On Literature

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) turned 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 questions 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.

The first was that of the pendulum, which I had seen for the first time thirty years previously in Paris, and it had made a huge impression on me. I am not saying that I forgot about it over the years. On the contrary, at one point in the sixties I was asked by a film-director friend of mine to write a script for a film. I don't want to talk about this, since subsequently it was used to make a terrible film that had nothing to do with my original idea, and luckily I managed to ensure that my name did not appear anywhere on it—not to mention the fact that I was paid just a token fee. But in that script there was a scene that took place in a cavern at the center of which hung a pendulum, and someone was clinging to it as he whirled through the darkness.

The second image that imposed itself on me was that of myself playing a trumpet at a funeral of partisans. A true story, which, besides, I had never stopped telling. Not often, but always in situations of great intimacy: late at night, having the last whiskey in a welcoming bar, or during a walk along the water, when I felt that a woman, either opposite or beside me, was just waiting for a good story in order to say "How wonderful" and take my hand. A true story around which other memories clustered, and a story I found beautiful.

That was it, the pendulum and that story in the cemetery on a sunlit morning. I felt that I could tell a story around those two things. There was just one problem: how to get from the pendulum to the trumpet? The reply to this question took me eight years, and became the novel.

Similarly, with The Island of the Day Before I started from two very strong images that had surfaced in instant reply to the question: if I were to write a third novel, what could it be about? I've spoken too much about monasteries and museums, I said to myself, too much, that is, about places of culture: I should try to write about nature. Nature and nothing else. And how would I be forced to see nature and nothing else? By placing a shipwrecked man on a deserted island.

Then, at the same time, but for totally independent reasons, I bought one of those world-time watches, where a middle ring rotates in the opposite direction to the hands in order to make local time line up with a series of places written on the outer ring. These kinds of watches have a sign indicating the international dateline. That this line exists, we all know, if for no other reason than having read Around the World in Eighty Days, but it is not something we think about every day. This provided a flash of inspiration: my man had to be west of that line and see an island to the east, an island distant in both space and time. It was a short step from here to deciding that he must actually be not on the island but opposite it.

At the outset, since my watch showed, at this fated point, the Aleutian Islands, I could see no good reason for placing someone there to do something. Where was he? Stuck on an oil-rig platform? Moreover, as I will make clear shortly, I only write about places I have been to, and the idea of going to such cold places, looking for an oil-rig platform, did not exactly fascinate me.

Then, as I continued to leaf through the atlas, I discovered that the line also passed through the Fijian archipelago. Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands ... At this point other memories intervened, other trails opened up. I read a few things, and then I was in the middle of the seventeenth century, the century when exploration voyages to the Pacific began to proliferate. This stirred the memory of many aspects of my old research on baroque culture. That then led to the idea that the man could be shipwrecked on a deserted ship, a kind of ghost ship ... And off I went. By that stage, I would say, the novel could walk on its own two feet.

First of All, Construct A World

But where does a novel walk to? Here is the second problem that I consider fundamental for a poetics of narrative. When interviewers ask me, "How did you write your novel?" I usually cut them short and reply: "From left to right." But here I have enough space for a more complex reply.

The fact is that I believe (or at least I now understand better, after four attempts at fiction) that a novel is not just a linguistic phenomenon. A novel (like the narratives we construct every day, explaining why we arrived late that morning, or how we got rid of someone annoying) uses a plane of expression (words that are very difficult to translate into poetry because what also counts there is their sound) to convey a plane of content, namely, the narrated facts. But on the level of content itself we can identify two more sides, story and plot.

The story of Little Red Riding-Hood is a pure sequence of actions that are chronologically ordered: the mother sends the little girl into the woods, the girl meets the wolf, the wolf goes to wait for her at her grandmother's house, eats the grandmother, dresses up as her, etc. The plot can organize these elements differently: for instance, the story could begin with the girl seeing the grandmother, being astonished at how she looks, and then go back to the moment she left home; or with the child returning home safely, thanking the woodsman, and telling her mother the preceding phases of the story....

The tale of Little Red Riding-Hood is so centered on its story (and, through it, on the plot) that it can be rendered in satisfying terms in any discourse, that is to say, using any form of representation: through cinematic images, or in French, German, or in comic strips (all of which has happened).

