by Umberto Eco
For the inquisitors of all periods, race and religion, fire purifies not only the sins of humanity, but also those of books. There are many stories of book burnings, some out of neglect, others out of ignorance, but others again, like the Nazi bonfires, in an attempt to purify and eliminate all evidence of degenerate art.
For reasons of morality and for the sake of his sanity, Don Quixote’s zealous friends burned his collection of romances. The library in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé (1935) also burns in a manner reminiscent of Empedocles’s sacrifice (“when the flames finally reach him he laughs loudly, as he has never laughed in all his life”). Books condemned to disappear are also burned in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) while the library in the abbey in my own novel The Name of the Rose (1980) meets a similar fate, by chance, although the original cause was censorship.
In his Universal History of the Destruction of Books (2007), Fernando Báez asks himself why fire has been the dominant factor in the destruction of books. He answers:
Fire is salvation, and for that reason, almost all religions dedicate fires to their respective divinities. This power to conserve life is also a destructive power. When man destroys with fire, he plays God, master of the fire of life and death. And in this way he identifies with a purifying solar cult and with the great myth of destruction that almost always takes place through fire. The reason for using fire is obvious: it reduces the spirit of a work to matter.
Contemporary Ekpyrosis
Fire is a destroyer in every episode of war, from the fabled Greek Fire of the Byzantines (a military secret if ever there was one, and I would like to mention the fine novel dedicated to it: Luigi Malerba’s Il fuoco greco of 1990) to the chance discovery of gunpowder by the monk Berthold Schwarz, who died in a personal and punitive ekpyrosis. Fire is the punishment for those who play a double game in times of war and “Fire!” is the command given to all firing squads, as if invoking the origin of life in order to expedite its end. But perhaps the fire of war that has horrified humanity the most—I mean all of humanity, aware for the first time all over the world of what was going on in one part of it—was the explosion of the atomic bomb.
One of the pilots who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki wrote that “suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit. Even with my dark welder’s goggles, I winced and shut my eyes for a couple of seconds.” The Bhagavad-Gita says, “if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.… I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” And this was the verse that came to Robert Oppenheimer’s mind after the explosion of the first atomic bomb.
And with this, we come close to the dramatic end of my speech and—in a more reasonable span of time, to the end of the human adventure on Earth or Earth’s adventure in the cosmos. Because never have three of the primordial elements been so threatened as they are today: the air killed by pollution and carbon dioxide, the water, which is contaminated on the one hand and getting scarcer and scarcer on the other. The only winner is fire, in the form of a heat that is parching the earth and upsetting the seasons, and which by melting the glaciers will invite the sea to invade it. All unawares, we are marching toward the first true ekpyrosis. While America and China reject the Kyoto Protocol, we are heading for death by fire. And it matters little to us if the universe will regenerate itself after our holocaust, because it will not be ours.
In his Fire Sermon, the Buddha warned:
All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire? The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire … the nose is on fire; odors are on fire … the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire … the mind is on fire; ideas are on fire … mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire.
Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, for that also he conceives an aversion. Conceives an aversion for the ear, conceives an aversion for sounds … conceives an aversion for the nose, conceives an aversion for odors … conceives an aversion for the tongue, conceives an aversion for tastes … conceives an aversion for the body, conceives an aversion for things tangible … conceives an aversion for the mind, conceives an aversion for ideas, conceives an aversion for mind-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the mind; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent.
But humankind has been unable (at least in part) to give up its attachment to its own smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile pleasures—and to making fire through friction. Perhaps we should have left its production to the gods, who would have given it to us only occasionally, in the form of lightning bolts.
[La Milanesiana, 2008]
6. The Invisible
Thus far I have developed topics such as the absolute, ugliness, and fire. This time, the theme is the invisible: How can you show what cannot be seen?
In this case, I will talk about the fact that we do see some curious entities that are not natural—if by that term we mean beings produced by nature, such as trees and humans. There are other entities that live among us that we talk about as if they were real. I am referring to beings in stories—or better, the fictional characters we encounter in literature.
