by Umberto Eco
I do not have any special method, days, hours, or seasons. But between the second and third novels I established a habit. I would collect ideas, write notes, make provisional drafts wherever I was, but then, when I could spend at least a week in my house in the country, that was where I would type out the chapters on the computer. When I left, I printed them out, corrected them, and left them to mature in a drawer, until the next time I returned to the country. The definitive versions of my first three novels were done there, usually in two or three weeks over the Christmas holidays. The result was that I started to cultivate a superstition (I who am the least superstitious person in the world: I go under ladders, greet affectionately any black cats crossing my path, and, to punish superstitious students, I always fix my university exams for a Friday, so long as it is a thirteenth): the almost definitive version, apart from minor corrections, had to be completed by 5 January, my birthday. If I was not ready for that year, I would wait for the next year (and once, when I was almost ready in November, I put everything away so I could finish in January).
Here too, Baudolino was the exception. Or rather, it was written with the same rhythm, out in the country as usual, but about halfway through the writing, during the Christmas holidays of 1999, I got stuck. I thought it was due to the Millennium Bug. I was on the chapter with Barbarossa's death, and what was to happen in that chapter dictated the final chapters, and the very way in which I would recount the journey toward Prester Johns Kingdom. I was blocked for several months, I could not imagine how to get over that hurdle, or around that cape. I could not do it, and I secretly yearned for those chapters (still to be written) that I had been most passionate about right from the start, the encounters with monsters and especially the meeting with Hypatia. I dreamed of being able to start on those chapters, but I did not want to do so until I had solved the problem that was obsessing me.
When I got back to the country, in the summer of 2000, I "rounded the cape" in the middle of June. I had begun to think about the novel in 1995, it had taken me five years to get halfway, and therefore—I said to myself—I still needed five more years to finish.
But obviously I had thought out the second half of the book so intensely in those five years that it had all sorted itself out in my head (or heart, or stomach, I don't know). In short, between mid-June and the beginning of August the book was completed almost on its own, in a spurt (afterward there were a few months of checking and rewriting, but by then it was done, the story was finished). At that point another of my principles crumbled, because even a superstition is also a principle, however irrational it is. I had not finished the book for the 5 th of January.
There was something that was not quite right, I thought for a few days. Then, on 8 August my first grandchild was born. It all became clear, for this fourth occasion I had to finish the novel not on the day of my birthday but on his birth day. I dedicated the book to him and felt reassured.
The Computer and Writing
How much has the computer influenced my writing? A huge amount, in my experience, but I don't know how much from the point of view of results.
By the way, seeing that Foucault's Pendulum spoke of a computer that created poetry and connected events in an aleatory way, many interviewers wanted me at all costs to confess that the entire novel had been written by giving a program to the computer, which then invented everything. Note that these were all journalists who by now worked in editorial offices where articles are written on computer and then go directly to press—so they knew how much one can expect from this servile machine. But they also knew they were writing for a public that still had a magical idea of what the computer was, and we know that often we write to tell readers not the truth but what they want to hear.
In any case, at a certain point I got annoyed and gave one of them the magic formula:
First of all you need a computer, obviously, which is an intelligent machine that thinks for you—and this would be an advantage for many people. All you need is a program of a few lines, even a child could do it. Then one feeds into the computer the content of a few hundred novels, scientific works, the Bible, the Koran, and many telephone directories (very useful for characters' names). Say, something like 120,000 pages. After this, using another program, you randomize, in other words, you mix all those texts together, making some adjustment, for instance eliminating all the a's. Thus as well as a novel you would have a lipogram. At this point you press "print" and it prints out. Having eliminated all the a's, what comes out is something less than 120,000 pages. After you have read them carefully, several times, underlining the most significant passages, you load them onto an articulated truck and take them to an incinerator. Then you simply sit under a tree, with a piece of charcoal and good-quality drawing paper in hand, and allowing your mind to wander you write down a couple of lines. For instance: "The moon is high in the sky / the wood rustles." Maybe what emerges initially is not a novel but, rather, a Japanese haiku; nevertheless, the important thing is to get started.
No one had the courage to report my secret recipe. But someone said, "one can feel that the novel was written directly on the computer, apart from the scene of the trumpet in the cemetery; that scene is heartfelt, and he must have rewritten it several times, and in pen." I am ashamed to say so, but in this novel that underwent so many phases of drafting, in which the ballpoint, the fountain pen, the felt-tip, and many revisions played a part, the only chapter written directly on the computer, and in a spurt, without many corrections, was precisely that trumpet chapter. The reason is quite simple: I had that tale so present in my mind, I had told it to myself or others so many times that by then it was as if it had already been written. I had nothing to add. I moved my hands over the keyboard as if it were a piano on which I was playing a melody I knew by heart, and if there is felicitous writing in that scene, it is due to the fact that it started as a jam session. You play, letting yourself go with the flow, record it, and what's there is there.
In fact, the beauty of the computer is that it encourages spontaneity: you dash down, in a hurry, whatever comes to mind. Meanwhile you know that later you can always correct and vary it.
