by Umberto Eco
To turn to other examples, I was grateful to the speaker who underlined the possible influence of Bouvard et Pécuchet on Foucault's Pendulum. For the fact is that while writing that novel, I thought a lot about Flaubert's book. I even promised to go and reread it, but then in the end I decided not to, because in some sense I wanted to be its Pierre Menard.
An opposite case is provided by my encounter with the Rosicrucians, which determined the structure of Foucault's Pendulum. Right from my youth I had devoted a shelf of my library to occult sciences; then one day I came across a totally stupid book on the Rosicrucians, and that was where I got the idea of doing a Bouvard and Pécuchet for occult idiocy. After that I collected texts by second-rate occultists on one hand, and on the other historically reliable literature on the Rosicrucians. Only when my novel was far advanced did I reread "Tlôn," where Borges talks of the Rosicrucians—as he often did, taking information at second hand (from De Quincey) and yet understanding everything about it better than scholars who have dedicated their whole lives to the subject.
In the course of this research I found a photocopy of an out-of-print book, Arnold's monograph. When the Pendulum eventually came out, I said that Arnold's old work should be translated into Italian; immediately afterward a French publisher decided to reprint the book and asked me to write a preface for it, and only in that preface do I refer, this time consciously, to Borges, beginning precisely with "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
But who can deny that from the time I read "Tlön" so many years previously, the word "Rosicrucian" might have lodged in some remote corner of my brain, so that decades later (when I read the book by the idiotic Rosicrucian) it reappeared thanks also to a Borgesian memory?
These past few days I have been led to reflect instead on how much I have been influenced by the "Pierre Menard model." This is a story that I have never tired of quoting since I first read it. In what sense has it determined the way I write? Well, I would say that the real Borgesian influence on The Name of the Rose does not lie in having imagined a labyrinthine library; after all, the universe is full of labyrinths from the time of Cnossos onward, and theorists of postmodernism regard the labyrinth as a recurring image in almost all contemporary literature. It lies rather in the fact that I knew I was rewriting a medieval story, and that this rewriting of mine, however faithful to the original, would have a different meaning for contemporary readers. I knew that if I rewrote what had really happened in the fourteenth century, with the Fraticelli movement and Fra Dolcino, the reader (even if I did not want him to) would see almost literal references to the Red Brigades—and I was really delighted to discover that Fra Dolcino's wife was called Margherita like the wife of Renato Curcio. The Menard model worked, and consciously so, since I knew that I was writing the name of the wife of Dolcino, and that the reader would think that I was thinking of Curcio's wife.
After the "Menard model" I would like to discuss the "Averroes model." The story of Averroes and the theater is another of Borges's tales that have come to fascinate me more and more. In fact, the only essay I have ever written on the semiotics of the theater begins with the story of Averroes.* What is so extraordinary about that story? It is that Borges's Averroes is stupid not in personal terms but culturally, because he has reality before his eyes (the children playing) and yet he cannot make that relate to what the book is describing to him. Incidentally, I have been thinking in the past few days that, taken to its extreme, Averroes's situation is that of the poetics of "defamiliarization," which the Russian formalists describe as representing something in such a way that one feels as if one were seeing it for the first time, thus making the perception of the object difficult for the reader. I would say that in my novels I reverse the "Averroes model": the (culturally ignorant) character often describes with astonishment something he sees and about which he does not understand very much, whereby the reader is led to understand it. That is to say, I work to produce an intelligent Averroes.
As someone said, it may be that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of my fiction: mine is the opposite of the "de-familiarization" technique; I make the reader familiar with something he did not know until then. I take a reader from Texas, who has never seen Europe, into a medieval abbey (or into a Templar commandery, or a museum full of complicated objects, or into a baroque room) and make him feel at ease. I show him a medieval character who takes out a pair of glasses as if it were completely natural, and I depict his contemporaries, who are astonished at this sight; at first the reader does not understand why they are amazed, but in the end he realizes that spectacles were invented in the Middle Ages. This is not a Borgesian technique; mine is an "anti-Averroes model," but without Borges's model before me I would never have been able to conceive of it.
These are the real influences, much more so than others, which are only apparent. Let us go back to the labyrinthine disorder of the world, which seems to be directly Borgesian. But in this instance I had found it in Joyce, as well as in some medieval sources. The Labyrinth of the World was written by Comenius in 1623, and the concept of the labyrinth was part of the ideology of mannerism and the baroque. It is no accident that a fine book on mannerism, Hocke's Die Welt als Labyrinth, was written in our own time, starting from Comenius's idea. But that is not all. That every classification of the universe leads to the construction of a labyrinth or of a garden of forking paths was an idea that was present both in Leibniz and—in a very clear and explicit way—in the introduction to Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. These are probably also Borges's sources. Here then is a case where it is not clear, not even to me, whether I (B) found X by going through writer A, or whether I (B) first discovered some aspects of X and then noticed how X had also influenced A.
