by Umberto Eco
And yet Dumas was a master at constructing narrative lingering which aims to create what I would call trepidation time—that is, it delays the arrival of a dramatic ending. And in this sense The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece. Aristotle had already stipulated that catastrophe and catharsis should be preceded by long peripeties.
In John Stages’ excellent film Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), a veteran of the Second World War, a mild-mannered fellow with a crippled left arm, played by Spencer Tracy, comes to a town in the middle of nowhere to find the father of a dead Japanese soldier, and becomes the object of unbearable daily persecution by racist bad guys. Viewers of the film identify with Tracy’s agony and yearn for an impossible revenge, undergoing an hour of intolerable frustration . . . At a certain point, while he’s having a drink in a luncheonette, Tracy is provoked by a hateful individual, and suddenly that forbearing man makes a rapid movement with his good arm and strikes the enemy a powerful blow: the bad guy is hurled the whole length of the place and flung out into the street after smashing through the door. This act of violence comes quite unexpectedly, but it’s been prepared for by such a slow series of extremely painful outrages that it acquires cathartic value for the spectators, who finally relax in their seats. If they had to wait less time and if their trepidation were less intense, the catharsis wouldn’t be so complete.
Italy is one of those countries in which one is allowed to enter a cinema at any time during the show and then stay to see it again from the beginning. I think this is a good custom, because I hold that a film is much like life in a certain respect: I entered into this life with my parents already born and Homer’s Odyssey already written, and then I tried to work out the story going backward, as I did with Sylvie, until I more or less understood what had happened in the world before I arrived. So it seems quite right to me to do the same thing with films. The night I saw Bad Day at Black Rock, I noticed that after Spencer Tracy’s violent gesture (which doesn’t occur at the end of the film) half of the audience got up and left. They were spectators who had come in at the start of that delectatio morosa and had stayed on to enjoy the preparatory phases of that moment of liberation all over again. From this you can see that the trepidation time functions not only to keep the attention of the naive first-level spectator, but also to stimulate the aesthetic enjoyment of the second-level spectator.
In point of fact, I wouldn’t want you to think that these techniques (which are of course more clearly evident in works that are none too complex) belong just to popular art or literature. Indeed, I would like to show you an example of lingering on an epic scale, spread over hundreds of pages, whose function is to prepare us for a moment of satisfaction and joy without end, compared to which the pleasures of a pornographic film pale into insignificance. I’m referring to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. And if we speak about Dante here, we have to think about and even try to become his model reader—a medieval reader, who firmly believed that one’s earthly pilgrimage should culminate in that moment of supreme ecstasy which is the vision of God.
But this reader approached Dante’s poem as if it were fictional, and Dorothy Sayers was right when she recommended, in introducing her translation of the work, that the ideal way of reading it would be “to start at the first line and go straight through to the end, surrendering to the vigour of the story-telling and the swift movement of the verse.” Readers must be aware that they are following a slow exploration of all the circles of Hell, through the center of the Earth, then up to the terraces and cornices of Mount Purgatory, and then higher still, beyond the earthly paradise, “from sphere to sphere of the singing Heavens, beyond the planets, beyond the stars, beyond the Primum Mobile, into the Empyrean, there to behold God as He is.”12
This voyage is none other than an interminable lingering, in the course of which we meet hundreds of characters; are involved in conversations about contemporary politics, about theology, about life and death; and witness scenes of suffering, melancholy, and joy. We often find ourselves wanting to skip passages in order to speed things up, but in skipping we know all the time that the poet is slowing down, and we almost turn around to wait for him to catch up with us. And all this for what? To get to that moment when Dante will see something he is unable to express adequately—that point “Where speech is vanquished and must lag behind—And memory surrenders in such plight.”
In that abyss I saw how love held bound
Into one volume all the lives whose flight
Is scattered through the universe around;
How substance, accident, and mode unite,
Fused, so to speak, together in such wise
That this I tell is one simple light.13
Dante says that he’s unable to express what he has seen (even though he’s managed it better than anyone else) and indirectly asks his readers to use their imagination, there where his “high phantasy lost power.” His readers are satisfied: they have been waiting for that moment when they would find themselves face to face with the Unutterable. And to experience that emotion, with its interminable lingering, the long preceding voyage is necessary. But these are delays during which time is not wasted: while we wait for an encounter which can only dissolve into a dazzling silence, we learn a great deal about the world—which is, after all, the best thing that can happen to us in this life.
Often, fictional delays comprise descriptions of objects, characters, or landscapes. The problem is determining what use these are to the story. In an old essay of mine on the James Bond novels,14 I pointed out that Ian Fleming reserves his long descriptions for a game of golf, for a car race, for a girl’s meditations on the sailor who appears on a packet of Player’s cigarettes, for the crawling of an insect; whereas more dramatic events like an assault on Fort Knox or a life-and-death struggle with a killer shark are related in a few pages or even at times a few lines. I deduced from this that the only function of these descriptions is to persuade readers that they are reading a work of art, because people generally believe that the difference between low-brow and high-brow literature lies in the fact that the latter is full of long descriptions, whereas the former cuts to the chase. Furthermore, Fleming lavishes description primarily on actions that readers could engage in themselves (a card game, a dinner, a Turkish bath) and compresses his accounts of those actions that readers would never dream of being able to do, such as escaping from a castle by hanging onto an aeronautic balloon. Lingering over the déjà vu allows the reader to identify with Bond and to dream of being like him.
