by David Lodge
It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat, sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate.
Were the effects of this banal but unpleasant operation ever described so vividly, sympathetically and humorously?
Nabokov, however, does not simply aim at a perfect match between his language and his imagined world. There are always in his work reminders that reality is larger, denser and more various than any work of art can encompass – moments when the discourse suddenly seems to take off on its own and break through the formal limits of the story into the world outside the story, where the author and the reader exist, sometimes sadly – e.g.:
During the eight years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings . . . about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody loves anybody.
The reference in Chapter Seven to Pnin’s conference paper ‘Homer’s and Gogol’s use of the Rambling Comparison’ acknowledges precedents for this trope, but Nabokov uses it in a wholly original way. And it is not only in figurative language that he is constantly reminding us of how much of reality the economy of art excludes. That is surely the point of the extraordinary plethora of proper names in this short text – over three hundred of them. Some are fictional, some historical; some are mentioned only once, and others reappear unexpectedly in the story. Most trail with them some anecdotal fragment of a whole life, which if reported in its entirety, would expand the book to epic proportions. This sentence, for example, wonderfully defies comprehension by sheer overload of disparate information, so that by the time you get to the end of it you have forgotten how it began:
Should one trace Victor’s passion for pigments back to Hans Andersen (no relation to the bedside Dane), who had been a stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind (and believing himself to be a cathedral) soon after his beloved daughter married a gray-haired Hamburg jeweler, author of a monograph on sapphires and Eric’s maternal grandfather?
When Nabokov submitted the complete Pnin to his American publishers, Viking, in the fall of 1955, they rejected it on the grounds that it was ‘too short’, which was probably a euphemistic way of saying that they thought it was too unconventional in form for the fiction market. Harper, whom Nabokov tried next, also passed. Finally, in August 1956 Doubleday undertook to publish the book, and it appeared in March of the following year. Over the same period Nabokov had experienced mixed fortunes with Lolita. Despairing of publishing it in America, he had agreed to its publication in 1955 by Maurice Girodias, a Paris-based publisher of works in English too sexually explicit to be tolerated in Britain and America. When Graham Greene picked Lolita as one of his ‘Books of the Year’ he drew international attention to it, and provoked a controversy about the morality of Nabokov’s novel which still continues. For a time the book was banned in France, but contraband copies circulated among the literati in England and America. In consequence, when Pnin was published Nabokov already enjoyed a kind of celebrity in America as the author of a highly controversial but generally unobtainable novel, variously described as a masterpiece and a piece of pornography. This ensured extensive review coverage for Pnin, which was also largely favourable. Though some critics complained that it was a collection of sketches rather than a novel, the book indubitably demonstrated that Nabokov was no pornographer but a literary artist of rare ability. Pnin was reprinted twice within two weeks of publication. Nabokov had never known such success before, but it was nothing to what awaited him. When Lolita was at last published in America in the following year, 1958, it went on to sell in millions, world-wide, and completely eclipsed Pnin in public consciousness. Lolita is the book for which Nabokov will always be best known, but it was Pnin which first established his reputation as a writer of distinction and originality in the medium of English, and as an American rather than an émigré author, representing the manners and speech and landscape of his adopted country as vividly as the Russia from which he was exiled.
Notes
1 Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (1997), p. 44.
2 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991), pp. 292–3.
3 Ibid., p. 225.
4 Ibid., p. 259.
* * *
UMBERT OECO :
The Name of
the Rose
* * *
In the middle of June 1979, when I was still a full-time professor at the University of Birmingham, I attended a conference in Israel on ‘Narrative Theory and Poetics of Fiction’ organised by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel-Aviv University. Some fifty scholars from all over the world assembled in a hotel in Tel-Aviv to deliver and debate papers on subjects like ‘Fictionality and the Role of Conventions in Aesthetic Communication’ and ‘Isotopic Organisation and Narrative Grammar’. One evening we were all bussed into the university for an official reception, followed by two public lectures. I had been asked to give one of them, and the other was to be given by Professor Umberto Eco of the University of Bologna, whom I had not previously met: a barrel-chested, bearded, genial man, who spoke fluent English accompanied by all the expressive body language one expects of Italians. To be invited to lecture was a kind of honour, but it was one both of us would gladly have relinquished. The weather was extremely hot, and the lecture theatre was not air-conditioned (I think the system had broken down). Our colleagues from the conference, who had already listened to five papers that day, were understandably resentful at being required to sit through two more lectures delivered end to end in conditions of stifling heat, and even the ‘public’ members of the audience looked somewhat listless. The chairman begged us to abbreviate our lectures from the customary fifty-five minutes to forty-five, and, making cuts on our feet, we managed to get through the session in just under an hour and a half. At the end Umberto Eco, his shirt soaked with perspiration from his animated performance, turned to me and said with a smile, ‘Well, we did it!’
