by Umberto Eco
The first was that of the pendulum, which I had seen for the first time thirty years previously in Paris, and it had made a huge impression on me. I am not saying that I forgot about it over the years. On the contrary, at one point in the sixties I was asked by a film-director friend of mine to write a script for a film. I don't want to talk about this, since subsequently it was used to make a terrible film that had nothing to do with my original idea, and luckily I managed to ensure that my name did not appear anywhere on it—not to mention the fact that I was paid just a token fee. But in that script there was a scene that took place in a cavern at the center of which hung a pendulum, and someone was clinging to it as he whirled through the darkness.
The second image that imposed itself on me was that of myself playing a trumpet at a funeral of partisans. A true story, which, besides, I had never stopped telling. Not often, but always in situations of great intimacy: late at night, having the last whiskey in a welcoming bar, or during a walk along the water, when I felt that a woman, either opposite or beside me, was just waiting for a good story in order to say "How wonderful" and take my hand. A true story around which other memories clustered, and a story I found beautiful.
That was it, the pendulum and that story in the cemetery on a sunlit morning. I felt that I could tell a story around those two things. There was just one problem: how to get from the pendulum to the trumpet? The reply to this question took me eight years, and became the novel.
Similarly, with The Island of the Day Before I started from two very strong images that had surfaced in instant reply to the question: if I were to write a third novel, what could it be about? I've spoken too much about monasteries and museums, I said to myself, too much, that is, about places of culture: I should try to write about nature. Nature and nothing else. And how would I be forced to see nature and nothing else? By placing a shipwrecked man on a deserted island.
Then, at the same time, but for totally independent reasons, I bought one of those world-time watches, where a middle ring rotates in the opposite direction to the hands in order to make local time line up with a series of places written on the outer ring. These kinds of watches have a sign indicating the international dateline. That this line exists, we all know, if for no other reason than having read Around the World in Eighty Days, but it is not something we think about every day. This provided a flash of inspiration: my man had to be west of that line and see an island to the east, an island distant in both space and time. It was a short step from here to deciding that he must actually be not on the island but opposite it.
At the outset, since my watch showed, at this fated point, the Aleutian Islands, I could see no good reason for placing someone there to do something. Where was he? Stuck on an oil-rig platform? Moreover, as I will make clear shortly, I only write about places I have been to, and the idea of going to such cold places, looking for an oil-rig platform, did not exactly fascinate me.
Then, as I continued to leaf through the atlas, I discovered that the line also passed through the Fijian archipelago. Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands ... At this point other memories intervened, other trails opened up. I read a few things, and then I was in the middle of the seventeenth century, the century when exploration voyages to the Pacific began to proliferate. This stirred the memory of many aspects of my old research on baroque culture. That then led to the idea that the man could be shipwrecked on a deserted ship, a kind of ghost ship ... And off I went. By that stage, I would say, the novel could walk on its own two feet.
First of All, Construct A World
But where does a novel walk to? Here is the second problem that I consider fundamental for a poetics of narrative. When interviewers ask me, "How did you write your novel?" I usually cut them short and reply: "From left to right." But here I have enough space for a more complex reply.
The fact is that I believe (or at least I now understand better, after four attempts at fiction) that a novel is not just a linguistic phenomenon. A novel (like the narratives we construct every day, explaining why we arrived late that morning, or how we got rid of someone annoying) uses a plane of expression (words that are very difficult to translate into poetry because what also counts there is their sound) to convey a plane of content, namely, the narrated facts. But on the level of content itself we can identify two more sides, story and plot.
The story of Little Red Riding-Hood is a pure sequence of actions that are chronologically ordered: the mother sends the little girl into the woods, the girl meets the wolf, the wolf goes to wait for her at her grandmother's house, eats the grandmother, dresses up as her, etc. The plot can organize these elements differently: for instance, the story could begin with the girl seeing the grandmother, being astonished at how she looks, and then go back to the moment she left home; or with the child returning home safely, thanking the woodsman, and telling her mother the preceding phases of the story....
The tale of Little Red Riding-Hood is so centered on its story (and, through it, on the plot) that it can be rendered in satisfying terms in any discourse, that is to say, using any form of representation: through cinematic images, or in French, German, or in comic strips (all of which has happened).
I have considered the relationships between expression and content in the contrast between prose and poetry on several occasions. Why in the Italian nursery rhyme did "la vispa Teresa avea tra l'erbetta / al volo sorpresa gentil farfalletta" (sparky Theresa catch amid the grass / a gentle little butterfly)? Why did she not catch it in a bush, or among climbing flowers, where it would have found it easier to suck the pollen that inebriates it? Naturally it is because "erbetta" (grass) rhymes with "farfalletta" (butterfly), whereas "cespuglio" (bush) would have rhymed with "guazzabuglio" (a mess). This is not a game. Let us leave sprightly Theresa and move to Montale: "Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato: / era il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia, / era l'incartocciarsi della foglia / riarsa, era il cavallo stramazzzato ..." (I have often met the evil of living: / it was the strangled stream gurgling, / it was the crumpling of a leaf / totally parched, it was the horse that had collapsed to the ground...). Why among all the symbols or epiphanies of the ills of living has the poet identified the leaf totally parched, and not some other phenomenon of withering and death? Why the strangled stream "gurgling"? Or perhaps the stream gurgles (" gorgoglia"), and it is a stream precisely because it had to prepare for the appearance of that leaf ("foglia")? In any case, the need for that rhyme encouraged the splendid enjambment of "riarsa" (totally parched), which prolongs onto the next line the agony of a life that is already vegetal and which is now gasping out its last breath in a final spasm that pulverizes it.