Fleming slows down on the superfluous and quickens the pace when it comes to the essential because slowing down on the superfluous is the erotic function of the delectatio morosa, and because he knows that we know that stories told excitedly are the most dramatic. Manzoni, like the good nineteenth-century romantic novelist that he is, uses basically the same strategy as Fleming, although well before him, and he makes us wait agonizingly for each event to occur; but he doesn’t waste time on the inessential. The Don Abbondio who puts his fingers nervously under his collar and asks himself what is to be done is an emblem of seventeenth-century Italian society under foreign domination. The thoughts of an adventuress pondering a packet of cigarettes don’t tell us very much about the culture of our time (we learn only that she is a dreamer or a snob), whereas Manzoni’s lingering over the uncertainty of Don Abbondio explains a lot of things about Italy—not only in the seventeenth century but in the twentieth, too.
Elsewhere, though, the descriptive lingering may have another function. There’s also something that I call hint time. Saint Augustine, who was a subtle reader of texts, wondered why the Bible tended to devote so many words to superfluous descriptions of clothes, buildings, perfumes, and jewelry. Was it possible that God, the inspirer of the biblical writer, could waste so much time indulging in mundane poetry? Obviously not. If there were indeed sudden slowing-down moments in the text, it was because the Holy Scripture was trying to make us realize that we should interpret those de
scriptions allegorically or symbolically.
I do beg your pardon, but I must return to Nerval’s Sylvie. You will remember that the writer, in Chapter 2, after sleepless hours spent evoking the years of his youth, decides to leave for Loisy during the night. But he doesn’t know what time it is. Is it possible that a rich young man, cultured, a lover of the theater, doesn’t have a clock in his house? Believe it or not, he doesn’t have one. Or rather, he does have one, but it doesn’t work. And yet Nerval spends a page describing it:
Among the bric-à-brac splendors which it was then customary to collect, in order to give local color to an old-fashioned apartment, there shone the restored brilliance of one of those tortoiseshell Renaissance pendulum-clocks, whose gilded dome surmounted by the figure of Time is supported by caryatids in the Medici style, resting in their turn on half-rearing horses. The historical Diana, leaning on her stag, appears in low relief under the face, where the enameled figures of the hours are displayed on an inlaid background. The works, excellent no doubt, had not been wound up for two centuries. It was not to tell the time that I had bought that clock in Touraine.
Here is a case where the lingering is designed not so much to slow down the action, to push the reader into taking exciting inferential walks, as it is to indicate that we must prepare ourselves to enter a world in which the normal measurement of time counts for next to nothing, a world in which clocks have broken down or been liquefied, as in a Dali painting.
But in Sylvie we also have time for getting lost. This is why I said in my previous lectures that whenever I go back to Sylvie I forget everything I knew about the text and lose myself again in the labyrinth of time. Nerval can apparently wander off for five pages evoking Rousseau on the ruins of Ermenonville, and certainly all of his digressions help us toward a fuller understanding of the story, of the era, of the character. But above all, this digressing and lingering helps to enclose readers within those time-woods from which they can escape only after the most strenuous efforts (and which they will then want to get back into again).
I promised that I would talk about Chapter 7 of Sylvie. The narrator, after a couple of flashbacks, to which we managed to assign a place in the story, is arriving at Loisy. It’s four in the morning. The scene is apparently the evening in 1838 when he is returning to Loisy, now a grown-up, and he describes the landscape through which the carriage passes, using the present tense. Suddenly he remembers, “It was along there that Sylvie’s brother drove me one evening . . .” What evening? Before or after the second party at Loisy? We’ll never know, and we mustn’t know. The narrator switches back to the present tense and describes the place as it looks that evening, but as it might still be at the moment he’s telling the story, and it’s a place that richly evokes the Medici, like the clock a few pages earlier. Then he returns to the imperfect tense, and Adrienne appears—for the second and last time in the story. She looks like an actress on a stage, in a holy play, “transfigured by her costume as she already was by her vocation” (she has become a nun). The vision is so vague that at this point the narrator expresses doubts which permeate the entire story: “As I retrace these details, I begin to wonder whether they were real or whether I dreamed them.” And then he asks himself if the apparition of Adrienne was as real as the incontestable existence of the Abbey of Châalis. Returning suddenly to the present tense, he muses, “Perhaps this memory is an obsession . . .” Now the carriage is approaching the real Loisy, and the narrator escapes from the realm of reverie.
Well! A long narrative lingering to say nothing—or nothing concerning the development of the story. To say only that time, memory, and dream can melt together and that the reader’s duty is to be captured by the whirl of their unresolved struggle.
