by Umberto Eco
Nobody remembers what happened in 1965 when the Gruppo met a second time, in Palermo, to discuss the experimental novel (and yet the proceedings are still in print, entitled Il romanzo sperimentale, published by Feltrinelli, with the date 1965 on the cover and 1966 in the colophon). Now, in the course of that debate many interesting things emerged. First of all, in his opening paper, Renato Barilli, theoretician of all the experimentalism of the Nouveau Roman, had to come to grips with Robbe-Grillet, with Grass, with Pynchon (it must not be forgotten that though Pynchon is now considered one of the inventors of postmodernism, the term did not exist then—not in Italy, anyway—and John Barth was just getting started in America). Barilli mentioned the rediscovered Roussel, who loved Verne, but he did not mention Borges, because his rediscovery was yet to come. And what did Barilli say? That till then the abolition of plots and action had been encouraged, in favor of the pure epiphany in its extreme form of “materialistic ecstasy” (we might say, “I will show you the heavens in a handful of dust,” as in the paintings of Pollock or Dubuffet or Fautrier). But now a new phase of narrative was beginning: action was being sanctioned again, even though it was an autre action.
I was analyzing the impression we had got the previous evening, watching a curious collage movie by Baruchello and Grifi called Verifica incerta, a story composed of fragments of stories, or, rather, of standard situations, topoi, from commercial cinema. And I pointed out that the places where the spectators had reacted with the greatest pleasure were those where, until a few years ago, they would have reacted with shock and outrage—namely, where the logical and temporal consequences of traditional action were omitted and the public’s expectations might have seemed violently frustrated. Avant-garde was becoming tradition: what had been dissonance a few years before was turning into a balm for the ears (or for the eyes). And from this observation only one conclusion could be drawn: unacceptability of the message was no longer the prime criterion for an experimental fiction (or any other art), since unacceptability had now been codified as entertaining. And I remarked that whereas at the time of the futurists’ programs it had been indispensable for the audience to boo, “sterile, today, and foolish is the polemic of those who consider an experiment a failure because of the fact that it is accepted as normal: this means going backward to the worn-out Utopia of the early avant-garde. We insist that the unacceptability of the message on the part of the recipient was a guarantee of value only in a specific historic moment. . . . I suspect that we will perhaps have to give up that arrière-pensée, which constantly dominates our discussions, whereby any external scandal caused by a work can be considered a guarantee of its worth. The very dichotomy between order and disorder, between a work for popular consumption and a work for provocation, though it remains valid, should perhaps be re-examined from another point of view. In other words, I believe it will be possible to find elements of revolution and contestation in works that apparently lend themselves to facile consumption, and it will also be possible to realize, on the contrary, that certain works, which seem provocative and still enrage the public, do not really contest anything. . . . Just recently I met someone who, because he had liked a certain product too much, had relegated it to a zone of suspicion. . . .” And so on.
Nineteen sixty-five. That was the time when Pop Art was beginning, and the traditional distinctions between experimental, nonfigurative art and mass art, narrative and figurative, were vanishing. This was when Pousseur, referring to the Beatles, said to me, “They are working for us”—not realizing, however, that he was also working for them (and it took the initiative of Cathy Berberian to show us that the Beatles, linked with Purcell, as was only right, could also be performed in recital with Monteverdi and Satie).
Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable
Between 1965 and today, two ideas have been definitively clarified: that plot could be found also in the form of quotation of other plots, and that the quotation could be less escapist than the plot quoted. In 1972 I edited the Almanacco Bompiani, celebrating “The Return to the Plot,” though this return was via an ironic re-examination (not without admiration) of Ponson du Terrail and Eugène Sue, and admiration (with very little irony) of some of the great pages of Dumas. The real problem at stake then was, could there be a novel that was not escapist and, nevertheless, still enjoyable?
This link, and the rediscovery not only of plot but also of enjoyability, was to be realized by the American theorists of postmodernism.
Unfortunately, “postmodern” is a term bon à tout faire. I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it increasingly retroactive: first it was apparently applied to certain writers or artists active in the last twenty years, then gradually it reached the beginning of the century, then still further back. And this reverse procedure continues; soon the postmodern category will include Homer.
Actually, I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category—or, better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as metahistorical category). I believe that in every period there are moments of crisis like those described by Nietzsche in his Thoughts Out of Season, in which he wrote about the harm done by historical studies. The past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us. The historic avant-garde (but here I would also consider avant-garde a metahistorical category) tries to settle scores with the past. “Down with moonlight”—a futurist slogan—is a platform typical of every avant-garde; you have only to replace “moonlight” with whatever noun is suitable. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a typical avant-garde act. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. In architecture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence (in this sense, the early Cage is modern).
But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony. . . . But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
Irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared. Thus, with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously. I think that the collages of Picasso, Juan Gris, and Braque were modern: this is why normal people would not accept them. On the other hand, the collag
es of Max Ernst, who pasted together bits of nineteenth-century engravings, were postmodern: they can be read as fantastic stories, as the telling of dreams, without any awareness that they amount to a discussion of the nature of engraving, and perhaps even of collage. If “postmodern” means this, it is clear why Sterne and Rabelais were postmodern, why Borges surely is, and why in the same artist the modern moment and the postmodern moment can coexist, or alternate, or follow each other closely. Look at Joyce. The Portrait is the story of an attempt at the modern. Dubliners, even if it comes before, is more modern than Portrait. Ulysses is on the borderline. Finnegans Wake is already postmodern, or at least it initiates the postmodern discourse: it demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking.