I have considered the relationships between expression and content in the contrast between prose and poetry on several occasions. Why in the Italian nursery rhyme did "la vispa Teresa avea tra l'erbetta / al volo sorpresa gentil farfalletta" (sparky Theresa catch amid the grass / a gentle little butterfly)? Why did she not catch it in a bush, or among climbing flowers, where it would have found it easier to suck the pollen that inebriates it? Naturally it is because "erbetta" (grass) rhymes with "farfalletta" (butterfly), whereas "cespuglio" (bush) would have rhymed with "guazzabuglio" (a mess). This is not a game. Let us leave sprightly Theresa and move to Montale: "Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato: / era il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia, / era l'incartocciarsi della foglia / riarsa, era il cavallo stramazzzato ..." (I have often met the evil of living: / it was the strangled stream gurgling, / it was the crumpling of a leaf / totally parched, it was the horse that had collapsed to the ground...). Why among all the symbols or epiphanies of the ills of living has the poet identified the leaf totally parched, and not some other phenomenon of withering and death? Why the strangled stream "gurgling"? Or perhaps the stream gurgles (" gorgoglia"), and it is a stream precisely because it had to prepare for the appearance of that leaf ("foglia")? In any case, the need for that rhyme encouraged the splendid enjambment of "riarsa" (totally parched), which prolongs onto the next line the agony of a life that is already vegetal and which is now gasping out its last breath in a final spasm that pulverizes it.

For if (and here we really are playing, luckily for the history of poetry) a stream that "borbotta" (murmurs) had come along first, then the ills of life would have had to be revealed in the darkness and stench of a "grotto" (cave).

On the other hand, although Verga's novel begins with "Un tempo i Malavoglia erano stati numerosi come i sassi della strada vecchia di Trezza ..." (At one stage the Malavoglia had been as numerous as the stones on the old road to Trezza...) and "ce n'erano persino ad Ognina, ad Aci Castello" (there were even some at Ognina and Aci Castello), he certainly could have chosen some other name for his town or village (and perhaps he might have liked Montepulciano or Viserba), but his choice was limited by the decision to make his story happen in Sicily, and even the simile of the stones was determined by the nature of that place, which did not allow stretches of pastoral, almost Irish, "erbetta."

Thus in poetry it is the choice of expression that determines the content, whereas in prose it is the opposite; it is the world the author chooses, the events that happen in it, that dictate its rhythm, style, and even verbal choices.

However, it would be a mistake to say that in poetry the content (and along with it the relationship between story and plot) is irrelevant. To give just one example, in Leopardi's "A Silvia"there is a story (there was a young girl just like that, the poet was in love with her, she died, the poet remembers her), and there is a plot (the poet appears first, when the girl is now dead, and brings her alive again in his memory). It is not enough to say that in a translation of this poem the change of expression means giving up on so many phonic and symbolic values (the play on "Silvia" and " salivi" [you were crossing]), on rhyme and meter. The fact is that no adequate translation would fail to respect both story and plot. It would be the translation of another poem.

This may seem a banal observation, but even in a poetic text the author is speaking to us about a world (there are two houses, one opposite the other, there is a young girl "all'opre femminili intenta" [busy with her girl's work]). All the more reason then that this should happen in narrative. Manzoni writes quite well (we might say), but what would his novel be if it did not have the Lombardy of the seventeenth century, Lake Como, two young lovers from a humble social background, an arrogant local aristocrat, and a cowardly curate? What would the Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) be if it were set in Naples while Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca was being hanged? Come on.

This is why, when I wrote The Name of the Rose, I spent a full year, if I remember correctly, without writing a line (and for Foucault's Pendulum I spent at least two, and the same for The Island of the Day Before). Instead I read, did drawings and diagrams, invented a world. This world had to be as precise as possible, so that I could move around in it with total confidence. For The Name of the Rose I drew hundreds of labyrinths and plans of abbeys, basing mine on other drawings and on places I visited, because I needed everything to work well, I needed to know how long it would take two characters in conversation to go from one place to another. And this also dictated the length of the dialogues.

If in a novel I had to write "while the train stopped at Modena station, he quickly got out and bought the newspaper," I could not do so unless I had been to Modena and had checked whether the train stops there long enough, and how far the newsstand is from the platform (and this would be true even if the train had to stop at Innisfree). All this may have little to do with the development of the story (I imagine), but if I did not do this, I could not tell the tale.

In Foucault's Pendulum I say that the two publishing houses of Manuzio and Garamond are in two different but adjoining buildings, between which a passage had been built, with a frosted-glass door and three steps. I spent a long time drawing several plans and working out how a passage could be built between the two buildings, and whether there had to be a difference of level between them. The reader takes those three steps without realizing it (I believe), but for me they were crucial.

Sometimes I have wondered whether it was necessary to design my world with such precision, seeing that those details were not prominent in the tale. But it was certainly useful for me in gaining confidence with that environment. Moreover, I have been told that if in one of Luchino Viscontis films two characters had to talk about a box full of jewels, even though the box was never opened, the director would insist that there were real jewels in it, otherwise the characters would not have been credible—that is to say, the actors would have performed with less conviction.

