On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  In attempting these definitions, one notices, I think, that the plurality of meanings is a phenomenon that is set up in a text even if the author was not thinking about it at all and has done nothing to encourage a reading on a multiplicity of levels. The worst hack telling stories of blood, horror, or death, or of sex and violence, cannot avoid leaving a moral sense fluctuating in the text, even if it is none other than the celebration of indifference toward evil, or of sex and violence as the only values worth pursuing.

  The same can be said of the two levels of reading, the semantic and the aesthetic. In the end this possibility exists even for railway timetables. Two different timetables give me the same information on a semantic level, but I might value the first as better organized and easier to consult than the second, thus moving on to a judgment about their organization and functionality that looks more at the how than the what.

  This does not happen with intertextual irony. Unless one goes looking for plagiarism or unconscious intertextual echoes, usually reading as a form of hunt-the-quotation exists in the form of a challenge between the reader and a text (leaving aside the author's intentions): the text somehow solicits the discovery of its secret dialogue with other texts.

  As an author of novels that play very much on intertextual quotation, I am always happy for the reader to catch the reference, the wink; but, without calling the empirical author into question, whoever has recognized, let's say, in The Island of the Day Before nods in the direction of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (for instance, the opening question about whether it was an island or a continent) must want other readers also to notice this allusion in the text.

  Of course, if there is intertextual irony, it is because one must admit as legitimate even the reading of those who only want to follow the plot about a shipwreck and who do not know whether he has landed on an island or a continent. The duty of the aesthetic reader is to decide that even that first kind of reading is independent and legitimate, and that the text allows it. If in the same novel I introduce a double, I admit that there is a reader who will be amazed and excited by this situation, but I obviously am aspiring to a reader who realizes that the presence of a double is almost obligatory in a baroque novel.

  When in Foucault's Pendulum the protagonist, Casaubon, spends his last night in Paris at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, he sees, from below, this construction as a monstrous being and becomes almost hypnotized by it. To write that passage I did two things: On the one hand, I spent some nights underneath the tower, trying to put myself at the center of its "paws" and to look at it from all possible angles, but always from the bottom upward. On the other hand, I looked up all the literary passages that had been written about the tower, especially while it was being built; these were mostly indignant, violent attacks on it, and what my protagonist sees and feels is a highly worked collage of a whole range of texts in both prose and verse. I was not anticipating that my reader could find all these quotations (and I myself am now unable to identify them and distinguish between them), but I certainly wanted the more subtle readers to sense the shadow of something déjà vu. At the same time I allowed the naive reader to live through the same sensations I had experienced at the foot of the tower, even though he did not know that they were bolstered with so much previous literature.

  It is pointless concealing the fact that it is not the author but the text that privileges the intertextual reader over the naive one. Intertextual irony is a "classist" selector. You can have a snobbish reading of the Bible that is satisfied only by its literal sense, or at most appreciates the rhythmic beauty of the Hebrew text or of the Latin Vulgate (thus certainly bringing into play the aesthetic reader), but there cannot be a snobbish reading of an intertextually ironic text that ignores its dialogical element. Intertextual irony calls together the happy few—except that the more there are of these happy few, the happier they will be.

  However, when a text unleashes the mechanism of intertextual irony, it has to expect that it will not produce just the allusions intended by the author, since the possibility of having a double reading depends on the breadth of the readers own textual ency clopedia, and this encyclopedia varies from reader to reader. In a conference held in Louvain in 1999, Inge Lanslots made a number of very acute observations on the many allusions to Verne that run throughout The Island of the Day Before, and she was certainly right in this. In the course of her oral presentation she found references to another novel by Verne (that I was frankly unaware of) where many mechanical clocks are described, as in my novel. I did not mean to use the intentions of the empirical author as a parameter for validating interpretations of the text, but I had to reply that the reader ought to recognize the many quotations from baroque literature that are scattered throughout that text. Now the topos of mechanical clocks is typically baroque (just think of Lubrano's poems). It is difficult to ask a foreign critic who is not a specialist in Italian baroque literature to recognize one of its minor poets, and I admitted that her approach was not, so to speak, prohibited. If one goes hunting subterranean allusions, it is difficult to say whether the person that is right is the author who was unaware of them or the reader who has found them. However, I pointed out that recognizing an allusion to baroque literature went with the grain of the general characteristics of the text, whereas identifying an allusion to Verne, at that point, did not lead anywhere.

  In any case, the discussion clearly convinced the speaker, because I cannot find any trace of her observation in the proceedings of that conference.*

  There are other cases where it is much more difficult to keep a check on the reader's encyclopedia. In Foucault's Pendulum I named the hero Casaubon, and I was thinking of Isaac Casaubon, the man who stripped the Corpus Hermeticum of its mythical status with impeccable critical arguments. My ideal second-level reader, who has access to intertextual irony, could identify a certain analogy between what the great philologist understood and what my character understands at the end of the novel. I was conscious of the fact that few readers would be able to recognize the allusion, and I believed that this was not essential in terms of textual strategy (in other words, one can read my novel and understand my Casaubon even without knowing about the historical Casaubon).

