by Umberto Eco
He would have done it for the same reason that Walter Scott began Ivanhoe like this:
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greatest part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.
After supplying other historical details, he goes on:
This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for the information of the general reader.
Not only was Scott intent on coming to some sort of agreement with his reader about facts and events that occurred in the fiction; he also wanted to supply information about the real world which he was not sure his reader possessed and which he believed indispensable for understanding the story. His readers were thus supposed both to pretend to believe that the fictional information was true and to accept the additional information provided by the author as being true in the actual world.
At times, information is given to us in the form of that rhetorical figure known as preterition. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” begins, “Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains . . .,” but I really don’t believe that the book is aimed just at those people who have gone up the Hudson and seen the Catskill Mountains. I think I am a good example of a reader who has never been up the Hudson and yet has pretended to have been up it, has pretended to have seen those mountains, and has enjoyed the rest of the story. But my suspension of disbelief has been only partial. I know that Rip Van Winkle has never existed; nevertheless, I not only believe but I assume to know that up the Hudson River one can really find the Catskill Mountains.
In my essay “Small Worlds,” now in The Limits of Interpretation, I quoted the beginning of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho:
On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the château of Monsier St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and wine, and plantations of olives.
My comment was that it is doubtful whether English readers of the late eighteenth century would have known much about the Garonne, Gascony, and the corresponding landscape. At most, they would have been able to infer from the word “banks” that the Garonne was a river and would have imagined, on the basis of their knowledge of the actual world, a typical southern European environment with vines and olives. Radcliffe invited her readers to behave as if they were familiar with the hills of France.
After publishing that essay, I received a letter from a gentleman of Bordeaux, who revealed to me that olive trees have never grown in Gascony or on the banks of the Garonne. This amiable person drew witty conclusions to support my thesis and praised my ignorance of Gascony, which had allowed me to choose such a convincing example (he then invited me to visit the region as his guest because, he maintained, vineyards did exist there and the wines of that area are exquisite).
So not only did Ann Radcliffe ask her readers to collaborate with her on the basis of their competence concerning the actual world, and not only did she supply part of that competence, and not only did she ask them to pretend to know things about the real world that they did not know, but she even led them to believe that the real world was endowed with items which are not in fact part of its actual furnishings.
Since it is extremely unlikely that Mrs. Radcliffe intended to deceive her readers, we must conclude that she was wrong. But this creates an even greater conundrum. To what extent can we take for granted those aspects of the actual world that the author erroneously takes for granted?
FIVE
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE RUE SERVANDONI
A recent dissertation by my student Lucrecia Escudero, concerning the Argentine press’s coverage of the Falklands-Malvinas war, contained the following story.1
On March 31, 1982, two days before the Argentine landing in the Malvinas and twenty-five days before the arrival of the British Task Force in the Falklands, the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin published an interesting item: allegedly, a London source claimed that Britain had sent the Superb, a nuclear submarine, to the Austral area of the South Atlantic. The British Foreign Office said immediately that they did not have any comment on this “version,” and the Argentine press inferred that, if the British authorities qualified the report as a “version,” this meant someone had leaked serious and secret military information. On April 1, when Argentines were on the verge of landing in the Malvinas, Clarin reported that the Superb was a ship of 45,000 tons, carrying a crew of ninety-seven specialists in scuba diving.
Subsequent reactions by the British were pretty ambiguous. A military expert said that sending atomic submarines of the hunter-killer type to that region would have been reasonable. The Daily Telegraph gave the impression of knowing a lot about the whole business, and step by step the rumor became fact. Argentine readers were shocked by the event, and the press tried to meet their narrative expectations by keeping them in suspense. The information it gave allegedly came directly from the Argentine military command, and the Superb became “that submarine which English sources locate in the South Atlantic.” On April 4 the submarine had already been sighted not far from the Argentine coasts. British military sources continued to answer all questions by saying they had no intention of revealing the location of their submarines, and such an obvious statement reinforced the general opinion that there were English submarines somewhere—which, of course, was quite true.
Also on April 4 several European press agencies reported that the Superb was on the verge of sailing toward the South Seas, at the head of the British Task Force. If this had been so, the submarine sighted near the Argentine coasts could not have been the Superb, but such a contradiction reinforced, rather than weakened, the submarine syndrome.
On April 5 the press agency DAN announced that the Superb was 250 kilometers from the Falklands-Malvinas. The rest of the media followed, describing all the characteristics of the submarine and its extraordinary power. On April 6 the Argentine navy spotted the vessel near the archipelago, and in the following week it was joined by a brother, the submarine Oracle. On April 8 the French daily Le Monde mentioned the two ships, and the Clarin quoted the French report under the dramatic title “A Submarine Fleet?” On April 12 the submarine fleet showed up again, and Clarin furthermore announced the arrival of Soviet submarines in southern waters.
