by Umberto Eco
The Middle Ages identified beauty with light and color (as well as with proportion), and this color was always a simple harmony of reds, blues, gold, silver, white, and green, without shading or chiaroscuro, where splendor is generated by the harmony of the whole rather than being determined by light enveloping things from the outside, or making color drip beyond the confines of the figures. In medieval miniatures light seems to radiate outward from the objects.
For Isidore of Seville, marble is beautiful because of its whiteness, metals for the light they reflect, and the air itself is beautiful and bears its name because aer-aeris derives from the splendor of aurum, i.e., gold (and that is why when air is struck by light, it seems to shine like gold). Precious gems are beautiful because of their color, since color is nothing other than sunlight imprisoned and purified matter. Eyes are beautiful if luminous, and the most beautiful eyes are sea green eyes. One of the prime qualities of a beautiful body is rose-colored skin. In poets this sense of flashing color is ever present: the grass is green, blood is red, milk is white. For Guido Guinizelli a beautiful woman has a "face of snowy whiteness colored with carmine," Petrarch writes of "clear, cool and sweet waters," and Hildegard of Bingens mystic visions show us glowing flames and compose even the beauty of the first fallen angel from gems shining like a starry sky, so that the countless number of sparks, shining in the bright light of all his ornaments, fills the world with light. In order to allow the divine to penetrate its otherwise dark naves, the Gothic church is cut through with blades of light from its windows, and it is to make room for these corridors of light that the space increases thanks to the side windows and rose windows, so that the walls almost disappear in a play of buttresses and climbing arches. The whole church is built on this system of light bursting through a fretwork of structures.
Huizinga reminds us of Froissart the chronicler's enthusiasm for ships with flags and ensigns fluttering in the wind, and gaily colored escutcheons flashing in the sun, the play of the suns rays on helmets, breastplates, lance tips, the pennants and banners of knights marching; and in coats of arms, the combinations of pale yellow and blue, orange and white, orange and pink, pink and white, black and white; and a young damsel in purple silk on a white horse with a saddlecloth of blue silk, led by three men clothed in vermilion and capes of green silk.
At the root of this passion for light there were theological influences of distant Platonic and Neoplatonic origin (the Supreme Good as the sun of ideas, the simple beauty of a color given by a shape that dominates the darkness of matter, the vision of God as Light, Fire, or Luminous Fountain). Theologians make light a metaphysical principle, and in these centuries the study of optics develops, under Arab influence, which leads in turn to ideas about the marvels of the rainbow and the miracles of mirrors (in Dante's third cantica the mirrors often appear to be liquid and mysterious).
Dante did not, therefore, invent his poetics of light by playing on a subject matter that was recalcitrant to poetry. He found it all around him, and he reformulated it, as only he could, for a reading public who felt light and color as passions. In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not a single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come, these vortices of flames, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69), these candid roses and ruby flowers. As Getto says, "Dante found before him a terminology, or, rather, a whole language already established to express the reality of the life of the spirit, the mysterious experience of the soul in its catharsis, the life of grace as stupendous joy, a prelude to a joyous, sacred eternity." For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car, the love of lost lovers, brief encounters, or the magic of old films and love songs, and they read it all with a deeply passionate intensity that is unknown to us. This is anything but doctrinal poetry and debates between teacher and pupil!
We now come to the second misunderstanding: that there cannot be poetry of pure intellect, capable of thrilling us not just at the kiss of Paolo and Francesca but at the architecture of the heavens, at the nature of the Trinity, at the definition of faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. Because in the meantime this reader has known the poetry of John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Valéry, or Borges, and knows that poetry can also be a metaphysical passion.
Speaking of Borges, from whom did he get the idea of the Aleph, that fateful single point which showed the populous sea, dawn and dusk, the multitudes of the Americas, a silver cobweb in the center of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth that was London, an inner courtyard in Calle Soler with the same tiles he had seen thirty years previously in the entryway of a house in Calle Frey Bentos, bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam coming off waters, convex equatorial deserts, an unforgettable woman in Inverness, an exemplar of the first translation of Pliny in a house in Adrogué, and simultaneously every letter on every page, a sunset at Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, a terraqueous globe placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly in a study in Alkmaar, a beach on the Caspian Sea at dawn, a pack of tarot cards in a shopwindow at Mirzapur, pistons, herds of bison, tides, all the ants that live on the earth, a Persian astrolabe, and the shocking remains of what had once been the delicious Beatriz Viterbo? The first Aleph appears in the final canto of the Paradiso, where Dante sees (and, as far as he can, makes us see) "bound with love in a single volume whatever is spread throughout the universe, substances and accidents and their behavior, almost fused together..." (Par. 33.88–89). In describing "the universal form of this bond," with "mind suspended and inadequate language," in "that clear subsistence," Dante sees three circles of three colors, and not, like Borges, the shocking remains of Beatriz Viterbo, because his Beatrice, who had turned into shocking remains some time previously, has come back again as light—and so Dante's Aleph is more passionately rich in hope than the one in Borges's hallucination, which is clearly informed by the understanding that he would not be allowed to see the Empyrean, and that all he had left was Buenos Aires.