The use of the computer concerns, in fact, the problem of corrections, and therefore of variants.
The Name of the Rose, in its definitive versions, was written on a typewriter. Then I would correct, retype, sometimes cut and paste, and in the end I gave it all to a typist, and then again I had to correct, replace, and cut and paste. With the typewriter you can correct only up to a certain point. Then you get tired of re-typing, cutting, pasting, and then having it retyped again. The rest of it you correct at proof stage, and off it goes.
With the use of the computer (Foucault's Pendulum was written in Wordstar 2000, The Island of the Day Before in Word5, Baudolino in Winword in its various versions over the years), things change. You are tempted to correct ad infinitum. You write, then print out, and you reread. You correct. Then you retype according to your corrections and printouts. I have kept the various drafts (with the odd gap). But it would be a mistake to think that a fanatic of textual variants could ever reconstruct your process of writing. In fact, you write (on the computer), print out, correct (by hand), and make the corrections on the computer, but as you do so you choose other variants, in other words you do not rewrite exactly what you have corrected by hand. The critic who studies variants would find further variants between your final correction in ink on the printout and the new version produced by the printer. If you really wanted to encourage pointless theses, you have all of posterity at your disposal. The fact is that the existence of the computer means that the very logic of variants has changed. They are neither a rethinking nor your final choice. Since you know that your choice can be changed at any time, you make many changes, and often you go back to your original option.
I really do believe that the existence of electronic means of writing will profoundly alter criticism of variants, with all due respect to the spirit of Contini. I on
ce worked on the variants in Manzoni's Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns) * At that time the substitution of a word was crucial. Nowadays it is not: tomorrow you can go back to the word you rejected yesterday. At most what will count is the difference between the first handwritten draft and the last one out of the printer. The rest is all coming and going, often dictated by the amount of potassium in your blood.
Joy and sadness
I do not have anything else to say about the way I write my novels. Except that they have to take many years. I do not understand those who write a novel a year; they might be wonderful, and I do admire them, but I don't envy them. The beauty of writing a novel is not the beauty of the live match, it is the beauty of the delayed transmission.
I am always annoyed when I realize that one of my novels is coming to the end, that is to say, that according to its internal logic it is time that it (he/she) stopped, and that I stopped too; when I notice that if I were to go any further it would only make it worse. The beauty, the real joy, is living for six, seven, eight years (ideally forever) in a world that you are creating bit by bit, and which becomes your own.
Sadness begins when the novel is over.
This is the only reason you would instantly want to write another one. But if it is not there waiting for you, it is pointless trying to rush it.
The Writer and the Reader
However, I would not like these last statements to generate automatically another view common to bad writers—namely, that one writes only for oneself. Do not trust those who say so: they are dishonest and lying narcissists.
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list. It helps to remember what you have to buy, and when you have bought everything you can destroy it, because it is no use to anyone else. Every other thing that you write, you write to say something to someone.
I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?
My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense.
One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.
Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader.
A first version of this piece was written for Maria Teresa Serafini, ed., Come si scrive un romanzo (Milan: Strumenti Bompiani, 1996). The editor had asked a number of writers a series of questions, which correspond to the sections of this essay. In the meantime I also published my fourth novel, Baudolino, and consequently I have inserted into the present version some passages dedicated to this, my latest experience with writing fiction.
The translator is very grateful, for assistance with particular problems, to Tim Farrant, Ann Jefferson, Cathy McLaughlin, Giuseppe Stellardi.
UMBERTO ECO is professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. His collections of essays include Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels in Hyperreality, and How to Travel with a Salmon. He is also the author of the bestselling novels The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and Baudolino. He lives in Milan.
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* Obviously, when I wrote this article, the term "globalization" already existed, and I did not use the expression by chance. But today, now that all of us have become sensitive to this problem, it really is worth going back and rereading these pages. It is astonishing how the Manifesto witnessed the birth, 150 years ahead of its time, of the era of globalization, and the alternative forces it would unleash. It almost suggests that globalization is not an accident that happens during the course of capitalist expansion (just because the Wall has come down and the Internet has arrived) but rather the inevitable pattern that the emergent class could not fail to follow, even though at the time, through the expansion of markets, the most convenient (though also the most bloody) means to this end was called colonization. It is also worth dwelling again (and this is advisable not just for the bourgeoisie but for all classes) on the warning that every force opposing the march of globalization is initially divided and confused, tends toward mere Luddism, and can be used by its enemy to fight its own battles.
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* Marcel Proust, "Gérard de Nerval," in Against Sainte-Beuve, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: 1994), 24–33.
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† A piece of advice I must give to the reader is to read (or reread) the text of Sylvie before tackling this essay. Before moving on to critical reflection it is important to discover or rediscover the pleasure of an "innocent" reading. Moreover, seeing that I will often refer to the various chapters, and that we have just said, in Proust's words, that "we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are," it is indispensable to experience personally this to-ing and fro-ing.
