On Literature

The translator is very grateful, for assistance with particular problems, to Tim Farrant, Ann Jefferson, Cathy McLaughlin, Giuseppe Stellardi.

UMBERTO ECO is professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. His collections of essays include Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels in Hyperreality, and How to Travel with a Salmon. He is also the author of the bestselling novels The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and Baudolino. He lives in Milan.

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* Obviously, when I wrote this article, the term "globalization" already existed, and I did not use the expression by chance. But today, now that all of us have become sensitive to this problem, it really is worth going back and rereading these pages. It is astonishing how the Manifesto witnessed the birth, 150 years ahead of its time, of the era of globalization, and the alternative forces it would unleash. It almost suggests that globalization is not an accident that happens during the course of capitalist expansion (just because the Wall has come down and the Internet has arrived) but rather the inevitable pattern that the emergent class could not fail to follow, even though at the time, through the expansion of markets, the most convenient (though also the most bloody) means to this end was called colonization. It is also worth dwelling again (and this is advisable not just for the bourgeoisie but for all classes) on the warning that every force opposing the march of globalization is initially divided and confused, tends toward mere Luddism, and can be used by its enemy to fight its own battles.

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* Marcel Proust, "Gérard de Nerval," in Against Sainte-Beuve, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: 1994), 24–33.

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† A piece of advice I must give to the reader is to read (or reread) the text of Sylvie before tackling this essay. Before moving on to critical reflection it is important to discover or rediscover the pleasure of an "innocent" reading. Moreover, seeing that I will often refer to the various chapters, and that we have just said, in Proust's words, that "we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are," it is indispensable to experience personally this to-ing and fro-ing.

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* A similar table appeared in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, page 40. Table A and Table B are taken from the Einaudi translation of Sylvie, by kind permission of the publisher.

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* In a fit of obsessive precision I actually visited the places. Naturally the roads are no longer the same, but the forests and many pools are still there (those near Commelle are particularly evocative, with the swans and Queen Blanches castle). You can follow the Thève in its meandering route, the structure of Ermenonville is still more or less what it once was, with the road passing above La Launette and the four dovecotes, Châalis is still touchingly dilapidated, and at Loisy they show you what was presumably Sylvie's house. The greatest danger for the sentimental Nervalian is to come across, somewhere between Orry and Mortefontaine, the Pare Asterix, and to find, in the desert, a reconstruction of the Wild West and the Sahara, with Indians and dromedaries (France's Disneyland is not far off). Forget about the road to Flanders, because Gonesse is close to Charles de Gaulle airport, stuck between high-rise blocks and refineries. But after Louvres you can start to go back to your memories again, and the mists are still what they once were, even though the distant landscape has to be seen from a motorway.

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* Unhappy the languages that do not have the imperfect and try to render Nerval's opening. A nineteenth-century English translation (Sylvie: A Recollection of Valois [New York: Routledge and Sons, 1887]) tried this: "I quitted a theater where I used to appear every night," while a more recent one went for: "I came out of a theater where I used to spend money every evening," and we have no idea where that mention of spending money comes from, but perhaps the translator wants us to realize that this was a habit, a vice, something that had been going on too long (Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Geoffrey Wagner [New York: Grove Press, 1957]). What lengths people will go to make up for the absence of the imperfect! The most recent translation, by Richard Sieburth (Sylvie [New York: Penguin, 1995]) seems to me more faithful: "I was coming out of a theater where, night after night, I would appear in one of the stage boxes...." It is rather long, but it conveys the durative and iterative nature of the original imperfect.

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* "Journées de lecture," in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1919, ed. 1958), 239 n 1.

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* See my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

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* Mirène Ghossein, in a term paper during my course at Columbia University in 1984, observed a continual dyscrasia between what is set up as a Platonic ideal, and what is revealed as a disappointing shadow in the cave. I do not know if Nerval was thinking of Plato, but certainly the mechanism is this: as something gradually comes within reach (real in the normal sense of the term), it becomes a shadow and cannot stand comparison with, is no longer equal to, the ideal image conjured up.