But there is also a way of lingering in the text, and of “wasting” time, so as to render the idea of space. One of the least precise and least analyzed of rhetorical figures is hypotyposis. How can a verbal text put something before our eyes as if we could see it? I would like to conclude this lecture by suggesting that one way of rendering the impression of space is to expand both the discourse time and the reading time in relation to the story time.
One of the questions that has always intrigued Italian readers is why Manzoni spends so much time, at the start of The Betrothed, in describing Lake Como. We can forgive Proust for taking thirty pages to describe the process of getting to sleep, but why does Manzoni have to take at least a page to tell us, “Once upon a time there was a lake and here I intend to set my story”? If we tried reading this passage with a map before us, we would see that Manzoni builds his description by combining two film techniques: zoom and slow motion. Don’t tell me that a nineteenth-century writer didn’t know about film techniques: on the contrary, movie directors make use of the techniques of literary fiction. Manzoni proceeds as if he were filming from a helicopter slowly landing (or as if he were reproducing the way God looks down from the heavens to single out a human individual on the earth’s surface). This first continuous movement downward from on high begins in a “geographical” dimension:
One arm of Lake Como turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains, which cut it up into a series of bays and inlets as the hills advance into the water and retreat again, until it quite suddenly grows much narrower and takes on the appearance and the motion of a river between a headland on one side and a wide stretch of shore on the other.
But then the vision abandons the geographical dimension to change slowly to a “topographical” one, at the point where you can begin to distinguish a bridge and the banks:
The bridge which connects the two banks at that point seems to make the change of state still clearer to the eye, marking the spot where the lake comes to an end and the Adda comes into being once more—though further on it again takes the name of a lake, as the banks separate, allowing the water to spread out and lose its speed among more bays and fresh inlets.
The geographical and topographical visions both proceed from north to south, following the course of the river; and the description thus moves from wide angle to narrow: from the lake to the river and then to the streams, from the mountaintops to the slopes and then to the little valleys. And as this happens, the “film” starts moving in a different way, this time not descending from the geographical to the topographical, but expanding from depth to width: at this point the mountains are seen in profile and the perspective alters, as if a human being were looking at them at last.
The stretch of shore we mentioned is formed by the silt from three considerable streams, and is backed by two adjoining mountains, one known as St. Martin’s Mount, and the other by the Lombard-sounding name of Resegone because of the many small peaks that make up its skyline, which do in fact give it the look of a saw. This is enough of a distinctive sign to make the Resegone easy to pick out from the long and vast chains of other mountains, less well known by name and less strange in shape, in which it lies, even if the observer has never seen it before—provided that he sees it from an angle which shows its full length, as for example looking northward from the walls of Milan.
Now, when the description has attained a human scale, we as readers can discern the smallest detail of every road. I would say more: we experience all the tactile sensations we would feel if we were marching upon those very pebbles.
The slope up from the water’s edge is gentle and unbroken for quite a long way: but then it breaks up into mounds and gullies, terraces and steeper tracts . . . Along the extreme fringe of the slope, the terrain is deeply cut up by watercourses, and consists mostly of gravel and pebbles; but the rest of the area is all fields and vineyards with townships, estates and hamlets here and there. There are also some woods, which extend upwards into the mountains. Lecco is the largest of the townships, and gives its name to the territory.15
Here Manzoni makes another choice: he passes from topography to history, beginning to tell us about the city of Lecco. Then he shifts from collective history to the individual st
ory of Don Abbondio, whom we finally meet “along one of those tracks” as he moves toward that fatal meeting with the bravoes.
Manzoni begins his description by assuming the viewpoint of God, the Great Geographer, and little by little assumes the viewpoint of the human beings who live in the landscape. But the fact that he seems to abandon the divine perspective should not fool us. At the end of the novel, if not before, we come to the realization that we are being told not just the story of some poor little human beings but the History of Divine Providence, which directs, corrects, saves, and resolves. The beginning of The Betrothed is not an exercise in literary self-indulgence; it’s a way of preparing the reader straightaway to read a book whose main protagonist is someone who looks at the ways of the world from on high.
I said that we could read the opening passages looking first at a geographical map and then at a topographical one. But this isn’t necessary. If you read properly, you will realize that Manzoni is designing a map; he is setting up a space. Looking at the world with the eyes of his creator, Manzoni competes with Him: he is constructing his fictional world by borrowing aspects of the real one.
A process that we shall hear more about (flashforward) in the next lecture.
FOUR
POSSIBLE WOODS
Once upon a time there was . . . “a King!” my gentle audience will immediately exclaim. That’s right; this time you’ve guessed correctly. Once upon a time there was Vittorio Emanuele III, the last king of Italy, sent into exile after the war. This king did not have much of a reputation for humanistic culture, being more interested in economic and military problems, although he was a keen collector of ancient coins. The story goes that one day he had to open a painting exhibition. Finding himself in front of a beautiful landscape showing a valley with a village running along the slopes of a hill, he looked at the little painted village for a long time, then turned to the director of the exhibition and asked: “How many inhabitants does it have?”