Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

by Umberto Eco

  Musil goes on for half a page and then remarks:

  In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.

  It is enough, however, to find just one work of fiction that does not display any of these features (we could provide dozens of examples) to argue that an incontrovertible signal of fictionality does not exist. But, as we noted earlier, elements of paratext can supervene.

  In such a case, what very often occurs is that one does not decide to enter a fictional world; one happens to find oneself within that world. After a while, one becomes aware of this and decides that what is happening is a dream. As Novalis said, “You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.” But this state of half sleep—a state in which the narrator of Sylvie finds himself—poses many problems.

  In fiction, precise references to the actual world are so closely linked that, after spending some time in the world of the novel and mixing fictional elements with references to reality, as one should, the reader no longer knows exactly where he or she stands. Such a state gives rise to some well-known phenomena. The most common is when the reader maps the fictional model onto reality—in other words, when the reader comes to believe in the actual existence of fictional characters and events. The fact that many people believed and still believe that Sherlock Holmes really existed is only the most famous of a great many possible examples. If you have ever visited Dublin with some Joyce fans, you will know that after a while it is extremely difficult, both for them and for you, to separate the city described by Joyce from the real one; and the conflation has become even easier now that scholars have identified the individuals Joyce used as models. As you walk along the canals or climb the Martello Tower, you begin to confuse Gogarthy with Lynch or Cranly and young Joyce with Stephen Dedalus.

  In speaking of Nerval, Proust says that “a shiver runs down one’s spine when one reads the name ‘Pontarme’ in a railway guide.”6 Having realized that Sylvie is about a man who dreams of a dream, Proust dreams about Valois, which actually exists, in the absurd hope of once again finding the girl who has become part of his own dreams.

  Taking fictional characters seriously can also produce an unusual type of intertextuality: a character from a particular fictional work may appear in another fictional work and thus act as a signal of truthfulness. This is what happens in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the end of Act 2, where the hero is congratulated by a musketeer, admiringly introduced as “d’Artagnan.” The presence of d’Artagnan is a guarantee of the truthfulness of Cyrano’s story—even though d’Artagnan was a minor historical figure (known mainly through Dumas), whereas Cyrano was a famous writer.

  When fictional characters begin migrating from text to text, they have acquired citizenship in the real world and have freed themselves from the story that created them.

  I once came up with the following idea for a novel (since postmodern narrative has by now inured readers to every possible metafictional depravity):

  Vienna, 1950. Twenty years have gone by, but Sam Spade has not given up his search for the Maltese falcon. His contact now is Harry Lime, and they are talking furtively at the top of the Prater’s Ferris wheel. They come down and walk over to the Mozart Café, where Sam is playing “As Time Goes By” on the lyre. At a table in the back, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, a bitter expression on his face, sits Rick. He has found a clue in the papers Ugarte has shown him, and now he shows Sam Spade a photograph of Ugarte: “Cairo!” murmurs the detective. Rick goes on with his account: when he triumphantly entered Paris with Captain Renault, as a member of De Gaulle’s liberating army, he heard about a certain Dragon Lady (allegedly the assassin of Robert Jordan during the Spanish Civil War), whom the secret service had put on the trail of the falcon. She should be here any minute. The door opens and a woman appears. “Ilsa!” Rick cries. “Brigid!” Sam Spade cries. “Anna Schmidt!” Lime cries. “Miss Scarlett!” Sam cries, “you’re back! Don’t make my boss suffer any more.”

  Out of the darkness of the bar comes a man with a sarcastic smile on his face. It’s Philip Marlowe. “Let’s go, Miss Marple,” he says to the woman. “Father Brown is waiting for us on Baker Street.”

  When does it become easy to attribute a real life to a fictional character? This is not the fate of all fictional characters. It did not happen to Gargantua, to Don Quixote, to Madame Bovary, to Long John Silver, to Lord Jim, or to Popeye (either Faulkner’s Popeye or the comic book one). Instead, it happened to Sherlock Holmes, Siddhartha, Leopold Bloom, and Rick Blaine. I believe that the extratextual and intratextual life of characters coincides with cult phenomena. Why does a movie become a cult movie? Why does a novel or a poem become a cult book?

  Some time ago, while trying to explain why Casablanca has become a cult movie, I proposed the hypothesis that one factor contributing to the development of a cult around a particular work is the “disjointedness” of the work. But disjointedness also entails the possibility of being “put out of joint”—a notion that needs some explaining. It is now common knowledge that Casablanca was shot day by day without anyone knowing how the story would end. Ingrid Bergman looks charmingly mysterious in the film because, while acting her role, she did not know which man she would choose, and so gave both of them her tender and ambiguous smile. We also know that, in order to advance the plot, the scriptwriters put all the cliches of cinematic and narrative history into the film, turning it into a museum, so to speak, for moviegoers. For this reason, it can be used as a kit for assembling archetypes. In a way, the same thing applies to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is the cult movie par excellence precisely because it lacks form, and so can be endlessly deformed and put out of joint. We should note also, however, that T. S. Eliot, in a famous essay, ventured the view that this was the reason for the success of Hamlet.

