by Umberto Eco
The basic rule in dealing with a work of fiction is that the reader must tacitly accept a fictional agreement, which Coleridge called “the suspension of disbelief.” The reader has to know that what is being narrated is an imaginary story, but he must not therefore believe that the writer is telling lies. According to John Searle, the author simply pretends to be telling the truth.1 We accept the fictional agreement and we pretend that what is narrated has really taken place.
Having had the experience of writing a couple of novels which have reached a few million readers, I have become familiar with an extraordinary phenomenon. For the first few tens of thousands of copies (the figure may vary from country to country), readers generally know perfectly well about this fictional agreement. Afterward, and certainly beyond the first-million mark, you get into a no-man’s-land where one can no longer be sure that readers know about it.
In Chapter 115 of my book Foucault’s Pendulum the character called Casaubon, on the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of June 1984, after attending an occultist ceremony at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, walks, as if possessed, along the entire length of the rue Saint-Martin, crosses the rue aux Ours, passes the Centre Beaubourg, and arrives at Saint-Merry Church. Afterward he continues along various streets, all of them named, until he gets to the place des Vosges. In order to write this chapter I walked the same route on several different nights, carrying a tape recorder, taking notes on what I could see and the impressions I had.
Indeed, since I have a computer program which can show me what the sky looks like at any time in any year, at whatever longitude or latitude, I even went so far as to find out if there had been a moon that night, and what position it occupied in the sky at various times. I did this not because I wanted to emulate Emile Zola’s realism, but because I like to have the scene I’m writing about in front of me while I narrate; it makes me more familiar with what’s happening and helps me get inside the characters.
After publishing the novel, I received a letter from a man who had evidently gone to the Bibliothéque Nationale to read all the newspapers from June 24, 1984. He had discovered that on the corner of the rue Réaumur (which I hadn’t actually named but which does cross the rue Saint-Martin at a certain point), after midnight, more or less at the time Casaubon passed by, there had been a fire—and a big fire at that, if the papers had talked about it. The reader asked me how Casaubon had managed not to see it.
To amuse myself, I answered that Casaubon had probably seen the fire but that he hadn’t mentioned it for some mysterious reason, unknown to me—a pretty likely explanation, given that the story was so thick with mysteries both true and false. I think that my reader is still trying to find out why Casaubon kept quiet about the fire, probably suspecting another conspiracy by the Knights Templars.
But that reader—even though affected by a sort of mild paranoia—was not entirely mistaken. I had led him to believe that my story took place in “real” Paris, and had even indicated the day. If in the course of such a minute description I had said that next to the Conservatoire stood Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, the reader would have been right to get annoyed, because if we are in Paris we are not in Barcelona. Did our reader really have the right to go looking for a fire which had actually taken place in Paris that night but which wasn’t in my book?
I maintain that my reader was exaggerating when he pretended that a fictional story should wholly match the actual world it refers to; but the problem is not quite as simple as that. Before passing final judgment, let’s have a look at just how guilty King Vittorio Emanuele III was.
When we enter the fictional wood we are certainly supposed to sign a fictional agreement with the author, and we are ready to accept, say, that wolves speak; but when Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf, we think she’s dead (and this conviction is vital to the reader’s extraordinary pleasure in her resurrection). We think of the wolf as shaggy and pointy-eared, more or less like the wolves one finds in real woods, and it seems quite natural that Little Red Riding Hood behaves like a little girl and her Mummy like a grown-up, worried and responsible. Why? Because that’s what happens in the world of our experience, a world that for now, without too many ontological commitments, we’ll call the actual world.
What I’m saying may seem very obvious, but it isn’t if we are hanging on to our dogma of suspension of disbelief. It would appear that when reading a work of fiction we suspend our disbelief about some things but not others. And given that the boundaries between what we have to believe in and what we don’t are pretty ambiguous (as we shall see), how can we condemn poor old Vittorio Emanuele? If he was merely supposed to admire the aesthetic elements of the picture (its colors, the quality of the perspective), he was quite wrong to ask how many inhabitants the village had. But if he entered it as one enters a fictional world and imagined himself wandering through those hills, why shouldn’t he have asked himself whom he would meet there and whether he might find a quiet little inn? Given that the picture was probably a realistic one, why should he have thought that the village was uninhabited, or plagued by nightmares à la Lovecraft? This is really the attraction in every fiction, whether verbal or visual. Such a work encloses us within the boundaries of its world and leads us, one way or another, to take it seriously.
At the end of the previous lecture we noted the way in which Manzoni, describing the Lake of Como, went about constructing a world. Yet he was borrowing the geographical characteristics of the real world. You may think that this happens only in a historical novel. We have seen, however, that it happens even in a fable—though in a fable the proportions between reality and invention are different.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
A nice beginning to a story which is certainly quite fantastic! Either we believe it or we’ll have to throw away the whole of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” But let’s carry on with our reading.
