The film director Marco Ferreri once said to me that my dialogue is like a movie’s because it lasts exactly the right length of time. It had to. When two of my characters spoke while walking from the refectory to the cloister, I wrote with the plan before my eyes; and when they reached their destination, they stopped talking.
It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely. In poetry the constraint can be imposed by meter, foot, rhyme, by what has been called the “verse according to the ear” (see Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Poetry New York 3 [1950]). In fiction, the surrounding world provides the constraint. This has nothing to do with realism (even if it explains also realism). A completely unreal world can be constructed, in which asses fly and princesses are restored to life by a kiss; but that world, purely possible and unrealistic, must exist according to structures defined at the outset (we have to know whether it is a world where a princess can be restored to life only by the kiss of a prince, or also by that of a witch, and whether the princess’s kiss transforms only frogs into princes or also, for example, armadillos).
One element of my world was history, and that is why I read and reread so many medieval chronicles; and as I read them, I realized that the novel had to include things that, in the beginning, had never crossed my mind, such as the debate over poverty and the Inquisition’s hostility toward the Fraticelli.
For example: why are the fourteenth-century Fraticelli in my book? If I had to write a medieval story, I ought to have set it in the twelfth or thirteenth century, because I knew them better than the fourteenth. But I needed an investigator, English if possible (intertextual quotation), with a great gift of observation and a special sensitivity in interpreting evidence. These qualities could be found only among the Franciscans, and only after Roger Bacon; furthermore, we find a developed theory of signs only with the Occamites. Or, rather, it also existed before, but either the interpretation of signs then was of a symbolic nature or else it tended to read ideas and notions in signs.
It is only between Bacon and Occam that signs are used to acquire knowledge of individuals. So I had to set the story in the fourteenth century—much to my irritation, because I could not move easily in that period. More reading ensued, with the discovery that a fourteenth-century Franciscan, even an Englishman, could not ignore the debate about poverty, especially if he was a friend, follower, or acquaintance of Occam. (I might add that initially the investigator was to have been Occam himself, but I gave up that idea, because I do not find the Venerable Inceptor very attractive as a human being.)
But why does everything take place at the end of November 1327? Because by December, Michael of Cesena is already in Avignon. (This is what I mean by furnishing a world in a historical novel: some elements, like the number of steps, can be determined by the author, but others, like the movements of Michael, depend on the real world, which, in this kind of novel, happens to coincide with the possible world of the story.)
But November is too early. I also needed to have a pig slaughtered. Why? The answer is simple: so that the corpse could be thrust, head down, into a great jar of blood. And why did I need this? Because the second trumpet of the Apocalypse says . . . I could not change the Apocalypse, after all; it was a part of this world. Now, it so happens (I made inquiries) that pigs are not slaughtered until cold weather comes, and November might be too early—unless I situated the abbey in the mountains, so there would already be snow. Otherwise my story might have taken place in the plains, at Pomposa, or at Conques.
The constructed world will then tell us how the story must proceed. Everyone asks me why my Jorge, with his name, suggests Borges, and why Borges is so wicked. But I cannot say. I wanted a blind man who guarded a library (it seemed a good narrative idea to me), and library plus blind man can only equal Borges, also because debts must be paid. And, further, it was through Spanish commentaries and illumination that the Apocalypse influenced the entire Middle Ages.
But when I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an “idealistic” position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
Another fine story was that of the labyrinth. All the labyrinths I had heard of—and I had Santarcangeli’s excellent study at hand—were outdoor labyrinths. They could be extremely complicated and full of circumvolutions. But I needed an indoor labyrinth (have you ever seen an open-air library?), and if it was too complicated, with too many passages and inner rooms, not enough air would circulate, whereas circulation of air was necessary to feed the fire. (This, the fact that the Aedificium had to burn at the end, was very clear to me, but also for cosmological-historical reasons: in the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.) So after I had worked for two or three months constructing a suitable labyrinth, I ended up having to add some slits to make absolutely sure there would be enough air.
Who Speaks?
I had many problems. I wanted an enclosed place, a concentrative universe; and to enclose it better, it seemed a good idea for me to introduce, besides unity of place, also unity of time (since the unity of action was doubtful). A Benedictine abbey, therefore, its life marked by the canonical hours (Ulysses may have been an unconscious model, because of its structure rigidly bound by the hours of the day; but another was The Magic Mountain, with its mountainous, sanative situation, where so many conversations could take place).
The conversations posed many problems for me, but I solved these as I wrote. There is a theme that has been scantily discussed in theories of narrative: that of the turn ancillaries—the devices, that is, through which the narrator grants the floor to the various characters. Look at the differences among these five exchanges:
1. “How are you?”
“Not bad. And you?”
2. “How are you?” John said.
“Not bad. And you?” Peter said.
3. “How,” John said, “are you?”
And Peter replied at once: “Not bad. And you?”
4. “How are you?” John inquired anxiously.
“Not bad. And you?” Peter cackled.
5. John said: “How are you?”
“Not bad,” Peter replied, in a dull voice.
Then, with an enigmatic smile, he added:
“And you?”
In all cases except the first two, we see that the author intrudes on the story, imposing his own point of view. He intervenes with a personal comment, to suggest how the words of the two speakers should be interpreted emotionally. But is this intention really absent from the first two, apparently aseptic examples? And is the reader freer in these aseptic cases, where he could undergo an emotional imposition without being aware of it (remember the apparent neutrality of Hemingway dialogue), or is he freer in the other cases, where at least he knows the game the author is playing?
It is a problem of style, an ideological problem, a problem of “poetry,” like the choice of an internal rhyme or an assonance, or the introduction of a paragram. A certain coherence must be found. In my case it was perhaps made easier because all the dialogue is reported by Adso, and it is obvious that Adso imposes his own point of view on the whole narrative.
But the dialogue created another problem for me: how medieval could it be? In other words, as I was writing the book, I realized that it was taking on an opera-buffa structure, with long recitatives and elaborate arias. The arias (the description of the great door, for example) imitated the solemn rhetoric of the Middle Ages, and there was no dearth of models for this. But the dialogue? At a certain point I feared it would sound like Agatha Christie, while the arias were Suger or Saint Bernard. I reread medieval romances, works from the age of chivalry, and I realized that, though I was taking just a bit of license, I was still respecting a narrative and poetic usage not unknown to the Middle Ages. But the