It is in the light of this centuries-old tradition of metaphysical poetry that the Paradiso can best be read and appreciated today. But I would like to add one further point, to strike the imagination of young readers, or of those who are not particularly interested in God or intelligence. Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can become, for the reader who has forgotten history, a tremendously real element of the future. It represents the triumph of pure energy, which the labyrinth of the Web promises but will never be able to give us; it is an exaltation of floods and bodies without organs, an epic made of novas and white dwarf stars, an endless big bang, a story whose plot covers the distance of light-years, and, if you really want familiar examples, a triumphant space odyssey, with a very happy ending. You can read the Paradiso in this way too; it can never do you any harm, and it will be better than a disco with strobe lights or ecstasy. After all, with regard to ecstasy, Dante's third cantica keeps its promises and actually delivers it.
Written as an article for la Repubblica on 6 September 2000, in a series of pieces to celebrate the seventh centenary of The Divine Comedy.
ON THE STYLE OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
It is difficult to imagine that a few fine pages can single-handedly change
the world. After all, Dante's entire oeuvre was not enough to restore a Holy Roman Empire to the Italian city-states. But, in commemorating The Communist Manifesto of 1848, a text that certainly has exercised a major influence on the history of two centuries, I believe one must reread it from the point of view of its literary quality, or at least—even if one does not read it in the original German—of its extraordinary rhetorical skill and the structure of its arguments.
In 1971 a short book by a Venezuelan author was published: Ludovico Silva's Marx's Literary Style. (An Italian translation was published in 1973.) I think it is no longer available, but it would be worthwhile reprinting it. In this book Silva retraces the development of Marx's literary education (few know that he had also written poetry, albeit awful poetry, according to those who have read it), and goes on to analyze in detail Marx's entire oeuvre. Curiously, he devotes only a few lines to the Manifesto, perhaps because it was not a strictly personal work. This is a pity, for it is an astonishing text that skillfully alternates apocalyptic and ironic tones, powerful slogans and clear explanations, and (if capitalist society really does want to seek revenge for the upheavals these few pages have caused it) even today it should be read like a sacred text in advertising agencies.
It starts with a powerful drumroll, like Beethoven's Fifth: "A specter is haunting Europe" (and let us not forget that we are still close to the pre-Romantic and Romantic flowering of the gothic novel, and specters are to be taken seriously). This is followed immediately by a bird's-eye history of class struggle from ancient Rome to the birth and development of the bourgeoisie, and the pages dedicated to the conquests achieved by this new, "revolutionary" class constitute a foundation epic that is still valid today, for supporters of free-market enterprise. One sees (I really do mean "one sees," in an almost cinematographic way) this unstoppable force, which, urged on by the need for new markets for its goods, pervades the whole world on land and sea (and, as far as I am concerned, here the Jewish, Messianic Marx is thinking of the opening of Genesis), overturns and transforms distant countries because the low prices of products are its heavy artillery, which allows it to batter down any Chinese wall and force surrender on even the barbarians who are most hardened in their hatred for the foreigner; it sets up and develops cities as a symbol and as the foundation of its own power; and it becomes multinational, globalized, and even invents a literature that is no longer national but international.*
At the end of this eulogy (which is convincing and borders on sincere admiration), suddenly we find a dramatic reversal: the wizard discovers that he is unable to control the subterranean powers he has conjured up, the victor is suffocated by his own overproduction and is forced to bring forth from his loins the digger of his own grave—the proletariat.
This new force now enters the scene: at first divided and confused, it is forged in the destruction of machinery and then used by the bourgeoisie as shock troops forced to fight its enemy's enemies (the absolute monarchies, the landed property holders, the petite bourgeoisie), until gradually it absorbs the artisans, shopkeepers, and peasant landowners who once were its adversaries but have now been turned into proletarians by the bourgeoisie. The upheaval becomes struggle as workers organize thanks to another power that the bourgeoisie developed for its own profit: communications. And here the Manifesto cites the example of the railways, but the authors are also thinking of new mass media (and let's not forget that in The Holy Family Marx and Engels were able to use the television of that age—namely, the serial novel—as a model of the collective imagination, and they criticized its ideology by using the very language and situations the serials had made popular).
At this point the Communists come onstage. Before saying in a programmatic way what they are and what they want, the Manifesto (in a superb rhetorical move) puts itself in the position of the bourgeois who fears them, and advances some terrified questions: Do you want to abolish property? Do you want common access to women? Do you want to destroy religion, the nation, the family?
