by Umberto Eco
The Mask
Actually I decided not only to narrate about the Middle Ages. I decided to narrate in the Middle Ages, and through the mouth of a chronicler of the period. I was a novice narrator, and in the past I had looked at narrators from the opposite side of the barricade. I was embarrassed at telling a story. I felt like a drama critic who suddenly exposes himself behind the footlights and finds himself watched by those who, until then, have been his accomplices in the seats out front.
Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy? But what if I had Snoopy say it? If, that is, “It was a beautiful morning . . .” were said by someone capable of saying it, because in his day it was still possible, still not shopworn? A mask: that was what I needed.
I set about reading or rereading medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence. They would speak for me, and I would be freed from suspicion. Freed from suspicion, but not from the echoes of intertextuality. Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Homer knew this, and Ariosto knew this, not to mention Rabelais and Cervantes. My story, then, could only begin with the discovered manuscript, and even this would be (naturally) a quotation. So I wrote the introduction immediately, setting my narrative on a fourth level of encasement, inside three other narratives: I am saying what Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said. . . .
I was now free of every fear. And at this point I stopped writing for twelve months. I stopped because I discovered something else I already knew (and everyone knew), but that I came to understand more clearly as I worked.
I discovered, namely, that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
The Novel as Cosmological Event
What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details. If I were to construct a river, I would need two banks; and if on the left bank I put a fisherman, and if I were to give this fisherman a wrathful character and a police record, then I could start writing, translating into words everything that would inevitably happen. What does a fisherman do? He fishes (and thence a whole sequence of actions, more or less obligatory). And then what happens? Either the fish are biting or they are not. If they bite, the fisherman catches them and then goes home happy. End of story. If there are no fish, since he is a wrathful type he will perhaps become angry. Perhaps he will break his fishing rod. This is not much; still, it is already a sketch. But there is an Indian proverb that goes, “Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by.” And what if a corpse were to come down the stream—since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river? We must also bear in mind that my fisherman has a police record. Will he want to risk trouble? What will he do? Will he run away and pretend not to have seen the corpse? Will he feel vulnerable, because this, after all, is the corpse of the man he hated? Wrathful as he is, will he fly into a rage because he was not able to wreak personally his longed-for vengeance? As you see, as soon as one’s invented world has been furnished just a little, there is already the beginning of a story. There is already the beginning of a style, too, because a fisherman who is fishing should establish a slow, fluvial pace, cadenced by his waiting, which should be patient but also marked by the fits of his impatient wrath. The problem is to construct the world: the words will practically come on their own. Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequentur. grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
The first year of work on my novel was devoted to the construction of the world. Long registers of all the books that could be found in a medieval library. Lists of names and personal data for many characters, a number of whom were then excluded from the story. In other words, I had to know who the rest of the monks were, those who do not appear in the book. It was not necessary for the reader to know them, but I had to know them. Who ever said that fiction must compete with the city directory? Perhaps it must also compete with the planning board. Therefore I conducted long architectural investigations, studying photographs and floor plans in the encyclopedia of architecture, to establish the arrangement of the abbey, the distances, even the number of steps in a spiral staircase. The film director Marco Ferreri once said to me that my dialogue is like a movie’s because it lasts exactly the right length of time. It had to. When two of my characters spoke while walking from the refectory to the cloister, I wrote with the plan before my eyes; and when they reached their destination, they stopped talking.
It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely. In poetry the constraint can be imposed by meter, foot, rhyme, by what has been called the “verse according to the ear” (see Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Poetry New York 3 [1950]). In fiction, the surrounding world provides the constraint. This has nothing to do with realism (even if it explains also realism). A completely unreal world can be constructed, in which asses fly and princesses are restored to life by a kiss; but that world, purely possible and unrealistic, must exist according to structures defined at the outset (we have to know whether it is a world where a princess can be restored to life only by the kiss of a prince, or also by that of a witch, and whether the princess’s kiss transforms only frogs into princes or also, for example, armadillos).
One element of my world was history, and that is why I read and reread so many medieval chronicles; and as I read them, I realized that the novel had to include things that, in the beginning, had never crossed my mind, such as the debate over poverty and the Inquisition’s hostility toward the Fraticelli.