  Before finishing my novel, I discovered by chance that Casaubon was also a character in Middlemarch; I had read this novel some time before, but that detail of nomenclature had left no trace in my memory. In certain cases the Model Author wants to ration interpretations that seem pointless to him, and I made an effort to eliminate a possible reference to George Eliot. Thus on [>] there is the following dialogue between Belbo and Casaubon:

  "By the way, what's your name?"

  "Casaubon."

  "Casaubon. Wasn't he a character in Middlemarch?"

  "I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we are not related."

  However, along came a clever reader, David Robey, who pointed out that, clearly not by chance, Eliot's Casaubon was writing a Key to All Mythologies, and I have to admit this does seem to fit my character. Later Linda Hutcheon devoted even more attention to this connection, and found other affinities between the Casaubons, which apparently increased the ironic-intertextual temperature of my novel.* As the empirical author I can say that this analogy had never even crossed my mind, but if the format of the encyclopedia of Hutcheon the reader is such as to allow her to see this intertextual relationship, and my text encourages it, then it must be said that the operation is objectively (in the sense of culturally and socially) possible.

  An analogous case is that of Foucault. My novel is entitled Foucault's Pendulum because the pendulum I talk about was invented by Léon Foucault. Had it been invented by Franklin, the title would have been Franklin's Pendulum. This time I was conscious right from the start that someone could sniff an allusion to Michel Foucault: my characters are obsessed by analogies and Foucault wrote about the four paradigms of similitude. As the empirical author, I was not very happy with this pos
sible link because it seemed rather superficial. But the pendulum invented by Léon was the protagonist of my story, and I could not change the title, so I hoped that my Model Reader would not attempt a link with Michel. I was wrong: many readers did just that. Linda Hutcheon more than anyone else, and she actually identified precise correspondences between elements of the novel and the four figures of similitude listed by Michel Foucault in the chapter in his The Order of Things entitled "The Prose of the World." Needless to say, I had read The Order of Things when it came out in 1966, almost twenty years before starting to write my novel, and in the meantime I had come across the ghosts of analogy in the tradition of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Hermeticism, so that when I was writing I was thinking about these direct sources, or the deranged use of such sources in current texts on commercial occultism. Probably if the novel had been entitled Franklin's Pendulum, no one would have felt authorized to link the references to the theory of library classification to Michel Foucault; it would have been easier to think of Paracelsus. But I admit that the title of the book, or at any rate the name of the inventor of the eponymous pendulum, constituted too attractive a trail for a hunter of intertextual traces, and Linda Hutcheon was perfectly within her rights to find all she did find. And who knows whether, at least on the level of a psychoanalysis of the author, she is not in fact right, and that my interests in certain aspects of Hermeticism were stimulated by my early reading of Foucault (Michel).

  Nevertheless, it would be interesting to establish whether my appeal to Foucault was a case of intertextual irony or simply one of unwitting influence. Up until now I have perhaps allowed people to think that intertextual irony depends on the author's intention, but I have theorized too much on the prevalence of intentio operis over intentio auctoris to allow myself to indulge in such naivete. If a possible quotation appears in the text, and this quotation seems to go with the grain of the rest of the text (and other citations from it), the intentions of the empirical author count for little. The critic (or reader) is right, then, to talk of "citationism," and of the "textual echo" (I am using another of Linda Hutcheon's terms and am not playing on my own name) that the work encourages.

  The fact is that once you start playing with intertextual irony it is difficult to resist the appeal of such echoes, even though some might be totally fortuitous, like the reference to Jules Verne's clocks. Linda Hutcheon, again, cites from page 378 of the American edition of Foucault's Pendulum, "The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect," and finds an intertextual echo of E. M. Forster's "Connect, only connect." Acute critic that she is, she has the prudence to say that this "ironic play" exists in the English: for the Italian text (and it is not clear whether she had this to hand when she was writing) does not contain this intertextual reference since it says, "sospettare, sospettare sempre." The reference, which was certainly conscious, was inserted by the translator, Bill Weaver. We have to be honest, the English text does contain this echo, which means that translation can not only alter the play of intertextual irony, it can also enrich it.

  In other instances you can come across the possibility of choosing between a reading that is squared and one that is cubed. In one passage from chapter 30 of the Pendulum, where the protagonists imagine that even the entire story told by the Gospels is an effect of an invention like that of the Plan they are hatching, Casaubon comments: " Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère." I do not recall what I was thinking about when I wrote this, but I probably would have been happy with the intertextual allusion to Baudelaire, which was already enriched by the allusion to the apocryphal Gospels. Linda Hutcheon, however, defines the phrase as "a parody of Baudelaire by Eliot" (in fact, if you remember, Eliot quotes this line from Baudelaire in The Waste Land), and certainly if this is so, it all becomes even richer. What are we to do? Divide readers into those who get as far as Baudelaire and those who come all the way up to Eliot? And what if there was a reader who found the "hypocrite lecteur" in Eliot, and remembered it, but did not know that Eliot was quoting Baudelaire?