Fictional characters are inventions of the imagination, and therefore common sense tells us they are nonexistent and cannot be seen. But they are also invisible in the sense that they are not expressed through images but through words, and frequently those words neglect to describe their physical characteristics in much detail.
Yet these characters exist in some way outside the novels that have introduced them to us, and they can live anew through countless images of all kinds. So I am going to resort to images of many invisible things and this will not be a simple rhetorical stratagem. The fact is that some fictional characters have become highly visible because of the many portrayals we have made of them outside the texts in which they came into being. What does it mean for the character created by a text to live outside it? If you think about it, this is no mean problem.
Tolstoy does not tell us much about the physical aspect of Anna Karenina beyond that she was beautiful and charming. Let’s read the descriptive passages:
Vronsky … felt he must glance at her once more; not because she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him.…
Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured her invariably in lilac. But now seeing her in black, she felt that she had not fully seen her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and al
l that was seen was she—simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and eager.…
She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination.
The description could equally be applied to Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Obama, or Carla Bruni. And we know how many Kareninas have come down to us from the tradition.
Not bad for an invisible person.
In 1860, after setting sail to join Garibaldi in Sicily, Alexandre Dumas stopped over in Marseilles and visited the Château d’If where, before becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, his character Edmond Dantès had been imprisoned for fourteen years, and had been visited in his cell by the abbé Faria. In the course of his visit, Dumas discovered that visitors were shown the Count’s cell and the guides talked about him and Faria as if they had actually existed in history, whereas they neglected to mention real historical figures such as Mirabeau who had been imprisoned there.
Dumas remarked on this in his memoirs: “One of the privileges novelists enjoy is creating characters who kill off those of the historians. The reason is that historians call up mere ghosts while novelists create people in flesh and blood.”
The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden claimed that, in ontological terms, fictional characters are not fully determined—in other words, we know few of their properties—whereas real people are fully determined and we can predicate their every difference. I think he was wrong: in reality no one can list all the properties of a given individual, because they are potentially infinite, whereas the properties of fictional characters are strictly limited by the text that talks about them—and only those properties mentioned by the text count for their identification.
And in truth, I know Alessandro Manzoni’s character in The Betrothed, Renzo Tramaglino, better than my father. As far as my father is concerned, there are episodes in his life—goodness knows how many—that I do not know and will never know. There were secret thoughts he never expressed, anxieties he concealed, fears and joys he left unsaid. So, like Dumas’s historians, I shall continue to call up this dear ghost to wonder about. Conversely, I know everything about Renzo Tramaglino that I ought to know. Whatever things Manzoni has not told me about him are irrelevant to me, just as they are to Manzoni and for that matter to Renzo, inasmuch as he is a fictional character.
Is this how things really are? Precisely because it tells us about invented things, which are therefore never verified in the real world, a statement in a novel should always be false. Yet we do not consider statements in novels as lies, nor do we accuse Homer or Cervantes of having been liars. We know perfectly well that in reading a work of fiction we make a tacit pact with the author, who pretends to say something true and we pretend to take him or her seriously. In doing this, every fictional statement designs and constructs a possible world and all our judgments on truth and falsehood will refer not to the real world but to the possible world of the fictional one. So it is false in the possible world of Arthur Conan Doyle to say that Sherlock Holmes lived on the banks of Spoon River, and in Tolstoy’s possible world it is false to say that Anna Karenina lived in Baker Street.
There are many possible worlds: for example, there is the possible world of my desires in which I imagine what would happen if I were shipwrecked on an uninhabited Polynesian island with Sharon Stone. Every possible world is by nature incomplete or chooses as its background many aspects of the real world: in the world of my fantasies, were I shipwrecked in Polynesia with Sharon Stone, the island would certainly have a crown of palm trees around a beach of white sand and other such things that I might encounter in the real world.
Fictional possible worlds never take as their background a universe that is too different from the one in which we live, not even fairy tales, in which the forest—even though there are talking animals in it—is still like the ones in our real world. The Sherlock Holmes stories are set in a London as it is or was, and we would find it disconcerting if Doctor Watson suddenly crossed Saint James Park to visit an Eiffel Tower on the Danube by the corner of Nevsky Prospekt. A writer might even introduce to us a possible world of this kind but she would have to employ many narrative artifices to make us accept it (for example, by introducing a phenomenon such as a space-time warp or something of that sort). Ultimately, if the story is to have any zest, the Eiffel Tower has to be the one in Paris.