For example: why are the fourteenth-century Fraticelli in my book? If I had to write a medieval story, I ought to have set it in the twelfth or thirteenth century, because I knew them better than the fourteenth. But I needed an investigator, English if possible (intertextual quotation), with a great gift of observation and a special sensitivity in interpreting evidence. These qualities could be found only among the Franciscans, and only after Roger Bacon; furthermore, we find a developed theory of signs only with the Occamites. Or, rather, it also existed before, but either the interpretation of signs then was of a symbolic nature or else it tended to read ideas and notions in signs. It is only between Bacon and Occam that signs are used to acquire knowledge of individuals. So I had to set the story in the fourteenth century—much to my irritation, because I could not move easily in that period. More reading ensued, with the discovery that a fourteenth-century Franciscan, even an Englishman, could not ignore the debate about poverty, especially if he was a friend, follower, or acquaintance of Occam. (I might add that initially the investigator was to have been Occam himself, but I gave up that idea, because I do not find the Venerable Inceptor very attractive as a human being.)
But why does everything take place at the end of November 1327? Because by December, Michael of Cesena is already in Avignon. (This is what I mean by furnishing a world in a historical novel: some elements, like the number of steps, can be determined by the author, but others, like the movements of Michael, depend on the real world, which, in this kind of novel, happens to coincide with the possible world of the story.)
But November is too early. I also needed to have a pig slaughtered. Why? The answer is simple: so that the corpse could be thrust, head down, into a great jar of blood. And why did I need this? Because the second trumpet of the Apocalypse says . . . I could not change the Apocalypse, after all; it was a part of this world. Now, it so happens (I made inquiries) that pigs are not slaughtered until cold weather comes, and November might be too early—unless I situated the abbey in the mountains, so there would already
be snow. Otherwise my story might have taken place in the plains, at Pomposa, or at Conques.
The constructed world will then tell us how the story must proceed. Everyone asks me why my Jorge, with his name, suggests Borges, and why Borges is so wicked. But I cannot say. I wanted a blind man who guarded a library (it seemed a good narrative idea to me), and library plus blind man can only equal Borges, also because debts must be paid. And, further, it was through Spanish commentaries and illumination that the Apocalypse influenced the entire Middle Ages. But when I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an “idealistic” position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
Another fine story was that of the labyrinth. All the labyrinths I had heard of—and I had Santarcangeli’s excellent study at hand—were outdoor labyrinths. They could be extremely complicated and full of circumvolutions. But I needed an indoor labyrinth (have you ever seen an open-air library?), and if it was too complicated, with too many passages and inner rooms, not enough air would circulate, whereas circulation of air was necessary to feed the fire. (This, the fact that the Aedificium had to burn at the end, was very clear to me, but also for cosmological-historical reasons: in the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.) So after I had worked for two or three months constructing a suitable labyrinth, I ended up having to add some slits to make absolutely sure there would be enough air.
Who Speaks?
I had many problems. I wanted an enclosed place, a concentrative universe; and to enclose it better, it seemed a good idea for me to introduce, besides unity of place, also unity of time (since the unity of action was doubtful). A Benedictine abbey, therefore, its life marked by the canonical hours (Ulysses may have been an unconscious model, because of its structure rigidly bound by the hours of the day; but another was The Magic Mountain, with its mountainous, sanative situation, where so many conversations could take place).
The conversations posed many problems for me, but I solved these as I wrote. There is a theme that has been scantily discussed in theories of narrative: that of the turn ancillaries—the devices, that is, through which the narrator grants the floor to the various characters. Look at the differences among these five exchanges:
1. “How are you?”
“Not bad. And you?”
2. “How are you?” John said.
“Not bad. And you?” Peter said.
3. “How,” John said, “are you?”
And Peter replied at once: “Not bad. And you?”
4. “How are you?” John inquired anxiously.
“Not bad. And you?” Peter cackled.
5. John said: “How are you?”
“Not bad,” Peter replied, in a dull voice.
Then, with an enigmatic smile, he added:
“And you?”
In all cases except the first two, we see that the author intrudes on the story, imposing his own point of view. He intervenes with a personal comment, to suggest how the words of the two speakers should be interpreted emotionally. But is this intention really absent from the first two, apparently aseptic examples? And is the reader freer in these aseptic cases, where he could undergo an emotional imposition without being aware of it (remember the apparent neutrality of Hemingway dialogue), or is he freer in the other cases, where at least he knows the game the author is playing?
It is a problem of style, an ideological problem, a problem of “poetry,” like the choice of an internal rhyme or an assonance, or the introduction of a paragram. A certain coherence must be found. In my case it was perhaps made easier because all the dialogue is reported by Adso, and it is obvious that Adso imposes his own point of view on the whole narrative.
