by Umberto Eco
Yet as I said in my previous lecture, although I have treated Sylvie with almost clinical rigor for years and years, the book has never lost its charm for me. Every time I reread it, it is as if my love affair with Sylvie (I’m not sure whether I mean the book or the character) were beginning for the first time. How can this be possible, since I know the grid, the secret of its strategy? Because the grid can be designed from outside the text, but when you read again, you return inside the text, and—once within it—you cannot read it in haste. Of course you can skim rapidly through the book if, say, you want to retrieve a certain sentence; but in that case you are not reading—you are consulting, scanning, as a computer would. If you are reading, trying to understand the various sentences, you will realize that Sylvie forces you to slow down. But as you slow down, as you accept its pace, then you forget any grid or Ariadne’s thread, and you get lost again in the woods of Loisy.
Being ill, Labrunie probably did not realize he had constructed such a wonderful narrative mechanism. But the laws of this mechanism lie within the text, before our eyes. How did the fourteenth-century monk Berthold Schwarz, in seeking the philosopher’s stone, ever discover gunpowder? He knew nothing about it and did not even want it; but gunpowder exists, unfortunately works, and works according to a chemical formula of which poor Berthold was ignorant. A model reader finds and attributes to the model author what the empirical author might have discovered by pure serendipity.
When I say that Nerval wanted us to understand which structures are used in a text to instruct a model reader, I am making an interpretive conjecture. There are, however, other cases in which the empirical author has directly intervened in order to tell us that he wanted to become exactly that sort of model author. I am thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his essay “The Philosophy of Composition.” Many people took this text as a form of provocation, an attempt to show that in “The Raven” “no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” I think that Poe simply wanted to describe what he hoped the first-level reader would feel and the second-level reader would discover in his poem.
We are tempted to consider Poe somewhat naive when he says that a literary work should be short enough to read at one sitting, “for if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.” But it seems to me that not even this prescription is based on the psychology of empirical readers: it concerns a model reader’s chance to collaborate, and hides the problem of the eternal search for a golden rule. As a second step, Poe reflects on what he considers the main effect of a poem, namely beauty: “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” But Poe wants to find “some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn” and declares that “no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain.”
Poe dwells at length on the power of the refrain, which derives from the “force of monotone—both in sound and thought,” and on the pleasure that “is deduced solely from the sense of identity—of repetition.” In the end he decides that, to be monotonously obsessive, the refrain must be “a single word . . . sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis,” and it seems obvious to him to choose the word “nevermore.” But since such a monotonous refrain could not reasonably be attributed to a human being, he feels he has no choice but to put it in the mouth of a speaking animal, the Raven. Then there is another problem to be solved.
I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” “Death”—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty.” The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited to such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.
I had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress, and a Raven continuously repeating the word “Nevermore.”
Poe forgets nothing, not even the type of rhythm and meter he considers ideal (“the former is trochaic—the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic”). Finally, he wonders what would be the most opportune way “of bringing together the lover and the Raven.” Although it would have been appropriate to have them meet in a forest, a “close circumscription of space” seems to Poe necessary, like “a frame to a picture,” to concentrate the attention of the reader. Thus, he places the lover in a room in the lover’s own house, and has only to decide how to introduce the bird. “And the thought of introducing him through the window was inevitable.” The lover supposes that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter is a tapping at the door, but this detail is designed to prolong the reader’s curiosity and “to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover’s throwing open the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked.” The night had to be tempestuous (as Snoopy likewise knows very well) “to account for the Raven’s seeking admission, and secondly, for the effects of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber.” Finally the author decides to have the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, because of the visual contrast between the whiteness of the marble and the blackness of the plumage, “the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.”
Need I continue to quote this extraordinary text? Poe is not telling us—as it seems at first—what effects he wants to create in the soul of his empirical readers; otherwise he would have kept quiet about his secret and would have considered the formula of the poem to be as hush-hush as that of Coca-Cola. At most he reveals to us how he produced the effect which is supposed to astound and attract his first-level reader. But in reality he confides to us what he would like his second-level reader to discover.
Should the model reader search for the mythical figure-in-the-carpet celebrated by Henry James? Although one might believe that such a figure is the final meaning of a work of art, it is not the aim here. Poe does not identify the final and univocal meaning of his poem: he describes the strategy he designed to enable a reader to explore his poem endlessly.