For if (and here we really are playing, luckily for the history of poetry) a stream that "borbotta" (murmurs) had come along first, then the ills of life would have had to be revealed in the darkness and stench of a "grotto" (cave).
On the other hand, although Verga's novel begins with "Un tempo i Malavoglia erano stati numerosi come i sassi della strada vecchia di Trezza ..." (At one stage the Malavoglia had been as numerous as the stones on the old road to Trezza...) and "ce n'erano persino ad Ognina, ad Aci Castello" (there were even some at Ognina and Aci Castello), he certainly could have chosen some other name for his town or village (and perhaps he might have liked Montepulciano or Viserba), but his choice was limited by the decision to make his story happen in Sicily, and even the simile of the stones was determined by the nature of that place, which did not allow stretches of pastoral, almost Irish, "erbetta."
Thus in poetry it is the choice of expression that determines the content, whereas in prose it is the opposite; it is the world the author chooses, the events that happen in it, that dictate its rhythm, style, and even verbal choices.
However, it would be a mistake to say that in poetry the content (and along with it the relationship between story and plot) is irrelevant. To give just one example, in Leopardi's "A Silvia"there is a story (there was a young girl just like that, the poet was in love with h
er, she died, the poet remembers her), and there is a plot (the poet appears first, when the girl is now dead, and brings her alive again in his memory). It is not enough to say that in a translation of this poem the change of expression means giving up on so many phonic and symbolic values (the play on "Silvia" and " salivi" [you were crossing]), on rhyme and meter. The fact is that no adequate translation would fail to respect both story and plot. It would be the translation of another poem.
This may seem a banal observation, but even in a poetic text the author is speaking to us about a world (there are two houses, one opposite the other, there is a young girl "all'opre femminili intenta" [busy with her girl's work]). All the more reason then that this should happen in narrative. Manzoni writes quite well (we might say), but what would his novel be if it did not have the Lombardy of the seventeenth century, Lake Como, two young lovers from a humble social background, an arrogant local aristocrat, and a cowardly curate? What would the Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) be if it were set in Naples while Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca was being hanged? Come on.
This is why, when I wrote The Name of the Rose, I spent a full year, if I remember correctly, without writing a line (and for Foucault's Pendulum I spent at least two, and the same for The Island of the Day Before). Instead I read, did drawings and diagrams, invented a world. This world had to be as precise as possible, so that I could move around in it with total confidence. For The Name of the Rose I drew hundreds of labyrinths and plans of abbeys, basing mine on other drawings and on places I visited, because I needed everything to work well, I needed to know how long it would take two characters in conversation to go from one place to another. And this also dictated the length of the dialogues.
If in a novel I had to write "while the train stopped at Modena station, he quickly got out and bought the newspaper," I could not do so unless I had been to Modena and had checked whether the train stops there long enough, and how far the newsstand is from the platform (and this would be true even if the train had to stop at Innisfree). All this may have little to do with the development of the story (I imagine), but if I did not do this, I could not tell the tale.
In Foucault's Pendulum I say that the two publishing houses of Manuzio and Garamond are in two different but adjoining buildings, between which a passage had been built, with a frosted-glass door and three steps. I spent a long time drawing several plans and working out how a passage could be built between the two buildings, and whether there had to be a difference of level between them. The reader takes those three steps without realizing it (I believe), but for me they were crucial.
Sometimes I have wondered whether it was necessary to design my world with such precision, seeing that those details were not prominent in the tale. But it was certainly useful for me in gaining confidence with that environment. Moreover, I have been told that if in one of Luchino Viscontis films two characters had to talk about a box full of jewels, even though the box was never opened, the director would insist that there were real jewels in it, otherwise the characters would not have been credible—that is to say, the actors would have performed with less conviction.
So for The Name of the Rose I drew all the monks of the abbey. I drew almost all of them (though not every single one) with a beard, even though I was not at all sure that the Benedictines wore beards at that time—and this was later a scholarly problem that Jean-Jacques Annaud, when he made the film, had to solve with the help of his learned consultants. It is worth noting that in the novel it is never said whether they were bearded or not. But I needed to recognize my characters as I was making them speak or act, otherwise I would not have known what to make them say.
