At the beginning I read Orfila’s Traité des poisons—which I had bought twenty years before at a book stall by the Seine, purely out of loyalty to Huysmans (Là-bas). Since none of the poisons satisfied me, I asked a biologist friend to suggest a drug that possessed certain properties (the possibility of being absorbed by the skin when handled). I promptly tore up his letter of reply, in which he said he knew of no poison that would serve my purpose: it was a document that, read in another context, could lead to the gallows.
At first my monks were going to live in a contemporary convent (I had in mind an investigator-monk who read the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto—in Italy even the left has its own heretics). But in any convent or abbey, countless medieval memories survive, so I began rummaging among my files. After all, I was a medievalist in hibernation (I had published a book on medieval aesthetics in 1956, another hundred pages on the subject in 1969, then a few scattered essays, and had returned to the medieval tradition in 1962 for my work on Joyce; in 1972 came a long study of the Apocalypse and the illuminations of the commentary by Beatus of Liébana:6 so the Middle Ages were kept limber). I dug out a huge amount of material (file cards, photocopies, notebooks), accumulated since 1952 and originally intended for other, still-vague, purposes: a history of monsters, or an analysis of medieval encyclopedias, or a theory of lists. . . .
At a certain point I said to myself that, since the Middle Ages were my day-to-day fantasy, I might as well write a novel actually set in that period. As I have said in interviews, I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have a direct knowledge of the Middle Ages. When we used to light bonfires on the grass in the country, my wife would accuse me of never looking at the sparks that flew up among the trees and glided along the electricity wires. Then when she read the chapter on the fire, she said, “So you were looking at the sparks!” And I answered, “No, but I knew how a medieval monk would have seen them.”
Ten years ago, in a letter from author to publisher accompanying my commentary on the commentary to the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, I confessed (to Franco Maria Ricci):
However you choose to look at it, I arrived at scholarship by crossing symbolic forests inhabited by unicorns and gryphons, and by comparing the pinnacled and squared construction of cathedrals to the barbs of exegetic malice concealed in the tetragonal formulas of the Summulae, wandering between the “Vico de le Strami”7 and Cistercian naves, engaging in affable colloquy with the cultivated and sumptuous Cluniac monks, under the surveillance of a plump and rationalistic Aquinas, tempted by Honorius Augustoduniensis, by his fantastic geographies, which explained simultaneously quare in pueritia coitus non contingat and how to reach the Lost Island, or how to capture a basilisk when you are armed only with a pocket mirror and unshakable faith in the Bestiary.
This taste and this passion have never abandoned me, even if later, for moral reasons and also material ones (being a medievalist usually implies having considerable wealth and the possibility of roaming among distant libraries, microfilming unheard-of manuscripts), I have pursued other things. And so the Middle Ages have remained, if not my profession, my hobby—and a constant temptation: I see the period everywhere, transparently overlaying my daily concerns, which do not look medieval, though they are.
Stolen holidays under the vaults of Autun, where the Abbé Grivot today writes manuals on the devil, their binding impregnated with sulphur; rustic ecstasies at Moissac and Conques, dazzled by the Elders of the Apocalypse or by the devils thrusting damned souls into boiling cauldrons; and, at the same time, refreshing study of the enlightened monk Bede, rational comforts sought in Occam, to understand the mystery of the Sign where Saussure is still obscure. And so on and on, with unceasing homesickness for the Peregrinatio Sancti Brandani, verifications of our thinking carried out through the Book of Kells, Borges revisited in the Celtic kenningars, relations between power and masses who have been persuaded checked against the diaries of Bishop Suger. . . .
The Mask
Actually I decided not only to narrate about the Middle Ages. I decided to narrate in the Middle Ages, and through the mouth of a chronicler of the period. I was a novice narrator, and in the past I had looked at narrators from the opposite side of the barricade. I was embarrassed at telling a story. I felt like a drama critic who suddenly exposes himself behind the footlights and finds himself watched by those who, until then, have been his accomplices in the seats out front.
Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy? But what if I had Snoopy say it? If, that is, “It was a beautiful morning . . .” were said by someone capable of saying it, because in his day it was still possible, still not shopworn? A mask: that was what I needed.
I set about reading or rereading medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence. They would speak for me, and I would be freed from suspicion. Freed from suspicion, but not from the echoes of intertextuality. Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Homer knew this, and Ariosto knew this, not to mention Rabelais and Cervantes. My story, then, could only begin with the discovered manuscript, and even this would be (naturally) a quotation. So I wrote the introduction immediately, setting my narrative on a fourth level of encasement, inside three other narratives: I am saying what Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said. . . .
I was now free of every fear. And at this point I stopped writing for twelve months. I stopped because I discovered something else I already knew (and everyone knew), but that I came to understand more clearly as I worked.
I discovered, namely, that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
The Novel as Cosmological Event
What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details. If I were to construct a river, I would need two banks; and if on the left bank I put a fisherman, and if I were to give this fisherman a wrathful character and a police record, then I could start writing, translating into words everything that would inevitably happen. What does a fisherman do? He fishes (and thence a whole sequence of actions, more or less obligatory). And then what happens? Either the fish are biting or they are not. If they bite, the fisherman catches them and then goes home happy. End of story. If there are no fish, since he is a wrathful type he will perhaps become angry. Perhaps he will break his fishing rod.
This is not much; still, it is already a sketch. But there is an Indian proverb that goes, “Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by.” And what if a corpse were to come down the stream—since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river? We must also bear in mind that my fisherman has a police record. Will he want to risk trouble? What will he do? Will he run away and pretend not to have seen the corpse? Will he feel vulnerable, because this, after all, is the corpse of the man he hated?
Wrathful as he is, will he fly into a rage because he was not able to wreak personally his longed-for vengeance? As you see, as soon as one’s invented world has been furnished just a little, there is already the beginning of a story. There is already the beginning of a style, too, because a fisherman who is fishing should establish a slow, fluvial pace, cadenced by his waiting, which should be patient but also marked by the fits of his impatient wrath. The problem is to construct the world: the words will practically come on their own. Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequentur. grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
The first year of work on my novel was devoted to the construction of the world. Long registers of all the books that could be found in a medieval library. Lists of names and personal data for many characters, a number of whom were then excluded from the story. In other words, I had to know who