  According to Eliot, Hamlet resulted from the blending of three different source works in which the motive was revenge, in which delays were caused by the difficulty in assassinating a king surrounded by guards, and in which madness was Hamlet’s deliberate and effective means of escaping suspicion. Shakespeare, in contrast, dealt with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and was unable to impose his motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of his sources. Thus, “the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the ‘madness’ is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion . . . And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of literature.”7

  The immense and age-old popularity of the Bible is due to its disjointed nature, stemming from the fact that it was written by several different authors. The Divine Comedy is not disjointed at all, but because of its complexity, the number of characters it deals with, and the events it recounts (everything concerning heaven and earth, as Dante said), every line of it can be put out of joint and used as a magic spell or as a mnemonic device. Some fanatics have even gone so far as to take it as a basis for trivia games, just as Virgil’s Aeneid was used in the Middle Ages as a manual for prophecies and divination, like Nostradamus’ Centuries (another excellent example of success due to radical, irremediable disjointedness). But although the Divine Comedy can be put out of joint, the Decameron cannot, since each tale is to be taken in its entirety. The extent to which a particular work can be put out of joint does not depend on its aesthetic value. Hamlet is still a fascinating work (and not even Eliot can persuade us to love it less), whereas I do not believe that even Rocky Horror addicts would feel inclined to credit it with Shakespearean greatness. Yet both Hamlet and Rocky Horror are cult objects, since the former is “disjointable,” while the latter is so disjointed as to allow all kinds of interactive games. In order to become a Sacred Wood, a wood must be tangled and twisted like the forests of the Druids, and not or
derly like a French garden.

  There are, then, many reasons a work of fiction may be mapped onto real life. But we must also consider another, far more important problem: our tendency to construct life as a novel.

  According to the Judeo-Christian myth of origins, Adam named all creatures and things. In the age-old search for the perfect language (which will be the topic of my next book), attempts have been made to reconstruct the language of Adam, who is said to have known how to name things and creatures according to their nature. For centuries it was believed that Adam had invented a nomenclature—that is, a list of rigid designators—consisting of names of “natural kinds,” so that he could give a “true” label to horses, apples, or oak trees. During the seventeenth century Francis Lodwick put forward the idea that original names were the names not of substances but of actions; in other words, there was no original name for the drinker or the drink, but there was such a name for the act of drinking. It was from the sphere of action, Lodwick claimed, that the names of the doer (the drinker), the object (the drink), and the place (the drinking house) derived. Lodwick’s notions preceded what today is called the theory of case grammar (of which Kenneth Burke was an early proponent), according to which our understanding of a given term in a given context takes the form of an instruction: “There should be an agent, a counteragent, a goal, and so on.” In short, we understand sentences because we are able to imagine short stories, to which these sentences refer even when they are naming a given natural kind.

  We can find a similar idea in Plato’s “Cratylus”: a word represents not a thing in itself but the source or the result of an action. The genitive form for Jupiter is Dios because such an original name expressed the usual activity of the king of gods—that is, to be di’ on zen, “the one through whom life is given.” Likewise anthropos (“man”) is seen as the corruption of an earlier syntagma meaning “the one who is able to reconsider what has seen.”

  Thus, we could say that Adam did not distinguish tigers (for example) merely as individual specimens of a natural kind. He distinguished particular animals, endowed with certain morphological properties, insofar as they were involved in certain types of action, interacting with other animals and with their natural environment. Then he stated that the subject (usually acting against certain countersubjects in order to achieve certain goals, and usually showing up in specific circumstances) was only part of a story—the story being inseparable from the subject, and the subject being an indispensable part of the story. Only at this stage of world-knowledge could the subject X-in-action be labeled “tiger.”

  Today, in the field of artificial intelligence, specialists use the word “frames” to mean action schemes (such as entering a restaurant, going to the station to catch a train, opening an umbrella). Once a computer has learned these schemes, it is able to understand different situations. But psychologists such as Jerome Bruner argue that our normal way of accounting for everyday experiences likewise takes the form of stories,8 and the same thing occurs with History seen as historia rerum gestarum, or narration of past real events. Arthur Danto said that “history tells stories,” and Hayden White spoke of “history as a literary artifact.”9 A. J. Greimas has founded the whole of his semiotic theory upon an “actantial model,” a sort of narrative skeleton which represents the deepest structure of every semiosic process, so that “narrativity is . . . the organizing principle of all discourse.”10

  Our perceptual relationship with the world works because we trust prior stories. We could not fully perceive a tree if we did not know (because others have told us) that it is the product of a long growth process and that it does not grow overnight. This certainty is part of our “understanding” that a tree is a tree, and not a flower. We accept a story that our ancestors have handed down to us as being true, even though today we call these ancestors scientists.

