The Name of the Rose (71 page)

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

 

Telling the Process

 

The author must not interpret. But he may tell why and how he wrote his book. So-called texts of poetics are not always useful in understanding the work that inspired them, but they help us understand how to solve the technical problem which is the production of a work.

Poe, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” tells how he wrote “The Raven.” He does not tell us how we should read it, but what problems he set himself in order to achieve a poetic effect. And I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

The writer (or painter or sculptor or composer) always knows what he is doing and how much it costs him. He knows he has to solve a problem. Perhaps the original data are obscure, pulsive, obsessive, no more than a yearning or a memory. But then the problem is solved at the writer's desk as he interrogates the material on which he is working—material that reveals natural laws of its own, but at the same time contains the recollection of the culture with which it is loaded (the echo of intertextuality).

When the author tells us he worked in a raptus of inspiration, he is lying.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Talking about a famous poem of his, I forget which, Lamartine said that it had come to him in a single flash, on a stormy night, in a forest. When he died, the manuscripts were found, with revisions and variants; and the poem proved to be the most “worked out” in all of French literature.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules. A child speaks his mother tongue properly, though he could never write out its grammar. But the grammarian is not the only one who knows the rules of the language; they are well known, albeit unconsciously, also to the child. The grammarian is merely the one who knows how and why the child knows the language.

Telling how you wrote something does not mean proving it is “well” written. Poe said that the effect of the work is one thing and the knowledge of the process is another. When Kandinsky and Klee tell us how they paint, neither is saying he is better than the other. When Michelangelo says that sculpture amounts to freeing from the block of stone the figure already defined in it, he is not saying that the Vatican
Pietà
is superior to the Rondanini. Sometimes the most illuminating pages on the artistic process have been written by minor artists, who achieved modest effects but knew how to ponder their own processes: Vasari, Horatio Greenough, Aaron Copland. . . .

 

Naturally, the Middle Ages

 

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story. Man is a storytelling animal by nature. I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk. I believe a novel is always born of an idea like this: the rest is flesh that is added along the way. The idea must have originated even earlier. Afterward, I found a notebook dated 1975 in which I had written down a list of monks in an unspecified monastery. Nothing else. At the beginning I read Orfila's
Traité des poisons
—which I had bought twenty years before at a book stall by the Seine, purely out of loyalty to Huysmans (
Là-bas
). Since none of the poisons satisfied me, I asked a biologist friend to suggest a drug that possessed certain properties (the possibility of being absorbed by the skin when handled). I promptly tore up his letter of reply, in which he said he knew of no poison that would serve my purpose: it was a document that, read in another context, could lead to the gallows.

At first my monks were going to live in a contemporary convent (I had in mind an investigator-monk who read the left-wing newspaper
Il Manifesto
—in Italy even the left has its own heretics). But in any convent or abbey, countless medieval memories survive, so I began rummaging among my files. After all, I was a medievalist in hibernation (I had published a book on medieval aesthetics in 1956, another hundred pages on the subject in 1969, then a few scattered essays, and had returned to the medieval tradition in 1962 for my work on Joyce; in 1972 came a long study of the Apocalypse and the illuminations of the commentary by Beatus of Liébana:
⁶
so the Middle Ages were kept limber). I dug out a huge amount of material (file cards, photocopies, notebooks), accumulated since 1952 and originally intended for other, still-vague, purposes: a history of monsters, or an analysis of medieval encyclopedias, or a theory of lists. . . . At a certain point I said to myself that, since the Middle Ages were my day-to-day fantasy, I might as well write a novel actually set in that period. As I have said in interviews, I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have a direct knowledge of the Middle Ages. When we used to light bonfires on the grass in the country, my wife would accuse me of never looking at the sparks that flew up among the trees and glided along the electricity wires. Then when she read the chapter on the fire, she said, “So you
were
looking at the sparks!” And I answered, “No, but I knew how a medieval monk would have seen them.”

Ten years ago, in a letter from author to publisher accompanying my commentary on the commentary to the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, I confessed (to Franco Maria Ricci):

 

However you choose to look at it, I arrived at scholarship by crossing symbolic forests inhabited by unicorns and gryphons, and by comparing the pinnacled and squared construction of cathedrals to the barbs of exegetic malice concealed in the tetragonal formulas of the Summulae, wandering between the “Vico de le Strami”
⁷
and Cistercian naves, engaging in affable colloquy with the cultivated and sumptuous Cluniac monks, under the surveillance of a plump and rationalistic Aquinas, tempted by Honorius Augustoduniensis, by his fantastic geographies, which explained simultaneously
quare in pueritia coitus non contingat
and how to reach the Lost Island, or how to capture a basilisk when you are armed only with a pocket mirror and unshakable faith in the Bestiary.

This taste and this passion have never abandoned me, even if later, for moral reasons and also material ones (being a medievalist usually implies having considerable wealth and the possibility of roaming among distant libraries, microfilming unheard-of manuscripts), I have pursued other things. And so the Middle Ages have remained, if not my profession, my hobby—and a constant temptation: I see the period everywhere, transparently overlaying my daily concerns, which do not look medieval, though they are.

Stolen holidays under the vaults of Autun, where the Abbé Grivot today writes manuals on the devil, their binding impregnated with sulphur; rustic ecstasies at Moissac and Conques, dazzled by the Elders of the Apocalypse or by the devils thrusting damned souls into boiling cauldrons; and, at the same time, refreshing study of the enlightened monk Bede, rational comforts sought in Occam, to understand the mystery of the Sign where Saussure is still obscure. And so on and on, with unceasing homesickness for the
Peregrinatio Sancti Brandani,
verifications of our thinking carried out through the Book of Kells, Borges revisited in the Celtic
kenningars,
relations between power and masses who have been persuaded checked against the diaries of Bishop Suger. . . .

 

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.