Now, this story concerns not only the presence of the Superb (which was taken for granted) but also the diabolical abilities of the Britons, who succeeded in keeping their position secret. On April 18 a Brazilian pilot sighted the Superb near Santa Catarina and took a photograph of it, but the image was blurred because of the cloudy weather. Here is yet another effect of fog (the third one in these lectures, if you remember), this time provided directly by readers in order to sustain the necessary suspense of the story. We seem to be halfway between Flatland and Antonioni’s Blow Up.
On April 22, when the British Task Force was really eighty kilometers from the theater of operations, with true warships and true submarines, Clarin informed its readers that the submarine which had allegedly been patrolling the Malvinas area had returned to Scotland. On April 23 the Scottish Daily Record revealed that, as a matter of fact, the Superb had never left its British base. Argentine newspapers were obliged to find another narrative genre, shifting from war movies to spy novels, and on April 23 Clarin announced triumphantly that the deception of the British forces had been unmasked.
Who invented that Yellow Submarine? The British secret services, in order to lower the spirits of Argentines? The Argentine military command, in order to justify its tough stance? The British press? The Argentine press? Who benefited from the rumor? I am not interested in this side of the story. I am interested in the way the whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine be
cause it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting.
This story—that is, the real story of a fictional construction—has many morals. In the first place, it shows that we are continually tempted to give shape to life through narrative schemes (but this will be the topic of my next and last lecture). Second, it demonstrates the force of existential presuppositions.2 In every statement involving proper names or definite descriptions, the reader or listener is supposed to take for granted the existence of the entity about which something is predicated. If someone tells me that he was unable to attend a meeting because his wife was ill, my first reaction is to take for granted the existence of that wife. Only later, if by chance I discover that the speaker is a bachelor, can I conclude that he was lying through his teeth. But until that moment, because his wife has been posited within the discursive framework by the act of mentioning her, I have no reason to think she does not exist. This is such a natural inclination on the part of normal human beings that if I read a text beginning, “As everyone knows, the present king of France is bald” (taking into account that France is generally known to be a republic and that I am not a philosopher of language but a normal human being), I do not start consulting the Truth Tables; rather, I decide to suspend my disbelief and take that discourse as a fictional one, which probably tells a story set in the time of Charles the Bald. I do this because it is the only way to assign a form of existence in whatever world to the entity posited by the statement.
Thus it happened with our submarine. Once posited by the discourse of the mass media, the submarine was there, and since newspapers are supposed to tell the truth about the actual world, people did their best to sight it.
In Ma che cos’è questo amore, by Achille Campanile (that sublime comic writer I quoted in my first lecture), there is a character named Baron Manuel who, in order to facilitate his secret adulterous life, continually tells his wife and others that he is obliged to visit and assist a certain Pasotti, a dear friend of his, who is chronically ill and whose health tragically declines as Baron Manuel’s love affairs become more and more complicated. The presence of Pasotti is so palpable in the novel that even though both the author and the reader know he does not exist, there comes a point where everybody (certainly the other characters, but also the reader) is prepared for him to appear physically on the scene. So Pasotti suddenly shows up, unfortunately a few minutes after Baron Manuel (who has become disgusted with his adulterous life) has announced Pasotti’s death.
The Yellow Submarine was posited by the media, and as soon as it was posited everyone took it for granted. What happens when in a fictional text the author posits, as an element of the actual world (which is the background of the fictional one), something that does not obtain in the actual world? As you may remember, this is the case of Ann Radcliffe, who posited olive trees in Gascony.
In the first chapter of The Three Musketeers, d’Artagnan arrives in Paris and soon finds lodgings on the rue des Fossoyeurs, at the house of Monsieur Bonacieux. Monsieur de Tréville’s residence, to which he goes immediately afterward, is on the rue du Vieux Colombier (Chapter 2). Only in the seventh chapter do we learn that Porthos lives on the same street and that Athos lives on the rue Férou. Today the rue du Vieux Colombier runs along the north side of the present place Saint-Sulpice, while the rue Férou joins it perpendicularly on the south side, but in the days in which The Three Musketeers is set the square did not yet exist. Where are the lodgings of that reticent and mysterious individual who goes by the name of Aramis? We find this out in Chapter 11, where we learn that he lives on a corner of the rue Servandoni, and if you look at a map of Paris (Figure 12) you’ll notice that the rue Servandoni is the first street running parallel to and east of the rue Férou. This eleventh chapter is called “L’Intrigue se noue” (“The Plot Grows Tangled”). Though Dumas, of course, had something different in mind, for us the plot grows tangled from the point of view of onomastics and town planning.
One night, after visiting Monsieur de Tréville on the rue du Vieux Colombier, d’Artagnan (who is in no hurry to go home, wanting to take a walk so that he can think tenderly of his beloved, Madame Bonacieux) returns to his rooms by “the longest way round,” as the text tells us. But we don’t know where the rue des Fossoyeurs is, and if we look at a map of present-day Paris we won’t find it. So let’s follow d’Artagnan, who is “talking to the night and smiling at the stars” (see Figure 13).