So for The Name of the Rose I drew all the monks of the abbey. I drew almost all of them (though not every single one) with a beard, even though I was not at all sure that the Benedictines wore beards at that time—and this was later a scholarly problem that Jean-Jacques Annaud, when he made the film, had to solve with the help of his learned consultants. It is worth noting that in the novel it is never said whether they were bearded or not. But I needed to recognize my characters as I was making them speak or act, otherwise I would not have known what to make them say.

For Foucault's Pendulum I spent evening after evening, right through to closing time, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where some of the main events of the story took place. In order to write of the Templars I went to visit the Forêt d'Orient in France, where there are traces of their commanderies (which are referred to in the novel in a few vague allusions). To describe Casaubon's night walk through Paris, from the Conservatoire to Place des Vosges and then to the Eiffel Tower, I spent various nights between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. walking, dictating into a pocket tape recorder everything I could see, so as not to get the street names and intersections wrong. For The Island of the Day Before I naturally went to the South Seas, to the precise geographical location where the book is set, to see the color of the sea, the sky, the fishes, and the corals—and at various hours of the day. But I also worked for two or three years on drawings and small models of ships of the period, to find out how big a cabin or cubbyhole was, and how one could move from one to the other.

When a foreign publisher asked me recently if it was not worthwhile including a plan of the ship with the novel, as had been done for all editions of The Name of the Rose with the plan of the abbey, I threatened to call a lawyer. In The Name of the Rose I wanted the reader to understand perfectly what the place was like, but in The Island I wanted the reader to be confused, and not be able to find his bearings in the little labyrinth of that ship, which held surprise after surprise in store. But to be able to talk about a dark, uncertain environment, experienced amid dreams, waking, and alcoholic stimulation, to confuse the reader's ideas, I needed my own ideas to be very clear, and to write constantly referring to a ship's structure that was calculated down to the last millimeter.

From the World to the Style

Once this world has been designed, the words will follow, and they will be (if all goes well) those that that world and all the events that take place in it require. For this reason the style in The Name of the Rose is—throughout—that of the medieval chronicler, precise, faithful, naive, and amazed, flat when necessary (a humble fourteenth-century monk does not write like Gadda, nor remember things like Proust). In Foucault's Pendulum, on the other hand, a plurality of languages had to come into play: Aglié's educated and archaizing language, Ardenti's Pseudo-Dannunzian, the disenchanted and ironically literary language of Belbo's secret files, which is both deliberate and tortuous, Garamond's mercantile kitsch style, and the ribald dialogues of the three editors during their irresponsible fantasies, who are able to mix erudite references with double entendres of dubious taste. But what Maria Corti defined as "leaps of register"^* (and I am grateful to her for pointing this out) did not depend on a simple decision about style: they were determined by the nature of the world in which the events took place, which was culturally uneven.

Then for The Island of the Day Before it was the very nature of the world it took off from that determined not just the style but the very structure of dialogue and the constant conflict between narrator and character, with the subsequent participation of the reader who is continually appealed to as a witness and accomplice in that conflict. In fact, in Foucault's Pendulum the story takes place in our time, so there was no problem of recovering a language that was no longer used. In The Name of the Rose the story is set in fairly remote centuries, but at a time when people spoke a different language, the ecclesiastical Latin that appears so often (according to some, too often) in the book to remind us that the story took place in a distant time. For this reason the stylistic model was indirectly the Latin of the chroniclers of the time, but directly it was the modern translations that are commonly read (and in any case I had taken the precaution of warning the reader that I was transcribing from a nineteenth-century translation of a medieval chronicle). In The Island, however, my character could not but talk in a baroque way, though I myself could not do so, except by parodying the manuscript that Manzonirejects at the beginning of his transcription of it in The Betrothed. So then I had to have a narrator who at times gets irritated with the verbal excesses of his character, at times indulges in them himself, and at times tempers them with appeals to the reader.

Thus three different worlds imposed three different "exercices de style" on me, which then, in the course of writing, became three ways of thinking and seeing, and I was almost led to translate my own daily experiences at that time into those terms.

Baudolino the Exception

Up to this point I have said that (i) one starts with a seminal idea, and that (ii) the construction of the narrative world determines the style. My latest experience in fiction, Baudolino, seems to contradict these two principles. As for the seminal idea, for at least two years I had many, and if there are too many seminal ideas it is a sign that they are not seminal. In fact, each one of them gave rise not to the general structure of the book but only to situations that were limited to just a few chapters.

I wont say what my first idea was, because I abandoned it—for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because I was unable to develop it—and perhaps I will keep it in reserve, who knows, for a fifth novel. This idea was accompanied by a secondary idea, which can be connected in a banal way with the topos of a murder in a closed room, and as you will see if you read the novel, I took up the topos only in the chapter on Fredericks death.