But the dialogue created another problem for me: how medieval could it be? In other words, as I was writing the book, I realized that it was taking on an opera-buffa structure, with long recitatives and elaborate arias. The arias (the description of the great door, for example) imitated the solemn rhetoric of the Middle Ages, and there was no dearth of models for this. But the dialogue? At a certain point I feared it would sound like Agatha Christie, while the arias were Suger or Saint Bernard. I reread medieval romances, works from the age of chivalry, and I realized that, though I was taking just a bit of license, I was still respecting a narrative and poetic usage not unknown to the Middle Ages. But the problem tormented me for a long time and I am not sure I ever resolved these changes of register between aria and recitative.
Another problem: the encasement of the voices, or, rather, of the narrative points of view. I knew that I was narrating a story with the words of another person, having declared in the preface that this person’s words had been filtered through at least two other narrative points of view, that of Mabillon and that of the Abbé Vallet, even if they had supposedly operated only as philologists (but who believes that?). The problem arose again, however, within Adso’s first-person narration. Adso, at the age of eighty, is telling about what he saw at the age of eighteen. Who is speaking, the eighteen-year-old Adso or the eighty-year-old? Both, obviously; and this is deliberate. The trick was to make the old Adso constantly present as he ponders what he remembers having seen and felt as the young Adso. The model (I did not reread the book: distant memories sufficed) was Serenus Zeitblom in Doctor Faustus. This enunciative duplicity fascinated and excited me very much. Also because—to return to what I was saying about the mask—in doubling Adso I was once more doubling the series of interstices, of screens, set between me as a biographical personality, me as narrating author, the first-person narrator, and the characters narrated, including the narrative voice. I felt more and more shielded, and the whole experience recalled to me (I mean physically, with the clarity of madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea) certain childish games in which I pretended I was in a submarine under the blankets and from it sent messages to my sister, under the blankets of the next bed, both of us cut off from the outside world and perfectly free to travel like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Adso was very important for me. From the outset I wanted to tell the whole story (with its mysteries, its political and theological events, its ambiguities) through the voice of someone who experiences the events, records them all with the photographic fidelity of an adolescent, but does not understand them (and will not understand them fully even as an old man, since he then chooses a flight into the divine nothingness, which was not what his master had taught him)—to make everything understood through the words of one who understands nothing.
Reading the reviews, I realize that this is one of the aspects of the novel that impressed cultivated readers least; or, in any case, I would say that few made a point of it. But I wonder now if this was not one of the features that made the novel readable for unsophisticated readers. They identified with the innocence of the narrator, and felt exonerated even when they did not understand everything. I gave them back their fear and trembling in the face of sex, unknown languages, difficulties of thought, mysteries of political life. . . . These are things I understand now, après coup; but perhaps I was then transferring to Adso many of my adolescent fears, certainly in his amorous palpitations (but always with the assurance that I could act through another person; in fact, Adso experiences his love sufferings only through the words with which the doctors of the Church discussed love). Art is an escape from personal emotion, as both Joyce and Eliot had taught me.
The struggle against emotion was hard. I wrote a beautiful prayer, modeled on the Plaint of Nature by Alan
us de Insulis, to be said by William in a crucial moment. Then I realized that both of us would be overcome by emotion, I as author and he as character. I as author should not succumb, for reasons of poetics. He as character could not, because he was made of different stuff, and his emotions were all mental, or repressed. So I cut that page. After a friend of mine had read the book, she said to me, “My only objection is that William never has a twinge of pity.” I quoted this to another friend, and he said, “That’s right, that is the style of his pity.” Perhaps this is so. And so be it.
Preterition
Adso was also useful to me in dealing with another matter. I could have had the story unfold in a Middle Ages where everyone knew what was being talked about, as in a contemporary story, in which, if a character says the Church would not approve his divorce, it is not necessary to explain what the Church is and why it does not approve the divorce. But in a historical novel this cannot be done, because the purpose of the narration is also to make clearer to us contemporaries what happened then and how what happened then matters to us as well.
Hence the risk of what I would call Salgarism.8 When the characters in Emilio Salgari’s adventures escape through the forest, pursued by enemies, and stumble over a baobab root, the narrator suspends the action in order to give us a botany lesson on the baobab. Now this has become topos, charming, like the defects of those we have loved; but it should not be done.