Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

by Umberto Eco

  What is the moral of this story? It is that fictional texts come to the aid of our metaphysical narrowmindedness. We live in the great labyrinth of the actual world, which is bigger and more complex than the world of Little Red Riding Hood. It is a world whose paths we have not yet entirely mapped out and whose total structure we are unable to describe. In the hope that rules of the game exist, humanity throughout the centuries has speculated about whether this labyrinth has an author, or perhaps more than one. And it has thought of God, or the gods, as if they were empirical authors, narrators, or model authors. People have wondered what an empirical divinity might be like: whether it has a beard, whether it’s a He, a She, or an IT, whether it was born or has always existed, and even (in our own times) whether it’s dead. God as Narrator has always been sought—in the intestines of animals, in the flittings of birds, in the burning bush, in the first sentence of the Ten Commandments. But some (including philosophers, of course, but also adherents of many religions) have searched for God as Model Author—that is, God as the Rule of the Game, as the Law that makes or someday will make the labyrinth of the world understandable. The Divinity in this case is something we must discover at the same time we discover why we are in the labyrinth, and what path we are being asked to walk within it.

  In my postscript to The Name of the Rose, I said that we like detective stories because they ask the same question as the one posed by philosophy and religion: “Whodunnit?”9 But this is metaphysics for a first-level reader. The second-level reader makes greater demands: How must I identify (conjecturally) or even how must I construct the Model Author so that my reading makes sense? Stephen Dedalus wondered: If a man hacking randomly at a block of wood makes the image of a cow, is that image a work of art? And if it isn’t, why not?10 Today, since we have formulated a poetics of the ready-made, we know the answer: that casual form is a work of art if we manage to imagine the shaping strategy of an author behind it. This is an extreme case, in which becoming a good reader necessarily entails becoming a good author. But it is an extreme case that expresses wonderfully well the indissoluble bond, the dialectic, between author and model reader.

  In this dialectic, we must follow the precept of the oracle of Delphi: Know Thyself. And since, as Heraclitus reminds us, “the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but indicates through signs,” the knowledge we seek is unlimited because it assumes the form of a continuous interrogation.

  Such an interrogation, although potentially infinite, is limited by the abridged format of the Encyclopedia requested by a work of fiction, whereas we are not sure whether the actual world, along with the infinity of its possible doubles, is infinite and limited or finite and unlimited. But there is another reason fiction makes us feel more metaphysically comfortable than reality. There is a golden rule that cryptanalysts and code breakers rely on—namely, that every secret message can be deciphered, provided one knows that it is a message. The problem with the actual world is that, since the dawn of time, humans have been wondering whether there is a message and, if so, whether this message makes sense. With fictional universes, we know without a doubt that they do have a message and that an authorial entity stands behind them as creator, as well as within them as a set of reading instructions.

  Thus, our quest for the model author is an Ersatz for that other quest, in the course of which the Image of the Father fades into the Fog of the Infinity, and we never stop wondering why there is something rather than nothing.

  SIX

  FICTIONAL PROTOCOLS

  If fictional worlds are so comfortable, why not try to read the actual world as if it were a work of fiction? Or, if fictional worlds are so small and deceptively comfortable, why not try to devise fictional worlds that are as complex, contradictory, and provocative as the actual one?

  Let me answer the second question first: Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Joyce indeed did this. And Nerval. In my writings on “open works,” I am referring precisely to works of literature that strive to be as ambiguous as life. It is true that in Sylvie we know without a doubt that Adrienne died in 1832 (whereas we are not equally sure that Napoleon died in 1821—since he could have been secretly rescued from Saint Helena by Julien Sorel, leaving a double there in his place, and may subsequently have lived under the name of Père Dodu in Loisy, where he encountered the narrator in 1830). The rest of Sylvie’s story, however—all that ambiguous interplay between life and dream, past and present—is more similar to the uncertainty that prevails in our everyday life than it is to the adamant certainty with which we, and Scarlett O’Hara, know that tomorrow is another day.

  Let me now answer the first question. In my book The Open Work, I commented on the strategy of live TV broadcasts, which try to frame the fortuitous flow of events by giving it a narrative structure; I noted that life is certainly more like Ulysses than like The Three Musketeers—yet we are all more inclined to think of it in terms of The Three Musketeers than in terms of Ulysses.1 My character Jacopo Belbo, in Foucault’s Pendulum, seems to praise such a natural inclination when he says:

  No true dandy, I thought, would have made love to Scarlett O’Hara or even to Constance Bonacieux . . . I played with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life . . . But I was wrong . . . Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa Solemnis. Great Art . . . shows us the art as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects.2

  A bitter remark indeed, by a disenchanted character. But it portrays our natural tendency to interpret what happens to us in terms of what Barthes called a “texte lisible,” a readerly text. Since fiction seems a more comfortable environment than life, we try to read life as if it were a piece of fiction.