If we read Dumas’ text looking at a seventeenth-century map, we see that d’Artagnan turns down the rue du Cherche-Midi (which at that time, Dumas notes, was called Chasse-Midi), wends his way along a little street that lies where the rue d’Assas is today and that was undoubtedly the rue des Carmes, and then turns left “because Aramis’ house was between the rue Cassette and the rue Servandoni.” After leaving the rue des Carmes d’Artagnan probably cuts across some land next to the convent of the Barefooted Carmelites, makes a dogleg at the rue Cassette, enters the rue Messiers (now Mézières), and somehow crosses the rue Férou (in those days known as the rue Ferrau), where Athos lives, without even realizing it (but of course d’Artagnan is wandering along just as people in love tend to do). If Aramis’ house lies between the rue Cassette and the rue Servandoni, it should be located on the rue du Canivet (though apparently the rue du Canivet didn’t yet exist in 1625).3 But it should be precisely on the corner of the rue Servandoni (on our map, “Rue?”), because just opposite his friend’s house d’Artagnan sees a shadowy form leave the rue Servandoni (later in the novel we find out that this was Madame Bonacieux).
Figure 12
Figure 13
Alas, our empirical reader will certainly be moved at the mention of the rue Servandoni, because Roland Barthes lived there, but Aramis couldn’t have, because the action takes place in 1625 whereas the Florentine architect Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni was born in 1695, designed the façade of Saint-Sulpice Church in 1733, and had the street dedicated to him only in 1806.
Although Dumas even knew that the rue du Cherche-Midi was then called Chasse-Midi, he was wrong when it came to the rue Servandoni. This wouldn’t matter if the issue concerned only the empirical author Dumas. But now that the text exists, we obedient readers have to follow its instructions, and we find ourselves in an entirely real Paris, identical to the Paris of 1625, except that in the former a street appears which couldn’t have existed.
As you know, logicians and philosophers of language have frequently debated the problem of the ontological status of fictional characters (as well as of fictional objects and events), and it is not preposterous to ask what it means to say that “p is true” when p is a proposition that refers not to the real world but to a fictional one. In the course of my previous lecture, however, we decided to stick to the most commonsensical opinion. Whatever your philosophical position, you would say that, in the fictional world of Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes is a bachelor; if in one of these stories Holmes were suddenly to tell Watson to book three train tickets because he is setting out with Mrs. Holmes to track down Dr. Moriarty, we would surely feel at the very least a little uneasy. Allow me to use a very crude notion of truth: it is not true that Holmes has a wife, just as it is not true that the Empire State Building is in Berlin. Period.
But can we really state with the same confidence that it is not true that Aramis lives on the corner of the rue Servandoni? Of course, we could argue that everything falls into place if we just say that in the possible world of The Three Musketeers Aramis lives on the corner of a certain X Street, and that only through the empirical author’s error is this street called Servandoni, whereas in fact it was probably called something else. We have been persuaded by Keith Donnellan that if one believes and maintains by mistake that Jones is Smith’s murderer, when one mentions Smith’s murderer one definitely wants to indicate Jones, even if he’s innocent.4
But the issue is more complicated than that. Where is the rue des Fossoyeurs, on which d’Artagnan lives? This street di
d exist in the seventeenth century, and doesn’t now for a very simple reason: the old rue des Fossoyeurs was the one we now call the rue Servandoni. So (1) Aramis lives on a street which was not known by that name in 1625, and (2) d’Artagnan lives on the same street as Aramis without knowing it. Indeed d’Artagnan is in a pretty curious ontological situation: he believes that in his Paris of 1625 there are two streets with two different names, whereas there was only one with one name. We might say that an error of this kind is not unlikely. For many centuries humanity believed that off the southern coast of India there were two large islands, Ceylon and Taprobane, and sixteenth-century cartographers depicted them both; but subsequently it was learned that this doubling was the result of imaginative interpretation of the descriptions of various travelers, and that in reality there was only one island. Similarly, it was believed that the Morning Star was different from the Evening Star (Hesperus and Phosphorus, as they were called), but these are really the same celestial body—namely, Venus.
Nevertheless, this is not quite the same as d’Artagnan’s situation. We earthly beings watch two entities, Hesperus and Phosphorus, from afar, at two different times of day, and it is understandable that we committed or still commit the mistake of believing they are two different entities. But if we were inhabitants of Phosphorus we couldn’t possibly believe in the existence of Hesperus, because no one would ever have seen it shining in the sky. The problem of Hesperus and Phosphorus has preoccupied Frege and other terrestrial philosophers but does not exist for Phosphoric philosophers, if there are any. As an empirical author who has evidently made a mistake, Dumas is in the same situation as terrestrial philosophers. But d’Artagnan, in his possible world, is in the situation of Phosphoric philosophers. If he is on the street that today we call Servandoni, he must know that he is on the rue des Fossoyeurs, the street on which he lives. So how can he think that it is another street, the one on which Aramis lives?