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* A similar table appeared in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, page 40. Table A and Table B are taken from the Einaudi translation of Sylvie, by kind permission of the publisher.
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* In a fit of obsessive precision I actually visited the places. Naturally the roads are no longer the same, but the forests and many pools are still there (those near Commelle are particularly evocative, with the swans and Queen Blanches castle). You can follow the Thève in its meandering route, the structure of Ermenonville is still more or less what it once was, with the road passing above La Launette and the four dovecotes, Châalis is still touchingly dilapidated, and at Loisy they show you what was presumably Sylvie's house. The greatest danger for the sentimental Nervalian is to come across, somewhere between Orry and Mortefontaine, the Pare Asterix, and to find, in the desert, a reconstruction of the Wild West and the Sahara, with Indians and dromedaries (France's Disneyland is not far off). Forget about the road to Flanders, because Gonesse is close to Charles de Gaulle airport, stuck between high-rise blocks and refineries. But after Louvres you can start to go back to your memories again, and the mists are still what they once were, even though the distant landscape has to be seen from a motorway.
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* Unhappy the languages that do not have the imperfect and try to render Nerval's opening. A nineteenth-century English translation (Sylvie: A Recollection of Valois [New York: Routledge and Sons, 1887]) tried this: "I quitted a theater where I used to appear every night," while a more recent one went for: "I came out of a theater where I used to spend money every evening," and we have no idea where that mention of spending money comes from, but perhaps the translator wants us to realize that this was a habit, a vice, something that had been going on too long (Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Geoffrey Wagner [New York: Grove Press, 1957]). What lengths people will go to make up for the absence of the imperfect! The most recent translation, by Richard Sieburth (Sylvie [New York: Penguin, 1995]) seems to me more faithful: "I was coming out of a theater where, night after night, I would appear in one of the stage boxes...." It is rather long, but it conveys the durative and iterative nature of the original imperfect.
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* "Journées de lecture," in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1919, ed. 1958), 239 n 1.
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* See my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
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* Mirène Ghossein, in a term paper during my course at Columbia University in 1984, observed a continual dyscrasia between what is set up as a Platonic ideal, and what is revealed as a disappointing shadow in the cave. I do not know if Nerval was thinking of Plato, but certainly the mechanism is this: as something gradually comes within reach (real in the normal sense of the term), it becomes a shadow and cannot stand comparison with, is no longer equal to, the ideal image conjured up.
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* The "completing analepsis" is sometimes not a calculated technique but a stopgap, as in the case of many nineteenth-century writers of serial novels. By expanding to excess the dimensions of their novels in installments, they would find themselves obliged either to make amends for details they had forgotten or to justify, with a brusque retrospective explanation, events they were forced to make happen. For a discussion of this technique, see, for instance, my "Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mystères de Paris," now in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
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* There are many works that have helped me understand Nerval. I will cite only some of those from which I took various suggestions. In the special issue of VS, 31/32 (Sur "Sylvie") (1982), see Daniele Barbieri, "Etapes de topicalisation et effets de brouillard," Beppe Cottafavi, "Micro-procès temporels dans le premier chapitre de Sylvie," Isabella Pezzini, "Paradoxes du désir, logique du récit" (and see also the same author's "Promenade a Ermenonville" in her Passioni e narrazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1996)), Maria Pia Pozzato, "Le brouillard et le reste," Patrizia Violi, "Du côté du lecteur." Among French critics I should mention Albert Béguin, Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Corti, 1945), Jacques Bony, Le récit nervalien (Paris: Corti, 1990), Frank Paul Bowman, Gérard de Nerval. La conquête de soi par l'écri-ture (Orléans: Paradigme, 1997), Pierre-Georges Castex, introduction and commentary to Sylvie (Paris: SEDES, 1970), Léon Cellier, Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Hatier, 1956), Michel Collot, Gérard de Nerval ou la dévotion à l'imaginaire (Paris: PUF, 1992), Uri Eisenzweig, L'éspace imaginaire d'un récit: 'Sylvie' de Gérard de Nerval (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976), Jacques Geninasca, "De la fête à l'anti-fête," and "Le plein, le vide et le tout," in La parole littéraire (Paris: PUF, 1997), Raymond Jean, Nerval par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1964), and his introduction and notes to Sylvie, Aurélie (Paris: Corti, 1964), Michel Jeanneret, La lettre perdue. Ecriture et folie dans l'oeuvre de Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), Aristide Marie, Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l'homme (Paris: Hachette, 1914), Pierre Moreau, Sylvie et ses soeurs nervaliennes (Paris: SEDES, 1966), Georges Poulet, "Nerval," in Le metamorfosi del cerchio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1971), Dominique Tailleux, L'éspace nervalien (Paris: Nizet, 1975). I will mention also the introductions and notes by Henri Lemaître in the Gamier edition of the Oeuvres, the commentaries by Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, and their collaborators, in the third volume of the Oeuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, and Vincenzo Cerami, introduction to Le figlie delfuoco (Milan: Garzanti, 1983). I have taken many ideas from Gérard Genette, Figure ILI (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).
