On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  But a stopgap is not just this. It can be a banal opening, which can be useful for finding a sublime ending. It was one night, at three in the morning, on the Colle dell'Infinito (the hill where Leopardi wrote "L'infinito") at Recanati, where the first words of one of the finest almost-sonnets of all time have been carved, that I realized that its opening, "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle" (This solitary hill has always been dear to me), is quite a banal line, which could have been written by any minor poet of the Romantic or other ages or movements. What can a hill be, in poetic "language," except "solitary"? And yet without that banal opening, the poem would not take off, and perhaps it needed to be banal, so that the Panic feeling of that shipwreck at the end, which is so memorable, could be felt.

  I would go so far as to say, perhaps just to pursue my thesis, that a line like "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" (In the middle of the journey of our life) has the singsong dignity of a stopgap. If it were not followed by the rest of The Divine Comedy, we would not have attached much importance to it, perhaps we might have thought of it as just an idiom.

  I am not saying that the opening phrase is always a stopgap. There are openings to some of Chopin's polonaises that are certainly not stopgaps. " Quel ramo del lago di Como" (That stretch of Lake Como) is not a stopgap; nor is "April is the cruellest month." But let us consider the end of Romeo and Juliet and then tell me whether it would not have ended better without the last sentence (in italics):

  A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

  The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.

  Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

  Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:

  For never was a story of more woe

  Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

  However, if Shakespeare decided to conclude with this moralizing banality, it can only be because he wanted to allow the spectators to catch their breath before allowing them to leave in peace, after the bloodbath they had just witnessed. So it was right that there was a stopgap there.

  "It was Leo who was the first to fall asleep" is not bad. But then Moravia adds: "Carla's unexpected, if inexperienced, assault on him had exhausted him." Come on, what can an adult who has been subjected to an adolescent's amorous assault be except "exhausted"? Does not that "unexpected, if inexperienced, assault" sound as if it had been taken from a judge's verdict? Nevertheless, without this rather clumsy but essential passage it would not be possible to begin chapter 10 of Moravia's Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), where the sad truth is made evident that "omne animal triste est post coitum."

  There is no need to belabor the point: "Examples of this are so widespread as to embrace the whole history of the arts" (Estetica, [>]). Certainly. Moreover, it is by arguing how stopgaps can be compensated for by the whole that Pareyson gradually moves on to talk of mutilations, of the action of time on things, of rubble, ruins, fragments, and the wastage that the work is subject to, and how despite all of this we can reconstitute its intimate legitimacy. A section that would not be clear unless we also saw the central value of the stopgap, and the appreciation for something that is not complete, because only if a work can be appreciated in spite of, and even because of, its imperfections can it be enjoyed in spite of (and perhaps because of) its weakness.

  Thus, counterbalancing that kind of Platonic optimism that led Pareyson to celebrate form in its adamantine perfection, his remarks on stopgaps (inspired by concrete experiences of reading) lead his phenomenology of art back to more human dimensions.

  If, however, we reexamine the problem of the stopgap in the light of Kant's doctrine of the reflecting judgment, it may become less marginal than it seems at first sight—both in the sense that the stopgap cannot be a marginal element in the work of art, and in the sense that the question of the stopgap is not so marginal in Pareysons aesthetics. For Pareyson, the reference to Kant is obligatory: his theory of form as autonomous organism stems from his reflections on the third Critique and on the aesthetics of German idealism.

  Let us review Kant's position: the recognition of organicity emerges in the reflecting judgment; the organicity of nature is postulated as an order that has to exist in things but which things by themselves do not exhibit; it has to be constructed, projected, as if. It is only because we cannot fail to see nature as an organism that we are then able to turn to art in the same spirit.

  But a judgment of organicity will be, like all reflecting and teleological judgments, a hypothesis: nature is sampled through its primary patterns and is more and more subtly subjected to interpretative activity. This must be due to countless other influences, but the weight that interpretation assumes in Pareysons philosophy is also due to Kantian aesthetics.

  Interpretative activity involves (and this is a central point for Pareyson) a kind of "perspective." Now, in pronouncing verdicts on organicity in things of nature, one finds elements that seem to contradict the postulate of the perfection of form: namely, stopgaps. They remain as a record of evolution, elements that at first seem not to work together with the whole but to exist in a natural body like records of a failed attempt. In studying the work's form, and subsequently in categorizing it and inserting it into the architecture of genus and species, sometimes these elements are dropped, or kept in the shade while the beam of interpretative attention shifts to illuminate other elements it considers central.

  One might wonder to what extent this criterion intervenes or not in the assignment of internal legitimacy to a work of art. The latter is given shape by the interpretative act, which sees it as a completed organism, and is stripped of apparently nonessential aspects, which are sacrificed in favor of others, and only in a further or parallel interpretation do these aspects come to assume a more prominent position. This is exemplified by the history of Dante criticism: theological elements that were seen by Romantic criticism as stopgaps (if they were defined as such) become fundamental in the light of a criticism that has injected greater familiarity with the medieval cultural world (dealing with a Dante that is reread not only after, say, Gilson, but also after Eliot), become the essential grain of the poetic architecture, just as much as the vaults and windows do in a Gothic cathedral. The perspective of Dante's cantica is thereby reversed: one discovers that Dante is sometimes more of a poet when he is talking of the planetary spheres and the flashes of light than when he is moved by the love affair of Paolo and Francesca.