  In my final lecture here, I’ll be dealing with various cases in which we are compelled to transpose fiction and life—to read life as if it were fiction, to read fiction as if it were life. Some of these confusions are pleasant and innocent, some absolutely necessary, some frightening.

  In 1934 Carlo Emilio Gadda published a newspaper article which described the slaughterhouse in Milan. Since Gadda was a great writer, that article was also a fine specimen of prose. Andrea Bonomi has recently suggested an interesting experiment.3 Let’s imagine that the article never mentioned the city of Milan but simply spoke of “this city,” that it remained in typewritten form among Gadda’s unpublished papers, and that today a researcher finds it but is not sure whether it describes a fragment of the real world or is a piece of fiction. And so she does not ask herself whether or not the statements the text contains are true; rather, she enjoys reconstructing a universe, the universe of the slaughterhouse of an unidentified—and perhaps imaginary—city. Later the researcher discovers another copy of the article in the archives of the Milan slaughterhouse; on this copy the director of the slaughterhouse many years ago inserted a marginal remark which says, “Note: this is a totally accurate description.” Thus, Gadda’s text is an allegedly faithful report about a precise place existing in the actual world. Bonomi’s point is that although the researcher must change her views on the nature of the text, she does not need to reread it. The world it describes, the inhabitants of that world, and all the properties of both are the same; the researcher will simply map that representation onto reality. As Bonomi puts it, “In order for us to grasp the content of an account describing a certain state of affairs, we do not need to apply the categories of true or false to that content.”

  This is not such a commonsensical statement. As a matter of fact, we tend to think that usually when we listen to or read any kind of verbal account, we assume that the speaker or the writer intends to tell us something we are supposed to take as true, and so we are prepared to evaluate hi
s or her statement in terms of truth or falsity. Likewise we commonly think that only in exceptional cases—those in which a fictional signal appears—do we suspend disbelief and prepare to enter an imaginary world. The thought-experiment with Gadda’s text proves, on the contrary, that when listening to a series of statements recounting what happened to someone in such-and-such a place, we initially cooperate in reconstructing a universe possessing a kind of internal cohesion—and only later do we decide whether we should take those statements as a description of the actual world or of an imaginary one.

  This calls into question a distinction which has been proposed by many theorists—namely, that between natural and artificial narrative.4 Natural narrative describes events that actually occurred (or which the speaker mendaciously or mistakenly claims actually occurred). Examples of natural narrative are my account of what happened to me yesterday, a newspaper report, or even Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Artificial narrative is supposedly represented by fiction, which only pretends to tell the truth about the actual universe, or which claims to tell the truth about a fictional universe.

  We usually recognize artificial narrative thanks to the “para-text”—that is, the external messages that surround a text. A typical paratextual signal for fictional narrative is the designation “A Novel” on the book’s cover. Sometimes even the author’s name can function in this way; thus, nineteenth-century readers knew that a book whose title page announced it was “by the author of Waverly” was unmistakably a piece of fiction. The most obvious textual (that is, internal) signal of fictionality is an introductory formula such as “Once upon a time.”

  Yet things are not as clear cut as they may seem from a theoretical point of view. Take, for example, the historic incident caused in 1940 by Orson Welles’s false radio broadcast about an invasion from Mars. Misunderstanding and even panic resulted from the fact that some listeners believed all radio news broadcasts are examples of natural narrative, whereas Welles thought he had provided listeners with a sufficient number of fictional signals. But many listeners tuned in after the broadcast had already begun; others did not understand the fictional signals and proceeded to map the content of the broadcast onto the actual world.

  My friend Giorgio Celli, who is a writer and a professor of entomology, once wrote a short story about the perfect crime. Both he and I were characters in this story. Celli (the fictional character) injected a tube of toothpaste with a chemical substance that sexually attracts wasps. Eco (the fictional character) brushed his teeth with this toothpaste before going to bed, and a small amount of it remained on his lips. Swarms of sexually aroused wasps were thus attracted to his face, and their stings were fatal to poor Eco. The story was published on the third page of the Bologna newspaper Il resto del carlino. As you may or may not know, Italian newspapers, at least until several years ago, generally devoted page three to arts and letters. The article called the “elzeviro” in the left-hand column of the page could be a review, a short essay, or even a short story. Celli’s short story appeared as a literary feature entitled “How I Murdered Umberto Eco.” The editors evidently had confidence in their basic assumption: readers know that everything printed in a newspaper must be taken seriously except for items on the literary page, which must or can be considered examples of artificial narrative.

