A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. But one of the chief obstacles to his maintaining this virtuous principle is the fact that a novel must have a title.
A title, unfortunately, is in itself a key to interpretation. We cannot escape the notions prompted by The Red and the Black or War and Peace. The titles that show most respect for the reader are those that confine themselves to the name of the hero, such as David Copperfield or Robinson Crusoe; but even this reference to the eponymous character can represent an undue interference of the author. Père Goriot focuses the reader’s attention on the figure of the old father, though the novel is also the story of Rastignac; or of Vautrin, alias Collin. Perhaps the best course is to be honestly dishonest, as Dumas was: it is clear that The Three Musketeers is, in reality, the tale of the fourth. But such a luxury is rare, and it may be that the author can allow himself to enjoy it only by mistake.
My novel had another, working, title, which was The Abbey of the Crime. I rejected it because it concentrates the reader’s attention entirely on the mystery story and might wrongly lure and mislead purchasers looking for an action-packed yarn. My dream was to call the book Adso of Melk—a totally neutral title, because Adso, after all, was the narrating voice. But in my country, publishers dislike proper names, and even Fermo and Lucia4 was, in its day, recycled in a different form. Otherwise, Italian fiction offers few examples of this kind of title—Lemmonio Boreo, Rubé, Metello—a handful compared with the legion of Cousin Bettes, Barry Lyndons, Armances, and Tom Joneses that people other literatures.
The idea of calling my book The Name of the Rose came to me virtually by chance, and I liked it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left: Dante’s mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name,5 a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians. The title rightly disoriented the reader, who was unable to choose just one interpretation; and even if he were to catch the possible nominalist readings of the concluding verse, he would come to them only at the end, having previously made God only knows what other choices. A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them.
Nothing is of greater consolation to the author of a novel than the discovery of readings he had not conceived but which are then prompted by his readers. When I wrote theoretical works, my attitude toward reviewers was judicial: Have they or have they not understood what I meant? With a novel, the situation is completely different. I am not saying that the author may not find a discovered reading perverse; but even if he does, he must remain silent, allow others to challenge it, text in hand. For that matter, the large majority of readings reveal effects of sense that one had not thought of. But what does not having thought of them mean?
A French scholar, Mireille Calle Gruber, has discovered subtle paragrams that link the simple (in the sense of the poor) with simples (in the sense of medicinal herbs); and then finds that I speak of the “tare” of heresy. I could reply that the term “simple,” in both uses, recurs in the literature of the period, as does the expression “mala pianta,” the tare, or poisonous herb, of heresy. Further, I was well aware of the example of Greimas on the possible double reading (semioticians call it “double isotopy”) that occurs when the herbalist is referred to as a “friend of the simple.” Did I know that I was playing with paragrams? It is of no importance to reply now: the text is there and produces its own effects of sense.
As I read the reviews of the novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic (the first were Ginevra Bompiani and Lars Gustaffson) who quoted a remark of William’s made at the end of the trial (page 410 in the English-language edition). “What terrifies you most in purity?” Adso asks. And William answers: “Haste.” I loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then a reader pointed out to me that on the following page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says: “Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal.” And the reader rightly asked me what connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard.
At that point I realized that a disturbing thing had happened. The exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript. I added this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And naturally, as I was making William loathe haste (and with great conviction, which is why I then liked the remark very much), I completely forgot that, a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. If you reread Bernard’s speech without William’s, it becomes simply a stereotyped expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the order of “All are equal before the law.”
Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question, an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Telling the Process
The author must not interpret. But he may tell why and how he wrote his book. So-called texts of poetics are not always useful in understanding the work that inspired them, but they help us understand how to solve the technical problem which is the production of a work.
Poe, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” tells how he wrote “The Raven.” He does not tell us how we should read it, but what problems he set himself in order to achieve a poetic effect. And I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
The writer (or painter or sculptor or composer) always knows what he is doing and how much it costs him. He knows he has to solve a problem. Perhaps the original data are obscure, pulsive, obsessive, no more than a yearning or a memory. But then the problem is solved at the writer’s desk as he interrogates the material on which he is working—material that reveals natural laws of its own, but at the same time contains the recollection of the culture with which it is loaded (the echo of intertextuality).
When the author tells us he worked in a raptus of inspiration, he is lying. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Talking about a famous poem of his, I forget which, Lamartine said that it had come to him in a single flash, on a stormy night, in a forest. When he died, the manuscripts were found, with revisions and variants; and the poem proved to be the most “worked out” in all of French literature.
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules. A child speaks his mother tongue properly, though he could never write out its grammar. But the grammarian is not the only one who knows the rules of the language; they are well known, albeit unconsciously, also to the child. The grammarian is merely the one who knows how and why the child knows the language.
Telling how you wrote something does not mean proving it is “well” written. Poe said that the effect of the work is one thing and the knowledge of the process is another. When Kandinsky and Klee tell us how they paint, neither is saying he is better than the other. When Michelangelo says that sculpture amounts to freeing from the block of stone the figure already defined in it, he is not saying that the Vatican Pietà is superior to the Rondanini. Sometimes the most illuminating pages on the artistic process have been written by minor artists, who achieved modest effects but knew how to ponder their own processes: Vasari, Horatio Greenough, Aaron Copland. . . .
Naturally, the Middle Ages
I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story. Man is a storytelling animal by nature. I began writing in March of