He was lying on his hard, as it were armour-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed-quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
This description seems to intensify the unbelievable nature of what has happened, yet reduces it to acceptable proportions. It’s amazing that a man wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect; but if in fact he has done so, this insect must have the normal features of a normal insect. These few lines of Kafka’s are an example of realism, not surrealism. We just have to pretend to believe that this ordinary insect is “gigantic,” which is actually quite a tall order for the fictional agreement. On the other hand, even Gregor can hardly believe his own eyes: “What has happened to me?” he asks himself. As we ourselves would in a similar situation. But let’s go on. The follow-up to the description is by no means fantastic but is absolutely realistic:
It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls . . .2
And the description continues, presenting a bedroom like many others we have encountered. Further on, it will seem absurd that Gregor’s parents and sister, without asking themselves too many questions, accept that their relative has become an insect, but their reaction to the monster is the one that any other inhabitant of the real world would have: they are terrified, disgusted, overwhelmed. To put it briefly, Kafka needs to set his unverisimilar story in a verisimilar background. If Gregor also found a talking wolf in his bedroom and together they decided to go off to a Mad Hatter’s tea party, we would have another story (although this, too, would have many aspects of the real world as background).
But let’s try to imagine a world even more unverisimilar than Kafka’s. Edwin Abbott, in his novel Flatland, has conceived of such a world, which he presents t
o us in the words of one of its inhabitants, in his first chapter, “Of the Nature of Flatland”:3
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard and with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.
If we looked at this two-dimensional world from above, as we look at the figures of Euclid in a geometry book, we would be able to recognize its inhabitants. But for the dwellers in Flatland, the notion of “above” doesn’t exist, because it’s a concept that requires the third dimension. So the Flatlanders can’t recognize one another by sight.
We could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines.
In case the reader finds this situation unlikely, Abbott is quick to point out how possible it is in terms of our experience of the real world:
When I was in Spaceland I heard that your sailors have very similar experiences while they traverse your seas and discern some distant island or coast lying on the horizon. The far-off land may have bays, forelands, angles in and out to any number and extent; yet at a distance you see none of these . . ., nothing but a grey unbroken line upon the water.
From an apparently impossible fact, Abbott deduces the conditions of possibility by making an analogy to what is possible in the real world. And since for the Flatlanders differences in shape mean differences of sex or of caste, and since they therefore have to know how to distinguish a triangle from a pentagon, Abbott shows, with great ingenuity, how it is possible for the lower classes to recognize the others by voice or touch (Chapter 5: “Of Our Methods of Recognising One Another”), while the upper classes can make such distinctions by sight, thanks to a providential feature of that world—namely, that it is always blanketed by fog. Here then, as in Nerval, fog plays an important role—although this time it’s not an effect of the discourse but a “real” feature of the story.
If Fog were non-existent, all lines would appear equally and indistinguishably clear . . . But wherever there is a rich supply of Fog objects that are at a distance, say of three feet, are appreciably dimmer than those at a distance of two feet eleven inches; and the result is that by careful and constant experimental observation of comparative dimness and clearness, we are enabled to infer with great exactness the configuration of the object observed. (Chapter 6: “Of Recognition by Sight”)
To render the proceedings more probable, Abbott presents various regular figures, with a great show of exact geometrical calculation. He thus explains, for example, that when we meet a triangle in Flatland, we naturally apprehend its top angle as very bright because it is nearer to the observer, while on either side the lines will fade away rapidly into dimness because the two sides recede into the fog. We have to summon all our knowledge of geometry acquired in the real world to render this unreal world possible.
We could say that, however improbable, Abbott’s world is nevertheless geometrically or perceptually possible—just as in reality it is possible that, through an accident in the evolution of the species, once upon a time there were wolves with certain phonatory organs or brain characteristics that allowed them to speak.
But as critics have shown, there are such things as “self-voiding” fictions—that is, fictional texts that demonstrate their own impossibility. According to a beautiful analysis by Lubomir Dolezel, in these worlds, as in Flatland, an author can bring possible entities into fictional existence by applying “conventional authentication procedures”; yet “the status of this existence is made dubious because the very foundation of the authenticating mechanism is undermined.” Doležel quotes, for instance, Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de rendez-vous (The House of Assignation), which appears to be an impossible world because “a) one and the same event is introduced in several conflicting versions; b) one and the same place (Hong-Kong) is and is not the setting of the novel; c) events are ordered in contradictory temporal sequences (A precedes B, B precedes A); d) one and the same fictional entity recurs in several existential modes (as fictional ‘reality’ or theater performance or sculpture or painting etc.).”4
Certain authors5 have suggested that a good visual metaphor of a self-voiding fiction is the celebrated optical illusion shown in Figure 11, which on a first “reading” gives both the impression of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility. On a second reading (to read it properly, one should try to design it), one realizes how and why it is bidimensionally possible but tridimensionally absurd.