Perhaps he decided to reveal his methods because up to that moment he had never come across his ideal reader, and he wanted to act as the best reader of his own poem. If so, his was a pathetic act of tender arrogance and humble pride; he should never have written “The Philosophy of Composition” and should have left us the task of understanding his secret. But we know that, so far as his mental health was concerned, Edgar was no better off than Gérard. The latter gave the impression of not knowing anything about what he had done, whereas the former gives the impression of knowing too much. Reticence (Labrunie’s mad innocence) and verbosity (Poe’s excess of formulas) belong to the psychology of the two empirical authors. But Poe’s loquacity permits us to understand Labrunie’s reserve. We have to transform the latter into a model author and make him say what he had hidden from us; with the former we have to recognize that, even if the empirical author had not spoken, the model author’s strategy would have been very clear from the text. The disquieting figure “on the pallid bust of Pallas” has now become our own discovery. We can wander around that room for ages, as in the forest between Loisy and Châalis, searching for the lost Adrienne-Lenore, wanting never to emerge from those woods again. Nevermore.
THREE
LINGERING IN THE WOODS
A certain Monsieur Humblot, in rejecting the manuscr
ipt of Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu for the publisher Ollendorff, wrote, “I may be slow on the uptake, but I just can’t believe that someone can take thirty pages to describe how you toss and turn in bed before falling asleep.”
Calvino, when he praised quickness, cautioned, “I do not wish to say that quickness is a value in itself. Narrative time can also be delaying, cyclic, or motionless . . . This apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering.”1 Unless such pleasures existed, we could not admit Proust into the Pantheon of letters.
If, as we have noted, a text is a lazy machine that appeals to the reader to do some of its work, why might a text linger, slow down, take its time? A fictional work, you would suppose, describes people performing actions, and the reader wants to know how these actions turn out. They tell me that in Hollywood, when a producer is listening to the story or plot of a film that is being proposed and finds that there is too much detail, he calls out “Cut to the chase!” And this means: don’t waste time, drop the psychological subtleties, get to the climax, when Indiana Jones has a crowd of enemies after him, or when John Wayne and his companions in Stagecoach are about to be overwhelmed by Geronimo.
On the other hand we do find, in the old manuals of sexual casuistry which so delighted Huysmans’ Des Esseintes, the notion of delectatio morosa, a lingering conceded even to those who urgently feel the need to procreate. If something important or gripping is going to take place, we have to cultivate the art of lingering.
In a wood, you go for a walk. If you’re not forced to leave it in a hurry to get away from the wolf or the ogre, it is lovely to linger, to watch the beams of sunlight play among the trees and fleck the glades, to examine the moss, the mushrooms, the plants in the undergrowth. Lingering doesn’t mean wasting time: frequently one stops to ponder before making a decision.
But since one can wander in a wood without going anywhere in particular, and since at times it’s fun to get lost just for the hell of it, I shall be dealing with those walks that the author’s strategy induces the reader to take.
One of the lingering or slowing-down techniques that an author can employ is the one that allows the reader to take “inferential walks.” I’ve spoken about this concept in The Role of the Reader.2
In any work of fiction the text emits signals of suspense, almost as if the discourse slowed down or even came to a halt, and as if the writer were suggesting, “Now you try carrying on . . .” When I spoke of “inferential walks” I meant, in the terms of our woodsy metaphor, imaginary walks outside the wood: readers, in order to predict how a story is going to go, turn to their own experience of life or their knowledge of other stories. In the 1950s, Mad magazine ran some short comic stories called “Scenes We’d Like to See,” of which you have an example in Figure 10.3 These stories were naturally aimed at frustrating the inferential walks of the reader, who inevitably imagined endings typical of Hollywood films.
But texts are not always so wicked, and are usually inclined to allow the reader the pleasure of making a guess which will then be proved correct. We mustn’t, however, make the mistake of thinking that signals of suspense are typical only of dime novels or of commercial films. The readerly process of making predictions constitutes a necessary emotional aspect of reading which brings into play hopes and fears, as well as the tension that derives from our identification with the fate of the characters.4
Figure 10
The masterpiece of nineteenth-century Italian literature is I promessi sposi (known in English as The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni. Almost all Italians hate it because they were forced to read it in school. My father, however, encouraged me to read I promessi sposi before my teachers forced me to, and I love it.