  Everyone noticed that The Name of the Rose begins with a quote from the Gospel according to Saint John ("In the beginning was the Word," etc.). But how many noticed that this can also be seen as a quote from the beginning of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, which opens with a (very respectful) imitation of Saint John: "In principio era il verbo appresso a Dio / ed era Iddio il verbo e il verbo lui. / Quest'era nel principio alparer mio / e nulla si pub far senza costui" (In the beginning the word was with God / and God was the Word and the Word was God. / This was in the beginning, it seems to me, / and we cannot do anything without Him)?

  However, when you really think about it, how many readers did notice that my novel begins with a quotation from Saint John? I have found Japanese readers (and perhaps I did not need to go that far) who attributed those very virtuous thoughts to good old Adso, and yet despite this they did not miss the religious afflatus that animates the words of the young monk.

  In fact, to be precise, intertextual irony is not, strictly speaking, a form of irony. Irony consists in saying not the opposite of the truth but the opposite of what one presumes the interlocutor thinks is true. It is ironic to define a stupid person as very intelligent, but only if the addressee knows that the person is stupid. If he does not know, then the irony is missed, and what one has is only false information. Thus irony becomes simply a lie when the addressee is not aware of the game.

  On the other hand, in terms of intertextual irony, I can tell the story of a double without the addressee sensing the reference to the baroque topos, yet despite this the addressee will not have enjoyed any less this very respectable, literal story about a double. In The Island of the Day Before there are some coups-de-scène that are clearly modeled on Dumas, and my quotation of them is sometimes literal, but the reader who does not get the reference can still enjoy the coups-de-scène, even though in a naive fashion. Thus if I said previously that the game of intertextual irony is snobbish and aristocratic, I should correct myself, because it does not set up a "conventio ad excludendum" as regards the naive reader. It is like a banquet where the remains of the dinner served on the upper floor are distributed on the lower floor, but not the remains from the dinner table, rather the remains in the pot, and these are also set out nicely, and, since the naive reader thinks the feast is happening on only one floor, he will enjoy these for what they are worth (and, when all's said and done, they will be tasty and plentiful) without supposing that anyone has enjoyed more.

  This is exactly what happens to the naive reader of Dante's sonnet" Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" who does not know how much its language has changed from Dante's time to ours, and what were the philosophical postulates of Dante's poetry. He will enjoy an elegant declaration of love, and will derive great gain from it just the same, both emotional and intellectual gain. This shows that my culinary analogy was perhaps provocative, but it was not intended to place art and gastronomy on the same level.

  And lastly, not even the most naive of readers can pass through the meshes of the text without entertaining the suspicion that sometimes (or often) it refers to something beyond itself. Here one sees then that intertextual irony not only is not a "conventio ad excludendum," but a provocation and invitation to include, such that it can gradually transform the naive reader into a reader who begins to sense the perfume of so many other texts that have preceded the one he is reading.

  Links between intertextual irony and biblical or Dantesque allegory? Some. Intertextual irony provides an intertextual second sense for readers who have been secularized and who no longer have any spiritual senses to look for in the text. The biblical and poetic second senses stemming from the theory of the four meanings allowed the text to flower vertically, each sense allowing us to approach ever closer to some Afterlife. The intertextual second sense is horizontal, labyrinthine, convoluted, and infinite, running from text to text—with no other promise than the continual murmuring of intertextuality. Intertextual irony presupp
oses an absolute immanentism. It provides revelations to those who have lost the sense of transcendence.

  However, I would not take too seriously anyone who started to moralize about this or drew the conclusion that intertextual irony is the aesthetics of the godless. It is a technique that can be activated even by a work that then aims at inspiring spiritual second senses, or one that presents itself as a high moral lesson, or is capable of talking about death and the infinite. Remo Ceserani has kindly pointed out that my presumed postmodernism is not without a sense of melancholy and pessimism.* This is a sign that intertextual irony does not presuppose at every turn a carefree carnival of dialogism. But it is certainly true that the text, to the extent that it is tormented, asks its reader to be aware of the rumble of intertextuality that has preceded our torments, and that author and reader also know how to unite in the mystic body of worldly Scriptures.

  Revised version of a lecture given in Forli, Italy, in February 1999.

  THE POETICS AND US

  Allow me, as an Italian, to approach the question of Aristotle's Poetics in the form of a confession by a child of this century. Italian culture produced the great Renaissance commentators on Aristotle, and in the baroque period it was Emanuele Tesauro who, with his Cannocchiale aristotelico, represented to the world of post-Galilean physics Aristotle's poetic theories as the sole key to approaching the human sciences. But at the very beginning of the following century this same Italian culture was enriched by Vico's New Science, the work that questioned every Aristotelian precept in order to posit a language and poetry that develop outside any rules. By doing so, Vico unwittingly opened the door—while in France, from Boileau to Batteux, from Le Bossu to Dubos, and right down to the Encyclopédie, writers were still looking to set down the rules of tragedy with the rules of taste—to a philosophy, a linguistics, and an aesthetics of the unpredictable freedom of the Spirit.