The second idea was that the final scene should take place among the mummified corpses in the Capuchin church in Palermo (in fact, I had been there several times and had collected many photographs of the place and of the individual mummies). Whoever has read the book knows that this idea is exploited in the final confrontation between Baudolino and the Poet, but in the economy of the novel it has only a marginal, or, rather, purely scene-setting, function.

The third was that the novel was to be about a group of characters who made forgeries. I had dealt with the semiotics of the fake on several occasions, of course.^* Initially the characters were to have been contemporaries who decided to found a daily paper and who experimented, in a series of dummy numbers, with how they could create scoops. In fact, I thought of entitling the novel Numero Zero (Dummy Run). But even then there was something that did not convince me, and I was afraid I would find myself dealing with the same set of characters as in Foucault's Pendulum.

Until I thought of what was one of the most successful fakes of Western history, namely, the Letter of Prester John. This idea fructified a series of memories and reading experiences. In 1960 I edited the Italian edition (Le terre leggendarie) of Lands Beyond by Ley and Sprague du Camp for Bompiani. There was a chapter on Prester John's kingdom and another on the lost tribes of Israel. On the cover they had put a skiapod, or shadow-footed monster (from a fifteenth-century engraving, I think, with fake coloring and done with a stencil). Years later I bought a colored map from an Ortelius atlas that had been cut up, the very map representing the lands of Prester John, and I hung it in my study. In the 1980s I read various versions of the letter.^† In short, Prester John had always intrigued me, and I was attracted by the idea of making the monsters that populated his Kingdom come alive again, as well as those spoken of in the various Alexander Romances, Mandeville's travels, and a whole series of bestiaries. And finally it was a good opportunity to return to my beloved Middle Ages. So my seminal idea was that of Prester John. But I had not started with this idea, I had simply arrived at it.

Perhaps all this would not have been enough for me had the letter not been attributed (it is one possible hypothesis) to the Imperial Chancery of Frederick Barbarossa. Now Frederick Barbarossa was another magical name for me, because I was born in Alessandria, the city that was founded in order to oppose the emperor. That led to a series of instinctive decisions, like a chain reaction: to discover a Frederick that went beyond the traditional clichés, seen by a son rather than by his enemies and courtiers (and off I went with further reading on Barbarossa), to tell the origins of my city and its legends, including that of Gagliaudo and his cow. Years earlier I had written an essay on the foundation and history of Alessandria (entitled, as it happens, "The Miracle of San Baudolino"),^* and from there came the idea to have this history lived through by a character called after the patron saint of the city, Baudolino, to make Baudolino the son of Gagliaudo, and to give the story a popular, picaresque thrust—thus creating a sort of counterpoint to The Name of the Rose, since the latter was a story of intellectuals talking in the high style, whereas this was a tale about the people and military men who were on the whole rather crude, talking in a style that was almost like dialect.

But here too, what was I to do? Make Baudolino talk in his Po Valley twelfth-century pseudodialect, when we have very few vernacular documents from that period, and none of them from the Piedmont area? Make a narrator talk, and have his modern style spoil Baudolino's spontaneity? However, suddenly at this point another obsession came to my rescue, one that had been going through my head for some time, without my ever thinking that it would be of use to me on that occasion: narrate a story set in Byzantium. Why? Because I knew very little about Byzantine civilization, and I had never been to Constantinople. To many this might seem a rather weak motive for deciding to narrate something that happened in Constantinople, all the more so since Constantinople had only a tangential link with Frederick Barbarossa's story. But sometimes one decides to tell a story only to get to know it better.

No sooner said than done. Off I went to Constantinople. I read many things about ancient Byzantium, mastered its topography, and came across Nicetas Choniates and his Chronicle. I had found the key, the way to articulate the "voices" of my story: an almost transparent narrator recounts the discussion between Nicetas and Baudolino, alternating Nicetas's learned, high-flown reflections with Baudolino's picaresque tales, without Nicetas, or the reader, ever being able to tell if and when Baudolino is lying, the only fixed point being that he maintains he is a liar (the paradox of the liar and the Cretan Epimenides).

I had this play of "voices," but not Baudolino's voice. Here I contradicted the second of my two principles. When I was still reading the chronicles of the Crusaders' capture of Constantinople (and I decided that I would have to narrate the story of that event which already appears so novelistic in the texts of Ville-hardouin, Robert de Clary, and Nicetas), just to pass the time I wrote out in pen, in the country, a sort of diary by Baudolino, in a hypothetical twelfth-century Po Valley pidgin, which then became the opening of the novel. It is true that I rewrote those pages several times in subsequent years, after consulting historical and dialect dictionaries, and all the documents I could lay my hands on, but already in that first draft, through its linguistic style, it became clear to me how Baudolino would think and speak. Thus, in the end, Baudolino's language was not born from the construction of a world, but a world was created from the stimulus of that language.