At one point in the book Don Abbondio, a seventeenth-century country curate whose main gift is cowardice, is returning home reciting his breviary and sees “something he did not expect or want to see at all”—that is, two “bravoes” waiting for him. “Bravoes” in those days were mercenaries or adventurers, scoundrels in the service of the Spanish aristocrats who dominated Lombardy, and were employed by their lords in perpetrating the dirtiest of dirty tricks. Another writer might wish to placate our impatience as readers and tell us straight away what happens—might cut to the chase. Not so Manzoni. He does something that the reader may find quite incredible. He takes a few pages, rich in historical detail, to explain who the bravoes were. Having done this, he goes back to Don Abbondio, but he doesn’t have him meet the bravoes at once. He keeps us waiting:
It was only too obvious that the two bravoes we mentioned earlier were waiting for someone; but the thing that Don Abbondio liked least of all was being forced to realize by certain unmistakable signs that they were waiting for him. For as he appeared they looked at each other, raising their heads as they did so in a movement which clearly went with the words “Here he is!” Then the man astride the wall swung his leg over on the track and got up, the other man parted company with the wall against which he had been leaning, and both of them began to walk towards the priest.
Don Abbondio still kept his breviary open in front of him, as if he were reading, but kept peeping over the top of it to see what they were doing. When he saw them coming straight towards him, a dozen unpleasant thoughts struck him at once. First he wondered whether there was a side-turning anywhere between himself and the bravoes, either to the right or the left; but he remembered clearly that no such paths existed. He rapidly searched his mind to see if he had fallen into the sin of offending men of power, or men of vengeance; but even at this moment of distress he could draw a little comfort from the witness of a perfectly clear conscience. And yet the bravoes drew nearer, looking straight at him as they did so. He put the first two fingers of his left hand under his collar, as if to adjust it; and he ran them round his neck, as he turned his head and looked behind him out of the corner of his eye, as far into the distance as he could, twisting his lips at the same time, to see if anyone was coming along from that direction. But there was no one there. He looked over the side wall into the fields, and there was no one there either. He directed a more cautious glance straight ahead, but there was nobody there except the bravoes.
What was he to do?5
What is to be done? Notice that this question is directly addressed not only to Don Abbondio but also to the reader. Manzoni is a master at mixing his narration with sudden, sly appeals to the reader, and this is one of the less sneaky. What would you have done in Don Abbondio’s place? This is a typical example of how a model author, or the text, can invite the reader to take an inferential walk. The delaying tactics serve to stimulate this walk. Note, further, that readers are not supposed to ask themselves what is to be done, because it’s obvious that Don Abbondio has no means of escape. Readers may likewise put two fingers under their collar—not to adjust it but to glance forward in the story. They are invited to wonder what two bravoes want with a man so innocuous and normal. Well, I’m not going to tell you. If you haven’t read The Betrothed, it’s time you did. You should know, however, that everything in the novel stems from this meeting.
Still, we might ask ourselves if it was necessary for Manzoni to insert those pages of historical information on the bravoes. The reader is tempted to skip them, of course, and every reader of The Betrothed has done so, at least the first time. And yet, even the time needed to turn the pages we don’t read is taken into account by the narrative strategy, because the model author knows (even if the empirical author wouldn’t know how to express it conceptually) that in a work of fiction time appears in three forms—namely, story time, discourse time, and reading time.
Story time is part of the content of the story. If the text says “a thousand years pass,” the story time is a thousand years. But at the level of linguistic expression, which is at the level of fictional discourse, the time to write (and read) the utterance is very short. This is why a rapid discourse time may express a very long story time. Of course the opposite may also occur
: we saw in the preceding lecture that Nerval needed twelve chapters to tell us what happened in a night and a day, and then in two short chapters he told us what happened in the course of months and years.
Theorists of fiction all more or less agree that it is easy to establish the story time.6 Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, from the time of departure to the time of arrival, lasts eighty days—at least for the members of the Reform Club, waiting in London (for Phileas Fogg, who is traveling eastward, it lasts eighty-one). But it is less easy to determine the discourse time. Should we base it on the length of the written text, or on the time needed to read it? We cannot be sure that these two durations are exactly in proportion. If we had to work it out from the number of words, the two passages I’m now going to read you would both be examples of the narrative phenomenon Gérard Genette calls “isochrony” and Seymour Chatman calls “scene”—that is, where story and discourse are of relatively equal duration, as happens with dialogues. The first example comes from a typical hard-boiled novel, a narrative genre where everything is reduced to action and the reader is not allowed a moment’s respite. The ideal description in the hard-boiled novel is that of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre: a few seconds, and all the enemies are liquidated. Mickey Spillane, who in this sense was the Al Capone of literature, at the end of One Lonely Night describes a scene which had to happen in a few instants: