On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  Borges, who delighted in other universal and secret languages, knew well that Wilkins's project was impossible, because it presupposed taking into account all the objects in the world, the ideas to which they referred, and a unitary criterion for ordering our atomized ideas. And it is this hurdle that defeats all Utopians who aspire to a universal language. But let us examine the conclusion Borges drew from this consideration.

  Once he had understood and declared that one cannot arrive at a unitary classification of the universe, Borges became fascinated by the opposite project: that of overthrowing and multiplying all classifications. It is in this very essay on Wilkins that we find the mention of that improbable Chinese encyclopedia (The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), where we find in turn the most amazing model of uncategorized and incongruous classification (which would later inspire Michel Foucault in the opening passage of The Order of Things.)

  The conclusion Borges draws from the failure of classifications is that we cannot know what the universe is. Furthermore, he says that "one can entertain the idea that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense that this ambitious word possesses." But immediately afterward he points out that "the impossibility of penetrating the divine design of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from trying to trace human designs." Borges knew that some patterns, like that of Wilkins and many in science, try to reach a provisional and partial order. But he chose the opposite path: if the atoms of knowledge are many, the poet's game consists in making them rotate and recombine ad infinitum, in the endless combinations not only of linguistic etyms but also of ideas themselves. In fact, the Library of Babel is made up of millions of new Chinese encyclopedias of Benevolent Knowledge whose totality is never achieved. Borges found this library to be a storehouse of the culture of several millennia and of diaries of each archangel, but he did more than just explore it: he played at putting different hexagons in contact with one another, at inserting pages from one book into those of another (or at least at discovering the possible books in which this disorder had already taken place).

  When it comes to the latest form of contemporary experimentalism, postmodernism, there is much talk of playing with intertextuality. But Borges had gone beyond intertextuality to anticipate the age of hypertextuality, in which one book not only talks of another, but one can penetrate one book from within another. In not only designing the form of his library but also prescribing in every page how one should peruse it, Borges had designed the World Wide Web ahead of its time.

  Borges had to choose between dedicating his life to the search for God's secret idiom (a search he tells us about) or celebrating the millennial universe of knowledge as a dance of atoms, an interweaving of quotations, a welding together of ideas to produce not only everything that is and has been but also that which will be or could be, as is the duty or the potential of the librarians of Babel.

  Only in the light of this Borgesian experimentalism (playing with ideas, not words) can one understand the poetics of The Aleph, that magic object in which one can see at a glance the countless and separate objects that make up whatever populates the universe. One has to be able to see everything at once, and change the criterion of what links things together, and be able to see something else, changing at every vision of the "Celestial Emporium."

  At this point the question of whether the Library is infinite or of indefinite size, or whether the number of books inside it is finite or unlimited and recurring, becomes a secondary question. The true hero of the Library of Babel is not the library itself but its Reader, a new Don Quixote, on the move, adventurous, restlessly inventive, alchemically combinatory, capable of overcoming the windmills he makes rotate ad infinitum.

  For this Reader, Borges has suggested a prayer and an act of faith, and it comes in the other poem dedicated to Joyce:

  Entre el alba y la noche está la historia

  Universal. Desde la noche veo

  A mis pies los caminos del hebreo,

  Cartago aniquilada, Infierno y Gloria.

  Dame, Señor, coraje y alegría

  Para escalar la cumbre de este día.

  Between dawn and night lies universal

  History. From the depths of night I see

  At my feet the wandering of the Jew,

  Carthage annihilated, Hell, and the Glory of Heaven.

  Grant me, Lord, the happiness and courage

  To touch the summit of my day.

  This is a revised version of a lecture given on 22 May 1997 at the University of Castilla-La Mancha on the occasion of being awarded an honorary degree.

  BORGES AND MY ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

  I have always maintained that one should never invite heart patients to a cardiologists' conference. However, now that I am here, my duty should be, apart from thanking you for the many kind things you have said about me in the last few days, to stay silent and be consistent with my idea that a written text is a manuscript in a bottle. This does not mean that a manuscript can be read any way we like, but it should be read when the old man's gone, to use another popular expression. That is why, as I listened to each paper over the past few days, I have been jotting down questions to answer and points to elaborate, but in the end I have decided not to discuss the papers individually.

  I prefer to take advantage of the suggestions received from all of you to discuss the concept of influence. It is a crucial concept for criticism, for literary history, for narratology; but it is also dangerous. Over the last few days I have noticed this danger repeatedly, and for that reason I wish to pursue these reflections.

  When we speak of a relationship of influence between two authors, A and B, we are in one of two situations:

  (1) A and B were contemporaries. We could, for instance, discuss whether there was any influence between Proust and Joyce. There was not; they met just once, and each of them said more or less of the other: "I don't like him, and I have read little or nothing of anything he's written."

  (2) A came before B, as was the case with the two writers discussed in the last few days, so the debate is concerned only with the influence of A on B.

  Nevertheless, one cannot speak of influence in literature, in philosophy, or even in scientific research, if one does not place an X at the top of the triangle. Shall we call this X culture, the chain of previous influences? To be consistent with our exchanges over the last few days, let's call it the universe of the encyclopedia. One has to take this X into account, and above all in the case of Borges, since, like Joyce, although in a different way, he used universal culture as an instrument of play.

  The relationship between A and B can take place in different ways: (1) B finds something in the work of A and does not realize that behind it lies X; (2) B finds something in the work of A and through it goes back to X; (3) B refers to X and only later discovers that X was already in the work of A.

  I do not intend to construct a typology of my relationship with Borges. Instead I will quote some examples in an almost haphazard order, and leave to someone else the question as to how these examples correspond to different positions in this triangle. Moreover, it is often the case that these moments are confused because any consideration of influence must take account of the temporality of memory: an author can easily recall something he read in another author in—let's say—1958, forget that thing in 1980 while writing something of his own, and rediscover it (or be induced to remember it) in 1990. One could carry out a psychoanalysis of influences. For instance, in the course of my fictional work critics have found influences of which I was totally conscious, others that could not possibly have been influences because I had never known the source, and still others that astonished me but that I then found convincing—as when Giorgio Celli, discussing The Name of the Rose, spotted the influence of the historical novels of Dmitri Merezkovskij, and I had to admit that I had read them when I was twelve, even though I never thought of them while I was writing the novel.

  In any case, the diagram is not quite so
simple, because in addition to A, B, and the sometimes millennial chain of culture represented by X, there is also the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist must not be considered a metaphysical or metahistorical concept; I believe it can be broken down into a chain of reciprocal influences, but what is extraordinary about it is that it can work even in the mind of a child. Some time ago I found in an old drawer something I had written at the age of ten, the diary of a magician who claimed he was the discoverer, colonizer, and reformer of an island in the Glacial Arctic Ocean called Acorn. Looking back on it now, this seems a very Borgesian story, but obviously I could not have read Borges at the age of ten (and in a foreign language). Nor had I read the Utopian works of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, with their tales of ideal communities. However, I had read many adventure stories, fairy tales of course, and even an abbreviated version of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and who knows what chemical reactions had taken place in my imagination.

  The Zeitgeist can even make us think of reversals of time's arrow. I remember writing some stories about planets at the age of sixteen (so around 1948): the plots had as protagonists the Earth, the Moon, Venus falling in love with the Sun, etc. They were in their own way Cosmicomic stories. I sometimes amuse myself wondering how Calvino managed to burgle my house years later and find these youthful writings, which existed only in a single copy. I'm joking, of course, but the point is that sometimes one must believe in the Zeitgeist. In any case, I know you will not believe me, but Calvino's cosmic stories are better than mine.

  Lastly, there are themes common to many authors because they come, as it were, directly from reality. For example, I remember how after The Name of the Rose was published a number of people pointed to other books in which an abbey was burned, many of which I had not read at all. And nobody bothered to mention the fact that in the Middle Ages it was quite common for abbeys, as it was for cathedrals, to burn.

  Now, without sticking rigorously to my diagram, I would like to introduce into my triad—intentio auctoris, intentio operis, intentio lectoris—the intentio intertextualitatis, which must play a role in this discussion. Allow me to reflect, once more in no particular order, on three types of relationship with Borges: 1) the cases where I was fully conscious of Borgesian influence; 2) the cases where I was not aware of it, but subsequently readers (among whom I would also count you over the past few days) forced me to recognize that Borges had influenced me unconsciously; 3) the cases where, without adopting a triangle based on preceding sources and the universe of intertextuality, we are led to consider as straight two-way influence cases of three-way influence—namely, the debts Borges owed to the universe of culture, so that we cannot attribute to Borges what he always proudly declared he took from culture. It was no accident that yesterday I called him a "delirious archivist": Borges's delirium could not exist without the archive on which he was working. I believe that if someone had gone to him and said: "You invented this," he would have replied: "No, no, it was already there, it already existed." And he would have proudly taken as his own model that phrase of Pascals that I placed as an epigraph to my book A Theory of Semiotics: "And don't let anyone tell me that I have not said anything new: la disposition des matiéres est nouvelle."

  I say this not to deny my debts to him, which are many, but to lead you back, and to lead myself back, to a principle that I think is fundamental for all those who have taken part in this conference, certainly for me, and certainly for Borges: this most important point is that books talk to each other.