I do not know how to solve this dilemma in theoretical terms. All I can do is quote Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself." Except that this use of dialect probably took me back to my childhood and my native area, and therefore to a preconstructed world, at least in memory.

Constraints, and time

And yet (world versus language or language versus world) it is not that you spend two or three years constructing a world as though that world existed on its own, independently of the story you want to set in it. This "cosmogonical" phase goes hand in hand with (and in a way that I really could not reduce to a formula or program) a hypothesis about the supporting structure of the novel—and of the world you are creating. This structure consists essentially of constraints and temporal rhythms.

Constraints are fundamental in every artistic operation. A painter who decides to use oil rather than tempera, or a canvas rather than a wall, is choosing a constraint; likewise the composer who opts for one tonality at the outset (he may then modulate it all he likes, but he has to return to that opening tonality), and the poet who builds what is a cage of rhyming couplets or of hendecasyllables. And do not think that avant-garde painters, composers, and poets—who seem to avoid those constraints—do not construct others. They do, but you may not be obliged to notice them.

Choosing the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse as a scheme for the succession of events can be a constraint. But also setting the story at a precise date: you can make some things happen then, but not others. It can be a constraint deciding that, to indulge the magic obsessions of your characters, the number of chapters in Foucault's Pendulum has to be 120, not one more or one less, and it has to be divided into ten parts, like the Sephiroth in the Kabbalah.

Constraints then gradually determine a temporal sequence. In The Name of the Rose, if the story had to follow a sequence based on the Apocalypse, plot time could coincide (except for substantial digressions) with the time of the story: the story begins with the arrival of William and Adso at the abbey, and ends with their departure. Easy (and easy to read).

With Foucault's Pendulum the very pendular movement of the eponymous device forced me to adopt a different temporal structure. Casaubon arrives at the Conservatoire one evening, hides there, and conjures up past events, then the story returns to its starting point, etc. If for The Name of the Rose I had gradually built up a kind of sequential timetable or calendar, trying to work out what was to happen each day for a week, for Foucault's Pendulum I created a sort of serpentine structure, which registered the shifts back to the past and the anticipations of the future. Like a measuring scale, or orthogonal Cartesian axes. The character is here now, but remembers what happened at time X in the past.

The beauty is that these schemes are rigid when you think of them at the time, but I have drawers full of schemes I constantly redid as the novel progressed. I mean, the beauty of the story is that you have to create constraints, but you must feel free to change them in the course of writing. Except that at that point you have to change everything and start again from scratch.

Besides, one of the constraints in the Pendulum was that the characters had to have lived through 1968, but since Belbo then writes his files on computer—which also plays a formal role in the whole story, since it in part inspires its aleatory and combinatory nature—the final events absolutely had to take place between 1983 and 1984 and not before. The reason is very simple: the first personal computers with word-processing programs went on sale in Italy in 1983 (or perhaps 1982). And this is worth bearing in mind by all those who try to explain the success of The Name of the Rose by insisting that it was written by computer. In 1978–79 you could scarcely find in America those cheap little computers called Tandy, and no one would ever have dared write more than one letter on them.

In order to make all that time elapse from 1968 to 1983,1 was forced to send Casaubon somewhere else. Where? Memories of some magic rituals I had witnessed there led me to Brazil (there I knew what I was talking about and what the shape of that world was). And this was the reason and the auspicious origin of what many found too long a digression, and which for me (and for some benevolent readers) was essential, because it allowed me to make happen in Brazil to Amparo, in shortened form, what would happen to the other characters in the course of the book. If IBM, Apple, or Olivetti had started selling word processors six or seven years earlier, my novel would have been different; there would have been no Brazil, to the relief of many superficial readers, but from my point of view it would have been a great loss.

The Island of the Day Before was based on a series of historical constraints and rigid novelistic restrictions. The historical constraints evolved from the fact that I needed Roberto to participate as a young man in the siege of Casale, to be there at Richelieu's death, and then to arrive at his island after December 1642, but not later than 1643, the year in which Tasman went there, even though this was some months earlier than the time in which my story was set. But I could set the story only between July and August because that was the period when I saw the Fiji islands, and a ship took several months to get there: this explains the mischievous novelistic insinuations that I made in the final chapter, to persuade myself and the reader that perhaps Tasman had come back later to that archipelago without saying anything to anybody. Here one sees the heuristic usefulness of constraints that force you to invent silences, conspiracies, ambiguities.

You will ask me: why all these constraints? Was it really necessary for Roberto to be present at Richelieu's death? Not at all. But it was necessary for me to set myself constraints. Otherwise the story could not have gone along under its own steam.