I spoke on problematical endings in English fiction;1 he on ‘What is Semiotics?’ The short answer to that question is: ‘the systematic study of signs’. Umberto Eco was well qualified to give a fuller answer, being the author of A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and numerous other publications highly regarded by specialists in literary and linguistic theory. At that time, outside Italy where he was also well known as a critic and journalist, his readers were almost exclusively academics like those attending the conference in Tel-Aviv. What we did not know, in June 1979, was that he was writing a novel, which must have been well on the way to completion by then, and would be published in Italy the following year under the title, Il Nome della Rosa. What even Umberto Eco did not know was that over the next three or four years he would in consequence become one of the most famous writers in the world.
It is impossible to write about The Name of the Rose without considering its extraordinary global success with both critics and the reading public at large. It is an example of that rare publishing phenomenon, the literary mega-bestseller which transcends linguistic boundaries. By ‘mega’ I denote sales calculated in millions, not thousands, and by ‘literary’ I mean a novel with the kind of artistic ambition and stylistic individuality that usually deters a mass audience: a category which includes, say, Midnight’s Children but not The Da Vinci Code. The difference, as Umberto Eco himself has said, is between the kind of book that gives readers what they want and the kind of book that makes its
readers realise that unconsciously they have always wanted it.2 Only a very few novels of the latter kind in recent times have become major bestsellers not only in their own countries, but in translation as well, and it is a particularly difficult feat for books translated into English from other languages to achieve, since Anglophone readers are already well supplied with high-quality literary fiction and tend to be lazily incurious about new work from other cultures. You can almost count on the fingers of one hand books of real distinction which have overcome this resistance: Dr Zhivago, The Leopard, The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Name of the Rose . . . There may be a few other candidates, but not many. And of those examples, the global success of The Name of the Rose was in many ways the most surprising and unpredictable. To be sure, it is a kind of murder mystery, a universally popular narrative form; but bookshop shelves are stacked with murder mysteries that attract only modest audiences, and the special features of this one include a formidable amount of non-narrative discourse about philosophy, theology, and a particularly complicated chapter of medieval European history, all of which the reader must negotiate in order to discover whodunnit. The book also contains numerous passages in Latin which are not translated into the vernacular. Given Eco’s reputation in Italy, The Name of the Rose was sure to do fairly well there, and his Italian publisher Bompiani ordered a first print run of 15,000 copies, hoping for an eventual sale of about 30,000. But its prospects in the international market must have seemed slim before publication. To date it has sold some nine million copies – the majority of them in translation.3
The Name of the Rose was enthusiastically received in Italy on its publication in 1980, soon sold 500,000 copies there and was awarded three literary prizes the following year. It was quickly translated into German and French, and became a bestseller in both countries, winning the Prix Medici Etranger in France in 1982. The English-language edition was slower to appear, being published in Britain and America in 1983. It so happens that the English publishers of The Name of the Rose, Secker & Warburg, are also the publishers of my own novels, and the managing director of the firm at that time, Tom Rosenthal, is a personal friend. I asked him how he came to acquire the rights in Eco’s novel, and his account was interestingly revealing about the book’s fortunes in the marketplace and the processes of modern publishing. Bompiani had acquired world rights in the novel, and after its successful publication in Italy sent out copies to leading literary publishers all round the world – to more than one in each country – inviting offers. It was a kind of auction, but not one on which Tom was inclined to risk a great deal of money. Publishing wisdom decreed that literary novels in translation do not sell. This one was extremely long (thus expensive to translate and produce), and even to the casual non-Italian eye seemed full of dense and difficult material. It was the first novel of a writer known in England (if at all) as the author of scholarly books of limited appeal. Tom Rosenthal prudently sought the co-operation of an American publisher, Helen Wolff, of Harcourt Brace, and suggested that if they got good reports on the novel they should share the cost of translation. Helen Wolff agreed, Secker obtained a favourable report from Isabel Quigley (very well qualified for the task, being fluent in Italian, a regular reviewer of fiction and a Catholic), and Tom made his offer to Bompiani: an advance against royalties of £1,000. (This implied a cautious projected sale of between 1,500 and 2,000 copies.) Tom recalls that ‘Bompiani kept phoning to say, “Can’t you offer more?”’ from which he deduced that no other British publisher had made a better offer – indeed he suspected that no one had made any offer at all. Had he been given first refusal of the English rights he might have gone up to £3,000 to secure them, but in the circumstances there was no incentive to improve his offer, and so the deal was done.
While the book was being translated (superbly, by William Weaver, probably the best translator from Italian into English in the world), The Name of the Rose became a critically acclaimed bestseller in Germany and France, but Secker & Warburg were by no means confident this success would be replicated in Britain. Their initial print order from Harcourt Brace (it was at that time cheaper to import finished copies from the USA than to produce them in England) was only 2,250. Tom Rosenthal recalls an editorial sales meeting early in 1983 at which he announced that the main item on the agenda was:
‘What the hell do we do about The Name of the Rose?’ Everyone looked very blank. I said, ‘It’s become for me a matter of national pride. We just can’t be the illiterate, insular Brits yet again. I’ve got the sales figures from Italy, Germany, France. I can’t face my colleagues at Frankfurt if we make a flop of it. I want some ideas.’