  In 1955 Borges's Ficciones came out in Italy, with the title La biblioteca di Babele in Einaudi's Gettoni series. It had been recommended to Einaudi by Sergio Solmi, a great poet whom I really loved, particularly for an essay of his on science fiction as a version of the fantastic, which he had written some years before. You see the role the Zeitgeist plays: Solmi discovers Borges while he is reading American writers of science fiction, who write (perhaps consciously) in the tradition of the Utopian tale that begins in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Let us not forget that Wilkins also wrote a book on the inhabitants of the moon, and therefore he too, like Godwin and others, was already traveling to other worlds. I think it was one evening in 1956 or '57 that Solmi told me as we strolled together in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan: "I advised Einaudi to publish this book; we have not managed to sell even five hundred copies, but you should read it because it is very good." That was how I first fell in love with Borges, and I remember going to friends' houses and reading them excerpts from Pierre Menard.

  At that time I was beginning to write those parodies and pastiches that later would become Diario mínimo (Misreadings). Influenced by what? Perhaps the strongest influence there was Proust's Pastiches et mélanges, so much so that when Diario min imo came out in French I chose the title Pastiches et postiches. But I recall that when I later published Diario minimo, in 1963, I thought of giving it a title that alluded to a title of Vittorini's, Piccola borghesia, except that I would have liked to change the title to Piccola Borgesia. The point of this, then, is to explain how a network of influences and echoes began to come into play.

  However, I could not have allowed myself a reference to Borges at that time, because in Italy he was still known to very few people. It was only in the following decade that the publication of all his other works established Borges definitively in Italy, principally thanks to Domenico Porzio, a very dear friend of mine and a man of great intellectual openness and wide reading, though a traditionalist critic. While polemics about the neo-avanguardia raged in Italy, Borges was not considered an avant-garde writer. This was the time when the poetry anthology / novissimi appeared and then the Gruppo 63, and their models were Joyce and Gadda. The neo-avant-garde was interested in an experimentalism that worked on the signifier (their model was that of the illegible book); Borges, on the other hand, who wrote in a classical style, worked on the signifieds, and therefore as far as we were concerned at the time he was beyond the pale, a disturbing presence, one not easily categorized. In crude terms, while Joyce or Robbe-Grillet was on the left, Borges was on the right. And since I would not want this distinction to be understood in political terms, we could also say the opposite, and their opposition would stay the same.

  In any case, for some of us Borges was a "secret love." He was reclaimed only later by the neo-avant-garde, after a lengthy and circuitous process.

  In the early 1960s fantasy was either traditional fiction or science fiction, so it was possible to write an essay on science fiction and the fantastic without addressing the theory of literature. I believe that interest in Borges began midway through the sixties, with what was called the structuralist and semiological movement.

  Here I must correct another error that is continually made, even in what claim to be scholarly works: today it is said that the Italian neo-avant-garde (Gruppo 63) was structuralist. In truth, nobody in that group was interested in structuralist linguistics except myself, but in my case it was a private hobby that began in university circles, between Pavia (Segre, Corti, Avalle) and Paris (my own and others' encounters with Barthes).

  Why do I say that the interest in Borges began with structuralism? Because Borges carried out his experimental work not on words but on conceptual structures, and it was only with a structuralist methodology that one could begin to analyze and understand his work.

  When I later wrote The Name of the Rose it was more than obvious that in constructing the library I was thinking of Borges. If you go and read my entry "Codice" (Codex) in the Einaudi Encyclopaedia, you will see that in one of its sections I carry out an experiment on the Library of Babel. That entry was written in 1976, two years before I began The Name of the Rose, which indicates that I had been obsessed by Borges's library for some time. When I began the novel later, the idea of the library came naturally to me and with it the idea of a blind librarian, whom I decided to call Jorge da Burgos. I really do not remember whether it was because I had decided to give him that name that I went to
see what was happening at Burgos, or whether I called him that because I already knew that in that period pergamino de paño, that is to say, paper instead of parchment, had been produced at Burgos. Sometimes things happen very quickly, as one reads here and there, and one cannot remember what came first.

  After that everyone asked me why Jorge becomes the "bad guy" in my story, and I could only reply that when I gave my character this name I did not know what he would do later (and that is what happened in my other novels as well, so that the game of finding precise allusions to this or that, which many people play, is generally a waste of time). Nevertheless, I cannot rule out the possibility that at the point when this ghost of Borges appeared I was influenced by the plot of his "Death and the Compass," which certainly had made an enormous impression on me.

  But you see how strange the game of influences is: if someone had asked me about influences at the time when I was depicting the mutual seduction between Jorge and William, I would have said that I was thinking of Proust, of that scene where Charlus tries to seduce Jupien, which is described with a metaphor of the bee buzzing around the flower.

  I also had other models. For instance, the model of Mann's Doctor Faustus was fundamental, because the way Adso relives his own story as an old man, telling us how he saw it as a young man, was in some sense the way old Serenus Zeitblom looked at the story of Adrian Leverkühn. Here is another good example of unknown influences, because few critics have spotted the Doctor Faustus model, whereas many have seen instead an allusion to the dialogues between Naphta and Settembrini in The Magic Mountain.