As for the novelistic constraints, Roberto had to be on the ship, not be able to get off it, and try in vain to learn to swim in order to reach the island. In the meantime, as he reflected on life and death, he would have to invent bit by bit, and then reject, through lack of intelligence, all the philosophical thought of that century. For the benevolent reader this would be more than just a constraint, placed just to receive stimuli: it would be the very essence of Desire. I would be the last to deny it. But since I am speaking about how I wrote and not what the reader could or should find in what I wrote (because, to say the latter, either the novel is enough on its own, or I have been wasting my time writing it and you reading it—which is not impossible), what I mean to say is that, on the one hand, it is the constraint that allows the novel to develop according to a particular Sense, and on the other it is the still-unclear idea of this Sense that suggests the constraints. Since one of these cannot function without the other, we talk of constraints rather than Sense, which is not something an author should pronounce on a posteriori.

A parenthesis. A rude hack—who wanted to mock Eco the novelist in order to punish Eco the politically committed polemicist—defined the novel as one long act of masturbation. In his crudeness, which was also lexical, the unwitting hack was dead right: the condition of a shipwreck separated forever from the object of desire is certainly, and by definition, onanistic. Except that the scribbler I am talking of, anchored in his own obtuse carnality, saw manna falling from heaven and read it as excreta from foul birds of prey. Nor did he catch the nature of "something mental"—and in the end metaphysical—in that solitary virtue, in that attempt to generate Being by spilling in disordered fashion the seed of a soul exasperated by solitude, until it reaches the point of vision.

But let us get back to the point. The point is that Roberto could not leave the ship (except at the end, but for uncertain objectives and outcomes). Consequently everything that had to be narrated but that did not happen on the ship had to come about via memory, unless the plot was to be flattened into just being the story, and end up relating in every detail how a young man, who went to Paris after his adventures at Casale, found himself on a ship, etc. Try if you like, but I can assure you that however vain my labors have been, yours will be even more so.

This imposed on me not a serpentine temporal sequence, as in the Pendulum, but more one step forward and three back, one step forward and two back, one step forward and one back. Roberto remembers something, and meanwhile something happens on the ship. Something happens on the ship, and Roberto remembers something. Gradually, as Roberto's memories move from 1630 to 1643, events on the ship happen hour by hour. All this up to the arrival of Father Caspar. At that point the story stops, as it were, in the present, for some time. Then Father Caspar disappears in the sea, and Roberto is on his own again.

What was I to make him do? The novelistic constraints meant I had to make him try various ways of getting ashore. But these had to be slow, recorded day after day, repetitive and monotonous. In the end I still had to write a novel, whose aim—let it be said in the face of every aesthete, and in full respect for the laws of the genre as they have come down to us from the Hellenistic romance to our own time, not to mention Aristotle's Poetics— had to be that of providing narrative pleasure.

Fortunately I was the victim of another constraint. To conform to the spirit of the seventeenth-century novel, I had to introduce a Double, and I really did not know what to do with him. Suddenly this Double came good: while he tries to reach the island, learning each day to swim better (but never well enough), Roberto imagines the novel about his Double, and thus the one-step-forward-three-back structure could be reproduced, since Roberto cannot reach the island but makes his Double reach it, making him start from the point where he himself started. How nice to see a novel writing itself! I did not know where I would get to, because the novelistic constraint dictated that Roberto should not get anywhere. The novel ends because it heads directly toward its conclusion on its own. This is what I would like my Model Reader to notice. That the novel writes itself, since that is how it happened, and how it always happens, really.

Speaking of constraints, the finale of Baudolino had to take place in 1204, because I wanted to narrate the conquest of Constantinople. But Baudolino had to be born around the middle of the century (I fixed on 1142 as a point of reference, so as to have my character at the age of reason and consent at the time of many events I wanted to relate). The first mention of Prester Johns letter is around 1165, and I already make it circulate a few years later, but why then does Baudolino, after persuading Frederick to give him permission, not set off immediately for Prester John's Kingdom? Because I had to have him coming back from the Kingdom only in 1204, so he could tell the tale to Nicetas during the burning of Constantinople. And what did I have to make Baudolino do in that interval of almost four decades? It was a bit like the business of the computer in Foucault's Pendulum.

I make him do many things, and I constantly make him delay his departure. At the time it seemed like a waste to me, it was like inserting a series of temporal stopgaps into the story in order to arrive finally at that damned date of 1204. And yet, when you look at it closely (and I hope, or rather I know, that many readers did realize this), I created the Spasm of Desire (or, rather, the novel created it without my realizing it there and then). Baudolino wants the Kingdom but constantly has to postpone his search. Thus Prester John's Kingdom grows in Baudolino's desire, and in the reader's eyes (I hope). Once more the advantages of constraints.

How I Write

At this point one can understand how useless are questions like "Do you begin with notes, immediately write the first or last chapter, write with pen, pencil, typewriter, or computer?" If one has to construct a world, day by day, and try out endless temporal structures, if the actions the characters perform and have to perform according to the logic of common sense or of narrative convention (or against narrative convention) have to fit with the logic of the constraints (involving constant rethinks, cancellations, and rewrites), there is no uniform way of writing a novel.