The main idea that emerged was to send six or seven hundred of the finished copies imported from Harcourt Brace to literary ‘opinion-formers’ in the UK (of whom I was one) instead of the drably bound uncorrected proofs usually circulated in advance of publication, in the hope that this handsome gift would demonstrate the publishers’ faith in the book and ensure that it was read. The strategy seemed to be successful inasmuch as The Name of the Rose received ecstatic reviews and reached the number one position in the Sunday Times bestseller list. It sold about 60,000 copies in hardback, and Picador, who paid just £2,000 advance for the paperback rights, had sold 850,000 copies of their edition by 1992 and the novel was still selling 70,000 copies a year.4
In America, with its larger market, the book’s success was even more spectacular, something Secker were able to exploit in their advertising. It had been turned down by nearly every major American publisher, sometimes more than once, before Harcourt Brace took it for a modest advance of $4,000. It was published in June 1983. Within two weeks it was in the New York Sunday Times bestseller list, by the beginning of August it was at number one position (just ahead of The Return of the Jedi) and it stayed on the list for twenty-three weeks. By the end of September it had sold more than 200,000 copies, and the paperback rights had been sold for a record sum for a translated novel. A rival publisher commented: ‘It’s not marketing, so it must be something in the book.’5 Indeed. Something like: a gripping mystery, vivid characterisation, an atmospheric setting, fascinating period detail, sly humour, dramatic confrontations, stunning set pieces, and a supple, eloquent prose that can shift its register to encompass the experience of faith, doubt, horror, erotic ecstasy, and despair. ‘A delight for an elite, yet giving pleasure to all’, was one journalistic description of The Name of the Rose.6 Or as Nicholas Shrimpton wittily observed when reviewing the novel, ‘Whether you’re into Sherlock Holmes, Montaillou, Borges, the nouvelle critique, the Rule of St Benedict, metaphysics, library design or The Thing from the Crypt, you’ll love it. Who can that miss out?’7
Readers of the novel are fortunate to have the author’s own account of its genesis and composition: a little book entitled Reflections on ‘The Name of the Rose’, published a few years later.8 Being a sophisticated literary theorist, Eco is well aware of the status and limitations of such revelations. ‘The author must not interpret. But he may tell why and how he wrote his book.’ A writer must not deliver an ‘authorised’ interpretation of his book because that would compromise the potential of a genuinely literary text to generate different meanings from different readings, without ever being completely exhausted; but telling why and how he wrote his book may throw a uniquely valuable light on the creative process, information which the reader can freely apply to his reading of the work. In short, the Reflections are themselves open to interpretation. Eco tells us, ‘I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.’ But he does not tell us why he felt like poisoning a monk. From what follows, and from the novel itself, we might deduce that there were two possible reasons, not mutually exclusive. One is that as a critic and semiotician fascinated by the productions of popular culture, and the structural principles and conventions that underlie them, and as a long-standing fan of the classic detective story exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir A
rthur Conan Doyle, Eco had a ‘yen’ (his, or his translator’s, word) to try his hand at such a story, and thought that a monastic community would provide a novel setting for one. His working title for some time was The Abbey of the Murder, suggesting a piquant variation on a familiar formula. But we might speculate that there was a deeper, personal and psychological motivation for wanting to murder a monk (or, as it turned out, several monks) if only in make-believe.
Originally he intended to set the story in contemporary Italy, but he soon shifted it to the late Middle Ages, adding more and more levels of meaning through intertextual references and correspondences between medieval and modern times, drawing on a great store of knowledge which he had accumulated early in life, but hardly used in his career as a critic and semiotician (‘I was a medievalist in hibernation’, he observes). As a student at Turin University, Umberto Eco switched from studying law (his father’s recommendation) to medieval literature and philosophy, writing a thesis on the aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas which was his first published book. The Name of the Rose is manifestly the work of a man who knows the Catholic religion and its underlying metaphysic with the intimate, detailed understanding of someone who was once a believer. He was brought up as a Catholic, and was once ‘a militant Catholic activist’, but at some stage of his adult life Umberto Eco ceased to believe, and described himself in 1983 as ‘a cane sciolto, a stray dog, who eschews rigid affiliation with any movement, religious or political’.9 The element of transgression inherent in murder, which makes it such a perennial source of literary interest, acquires an extra frisson when placed in a monastic context – when both the victims and the suspects are members of a religious community. It is possible therefore that this narrative idea attracted Eco and excited his imagination partly because it dramatised his own ambivalent attitude to the faith of his childhood, a mixture of respect and repulsion, nostalgia and rejection. The detective-hero of The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville, is a Franciscan friar who has many intellectual traits that belong to the modern secular world, is highly critical of the institutional Church, and in the eyes of his devoutly orthodox acolyte, Adso, the narrator of the tale, comes perilously close to questioning the philosophical foundations of the Christian faith.