  But that morning, when I walked into the café near my house, I was greeted by the waiters with expressions of joy and relief, for they thought Celli had actually murdered me. I attributed this incident to the fact that their cultural background did not equip them to recognize journalistic conventions. Later in the day, however, I happened to see the dean of my college, a highly educated man who of course knows all there is to know about the difference between text and paratext, natural and artificial narrative, and so on. He told me that, on reading the paper that morning, he had been taken aback. Though the shock had not lasted long, the appearance of that title in a newspaper—a textual framework where by definition true events are recounted—had momentarily misled him.

  It has been said that artificial narrative is recognizable because it is more complex than the natural kind. But any attempt to determine the structural differences between natural and artificial narrative can usually be falsified by a series of counterexamples. We might, for instance, define fiction as narrative in which characters perform certain actions or undergo certain experiences, and in which these actions and passions transform a character’s situation from an initial state to a final one. Yet this definition could also apply to a story that is both serious and truthful, such as: “Last night I was famished. I went out to eat. I had steak and lobster, and after that I felt content.”

  If we add that these actions must be difficult and must entail dramatic and unexpected choices, I am sure that W. C. Fields would have known how to fashion a dramatic account of how he was overcome with anguish at the prospect of having to make the difficult choice between steak and lobster, and how he succeeded in solving his predicament brilliantly. Nor can we say that the choices confronting the characters in Ulysses are any more dramatic than the ones we must make in our daily lives. Not even Aristotelian precepts (according to which the hero of a story must be neither better nor worse than us, must experience unexpected recognitions, and must be subjected to rapid turns of fortune until the point at which the action reaches a catastrophic climax, followed by catharsis) are enough to define a work of fiction: many of Plutarch’s Lives also meet these requirements.

  Fictionality seems to be revealed by an insistence on unverifiable details and introspective intrusions, since no historical report can support such “reality effects.” Roland Barthes, however, has cited a passage from Michelet’s Histoire de France (volume 5, La Révolution, 1869) in which the author employs this fictional device when describing Charlotte Corday’s imprisonment: “Au bout d’une heure et demie, on frappa doucement à une petite porte qui était derrière elle” (“After an hour and a half, somebody knocked softly at the little door behind her”).5

  As for explicit introductory fictional signals, one would of course never find them at the beginning of any natural narratives. Thus, despite its title, A True Story by Lucianus of Samosata must be considered fictional, since in the second paragraph the author clearly states, “I have presented lies of all kinds under the guise of truth and reliability.” Similarly, Fielding begins Tom Jones by warning the reader that he is introducing a novel. But another typical indication of fictionality is the false assertion of truthfulness at the outset of a story. Compare these examples of incipits:

  I was prompted by the just and insistent requests of the most learned brothers . . . to ask myself why there is no one today who could write a chronicle, in any literary form, so that we might hand down to our descendants an account of the many events that have taken place both in God’s churches and among peoples, events that deserve to be known.

  Never have grandeur and gallantry shone so brightly in France as during the last years under the reign of Henry II.

  The first is the beginning of the Historia suorum temporum, by Rudolph Glaber; the second is from La Princesse de Clèves, by Madame de Lafayette. It should be pointed out that the latter passage goes on for pages and pages before revealing to the reader that it is the opening of a novel and not of a chronicle.

  On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet . . . Supplemented by historical information that was actually quite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-century manuscript.

  When Caesar saw certain rich strangers holding puppies and baby monkeys in their arms, caressing them, he asked (it is said) whether their women bore children.

  The second incipit, which seems to be fiction, is the beginning of Plutarch’s “Life of Pericles,” whereas the first is the beginning of my novel The Name of the Rose.

  If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making public, and were acceptable when publish
ed, the Editor of this account thinks this will be so. The wonders of this man’s life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant . . . The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.

  It may not be unacceptable to our readers that we should take this opportunity of presenting them with a slight sketch of the greatest king that has, in modern times, succeeded by right of birth to a throne. It may, we fear, be impossible to compress so long and eventful a story within the limits which we must prescribe to ourselves.

  The first excerpt is the beginning of Robinson Crusoe; the second is the beginning of Macaulay’s essay on Frederick the Great.

  I must not begin to narrate the events of my life without first mentioning my good parents, whose characters and lovingness were to so greatly influence my education and my well-being.

  It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.

  The first passage is the beginning of the memoirs of Giuseppe Garibaldi; the second is from The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  Fairly explicit fictional signals do exist, of course—for instance, the in medias res beginning, an opening dialogue, insistence on an individual story rather than on a general one, and, above all, immediate signals of irony, as in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities, which starts with a lengthy description of the weather, full of technical terms:

  There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was traveling eastward, toward an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northward around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their function. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature.