by Umberto Eco
Why consider it absurd to believe in conspiracies and plots, when they are used even today to explain the failure of our actions, or the fact that events have taken a different turn from the one we wanted?
False stories are above all stories, and stories, like myths, are always persuasive. And how many other false stories could we discuss...? For instance, the myth of the Southern Land, that immense continent that was meant to run along the whole of the polar ice cap and subtropical Antarctica. The firm belief in the existence of this land (certified by countless geographical maps showing the globe wrapped, to the south, by a substantial sort of land support) encouraged navigators for three centuries and from various countries to attempt to explore the southern seas and Antarctica itself.
What can we say about El Dorado and the fountain of eternal youth, which inspired mad and courageous heroes to explore the two Americas? Of the impulse given to the new science of chemistry by the hallucinations caused by the specter of the philosophers stone? Of the story of phlogiston, the account of cosmic ether?
Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales have produced positive effects and others have produced horror and shame. All of them have created something, for good or ill. Nothing is inexplicable about their success. What constitutes the problem is, rather, how we have managed to replace these with other stories that we consider true today. In my essay on fakes and forgeries, written some years ago, I concluded that there certainly exist tools, either empirical or conjectural, to prove that something is a fake, but that every judgment on the question presupposes the existence of an original that is authentic and true, against which the forgery is compared; however, the real cognitive problem consists not only in proving that something is a forgery but in proving that the authentic object is just that: authentic.
And yet this obvious consideration must not lead us to conclude that there is no criterion of truth, and that stories said to be false are the same as those that we consider today to be true, just because both belong to the literary genre of narrative fiction. There is a practice of verification that is based on slow, collective, public work done by what Charles Sanders Peirce called the Community. It is through our human faith in the work of this community that we can say, with a certain degree of tranquillity, that the Constitutum Constantini was a forgery, that the earth moves around the sun, and that Saint Thomas Aquinas at least knew that the earth was round.
At most, recognizing that our history has been shaped by many stories that we now regard as false must make us cautious, and always ready to call into question the very stories that we now hold as true, since the criterion of wisdom of the community is based on constant wariness about the fallibility of our knowledge.
Some years ago there appeared in France a book by Jean-François Gautier, entitled L'Univers existe-t-il?* Does the universe exist? Good question. And what if the universe were just a concept like cosmic ether, phlogiston, or the conspiracy by the elders of Zion?
Gautier's arguments are philosophically sensible. The idea of the universe as the totality of the cosmos is an idea that comes from the most ancient cosmographies, cosmologies, and cosmogonies. But can we possibly describe, as if we could see it from above, something inside which we are contained, of which we form a part, and which we cannot leave? Can we provide a descriptive geometry of the universe when there is no space outside it onto which to project it? Can we speak of the beginning of the universe when a temporal notion like that of a beginning must refer to the parameters of a clock, whereas at most the universe is its own clock and cannot be referred to anything that is external to it? Can we say with Eddington that "hundreds of thousands of stars make up a galaxy; hundreds of thousands of galaxies make up the universe," when, as Gautier observes, although a galaxy is an object that can be observed, the universe is not, and therefore one is establishing an unwarranted analogy between two incommensurate entities? Can one postulate the universe in order to then study with empirical instruments this postulate as if it were an object? Can a singular object (certainly the most singular of all objects) exist that has as its characteristic that of being just a law? And if the story of the big bang were just a story as fantastic as the Gnostic tale that claimed that the universe was born from the mistake made by an unskillful Demiurge?
Basically this critique of the notion of the universe is like the Kantian critique of the notion of World.
Since for some people the suspicion that the sun does not go around the earth seemed at a certain moment in history just as foolish and execrable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist, it is useful to keep our mind free and fresh for the moment when the community of men of science decrees that the idea of the universe was an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians.
Deep down, the first duty of the Community is to be on the alert in order to be able to rewrite the encyclopedia every day.
Expanded version of the inaugural lecture for the academic year 1994–95 at the University of Bologna.
HOW I WRITE
The Beginnings, Remote.
I am a rather anomalous example of a fiction writer. For I began to write stories and novels between the ages of eight and fifteen, then I stopped, only to start again when I was on the verge of fifty. Before this explosion of mature impudence, I spent more than thirty years of presumed modesty. I said "presumed," and I need to explain this. Let us proceed in the proper order, namely, as is my wont in novels, by going back in time.
When I began to write I would take a notebook and write the first page. The title would have a Salgari flavor, because his works were one of my sources (along with those of Verne, Boussenard, Jacolliot, and the years 1911–21 of the Giornale illustrato dei viaggi e delle avventure di terra e di mare [Illustrated Journal of Travels and Adventures on Land and Sea], discovered in a trunk in the basement). So they had titles like Gli scorridori del Labrador (The Pirates of Labrador) or Lo sciabecco fantasma (The Phantom Ship). Then at the bottom I would write the name of the publisher, which was Tipografia Matenna, a daring hybrid of "Matita" (Pencil) and "Penna" (Pen). I then proceeded to insert an illustration every ten pages, like those by Delia Valle or Amato for Salgari's books.
The choice of illustration determined the story I would then have to write. I would write only a few pages of the first chapter. I wrote in block letters, without allowing myself any changes, in order to do things correctly from the publishing point of view. Needless to say, I would abandon the enterprise after a few pages. Thus I was, at that time, the author of only great unfinished novels.
Of this output (which was lost during a move) I have retained only one finished work, of indeterminate genre. For I was given a huge kind of notebook as a present, its pages faintly marked with horizontal lines and big purple margins. That gave me the idea of writing (the title page bears the date of 1942, followed by Year XXI of the Fascist Regime, as was the custom, and indeed the requirement) In nome del "Calendario"(In the Name of "Calendar"), the diary of a magician, Pirimpimpino, who passed himself off as the discoverer, colonizer, and reformer of an island in the Glacial Arctic Ocean called the Acorn, whose inhabitants adored the god "Calendar." Every day this Pirimpimpino would note down, and with great documentary pedantry, the deeds and (what I would call today) socioanthropological structures of his people, interspersing these diary jottings with literary exercises. I have found in it a "Futurist short story," which goes like this: "Luigi was a good man, that was why, once he had kissed the hares' plates, he went to the Lateran to buy the present perfect [...]. But en route he fell into a mountain and died. A shining example of heroism and philanthropy, he was mourned by the telegraph poles."
For the rest the narrator described (and drew) the island he ruled, its woods, lakes, coasts, and mountainous regions, dwelled on his own social reforms, his people's rites and myths, introduced his own ministers, and spoke of wars and pestilences.... The text alternated with drawings, and the story (which did not follow the rules of any genre) tur
ned into an encyclopedia—and with hindsight one can see how the child's boldness presaged the adult's weaknesses.
Until the point where, no longer knowing what to make happen to the king and his island, I ended the tale on [>], saying: "I will go on a long voyage.... Perhaps I will not even come back; just one small confession: in the early days I declared myself to be a wizard. This is not true: I am only called Pirimpimpino. Forgive me."
After these experiments I decided that I would have to go over to comics, and I did produce some. If photocopiers had existed at that time, I would have distributed them widely; instead, in order to make up for my limitations as amanuensis, I proposed that my school friends give me a number of pages from their squared paper notebooks, which amounted to the number of pages for the volume, plus some more as compensation for my expenses in ink and labor, promising to produce several copies of the same adventure. I drew up all the contracts without realizing how laborious it was to copy the same story ten times. In the end I had to give the notebooks back, humiliated by my failure, not as an author, but as a publisher.
At middle school I wrote narratives because by that time "essays" (where there was no choice of subject) had been replaced by "chronicles" (where we had to recount "a slice of life," but there was an element of choice). I excelled in humorous sketches. My favorite author then was P. G. Wodehouse. I still have my masterpiece: a description of how I prepared, after many experiments, to demonstrate to neighbors and relatives a technological wonder, namely, one of the first unbreakable glasses; I dropped it triumphantly on the ground, where, of course, it smashed into pieces.
Between 1944 and 1945 I turned to epic, with a parody of The Divine Comedy and a series of portraits of the gods of Olympus, all portrayed in the style of that dark period, when we were coping with rationing, blackouts, and Rabagliati's songs.
Finally in my first two years of high school, I wrote an "Illustrated Life of Euterpe Clips" (with illustrations), and at that stage my literary models were the novels of Giovanni Mosca and Giovanni Guareschi. In my final years there I wrote some stories with more serious literary ambitions. I would say that at that time the dominant tone was a magic realism a la Bontempelli. For a long time, I would get up early and plan to rewrite "The Concert," which contained an interesting narrative idea. A certain Mario Tobia, a failed composer, gathered together all the mediums of the world to produce onstage, in the form of ectoplasms, the greatest musicians of the past, to play his "Conradino of Swabia." Beethoven conducting, Liszt on the piano, Paganini on the violin, and so on. Just one contemporary, Louis Robertson, on the trumpet. There was quite a good description of how gradually the mediums were unable to keep their creatures alive, and the great composers of the past slowly dissolved, amid the whines and dissonances of dying instruments, leaving on its own up there, shrill, magical and unopposed, Robertsons trumpet.
I ought to leave to my faithful readers (all twenty-four of them, I would say, in order not to compete with the Great Manzoni's twenty-five readers, since I want to outdo him only in modesty) the job of recognizing how both episodes were exploited forty years later in Foucault's Pendulum.
I also wrote some "Ancient Stories of the Young Universe," whose protagonists were the earth and the other planets, just after the birth of the galaxies, as they were seized by reciprocal passions and jealousies: in one story, Venus fell in love with the Sun and with a huge effort managed to remove herself from her own orbit to go and annihilate herself in the incandescent mass of her beloved. My little, unaware Cosmicomics.
At sixteen my love for poetry began. I devoured the Hermetic poets, but my own taste was more for Cardarelli and the classicism of those who wrote for La Ronda. I no longer know whether it was the need for poetry (and the contemporary discovery of Chopin) that caused the flowering of my first, platonic, and unspoken love, or vice versa. In either case, the mixture was disastrous, and not even the most tender and narcissistic of nostalgias would allow me to revisit those efforts now without feeling deep and thoroughly deserved shame. But a severe critical sternness must have emerged from that experience: that was what drove me, in the space of a few years, to decide that my poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne. Hence the resolution (kept for over thirty years) to abandon so-called creative writing, and to limit myself to philosophical reflection and the writing of essays.
The Essayist and the Fiction Writer
This was a decision that I have never regretted for thirty years or more. What I mean is that I was not one of those who are condemned to write about science while burning with desire to write about art. I felt totally fulfilled doing what I was doing, and what's more, I looked with a touch of Platonic disdain at poets, prisoners of their own lies, imitators of imitations, unable to attain that vision of the hypercelestial Idea with which I—as a philosopher—believed I had chaste, peaceful, and daily intercourse.
In reality, I now realize, I was satisfying my passion for narrative, without noticing it, in three different ways. First of all, through a constant exercise of oral narrativity (I missed enormously our young children when they grew up, because I could no longer tell them stories). Second, by playing with literary parodies and pastiches of various types (a period documented in my Misreadings [New York: Harcourt, 1993], written in the late fifties and early sixties. And third, by making a narrative out of every critical essay. I have to explain this point because I think it is essential for understanding both my activity as an essayist and my (subsequent) future as a narrator.
When I was examined for my graduating thesis on the problem of aesthetics in Thomas Aquinas, I was struck by one of the criticisms of the second examiner (Augusto Guzzo, who, however, later published my thesis as it was): he told me that what I had actually done was to rehearse the various phases of my research as if it were an inquiry, noting the false leads and the hypotheses that I later rejected, whereas the mature scholar digests these experiences and then offers his readers (in the final version) only the conclusions. I recognized that this was true of my thesis, but I did not feel it to be a limitation. On the contrary, it was precisely then that I was convinced that all research must be "narrated" in this way. And I think I have done so in all my subsequent works of nonfiction.
As a result, I could refrain peacefully from writing stories because in fact I was satisfying my passion for narrative in another way; and when I would later write stories, they could not be anything other than the account of a piece of research (only in narrative this is called a Quest).
Where Did I Start From?
Between the ages of forty-six and forty-eight I wrote my first novel, The Name of the Rose. I do not intend to discuss the (how shall I say, existential?) motives that led me to write a first novel: they were numerous, probably cumulative, and I believe the fact that I felt a desire to write a novel is motivation enough.
One of the questions that the editor of this volume has put to the writers she has contacted is: What are the phases one goes through in the genesis of a text? The question blithely implies that writing goes through phases. Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.
There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules; and there is no hot magma of inspiration. But it is true that there is a sort of initial idea and that there are very precise phases in a process that develops only gradually.
My three novels stemmed from a seminal idea that was little more than an image: that was what seized me and made me want to go on. The Name of the Rose was born when I was struck by an image of the murder of a monk in a library. When I wrote in the Reflections on "The Name of the Rose" that "I wanted to poison a monk," this provocative formula was taken literally, unleashing a series of follow-up questi
ons on why I wanted to commit this crime. But I did not want to poison a monk at all (and indeed have never done so): I was fascinated by the image of a monk who was poisoned while reading a book in the library. I do not know whether I was under the influence of the traditional poetics of the English detective novel, where the murder has to be committed in a vicarage. Perhaps I was following up certain emotions I had felt at sixteen, during a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, where I walked through Gothic and Romanesque cloisters and then went into a dark library where, open on a lectern, I found the Acta Sanctorum, and there I learned that there was not just one Blessed Umberto, as I had been led to believe, with a feast day on 4 March, but also a Saint Umberto, a bishop, whose feast was celebrated on 6 September and who had converted a lion in a forest. But one can see that at that point, while I was leafing through that folio volume open vertically in front of me, in supreme silence, amid shafts of light entering through opaque windows that were almost grooved into the walls and ended in pointed arches, I had experienced a moment of upheaval.
I don't know. But the fact is that that image, of the monk murdered while reading, demanded at a certain point that I construct something else around it. The rest came bit by bit, in order to make sense of that image, including the decision to set the story in the Middle Ages. Initially I thought it should take place in our own time; then I decided that, since I knew and loved the medieval period, it was worthwhile making it the backdrop of my story. All the rest came on its own, gradually, as I read, looked at images, reopened cupboards where there was a twenty-five-year-old pile of filing cards on the Middle Ages, which had been filled out for completely different purposes.
With Foucault's Pendulum things were more complicated. I had to go and look for the seminal image—or, rather, the two seminal images, as we shall see—like a psychoanalyst gradually extracting the patients secret from some disconnected memories and fragments of dreams. Initially I felt only one anxiety: I've written a novel—I said to myself—the first novel in my life, and perhaps the last, because I have the feeling that I put into it all the things that I liked or found intriguing, along with everything that, even indirectly, I could say about myself. Is there anything else that is truly my own that I could narrate? And into my mind came two images.