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* The "completing analepsis" is sometimes not a calculated technique but a stopgap, as in the case of many nineteenth-century writers of serial novels. By expanding to excess the dimensions of their novels in installments, they would find themselves obliged either to make amends for details they had forgotten or to justify, with a brusque retrospective explanation, events they were forced to make happen. For a discussion of this technique, see, for instance, my "Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mystères de Paris," now in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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* There are many works that have helped me understand Nerval. I will cite only some of those from which I took various suggestions. In the special issue of VS, 31/32 (Sur "Sylvie") (1982), see Daniele Barbieri, "Etapes de topicalisation et effets de brouillard," Beppe Cottafavi, "Micro-procès temporels dans le premier chapitre de Sylvie," Isabella Pezzini, "Paradoxes du désir, logique du récit" (and see also the same author's "Promenade a Ermenonville" in her Passioni e narrazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1996)), Maria Pia Pozzato, "Le brouillard et le reste," Patrizia Violi, "Du côté du lecteur." Among French critics I should mention Albert Béguin, Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Corti, 1945), Jacques Bony, Le récit nervalien (Paris: Corti, 1990), Frank Paul Bowman, Gérard de Nerval. La conquête de soi par l'écri-ture (Orléans: Paradigme, 1997), Pierre-Georges Castex, introduction and commentary to Sylvie (Paris: SEDES, 1970), Léon Cellier, Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Hatier, 1956), Michel Collot, Gérard de Nerval ou la dévotion à l'imaginaire (Paris: PUF, 1992), Uri Eisenzweig, L'éspace imaginaire d'un récit: 'Sylvie' de Gérard de Nerval (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976), Jacques Geninasca, "De la fête à l'anti-fête," and "Le plein, le vide et le tout," in La parole littéraire (Paris: PUF, 1997), Raymond Jean, Nerval par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1964), and his introduction and notes to Sylvie, Aurélie (Paris: Corti, 1964), Michel Jeanneret, La lettre perdue. Ecriture et folie dans l'oeuvre de Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), Aristide Marie, Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l'homme (Paris: Hachette, 1914), Pierre Moreau, Sylvie et ses soeurs nervaliennes (Paris: SEDES, 1966), Georges Poulet, "Nerval," in Le metamorfosi del cerchio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1971), Dominique Tailleux, L'éspace nervalien (Paris: Nizet, 1975). I will mention also the introductions and notes by Henri Lemaître in the Gamier edition of the Oeuvres, the commentaries by Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, and their collaborators, in the third volume of the Oeuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, and Vincenzo Cerami, introduction to Le figlie delfuoco (Milan: Garzanti, 1983). I have taken many ideas from Gérard Genette, Figure ILI (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).

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* "Pitigrilli: l'uomo che fece arrossire la mamma," in II superuomo di massa (2nd ed; Milan: Bompiani, 1978).

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* Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986).

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* This reverses the commonplace whereby one does wonderful things for noble reasons, but it too can be reversed: when a person does a particularly noble deed, it is always for the most stupid of motives.

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† This reverses a commonplace, but it continues with "But no one is readier than myself to recognize that it is better to be good than to be ugly," and so resorts to a commonplace of the lowest order, of the kind made popular on Italian TV screens by talk-show hosts: "It is better to be beautiful, rich, and healthy than to be ugly, poor, and sick."

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* See Diego Poli, "La metafora di Babele e le partitiones nella teoria grammaticale irlandese dell' Auraicept na n-Éces," in Episteme. Quaderni Linguistici e Filologici, 4 (1986–89), ed. Diego Poli (Macerata: Istituto di Glottologia e Linguistica Generale), 179–98.

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* The Books at the Wake (London: Faber, 1959).

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* The Book of Kells (Ms 58, Trinity College Library Dublin), commentary and ed. by Peter Fox. Fine Art Facsimile Publishers of Switzerland (Lucerne: Faksimile Verlag, 1990).

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* See The Hisperica Famina. I: The A-Text, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), and The Hisperica Famina. II: Related Poems, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987).

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* Liber Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus, ed. Corrado Bologna (Milan: Bompiani, 1977).

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* Virgilio Grammatico Marone, Epitomi ed Epistole, ed. G. Polara (Naples: Liguori, 1979).