  The stopgap then becomes relative, surviving like a remnant of a stage of interpretation, and as such remains in reserve, ready to assume a different light in a new "reading," for which it will no longer be accidental.

  We looked at the example of turn ancillaries: we accept them as stopgaps, and as stopgaps we "skim" them. That someone said, sneered, insinuated, or replied does not seem to us to be essential to the dialogue's progress or the narrative universe that it illuminates. They are almost casual support posts. Then, suddenly, for another reader these "points" (in the railway sense of the term) become fundamental, for good as well as for ill: if for some authors they are pure elements of a "gastronomic" strategy (at times the fact that someone "sighs" rather than "says" can produce effects that are actually pornographic), for others these interjectory mechanisms become instead an element of rhythm, an indicator of harshness or restraint, or of extraordinary inventiveness. The stopgap is then redeemed, and becomes a structural element; from essential but inelegant it becomes inessential but graceful, or even supremely necessary. The work as organism has been examined from a different point of view.

  If this were the case, it would mean that in Pareysons aesthetics a stopgap acts as more than a prudent corrective to the Platonic or Neoplatonic triumph of Form in all its metaphysical purity, and as a recognition of the material life of "forms," which are also accepted as impure and imperfect; it is also something that interpretation sets aside, keeping it as a latent opportunity or stimulus for later interpretations, a potential signal capable of calling the interprete
r back to renewing with each reading his faithful commitment to the works promises. Thus interpretation is reconfirmed as both free and faithful at the same time, capable of many indulgences as long as in the end it comes to rest in the recognition of a form, but is also capable of many changes of direction in order not to let the form rest in the condition that our reading has led it to provisionally.

  And should it turn out that a stopgap can never, despite many rereadings, be redeemed at any cost (because it is genuinely evidence of a distraction or weakness), its very presence would be there to testify how and to what extent the interrogation of the work can be collaborative and charitable, can identify a pattern drawn even where it was only a sketch, a wish, an intention, left as a bequest to the infinite work of interpretation.

  INTERTEXTUAL IRONY AND LEVELS OF READING

  I apologize if in the course of this talk I will have to quote, among my various examples, some that come from my own work as a storyteller as well, but I shall have to dwell on certain characteristics of so-called postmodern narrative, which some literary critics and theoreticians, in particular Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Remo Ceserani,* have found to be not only present in my fiction but also explicitly theorized in my Reflections on "The Name of the Rose." These features are metanarrative, dialogism (in Bakhtin's sense, in which, as I said in the Reflections, texts talk to one another), "double coding," and intertextual irony.

  Although I do not yet know what exactly the postmodern is, nevertheless I have to admit that the above-mentioned characteristics are present in my novels. However, I would want to distinguish between them, because it often happens that these are understood as four aspects of the same textual strategy.

  ***

  Metanarrative, inasmuch as it is a reflection that the text carries out on itself and its own nature, or the intrusion of the authorial voice reflecting on what it is narrating, and perhaps appealing to the reader to share its reflections, is much more ancient than the postmodern. Deep down, metanarrative in this sense is already present in Homer's "Sing, Muse...," and—to come closer to our own time—is evident in Manzoni's reflections, for instance, on the suitability of talking about love in the novel. I admit that in the modern novel metanarrative strategy is present with greater insistence, and it has happened to me that, in order to highlight the reflection the text is carrying out on itself, I have turned to what I would call "artificial dialogism," namely, the fiction of a manuscript on which the narrating voice reflects, and tries to decipher and judge at the very moment when it is narrating (but as is all too clear, this strategy, too, was already present in Manzoni).

  Even dialogism, especially in its most obvious form of "citationism," is neither a postmodern vice nor virtue; otherwise Bakhtin would never have been able to discuss it so far ahead of its time. In Purgatorio canto 26 Dante meets a poet who begins "freely to say:"

  Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,

  qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

  leu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan...

  (So much does your courteous request please me,

  that I cannot and do not want to conceal myself from you.

  I am Arnaut, who weeps and goes on his way singing...)

  Dante's contemporary reader would have recognized easily that this Arnaut was Arnaut Daniel, but only and precisely because he is brought on stage speaking Provençal (and with lines that, although invented by Dante, are modeled on the troubador tradition). The reader (whether modern or of that time) who is incapable of recognizing this kind of intertextual quotation is excluded from an understanding of the text.