At least for me. I know of writers who wake up at 8:00 A.M., work at their keyboard from 8:30 to 12:00 ("nulla dies sine linea; no day without at least a line"), and then stop and go out and enjoy themselves until evening. Not me. First of all, when I write a novel, the act of writing comes later. First I read, make notes, draw portraits of the characters, maps of the places, and plans for the time sequences. And these are done with a felt pen, or computer, depending on when and where one does this, or on the kind of narrative idea or detail one wants to record: on the back of a train ticket, if the idea comes to you on a train, in a notebook, on an index card, using ballpoint, tape recorder, or blackberry juice if really necessary.

Then what happens is that I chuck out, tear up, tear into pieces, forget things in different places, but I have boxes full of notebooks, with blocks of pages in different colors, bits of card, even sheets of foolscap. And this chaotic variety of props helps my memory, because I remember that I jotted down that particular note on the letterhead paper of a London hotel, and the first page of that chapter was scribbled down in my study, on an index card with pale blue lines, and using a Mont Blanc pen, whereas the following chapter was initially written down in the country, on the back of a recycled piece of draft paper.

I do not have any special method, days, hours, or seasons. But between the second and third novels I established a habit. I would collect ideas, write notes, make provisional drafts wherever I was, but then, when I could spend at least a week in my house in the country, that was where I would type out the chapters on the computer. When I left, I printed them out, corrected them, and left them to mature in a drawer, until the next time I returned to the country. The definitive versions of my first three novels were done there, usually in two or three weeks over the Christmas holidays. The result was that I started to cultivate a superstition (I who am the least superstitious person in the world: I go under ladders, greet affectionately any black cats crossing my path, and, to punish superstitious students, I always fix my university exams for a Friday, so long as it is a thirteenth): the almost definitive version, apart from minor corrections, had to be completed by 5 January, my birthday. If I was not ready for that year, I would wait for the next year (and once, when I was almost ready in November, I put everything away so I could finish in January).

Here too, Baudolino was the exception. Or rather, it was written with the same rhythm, out in the country as usual, but about halfway through the writing, during the Christmas holidays of 1999, I got stuck. I thought it was due to the Millennium Bug. I was on the chapter with Barbarossa's death, and what was to happen in that chapter dictated the final chapters, and the very way in which I would recount the journey toward Prester Johns Kingdom. I was blocked for several months, I could not imagine how to get over that hurdle, or around that cape. I could not do it, and I secretly yearned for those chapters (still to be written) that I had been most passionate about right from the start, the encounters with monsters and especially the meeting with Hypatia. I dreamed of being able to start on those chapters, but I did not want to do so until I had solved the problem that was obsessing me.

When I got back to the country, in the summer of 2000, I "rounded the cape" in the middle of June. I had begun to think about the novel in 1995, it had taken me five years to get halfway, and therefore—I said to myself—I still needed five more years to finish.

But obviously I had thought out the second half of the book so intensely in those five years that it had all sorted itself out in my head (or heart, or stomach, I don't know). In short, between mid-June and the beginning of August the book was completed almost on its own, in a spurt (afterward there were a few months of checking and rewriting, but by then it was done, the story was finished). At that point another of my principles crumbled, because even a superstition is also a principle, however irrational it is. I had not finished the book for the 5 th of January.

There was something that was not quite right, I thought for a few days. Then, on 8 August my first grandchild was born. It all became clear, for this fourth occasion I had to finish the novel not on the day of my birthday but on his birth day. I dedicated the book to him and felt reassured.

The Computer and Writing

How much has the computer influenced my writing? A huge amount, in my experience, but I don't know how much from the point of view of results.

By the way, seeing that Foucault's Pendulum spoke of a computer that created poetry and connected events in an aleatory way, many interviewers wanted me at all costs to confess that the entire novel had been written by giving a program to the computer, which then invented everything. Note that these were all journalists who by now worked in editorial offices where articles are written on computer and then go directly to press—so they knew how much one can expect from this servile machine. But they also knew they were writing for a public that still had a magical idea of what the computer was, and we know that often we write to tell readers not the truth but what they want to hear.

In any case, at a certain point I got annoyed and gave one of them the magic formula:

First of all you need a computer, obviously, which is an intelligent machine that thinks for you—and this would be an advantage for many people. All you need is a program of a few lines, even a child could do it. Then one feeds into the computer the content of a few hundred novels, scientific works, the Bible, the Koran, and many telephone directories (very useful for characters' names). Say, something like 120,000 pages. After this, using another program, you randomize, in other words, you mix all those texts together, making some adjustment, for instance eliminating all the a's. Thus as well as a novel you would have a lipogram. At this point you press "print" and it prints out. Having eliminated all the a's, what comes out is something less than 120,000 pages. After you have read them carefully, several times, underlining the most significant passages, you load them onto an articulated truck and take them to an incinerator. Then you simply sit under a tree, with a piece of charcoal and good-quality drawing paper in hand, and allowing your mind to wander you write down a couple of lines. For instance: "The moon is high in the sky / the wood rustles." Maybe what emerges initially is not a novel but, rather, a Japanese haiku; nevertheless, the important thing is to get started.