  No one lives in the immediate present; we link things and events thanks to the adhesive function of memory, both personal and collective (history and myth). We rely upon a previous tale when, in saying “I,” we do not question that we are the natural continuation of an individual who (according to our parents or the registry office) was born at that precise time, on that precise day, in that precise year, and in that precise place. Living with two memories (our individual memory, which enables us to relate what we did yesterday, and the collective memory, which tells us when and where our mother was born), we often tend to confuse them, as if we had witnessed the birth of our mother (and also Julius Caesar’s) in the same way we “witnessed” the scenes of our own past experiences.

  This tangle of individual and collective memory prolongs our life, by extending it back through time, and appears to us as a promise of immortality. When we partake of this collective memory (through the tales of our elders or through books), we are like Borges gazing at the magical Aleph—the point that contains the entire universe: in the course of our lifetime we can, in a way, shiver along with Napoleon as a sudden gust of cold wind sweeps over Saint Helena, rejoice with Henry V over the victory at Agincourt, and suffer with Caesar as a result of Brutus’ betrayal.

  And so it is easy to understand why fiction fascinates us so. It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past. Fiction has the same function that games have. In playing, children learn to live, because they simulate situations in which they may find themselves as adults. And it is through fiction that we adults train our ability to structure our past and present experience.

  But if narrative activity is so closely linked to our everyday life, couldn’t it be that we interpret life as fiction, and that in interpreting reality we introduce fictional elements?

  I would like to cite a disconcerting story which was always clearly fictional—because it was founded on explicit quotations from fictional sources—yet which many people have unfortunately taken to be true history.

  The construction of our story began a long time ago, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Philip the Fair destroyed the Knights Templars. Since then, numerous tales have been invented concerning the clandestine activities of the survivors of the order. Even today we can find dozens of recent works on this subject, on the bookshelves usually labeled “New Age.”

  In the seventeenth century, another story originated—that of the Rosy Cross. The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross first appeared on the scene in the descriptions contained in the Manifestos of the Rosy Cross (Fama fraternitatis, 1614; Confessio roseae crucis, 1615). The author or authors of the Manifestos are unknown, officially, because those to whom authorship was attributed denied it. The Manifestos gave rise to a series of activities on the part of those who believed in the existence of the brotherhood, and who were thereby expressing their ardent desire to become members themselves. Aside from a few hints, no one admitted to belonging to the brotherhood, because the group was secret and Rosicrucian writers typically claimed that they were not Rosicrucians. This implies that, ipso facto, all those who later claimed to be Rosicrucians were certainly not. As a consequence, not only is there no historical proof of the existence of Rosicrucians, but by definition there can be none. In the seventeenth century Heinrich Neuhaus was able to “demonstrate” that they existed, supporting his claim with this extraordinary argument: “Simply because they change their names and lie about their age, and because through their own admission they come and go without being recognized, no logical person can deny that they must necessarily exist” (Pia et ultimissima admonestatio de fratribus Roseae Crucis, Danzig, 1618). In the centuries that have passed since then, adherents have formed countless esoteric groups that have claimed to be the sole and true heirs of the original Rosicrucians and to possess indisputable documents—which, however, cannot be shown to anyone, as they are secret.

  In the eighteenth century a French branch of Freemasonry called Scottish Freemasonry (also known as Templar and Occultist Freemasonry) became part of this fictional construction. Not only did Scot
tish Freemasons trace their origins to the builders of Solomon’s Temple, but they also claimed that the builders of the Temple were related to the Templars, whose secret tradition supposedly had been handed down through the mediation of the Rosicrucians. These secret societies and the possible existence of “Unknown Superiors” guiding the fate of the world were the subject of debate in the days just prior to the French Revolution. In 1789 the Marquis de Luchet warned that “in the bosom of the deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new beings, who know one another although they have never seen one another . . . From the Jesuits’ system of rule, this society adopts blind obedience; from the Masons, it takes its trials and ceremonies; and from the Templars, its subterranean mysteries and its great audacity” (Essai sur la secte des illuminés, 1789).

  Between 1797 and 1798, in an effort to account for the French Revolution, Abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à I’histoire du jacobinisme, a supposedly factual book that reads like a dime novel. It begins, naturally, with a discussion of the Templars. After the burning of their Great Master Molay, they allegedly transformed themselves into a secret society dedicated to destroying the papacy and all monarchies and to creating a world republic. In the eighteenth century they took over Freemasonry and created a sort of academy (whose evil members were Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert); they were also responsible for the founding of the Jacobins. But the Jacobins were controlled by an even more secret society, that of the Illuminati of Bavaria—regicides by vocation. Thus, the French Revolution, according to Barruel, was the final result of an age-old plot.

  Even Napoleon requested reports about clandestine sects. The author of these reports was Charles de Berkheim, who—as spies and informers usually do—got his information from public sources and gave Napoleon, as a fantastic scoop, all the news that Napoleon himself could have read in the books of the Marquis de Luchet and Barruel. Apparently, Napoleon was so impressed by these horrifying descriptions of a directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world, that he did his best to join the group.