I Am Edmond Dantès! Umberto Eco
I Am Edmond Dantès!
SOME UNFORTUNATES HAVE been initiated into literature reading someone like, say, Robbe-Grillet. You can read Robbe-Grillet only after you have understood the age-old narrative structures he violates. To enjoy the lexical inventions and distortions of Gadda, you need to know the rules of Italian and be familiar with the fine Tuscan of Pinocchio.
I remember that when I was a child, I found myself in continual competition with a friend from an educated family who read Ariosto, and I spent what little money I had on a copy of Tasso from a secondhand bookstall to keep up with him. I dipped into it from time to time, but was secretly reading The Three Musketeers. The boy’s mother, visiting our house one evening, spotted the incriminating book in the kitchen (future men of letters did their reading in the kitchen, propped against a kitchen cupboard, with our mothers shouting at us that we would ruin our eyes and ought at least go outside and get some fresh air). She was scandalized: “But how can you read trash like this?” That same lady, it should be said, told my mother that her idol was Wodehouse, whom I also used to read, and with great enjoyment but—one lightweight author against another—why was Wodehouse more noble than Dumas?
A century-old sentence hung over the serialized novel, and its demise was threatened not only by the Riancey Amendment of 1850, which imposed a punishing tax on newspapers that published these feuilletons, but also by the general opinion among God-fearing people that feuilletons were the ruin of families—they corrupted the young, drove adults to communism, and undermined the throne and the altar. See, for example, the two-volume Études critiques sur le feuilleton roman, almost a thousand pages that Alfred Nettement devoted in 1845 to this devilish literature.
And yet it is only through the serialized novel that, from early childhood, we learn about classic narrative devices. Here they appear in their purest form, often brazenly, but with an overwhelming mythopoeic energy.
And so I would like to consider not a particular book, but a particular genre (the feuilleton) and a specific device: anagnorisis, or recognition.
If it were necessary to remind you, as I have just done, that the feuilleton makes use of timeless narrative devices, then we would cite Aristotle (Poetics, section 1452 a–b). Anagnorisis is the “change from ignorance to knowledge,” and in particular the recognition of one person by another, as when a character unexpectedly discovers (by another person’s revealing it, or by discovering a necklace or a scar) that someone else is his father or son or worse still, as when Oedipus realizes that Jocasta, the woman he has married, is his mother.
One reacts to anagnorisis either with a simple willingness to play the narrator’s game or in accordance with the rules of narrative. In the second case, some think the effect is in danger of being lost, but that is not correct—and to prove this I will make a few observations about narrative before turning swiftly to look at the miracles of anagnorisis at first hand.
A double anagnorisis must take not only the character but also the reader unawares. This surprise may have been prepared through hints and suspicions or it may arrive quite unexpectedly even for the reader, and the way these subtle, almost imperceptible clues or sudden coups de théâtre are handled depends on the skill of the narrator. A simple anagnorisis, on the other hand, occurs when a character is taken completely by surprise at a certain revelation, but the reader already knows what is going on. Typical of this category is the multiple unmasking of Monte Cristo to his enemies, which the reader has been eagerly awaiting since halfway through the book.
In a double anagnorisis, the reader identifies with the character, sharing his joy and suffering as well as his surprises. But in simple anagnorisis the reader projects his own frustrations or hopes of revenge onto the character, whose secret he already knows or can guess, and anticipates the turn of events. In other words, the reader would like to deal with his enemies, his boss, or the woman who has walked out on him in the same way that Monte Cristo does. “You used to despise me? Well then, now I shall tell you who I really am!” And he licks his lips, waiting for the final moment to arrive.
A useful element for the successful outcome of an anagnorisis is disguise: by removing his mask, the person disguised increases the other characters’ surprise; and the reader either shares that surprise or, having seen through the disguise, enjoys the surprise of the unsuspecting characters.