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* For this, see the following essay on Borges and the anxiety of influence.

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* Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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* The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana, 1997).

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* See "Interpreting drama," The Drama Review, 21.1 (March 1977), now in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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* Carlo Ossola, "La rosa profunda. Metamorfosi e variazioni sul Nome della rosa," Lettere italiane 36.4 (1984), subsequently in "Purpur Wort," in his Figurato e rimosso. Icone di interni del testo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988).

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* Paul Morand, Tendres Stocks, preface by Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1921).

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* David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Four Dissertations and Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, ed. John Immerwahr, John Valdimir Price, and James Fieser (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 1995), 216–17.

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* Now in Hermann Parret, "Nel nome dell'ipotiposi," in J. Petitot and P. Fabbri, eds., Nel nome del senso (Milan: Sansoni, 2001).

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* See my "II tempo dell'arte," in Sugli specchi (Milan: Bompiani, 1985), 115–24.

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* In George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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* See Joseph Frank, "Spatial form in modern literature," Sewanee Review (1945).

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† "Lingering in the woods," in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 49–73.

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* See my "Jerusalem and the Temple as signs in medieval culture," in G. Manetti (ed.), Knowledge through Signs (Paris: Brepols, 1996), pp. 329–44.

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* I quote from the most recent edition of his Estetica (Milan: Bompiani, 1988), though this passage has remained unchanged since the first edition was published in 1954.

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* I have often wondered whether Pareysons idea of the stopgap was inspired by some previous discussion. We know how devoid his Estetica is of notes, and his references are often generic. On this particular point, I have not found any reference or quotation in his notes. Taking a deconstructionist's privilege, and going against any sense of fidelity to the text, and therefore against all the teachings of my Maestro, I note that the dictionaries give also "cuneo" (wedge) as a definition of "zeppa!" and I have decided to see in his choice of the latter nontechnical term an unconscious homage to his hometown (of Cuneo in Piedmont).

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* Linda Hutcheon, "Ecos Echoes: Ironizing the Postmodern," in N. Bouchard and V. Pravadelli, eds., Umberto Eco's Alternative (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988); Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992); Remo Ceserani, "Ecos (Postmodernist fiction," in Bouchard and Pravadelli, 148 ff.

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* Charles A. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (Wisbech: Balding and Mansell, 1978), 6.

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† Charles A. Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism? (London: Art and Design, 1986), 14–15. See also Charles A. Jencks, ed., The Post-Modem Reader (London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martins Press, 1992).

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* For an idea of how misleading this practice has been, I refer to the essay in this same volume, "A Reading of the Paradiso" (above, pp. 16–22).

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* Franco Musarra, ed., Eco infabula (Florence: Cesati, 2002).

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* "Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Postmodern," op. cit, 171.

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* "Eco e il postmoderno consapevole," in Raccontare il postmoderno (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997), 180–200.

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* "Poetics in particular, language in general," in Poetry (1961); later in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 32.

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† "Aristotelian Poetics as a Science of Literature," 1984, now "Aristotle: Poetics and Criticism," in Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 11–32.

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* Aristotle's Poetics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1957).

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* Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2.

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† See his Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, now in its 4th edition (The Hague and New York: Mouton, 1980).

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* See Barthes, "Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis of Narratives"), in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 251–95 (251–52).

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† On the contrary, the cultures that have produced the novel have always produced theories of plot. Going back to the rejection of Aristotle that characterized Italian culture after the seventeenth century, I do not want to stick my neck out by deciding what the cause or effect was, but it is certainly true that for centuries Italian culture did not produce either good novels or good theories of plot. Although it was a great culture for storytelling in the form of the novella, starting with Boccaccio, Italian literature produced novels much later than other cultures. We have quite a vast tradition of baroque novels, but without any peaks of excellence (even though at that time Aristotle was still being followed), and then nothing of interest until the nineteenth century, where, however, there are few Italian titles one would rank alongside the Dickenses, Balzacs, and Tolstoys. It is true that the novel is the product of bourgeois culture and that Italy had a burgeoning bourgeoisie in Boccaccio's time, but it did not have a modern bourgeoisie until much later than the rest of Europe. But whether this was cause or effect, it did not have theories of plot either. It is for this reason that Italy (which today has excellent writers of detective fiction, and also had two or three such authors in the period before the Second World War) was not a land where the detective story emerged or developed; for the detective story is nothing but the Poetics boiled down to its essential coordinates, a sequence of events (pragmata) whose wires have been crossed, and the plot tells us how the detective unravels them.

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* "Des accidents dans les sciences dites humaines," in Du Sens II (Paris: Seuil, 1983).

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* (New York: Longman, 1937).

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† See, for instance, Robert Langbaum, "Aristotle and modern literature," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (September 1956).

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* The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1.2.

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* George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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* Charles Fillmore, "The Case for Case," in E. Bach et al., eds., Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York: Holt, 1968); Manfred Bierwisch, "On Classifying Semantic Features," in D. D. Steinberg and L. A. Jakobovits, eds., Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

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† Eugene Charniak, "A Partial Taxonomy of Knowledge about Actions," Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies. Castagnola. Working Papers 13 (1975).

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* Summa Theol. I. 79.8; Contra Gentiles, 4.46.

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† Collected Papers, 2. 330.

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* Inventing the Flat Earth (New York: Praeger, 1991).

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† (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906).

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‡ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

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* (New York: Appleton, 1896).

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* F. S. Marvin, "Science and the Unity of Mankind," in Charles Singer, ed., Studies in the History and Method of the Sciences (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), II, 344–58 (352).

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* See, also for what follows, Gioia Zaganelli, La lettera del Prete Gianni (Parma: Pratiche, 1990).

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* See Umberto Eco, "Fakes and Forgeries," in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 174–202.

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* The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Roudedge, 2000).

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* I know that I took up this story both in Foucault's Pendulum and in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, but it is always worth repeating, and unfortunately the story can never be retold often enough. As always, the evidence derives largely, apart from my own personal researches into the "roman feuilleton," from Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1996), and from that inexhaustible source of anti-Semitic arguments, Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).

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* Philip Fauth, Hörbigers Gladd-Kosmogonie (Kaiserslautern: Hermann Kayser Verlag, 1913).

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* Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, trans. Rollo Myers (London: Souvenir, 2001), II, 5–7.

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† See, for instance, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985), or René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés'sécrètes (Paris: Grasset, 1969).

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* For instance, Gerard Kniper, of the Mount Palomar observatory, in an article that came out in Popular Astronomy in 1946, and Willy Ley, who had worked on the V-1 in Germany, in his article "Pseudoscience in Naziland," in Astounding Science Fiction 39 (1947).

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* In 1926 Admiral Byrd flew over the North Pole and in 1929 over the South Pole without sighting any hole giving access to the center of the earth, but a huge literature has arisen on Byrd's flights (just search for "Byrd" on the Internet), where various bizarre spirits interpret his findings in exactly the opposite sense, seeing them as proof that the access holes exist. This is also because, if you photograph these zones during the day, you notice a dark zone that is the portion of the Arctic Circle that is never shone on by the sun during the winter months. Those who want maps showing the polar conduits leading to the center of the Earth should look at sites like www.v-j-enterprises.com/holearth.html or www.ourhollowearth.com/Polar Opn.htm. Those who want to penetrate more deeply into the hollow earths archipelago can visit countless sites, among which I will cite only www.healthresearcharchbooks.comlcategorieslhollowearth.html and hohle-erde.de/body_l-he.htme. Of course, you cant believe everything you read.

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* Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 123.

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* (ArIes: Actes Sud, 1994).

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* Maria Corti, "I giochi del Piano," in L'Indice dei Libri del Mese 10 (1988), 14–15.

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* See "Fakes and Forgeries," in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 174–202. See also in this volume my inaugural lecture on forgeries (pp. 272–301), which perhaps, given its date (1994), constitutes the first nucleus of Baudolino.

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† Especially Gioia Zaganelli, ed., La lettera del Prete Gianni (Parma: Pratiche, 1990).

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* In How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 234–278.

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* "Il segno della poesia e il segno della prosa," in Sugli specchi (Milan: Bompiani, 1985).

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