And yet the Borgesian labyrinths probably made the many references to the labyrinth that I had found elsewhere coalesce in me, so much so that I have wondered whether I could have written The Name of the Rose without Borges. This is a counterfactual hypothesis of the kind: "If Napoléon had been a Somalian woman, would he have won at Waterloo?" In theory, taking Father Emanuele's machine (seeing that someone here quoted the Jesuit from my book The Island of the Day Before) and making it rotate at maximum speed, the libraries already existed, the arguments over laughter did take place in the medieval world, the collapse of order was a story that began, if you like, from Occam onward, mirrors were already celebrated in the Roman de la rose and had been researched by the Arabs, and then when I was very young I had been fascinated by a Rilke poem on mirrors. Would I have been able to catalyze all these elements without Borges? Probably not. But would Borges have written what he wrote if the texts I have mentioned had not been behind him? How is it that he catalyzed the idea of the labyrinth and the idea of the mystery of mirrors? Borges's work also consisted in taking from the immense territory of intertextuality a series of themes that were already whirling around there, and turning them into an exemplary pattern.
Now I would like to highlight all those cases where the search for two-way influence is dangerous, since one loses sight of the networks of intertextuality. Borges is a writer who has mentioned everything. One cannot identify in the history of culture a single theme he has not touched on, even if only fleetingly. Just yesterday I listened to a speaker who suggested that Borges could have influenced Plato when he was writing the Parmenides since he, Borges, had portrayed the same characters as Plato. I do not remember who evoked the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy yesterday: certainly Borges talks of it, but on this subject there is an endless bibliography, which begins in the seventeenth century, continues with monumental (and crazy) works in the nineteenth century, and extends to this day with pseudosecret societies that continue to look for the traces of Francis Bacon in Shakespeare's works. Obviously an idea like this (that the work of the great bard was written by someone else, who has left constant clues in the text if you read between the lines) could not but fascinate Borges. But that certainly does not mean that an author who cites the Shakespea
re controversy today is quoting Borges.
Let us consider the problem of the rose. As I have said on several occasions, the title The Name of the Rose was chosen by some friends who looked at the list of ten titles I had scribbled down at the last minute. In fact the first title was Delitti all' abbazia (Murders at the Abbey) (a clear quotation of Murder at the Vicarage, which is a recurrent theme in English crime novels), and the subtitle was Storia italiana del XIV secolo (An Italian Tale from the Fourteenth Century) (a quotation from Manzoni's subtitle to The Betrothed). Subsequently this title seemed a bit heavy to me. I made a list of titles, among which I liked best Blitiri ("blitiri," like "babazuf," is a term used by the late Scholastics to indicate a word devoid of meaning), and then, seeing that the last line of the novel quoted a verse by Bernard of Morlaix that I had chosen for its allusion to Nominalism ("Stat rosa pristina nomine, etc."), I also put down The Name of the Rose. As I have said elsewhere, it seemed a good title to me because it was generic, and because in the course of the history of mysticism and literature the rose had taken on so many different meanings, often contradictory ones, that I hoped it would not lend itself to one-sided interpretations.
But it was pointless: everyone tried to find a precise meaning and many saw in it a reference to Shakespeare's "A rose by any other name," which means exactly the opposite of what my source intended. At any rate, I can swear that I never gave a thought to the appearances of the rose in Borges. Nevertheless, I find it wonderful that Maria Kodama made an allusion to Angelus Silesius the other day, probably unaware of the fact that some years ago Carlo Ossola wrote a very learned article on the links between my title and Silesius.* Ossola noticed that in the closing pages of my novel there is a collage of mystic texts from the period when the aged Adso is writing, but that I also inserted, in a wicked anachronism, a quotation from Angelus Silesius, which I had found somewhere or other, without knowing (at the time) that Silesius had also dealt with the rose. Here is a fine example of how the triangle of influences becomes more complex, but there was no straight two-way influence.
Another Borgesian theme that has been mentioned is the Golem. I inserted this theme into the Pendulum because it is part of the bric-a-brac that makes up occult lore, but my most direct source was obviously Meyrink, not to mention the famous film, closely followed by the kabbalistic texts I had studied through Scholem.
It has been pointed out in these last few days that many ideas that Borges later worked on had been expounded by Peirce and Royce. I believe that if you scour the index of names for all of Borges's works you will find neither Peirce nor Royce. And yet it is highly possible that Borges was influenced by them via other writers. I have many experiences that are, I think, common to all who possess very many books (I now have around forty thousand volumes, between Milan and my other houses) and to all who consider a library not just a place to keep books one has already read but primarily a deposit for books to be read at some future date, when one feels the need to read them. It often happens that our eye falls on some book we have not yet read, and we are filled with remorse.
But then the day eventually comes when, in order to learn something about a certain topic, you decide finally to open one of the many unread books, only to realize that you already know it. What has happened? There is the mystical-biological explanation, whereby with the passing of time, and by dint of moving books, dusting them, then putting them back, by contact with our fingertips the essence of the book has gradually penetrated our mind. There is also the casual but continual scanning explanation: as time goes by, and you take up and then reorder various volumes, it is not the case that that book has never been glanced at; even by merely moving it you looked at a few pages, one today, another the next month, and so on until you end up by reading most of it, if not in the usual linear way. But the true explanation is that between the moment when the book first came to us and the moment when we opened it, we have read other books in which there was something that was said by that first book, and so, at the end of this long intertextual journey, you realize that even that book you had not read was still part of your mental heritage and perhaps had influenced you profoundly. I think one can say this of Borges and his relation to Royce or Peirce. If this is influence, it is not two-way influence.