Sometimes a fictional world can reveal conspicuous contradictions with respect to the real world. For example, in A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare tells us in Act II, scene 2 that the action takes place in Bohemia in a deserted wilderness near the sea—whereas in the real world Bohemia has no beaches, just as there are no Swiss seaside resorts. But it costs us nothing to accept (or pretend to believe) that in that possible world Bohemia is by the sea. Those who subscribe to the fictional pact are usually not hard to please, or are sufficiently uninformed.
Once we have established these differences between the fictional possible world and the real one, we will usually admit that the statement “Anna Karenina committed suicide by throwing herself under a train” is not true in the same way in which the historical statement “Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin” is true.
Nonetheless, why is it that we would fail a student in a history exam if she said that Hitler was shot on Lake Como but we would also fail a student in a literature exam if he said that Anna Karenina fled to Siberia with Alyosha Karamazov?
The matter is easily resolved in logical and semantic terms, by recognizing that it is true that “Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself under a train” is only a conventionally quicker way of saying “It is true that in the real world Tolstoy wrote that Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.” So it is Tolstoy and Hitler who belong to the same world, not Hitler and Anna Karenina.
So, in logical terms, that Anna Karenina commits suicide would be true de dicto while Hitler committed suicide would be true de re. Or better yet, what happens to Anna Karenina does not concern the meaning of the expression but its signifier. To put it another way, we can make true statements about fictional characters in the same way that we can say that it is true that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in C minor (and not in F major like the Sixth) and begins with “G, G, G, E flat.” It would be a judgment on the score. Anna Karenina begins with a maxim (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”) which is a matter of opinion, but one immediately followed by a factual statement (“Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household”) with regard to which we must not wonder whether it is true that everything was upside down in the Oblonsky household but whether it is true that in the score called Anna Karenina it really says “Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household,” or its Russian equivalent.
This solution, however, leaves us dissatisfied. A musical score (apart from the infinite problems of interpretation that it implies) is basically a set of instructions for the production of a sequence of sounds, and the real problem of the enjoyment, aesthetic judgment, and the feelings aroused by the Fifth come later. Likewise, what is written on the first page of the novel called Anna Karenina makes us think about a state of affairs in the Oblonsky home and it is that state of affairs that determines whether we take something as true or false. In other words, to be strictly obvious, even if we take as true that at the beginning of Anna Karenina it says, “Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household,” we have not yet decided whether it is true or not that everything really was upside down in the Oblonsky house, and especially if, in addition to being true in Tolstoy’s possible world, this disorder is not in some way true for us, in our everyday world.
It is true that the score called the Bi
ble begins with “Bereshit,” but when we say that Abraham was about to sacrifice his son (and we frequently try to interpret this event allegorically, mystically, or morally) we are not referring to the original Hebrew score (which ninety-nine percent of those who talk about Cain or Abraham do not know); further, we are talking about the meanings and not the signifiers of that book—and those meanings can also be interpreted with other words, frescoes, or films that do not appear in the original score.
The problem as to whether we can make true statements about fictional characters has nothing to do with the problem of the words used to introduce them to us. As children, many young Italians will have read the beautiful books in the Scala d’Oro series, which were abridged versions of the great works of literature written for younger readers by excellent writers. Anna Karenina was obviously not one of them, because it is difficult to summarize this work for children or adolescents, but the series did include, for example, Les Misérables and Le capitaine Fracasse. Thanks to these books, many Italians know who Jean Valjean and the Baron de Sigognac are without having ever seen the scores that were the original texts. How are these characters able to survive, and rather well at that, outside the score that created them?
No one can reasonably deny that Hitler and Anna Karenina are two different entities, with a different ontological status. But we have to admit that many times even our historical statements are de dicto—just like those regarding fictional characters. Those students whose modern history essays state that Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin are not referring to something they know from direct experience, they are simply asserting that this is what it says in their history books.