Here things become more subtle, because the Manifesto seems to reply to all these questions in a reassuring way, as though to mollify its adversaries—then, in a sudden move, it hits them in the solar plexus, winning the cheers of the proletarian public ... Do we want to abolish property? Of course not. But property relations have always been subject to change: did not the French Revolution abolish feudal property in favor of bourgeois property? Do we want to abolish private property? What a crazy idea; there is no chance of that, because it is the property of a tenth of the population, which works against the other nine-tenths. Are you reproaching us for wanting to abolish "your" property? Well, yes, that is exactly what we want to do.
Common access to women? Come on, we prefer to relieve women from their role as instruments of production. Do you see us having common access to women? Possessing women in common was invented by you, since apart from using your own wives you take advantage of workers' wives, and as your ultimate sport you practice the art of seducing your peers' wives. Destroy the nation? But how can you take from the workers something they have never possessed? On the contrary, we want to turn ourselves into a nation and triumph...
And so on up to the masterpiece of reticence that is the reply to the question of religion. We can intuit that the reply is "We want to destroy this religion," but the text does not say so: just when it broaches such a delicate topic, it glides over it and lets us infer that all transformations come at a price, but for goodness' sake, let's not take up such delicate issues immediately.
There then follows the most doctrinal part, the movement's program, the critique of different kinds of socialism, but by this stage the reader is already seduced by the preceding pages. And just in case the programmatic part is too difficult, here we find a final sting in the tail, two breathtaking slogans, easy, memorable and destined (it seems to me) to have an extraordinary future: "Workers have nothing to lose but their chains," and "Workers of the world, unite!"
Even apart from its genuinely poetic capacity to invent memorable metaphors, the Manifesto remains a masterpiece of political (but not only political) oratory, and it ought to be studied at school along with Cicero's Invectives against Catiline and Mark Antony's speech over Julius Caesar's body in Shakespeare, especially as it is not impossible, given Marx's familiarity with classical culture, that he had in mind these very texts when writing it.
Article published in L'Espresso, 8 January 1998, for the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto.
THE MISTS OF THE VALOIS
I discovered Sylvie when I was twenty, almost by chance, and I read it knowing very little about Nerval. I read the story in a state of total innocence, and I was bowled over. Later I discovered that it had made the same impression on Proust as it did on me. I do not remember how I articulated this impression in the vocabulary I had then, especially as now I can only express it in Proust's words from the few pages he devotes to Nerval in Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve).
Sylvie is certainly not, as Barrés (and a certain strand of "reactionary" criticism) insisted, a typically French, neoclassical idyll; it does not express a rootedness in the French soil (if anything, by the end the protagonist feels uprooted). Sylvie speaks to us of something that has unreal colors, the kind of thing we sometimes see when asleep and whose contours we would like to pin down, and which we inevitably lose when we awake. Sylvie is the dream of a dream, and its oneiric quality is such that "we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are...." The colors in Sylvie are not those of a classic watercolor: Sylvie is of "a purple color, a pink-purple color like purple-violet satin, at the opposite pole from the watercolor tones of moderate France.'" It is a model not of "gracefulness full of restraint" but, rather, of a "morbid obsession." The atmosphere of Sylvie is "bluish and purple," although this atmosphere is found not in the words but in the spaces between one word and another: "like the mists in a morning at Chantilly."*
Perhaps at twenty I co
uld not have put it like this: but I emerged from the story as though my eyes were glazed, not quite as happens in dreams, but, rather, as though I were on that morning threshold when you slowly awaken from a dream, you confuse the first conscious reflections with the last glimmers of the dream, and you cannot make out (or have not yet crossed) the border between dream and reality. Without having read Proust at that time, I knew I had felt the mist-effect.
I have reread this story very many times in the course of the last forty-five years, and on each occasion I would try to explain to myself or to others why it had this effect on me. Each time I thought I had discovered the reason, and yet each time I started to reread it I would find myself as at the beginning, still a victim of the mist-effect.
In what follows I will try to explain why and how the text manages to produce its mist-effects. But whoever wants to follow me must not be afraid of losing the magic of Sylvie by knowing too much about it. On the contrary, the more the reader knows about it, the more able will's/he be to reread it with renewed astonishment.†
Labrunie and Nerval
I must begin with a very important distinction. I want to eliminate from the outset an unwelcome character—namely, the empirical author. The empirical author of this story was called Gérard Labrunie, and he wrote under the nom de plume of Gérard de Nerval.
If we try to read Sylvie thinking about Labrunie, we are immediately on the wrong track. For instance, one then has to try, as many critics have done, to see how and to what extent the facts narrated in Sylvie refer to Labrunie's life. Thus it is that editions and translations of Sylvie are generally accompanied by biographical notes debating whether Aurélie was the actress Jenny Colon (incidentally, whoever looks at her portrait, reproduced in various editions, becomes seriously disillusioned), whether there really was an archery company at Loisy (or whether it was not rather at Creil), whether Labrunie really had received an inheritance from his uncle, or whether the character of Adrienne was based on Sophie Dawes, Baroness of Feuchères. Many solid academic reputations have been built on the basis of such meticulous research, all very useful for writing a biography of Gérard Labrunie but not for understanding Sylvie.