The theme of the double: Why did I put a double in The Island of the Day Before? Because Tesauro (in the chapter on novels in his Cannocchiale aristotelico) says that you have to do so if you want to write a novel in the baroque manner. Following Tesauro's rules, I put the twin brother in the opening chapter of my novel, but then I did not know what to do with him. At a certain point I found a way of using him, however. Would I have put him in if (leaving aside Tesauro's suggestion) I had not been influenced also by the theme of the double in Borges? And what if I had had in mind instead the theme of the double in Dostoyevsky? And what if Borges had been influenced by Tesauro, whom he perhaps absorbed indirectly through other baroque authors?
In these games of intertextuality and influences one must always be careful not to go for the most naive solution. Some of you at this conference recalled how Borges refers to a monkey hitting the keys of a typewriter at random and in the end writing The Divine Comedy. But be careful, for the argument that, if one denies the existence of God, then one must admit that the creation of the world happened rather as in the case of the famous monkey, was used countless times by fundamentalist believers in the nineteenth century (and also later) against the theory of evolution, as well as against the theory of the random formation of the cosmos. In fact, this theme is more ancient even than that; we could trace it back to Democritus's and Epicurus's discussions of the clinamen ...
This morning someone mentioned, referring to Fritz Mauthner, the question of whether real characters are like the characters of an ancient Chinese language (which then leads to Borges's idea of the Celestial Emporium). But it was Francis Bacon who first said that real characters had to be the same as Chinese ideograms, and that was what started the whole search for the perfect language in the seventeenth century. It was against this idea that Descartes launched his attack. Borges certainly knew this, either through Mauthner or directly from Descartes' famous letter to Father Mersenne, but did he also know Francis Bacon's discussion on real characters and Chinese ideograms? Or did he rediscover the topic through his reading of Athanasius Kircher? Or reading some other author? I believe it is fruitful to let the wheels of intertextuality rotate fully in order to see how the interplay of influence works in unexpected ways. Sometimes the most profound influence is the one you discover afterward, not the one you find immediately.
Now I would like to underline some aspects of my work that can not be called Borgesian, but as we are coming toward the end, I will mention only two.
First and foremost is the matter of quantity. Naturally one can write Leopardi's "L'infinito," which is a very short work, and one can write Cantu's Margherita Pusterla, which is a long and unbearable book; but on the other hand The Divine Comedy is long and sublime, while a brief sonnet by Burchiello is simply entertaining. The opposition between minimalism and maximalism is not one that entails value. It is an opposition of genre or procedure. In this sense Borges certainly is a minimalist, while I am a maximalist. Borges writes under the sign of rapidity, moves quickly to the conclusion of his story, and in this sense it is hardly surprising that Calvino admired him. I, on the other hand, am a writer who delays (as I wrote in my Six Walks in the Fictional Woods).
Perhaps also for quantitative reasons, I think one could define my writing as neo-baroque. Borges is fascinated intellectually by the baroque and the way the baroque maneuvers concepts, but his writing is not baroque. His style is limpidly classical.
But I prefer to pick out some strong Borgesian ideas, which cannot be reduced to a single quotation, and which probably constitute his most profound legacy, and therefore represent the way he influenced not just me but many others.
Someone mentioned narrative as a model of knowledge. Ce
rtainly Borges's fabulist narratives have influenced us in showing how one can make philosophical, metaphysical statements while telling a parable. Here too, of course, we have a topic that begins with Plato, or even with Jesus—if I may say so—and finishes with Lotman (with a textual modality as opposed to a grammatical modality), with Jerome Bruner's psychology (narrative models actually aid perception itself), and with the frames of artificial intelligence. But it seems certain to me that Borges's power of influence has been fundamental in this sense.
Now I would like to consider the call (and that is why I spoke of Borges as a delirious archivist) to reread the whole encyclopedia in the light of suspicion, and in a counterfactual way to seek the revelatory word in the margins, to reverse the situation, to make the encyclopedia play against itself.
It is very difficult to escape the anxiety of influence, just as it was very difficult for Borges to be a precursor of Kafka. Saying that there is no idea in Borges that did not exist before is like saying there is not a single note in Beethoven that had not already been produced before. What remains fundamental in Borges is his ability to use the most varied debris of the encyclopedia to make the music of ideas. I certainly tried to imitate this example (even though the idea of a music of ideas came to me from Joyce). What can I say? Compared with Borges's divine melodies, so instantly singable (even when they are atonal), memorable, and exemplary, I feel as if I blow into an ocarina.
But I hope that still someone will be found after my death who is even less skillful than me, someone for whom I will be recognized as the precursor.