  Let us now come to so-called double coding. The man who coined the expression was Charles Jencks, for whom postmodern architecture

  speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life.* The postmodern building or work of art addresses simultaneously a minority, elite public, using "high" codes, and a mass public using popular codes.†

  This idea can be understood in many ways. In architecture we all know examples of so-called postmodernism, which abound in quotations from the Renaissance or baroque, or some other epoch, blending "high" cultural models into an ensemble that nevertheless turns out to be pleasing and imaginative also for the popular user—often to the detriment of functionality and while reinstating the value of decoration and ornamentation. For instance, there are countless allusions to and components of extreme avant-gardism present in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which nevertheless also attracts visitors who have no knowledge of architectural history but who nonetheless say (as the statistics also show) they "like it." In any case, this element was also present in the music of the Beatles, which was also—and not accidentally—arranged in Purcell's style (in an unforgettable disk by Cathy Berberian) precisely because these melodies, so tuneful and pleasant, used cultured phrasing and echoes of other times, which are noticeable to the educated ear.

  Examples of double coding can be found today in many advertisements, which are constructed like experimental texts that at one stage would have been understandable to only small groups of cineasts, and which nevertheless attract all types of spectators because of their various "popular" motifs, such as the allusion to erotic situations, the appeal of a well-known face, the rhythm of the editing, the musical accompaniment.

  Many works of literature, because of their rediscovery of typical novel plots, have been appreciated even by the wider public, which ought to have been put off by avant-garde stylistic elements, such as the use of interior monologue, metanarrative play, the plurality of voices that are nested inside each other in the course of the narration, the unhinging of temporal sequences, leaps in stylistic register, intermingling of third- and first-person narration, and free indirect speech.

  But this seems to mean only that one of the characteristics of so-called postmodernism is to provide stories that are capable of attracting a wide public even though they employ learned allusions and "arty" stylistic devices; in other words (in the most successful cases) if they can blend the two components in a nontraditional way. It is undoubtedly an interesting feature, and it is no accident that it has aroused perplexed attempts at explanations from theoreticians of the so-called quality best seller, a work that pleases even though it contains some artistic virtues and involves the reader in problems and procedures that were once the exclusive prerogative of high literature.

  It has never been clear whether a quality best seller is to be understood as a popular novel that uses some "cultured" strategies, or as a "cultured" novel that for some mysterious reason becomes popular. In the first case the phenomenon should be explained in terms of a structural analysis of the work, concluding, for example, that its appeal to popular taste is due, say, to the reworking of a "plot," maybe a thriller plot, that hooks the reader and allows him to overcome the stylistic or structural difficulties. In the second case the phenomenon comes under the rubric of reception aesthetics, or, rather, reception sociology. One ought, for instance, to say that a quality best seller depends not on the poetics of the project but on a transformation of the reading public's tendencies, seeing that (i) one cannot underestimate the growth of a category of "popular" readers who, sated with "easy" and instantly consolatory texts, realize the fascination of works that challenge them to a more demanding though somehow more satisfying experience, and agree to reread them several times; and (ii) many readers, whom the publishing industry obstinately still considers "naive," have absorbed many of the techniques of contemporary literature through various channels, and consequently feel less embarrassed when faced with a quality best seller than some sociologists of literature.

  In this sense the quality best seller appears to be a phenomenon that is as old as the world. Certainly The Divine Comedy was a quality best seller, if we are to give creden
ce to the legends that say Dante took revenge on the blacksmith who sang his poetry badly (even if he did sing it badly, the fact is he sang it and therefore knew it). Shakespeare was also a quality best seller, judging by the size of the audience that followed him, even though they did not perhaps catch many of his subtleties and recycling of previous texts. Manzoni's The Betrothed was also a best seller, even though, with its at times essaylike qualities, it conceded very little to the tastes of those who had up until then fed themselves on gothic novels and popular romances—and yet it was the victim of countless pirated editions, and Manzoni was persuaded to accommodate popular tastes by personally supervising Gonin's illustrations for the 1840 edition. In fact, when you think carefully about it, the definition of quality best seller applies to all the great works that have come down to us in multiple manuscripts and printed editions on the wave of a success that has affected more than an elite readership, from the Aeneid to Orlando Furioso to Pinocchio. Consequently, this is not a unique phenomenon but a recurrent one in the history of art and literature, even if it must be accounted for in a different way in each individual age.

  Now, in order to underline the differences between double coding and intertextual irony, allow me to reflect on my personal experience as a writer. The Name of the Rose begins by telling how the author came across an ancient manuscript. We are in full citationism here, since the topos of the rediscovered manuscript is of venerable antiquity, and as a direct consequence we immediately enter the area of double coding: if the reader wants to get access to the story as it is told, he has to accept some quite learned observations as well as a metanarrative technique raised to the nth degree, because not only is the author inventing out of the blue a text that he can dialogue with, but he is presenting it as a nineteenth-century, neo-Gothic version of the original manuscript, which went back to the end of the fourteenth century. The "popular" reader cannot enjoy the narrative that follows unless he has agreed to this game of Chinese boxes of sources, which confers on the story an aura of ambiguity stemming from the fact that the source is uncertain.