For the two types of anagnorisis there are then two sorts of degeneration—when the recognition is redundant or pointless. Revelation is, in fact, a currency to be spent thriftily and should provide the clou to a respectable plot. The case of Monte Cristo, who reveals his identity many times and, in turn, gradually learns of the plot in which he has been victim, is a rare and masterly case of revelation that, though used numerous times, is no less satisfying for it. In the popular feuilleton, however, since revelation “sells well,” it is repeated to the point of excess, thus losing all dramatic power and acquiring a purely consoling function, in the sense that it provides a drug that the reader comes to depend on and cannot do without.
The overuse of this device reaches extreme proportions when the revelation is obviously completely pointless in terms of plot development, and the novel becomes stuffed with it purely for publicity purposes, so that it can be promoted as the ideal serial novel and worth every penny. A patent example of pointless moments of anagnorisis, one after the other, is Ponson du Terrail’s Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu. Note that the pointless anagnorises in the following list are those marked with an asterisk (and, as you will see, they are in the majority).
This is the story: *Dom Jérôme reveals who he is to Jeanne; Dom Jérôme reveals who he is to Mazures; *the comtesse des Mazures, from Valognes’s description, recognizes Jeanne as the sister of Aurore; *from the portrait in the small box left to her by her mother, Aurore recognizes Jeanne as her sister; Aurore, while reading her mother’s letter, recognizes old Benjamin as Fritz; *Lucien learns from Aurore that Jeanne is her sister (and that his mother killed their mother); *Raoul de la Maurelière realizes that César is the son of Blaisot and that his temptress is the comtesse des Mazures; *Lucien, after wounding Maurelière in a duel, discovers under his shirt a medallion with the portrait of Gretchen; *the gypsy girl realizes from a medallion found in Polyte’s hand that Aurore is free; *Bibi recognizes Jeanne and Aurore as being the aristocrats described by the gypsy girl; *Paul (alias the chevalier des Mazures), having seen the medallion of Gretchen that Bibi shows him (after having received it from the gypsy girl who received it from Polyte), recognizes that the aristocrat he should be arresting is his daughter Aurore; *Bibi reveals to Paul that his daughter has been arrested in place of Jeanne; Bibi, who has escaped, learns that the girl saved from the guillotine is Aurore; Bibi discovers that his fellow stagecoach passenger is Dagobert; *Dagobert learns from Bibi that Aurore and Jeanne are in Paris and that Aurore is in prison; Polyte recognizes Dagobert as the man at the Tuileries who saved his life; *Dagobert recognizes the gypsy girl who had once foretold his fortune; *Dagobert’s doctor realizes that the German doctor who arrives unexpectedly—sent by the Masques Rouges—is his old master and he recognizes him to be his pupil and Polyte to be the young man whom he had just saved on the road; years later, Polyte recognizes a stranger who comes up to talk to him as Bibi; both recognize the gypsy girl, and Zoe to be her assistant; Benedict comes across and recognizes Bibi; *Paul (who has been mad for years) regains his sanity and recognizes Benedict and Bibi; the old hermit is recognized as Dom Jérôme; *the chevalier des Mazures learns from Dom Jérôme that his daughter is alive; *the gypsy girl discovers that her manservant is none other than Bibi; *the republican (lured into a trap) realizes that an attractive German lady was the young girl whose parents he had sent to the guillotine (her identity was revealed to the reader two pages earlier); *the gypsy girl (condemned by the gypsies) recognizes Lucien, Dagobert, Aurore, and Jeanne as those who have trapped and ruined her.
It does not matter whether those who have (fortunately) not read Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu have managed to make head or tail of this torrent of anagnorisis involving characters they know nothing about. It is all the better for them to remain in a state of confusion, since this novel, in comparison to feuilleton classics, is like a film that, to attract a Last Tango in Paris audience, offers its spectators 120 minutes of uninterrupted rear penetration between a hundred patients in a psychiatric hospital. Which is exactly what Sade did in The 120 Days of Sodom, pushing down the accelerator pedal for hundreds of pages, whereas Dante limited himself to writing “he kissed my mouth, trembling all over.”
Ponson du Terrail’s recognitions are pointless, apart from being exaggeratedly redundant, because the reader already knows all about his characters. But for the benefit of readers who are easy to please, a touch of sadism is brought into play. The characters in