On the subject of the postmodern nearly everything has been said, from the very beginning (namely, in essays like “The Literature of Exhaustion” by John Barth, which dates from 1967). Not that I am entirely in agreement with the grades that the theoreticians of postmodernism (Barth included) give to writers and artists, establishing who is postmodern and who has not yet made it. But I am interested in the theorem that the trend’s theoreticians derive from their premises: “My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. . . . He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace—not to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterates. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art. . . . The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. . . . My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: one finds much on successive listenings or close examination of the score that one didn’t catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay.”
This is what Barth wrote in 1980, resuming the discussion, but this time under the title “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.”9 Naturally, the subject can be discussed further, with a greater taste for paradox; and this is what Leslie Fiedler does. In 1980 Salmagundi (no. 50–51) published a debate between Fiedler and other American authors. Fiedler, obviously, is out to provoke. He praises The Last of the Mohicans, adventure stories, Gothic novels, junk scorned by critics that was nevertheless able to create myths and capture the imagination of more than one generation. He wonders if something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin will ever appear again, a book that can be read with equal passion in the kitchen, the living room, and the nursery. He includes Shakespeare among those who knew how to amuse, along with Gone with the Wind. We all know he is too keen a critic to believe these things. He simply wants to break down the barrier that has been erected between art and enjoyability. He feels that today reaching a vast public and capturing its dreams perhaps means acting as the avant-garde, and he still leaves us free to say that capturing readers’ dreams does not necessarily mean encouraging escape: it can also mean haunting them.
The Historical Novel
For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of “Is your novel an open work or not?” How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or “With which of your characters do you identify?” For God’s sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.
Of all idle questions the most idle has been the one raised by those who suggest that writing about the past is a way of eluding the present. “Is that true?” they ask me. It is quite likely, I answer: if Manzoni wrote about the seventeenth century, that means the nineteenth century did not interest him. Shakespeare rewrote medieval subjects and was not concerned with his own time, whereas Love Story is firmly committed to its own time, yet La Chartreuse de Parme told only of events that had occurred a good twenty-five years earlier. . . . It is no use saying that all the problems of modern Europe took the shape in which we still feel them during the Middle Ages: communal democracy and the banking economy, national monarchies and urban life, new technologies and rebellions of the poor. The Middle Ages are our infancy, to which we must always return, for anamnesis. But there is also the Excalibur-style Middle Ages. And so the problem is something else and cannot be skirted. What does writing a historical novel mean? I believe there are three ways of narrating the past. One is romance, and the examples range from the Breton cycle to Tolkien, also including the Gothic novel, which is not a novel but a romance. The past as scenery, pretext, fairy-tale construction, to allow the imagination to rove freely. In this sense, a romance does not necessarily have to take place in the past; it must only not take place here and now, and the here and now must not be mentioned, not even as allegory. Much science fiction is pure romance. Romance is the story of an elsewhere.
Then comes the swashbuckling novel, the cloak-and-dagger stories, like the work of Dumas. This kind of novel chooses a “real” and recognizable past, and, to make it recognizable, the novelist peoples it with characters already found in the encyclopedia (Richelieu, Mazarin), making them perform actions that the encyclopedia does not record (meeting Milady, consorting with a certain Bonacieux) but which the encyclopedia does not contradict. Naturally, to corroborate the illusion of reality, the historical characters will also do what (as historiography concurs) they actually did (besiege La Rochelle, have intimate relations with Anne of Austria, deal with the Fronde). In this (“real”) picture the imaginary characters are introduced, though they display feelings that could also be attributed to characters of other periods. What d’Artagnan does, in recovering the Queen’s jewels in London, he could have done as well in the fifteenth century or the eighteenth. It is not necessary to live in the seventeenth century to have the psychology of d’Artagnan.
In the historical novel, on the other hand, it is not necessary for characters recognizable in normal encyclopedias to appear. Take The Betrothed: the best-known real character is Cardinal Federigo, who, until Manzoni came along, was a name known only to a few people (the other Borromeo, Saint Charles, was the famous one). But everything that Renzo, Lucia, or Fra Cristoforo does could be done only in Lombardy in the seventeenth century. What the characters do serves to make history, what happened, more comprehensible. Events and characters are made up, yet they tell us things about the Italy of the period that history books have never told us so clearly.
In this sense, certainly, I wanted to write a historical novel, and not because Ubertino or Michael had really existed and had said more or less what they say, but because everything the fictitious characters like William say ought to have been said in that period.
I do not know how faithful I remained to this purpose. I do not believe I was neglecting it when I disguised quotations from later authors (such as Wittgenstein), passing them off as quotations from the period. In those instances I knew very well that it was not my medieval men who were being modern; if anything, it was the moderns who were thinking medievally. Rather, I ask myself if at times I did not endow my fictitious characters with a capacity for putting together, from the disiecta membra of totally medieval thoughts, some conceptual hircocervuses that, in this form, the Middle Ages would not have recognized as their own. But I believe a historical novel should do this, too: not only identify in the past the causes of what came later, but also trace the process through which those causes began slowly to produce their effects.
If a character of mine, comparing two medieval ideas, produces a third, more modern, idea, he is doing exactly what culture did; and if nobody has ever written what he says, someone, however confusedly, should surely have begun to think it (perhaps without saying it, blocked by countless fears and by shame).
In any case, there is one matter
that has amused me greatly: every now and then a critic or a reader writes to say that some character of mine declares things that are too modern, and in every one of these instances, and only in these instances, I was actually quoting fourteenth-century texts.
And there are other pages in which readers appreciated the exquisite medieval quality whereas I felt those pages are illegitimately modern. The fact is that everyone has his own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages. Only we monks of the period know the truth, but saying it can sometimes lead to the stake.
Ending
I found again—two years after having written the novel—a note I made in 1953, when I was still a student at the university.