “Most willingly. And now?”

  “Now conduct me.”

  “Where?”

  “Where I am going.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “You will see, because you will leave me at the door.”

  “Shall I wait for you?”

  “That will be useless.”

 
; “You will return alone, then?”

  “Perhaps I may, perhaps I may not.”

  “But will the person who shall accompany you afterward be a man or a woman?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “But I will know it!”

  “How?”

  “I will wait for your coming out.”

  “In that case, adieu!”

  “Why so?”

  “I do not want you.”

  “But you have claimed . . .”

  “The aid of a gentleman, not the watchfulness of a spy.”

  “The word is rather hard.”

  “How are they called who follow others in spite of them?”

  “They are indiscreet.”

  “The word is too mild.”

  “Well, madame, I perceive I must act as you please.”

  “Why did you deprive yourself of the merit of doing so at once?”

  “Is there no merit in repentance?”

  “And you do really repent?”

  “I know nothing about myself. But what I know is, that I promise to do all you wish if you will allow me to accompany you where you are going.”

  “And you will leave me afterward?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without waiting for my coming out again?”

  “No.”

  “Parole d’honneur?”

  “By the faith of a gentleman.”

  “Take my arm, then, and let us go on.”11

  Certainly we know other instances of lengthy and irrelevant dialogue—for example, in Ionesco or in Ivy Compton-Burnett—but in those cases the dialogue is inconsistent because it is designed to represent irrelevance. In Dumas’ case a jealous lover and a lady who must run to meet Lord Buckingham to bring him to the Queen of France should not waste time in such mari-vaudages. This is not “functional” lingering; it is more similar to the deceleration found in pornographic films.