Figure 11
Yet even in this case, the impossibility of a universe in which Figure 11 can exist derives from the fact that we tend to think such a universe operates according to the same laws of solid geometry that obtain in the real world. Obviously, if these laws hold, the figure is impossible. But as a matter of fact, this figure is not geometrically impossible, and the proof is that it was possible to design it on a bidimensional surface. We are simply misled when we apply to it not only the rules of plane geometry but also the rules of perspective used in drawing three-dimensional objects. This figure would be possible not only in Flatland but also in our own world, if we did not take the shading as a representation of shadows on a three-dimensional structure. And so we must admit that in order to be impressed, disturbed, frightened, or touched by even the most impossible of worlds, we must rely upon our knowledge of the actual one. In other words, we ought to take the real world as background.
This means that fictional worlds are parasites of the real world. There is no rule that prescribes the number of fictional elements that are acceptable in a work. In fact, there is a great deal of variety here—forms such as the fable, for instance, lead us to accept correctives to our knowledge of the real world at every step. But everything that the text doesn’t name or describe explicitly as different from what exists in the real world must be understood as corresponding to the laws and conditions of the real world.
Earlier in these lectures I cited two fictional passages in which there was a horse and a carriage. The first one, by Achille Campanile, made us laugh because the character Gedeone, asking a coachman to come and pick him up the next day, specified that he ought to bring the coach as well—and by the way, “Don’t forget the horse!” We laughed because it seemed obvious that the horse had to come too, even if it hadn’t been mentioned explicitly. We encountered another coach in Sylvie: during the night, it takes our narrator toward Loisy. If you read the pages where that journey is described (but you can trust me on this score), you will see that the horse is never mentioned. So maybe that horse doesn’t exist in Sylvie, since it doesn’t appear in the text? Yet it does exist. While reading, you imagine it trotting through the night, imparting a bumping movement to the carriage, and it is under the physical influence of those soft bumps that the narrator, as if listening to a lullaby, begins once more to dream.
But let us suppose we are not very imaginative readers: we read Nerval, and we don’t think about the horse. Now let us suppose that, once he had arrived at Loisy, the narrator had told us: “I stepped out of the coach and I found that throughout the whole journey from Paris it had not been drawn by a horse.” Sensitive readers would no doubt start and would hurry back to read the book from the beginning, because they had settled into a story of delicate and scarcely definable feelings in the best romantic spirit, whereas they should instead have been settling into a Gothic novel. Or perhaps they were reading a romantic variation of Cinderella, and the carriage was actually drawn by mice.
To sum up, there is a horse in Sylvie. It exists in the sense that it is not necessary to say there is one, but you can’t say there isn’t one.
Rex Stout’s detective stories take place in New York City, and his readers agree to pretend that character
s called Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Fritz, and Saul Panzer exist; in fact, readers even accept that Wolfe lives in a sandstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, near the Hudson River. They could go to New York and see if it really exists, or if it existed in the years in which Stout sets his tales; but they usually don’t bother. I say “usually” because we all know that there are people who go looking for Sherlock Holmes’s house in Baker Street, and I happen to be one of those who has gone looking for the house in Eccles Street in Dublin where Leopold Bloom is supposed to have lived. But these are episodes of literary fanship—which is a pleasant activity, and moving at times, but different from the reading of texts. To be a good reader of Joyce, it’s not necessary to celebrate Bloomsday on the banks of the Liffey.
But although we accept that Wolfe’s house is where it wasn’t and isn’t, we couldn’t accept that Archie Goodwin hails a taxi on Fifth Avenue and asks to be taken to Alexanderplatz—because, as Doblin has taught us, Alexanderplatz is in Berlin. And if Archie were to leave Nero Wolfe’s home (on West Thirty-fifth Street), turn the corner, and find himself straightaway on Wall Street, we would be justified in believing that Stout had gone over to a different kind of fiction and wanted to tell us of a world analogous to that of Kafka’s The Trial, where K goes into a building at one point in the city and comes out from the building at another. But in Kafka’s story we must accept that we are moving in a non-Euclidean world, mobile and elastic, as if we were living on an immense piece of chewed chewing gum.
Thus, it seems that readers have to know a lot of things about the actual world in order to take it as the correct background of the fictional one. But at this point we face a predicament. On the one hand, insofar as it tells us the story of only a few characters, usually in a well-defined time and place, a fictional universe can be seen as a small world infinitely more limited than the actual one. On the other hand, insofar as it adds some individuals, properties, and events to the whole of the actual universe (which serves as its background), it can be considered greater than the world of our experience. From this point of view, a fictional universe doesn’t end with the story itself but extends indefinitely.