For Foucault's Pendulum I spent evening after evening, right through to closing time, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where some of the main events of the story took place. In order to write of the Templars I went to visit the Forêt d'Orient in France, where there are traces of their commanderies (which are referred to in the novel in a few vague allusions). To describe Casaubon's night walk through Paris, from the Conservatoire to Place des Vosges and then to the Eiffel Tower, I spent various nights between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. walking, dictating into a pocket tape recorder everything I could see, so as not to get the street names and intersections wrong. For The Island of the Day Before I naturally went to the South Seas, to the precise geographical location where the book is set, to see the color of the sea, the sky, the fishes, and the corals—and at various hours of the day. But I also worked for two or three years on drawings and small models of ships of the period, to find out how big a cabin or cubbyhole was, and how one could move from one to the other.
When a foreign publisher asked me recently if it was not worthwhile including a plan of the ship with the novel, as had been done for all editions of The Name of the Rose with the plan of the abbey, I threatened to call a lawyer. In The Name of the Rose I wanted the reader to understand perfectly what the place was like, but in The Island I wanted the reader to be confused, and not be able to find his bearings in the little labyrinth of that ship, which held surprise after surprise in store. But to be able to talk about a dark, uncertain environment, experienced amid dreams, waking, and alcoholic stimulation, to confuse the reader's ideas, I needed my own ideas to be very clear, and to write constantly referring to a ship's structure that was calculated down to the last millimeter.
From the World to the Style
Once this world has been designed, the words will follow, and they will be (if all goes well) those that that world and all the events that take place in it require. For this reason the style in The Name of the Rose is—throughout—that of the medieval chronicler, precise, faithful, naive, and amazed, flat when necessary (a humble fourteenth-century monk does not write like Gadda, nor remember things like Proust). In Foucault's Pendulum, on the other hand, a plurality of languages had to come into play: Aglié's educated and archaizing language, Ardenti's Pseudo-Dannunzian, the disenchanted and ironically literary language of Belbo's secret files, which is both deliberate and tortuous, Garamond's mercantile kitsch style, and the ribald dialogues of the three editors during their irresponsible fantasies, who are able to mix erudite references with double entendres of dubious taste. But what Maria Corti defined as "leaps of register"* (and I am grateful to her for pointing this out) did not depend on a simple decision about style: they were determined by the nature of the world in which the events took place, which was culturally uneven.
Then for The Island of the Day Before it was the very nature of the world it took off from that determined not just the style but the very structure of dialogue and the constant conflict between narrator and character, with the subsequent participation of the reader who is continually appealed to as a witness and accomplice in that conflict. In fact, in Foucault's Pendulum the story takes place in our time, so there was no problem of recovering a language that was no longer used. In The Name of the Rose the story is set in fairly remote centuries, but at a time when people spoke a different language, the ecclesiastical Latin that appears so often (according to some, too often) in the book to remind us that the story took place in a distant time. For this reason the stylistic model was indirectly the Latin of the chroniclers of the time, but directly it was the modern translations that are commonly read (and in any case I had taken the precaution of warning the reader that I was transcribing from a nineteenth-century translation of a medieval chronicle). In The Island, however, my character could not but talk in a baroque way, though I myself could not do so, except by parodying the manuscript that Manzonirejects at the beginning of his transcription of it in The Betrothed. So then I had to have a narrator who at times gets irritated with the verbal excesses of his character, at times indulges in them himself, and at times tempers them with appeals to the reader.
Thus three different worlds imposed three different "exercices de style" on me, which then, in the course of writing, became three ways of thinking and seeing, and I was almost led to translate my own daily experiences at th
at time into those terms.
Baudolino the Exception
Up to this point I have said that (i) one starts with a seminal idea, and that (ii) the construction of the narrative world determines the style. My latest experience in fiction, Baudolino, seems to contradict these two principles. As for the seminal idea, for at least two years I had many, and if there are too many seminal ideas it is a sign that they are not seminal. In fact, each one of them gave rise not to the general structure of the book but only to situations that were limited to just a few chapters.
I wont say what my first idea was, because I abandoned it—for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because I was unable to develop it—and perhaps I will keep it in reserve, who knows, for a fifth novel. This idea was accompanied by a secondary idea, which can be connected in a banal way with the topos of a murder in a closed room, and as you will see if you read the novel, I took up the topos only in the chapter on Fredericks death.
The second idea was that the final scene should take place among the mummified corpses in the Capuchin church in Palermo (in fact, I had been there several times and had collected many photographs of the place and of the individual mummies). Whoever has read the book knows that this idea is exploited in the final confrontation between Baudolino and the Poet, but in the economy of the novel it has only a marginal, or, rather, purely scene-setting, function.
The third was that the novel was to be about a group of characters who made forgeries. I had dealt with the semiotics of the fake on several occasions, of course.* Initially the characters were to have been contemporaries who decided to found a daily paper and who experimented, in a series of dummy numbers, with how they could create scoops. In fact, I thought of entitling the novel Numero Zero (Dummy Run). But even then there was something that did not convince me, and I was afraid I would find myself dealing with the same set of characters as in Foucault's Pendulum.