No one had the courage to report my secret recipe. But someone said, "one can feel that the novel was written directly on the computer, apart from the scene of the trumpet in the cemetery; that scene is heartfelt, and he must have rewritten it several times, and in pen." I am ashamed to say so, but in this novel that underwent so many phases of drafting, in which the ballpoint, the fountain pen, the felt-tip, and many revisions played a part, the only chapter written directly on the computer, and in a spurt, without many corrections, was precisely that trumpet chapter. The reason is quite simple: I had that tale so present in my mind, I had told it to myself or others so many times that by then it was as if it had already been written. I had nothing to add. I moved my hands over the keyboard as if it were a piano on which I was playing a melody I knew by heart, and if there is felicitous writing in that scene, it is due to the fact that it started as a jam session. You play, letting yourself go with the flow, record it, and what's there is there.

In fact, the beauty of the computer is that it encourages spontaneity: you dash down, in a hurry, whatever comes to mind. Meanwhile you know that later you can always correct and vary it.

The use of the computer concerns, in fact, the problem of corrections, and therefore of variants.

The Name of the Rose, in its definitive versions, was written on a typewriter. Then I would correct, retype, sometimes cut and paste, and in the end I gave it all to a typist, and then again I had to correct, replace, and cut and paste. With the typewriter you can correct only up to a certain point. Then you get tired of re-typing, cutting, pasting, and then having it retyped again. The rest of it you correct at proof stage, and off it goes.

With the use of the computer (Foucault's Pendulum was written in Wordstar 2000, The Island of the Day Before in Word5, Baudolino in Winword in its various versions over the years), things change. You are tempted to correct ad infinitum. You write, then print out, and you reread. You correct. Then you retype according to your corrections and printouts. I have kept the various drafts (with the odd gap). But it would be a mistake to think that a fanatic of textual variants could ever reconstruct your process of writing. In fact, you write (on the computer), print out, correct (by hand), and make the corrections on the computer, but as you do so you choose other variants, in other words you do not rewrite exactly what you have corrected by hand. The critic who studies variants would find further variants between your final correction in ink on the printout and the new version produced by the printer. If you really wanted to encourage pointless theses, you have all of posterity at your disposal. The fact is that the existence of the computer means that the very logic of variants has changed. They are neither a rethinking nor your final choice. Since you know that your choice can be changed at any time, you make many changes, and often you go back to your original option.

I really do believe that the existence of electronic means of writing will profoundly alter criticism of variants, with all due respect to the spirit of Contini. I once worked on the variants in Manzoni's Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns) ^* At that time the substitution of a word was crucial. Nowadays it is not: tomorrow you can go back to the word you rejected yesterday. At most what will count is the difference between the first handwritten draft and the last one out of the printer. The rest is all coming and going, often dictated by the amount of potassium in your blood.

Joy and sadness

I do not have anything else to say about the way I write my novels. Except that they have to take many years. I do not understand those who write a novel a year; they might be wonderful, and I do admire them, but I don't envy them. The beauty of writing a novel is not the beauty of the live match, it is the beauty of the delayed transmission.

I am always annoyed when I realize that one of my novels is coming to the end, that is to say, that according to its internal logic it is time that it (he/she) stopped, and that I stopped too; when I notice that if I were to go any further it would only make it worse. The beauty, the real joy, is living for six, seven, eight years (ideally forever) in a world that you are creating bit by bit, and which becomes your own.

Sadness begins when the novel is over.

This is the only reason you would instantly want to write another one. But if it is not there waiting for you, it is pointless trying to rush it.

The Writer and the Reader

However, I would not like these last statements to generate automatically another view common to bad writers—namely, that one writes only for oneself. Do not trust those who say so: they are dishonest and lying narcissists.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list. It helps to remember what you have to buy, and when you have bought everything you can destroy it, because it is no use to anyone else. Every other thing that you write, you write to say something to someone.

I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?

My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense.

One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.

Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader.

A first version of this piece was written for Maria Teresa Serafini, ed., Come si scrive un romanzo (Milan: Strumenti Bompiani, 1996). The editor had asked a number of writers a series of questions, which correspond to the sections of this essay. In the meantime I also published my fourth novel, Baudolino, and consequently I have inserted into the present version some passages dedicated to this, my latest experience with writing fiction.