Another problem: the encasement of the voices, or, rather, of the narrative points of view. I knew that I was narrating a story with the words of another person, having declared in the preface that this person’s words had been filtered through at least two other narrative points of view, that of Mabillon and that of the Abbé Vallet, even if they had supposedly operated only as philologists (but who believes that?). The problem arose again, however, within Adso’s first-person narration. Adso, at the age of eighty, is telling about what he saw at the age of eighteen. Who is speaking, the eighteen-year-old Adso or the eighty-year-old? Both, obviously; and this is deliberate. The trick was to make the old Adso constantly present as he ponders what he remembers having seen and felt as the young Adso.
The model (I did not reread the book: distant memories sufficed) was Serenus Zeitblom in Doctor Faustus. This enunciative duplicity fascinated and excited me very much. Also because—to return to what I was saying about the mask—in doubling Adso I was once more doubling the series of interstices, of screens, set between me as a biographical personality, me as narrating author, the first-person narrator, and the characters narrated, including the narrative voice. I felt more and more shielded, and the whole experience recalled to me (I mean physically, with the clarity of madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea) certain childish games in which I pretended I was in a submarine under the blankets and from it sent messages to my sister, under the blankets of the next bed, both of us cut off from the outside world and perfectly free to travel like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Adso was very important for me. From the outset I wanted to tell the whole story (with its mysteries, its political and theological events, its ambiguities) through the voice of someone who experiences the events, records them all with the photographic fidelity of an adolescent, but does not understand them (and will not understand them fully even as an old man, since he then chooses a flight into the divine nothingness, which was not what his master had taught him)—to make everything understood through the words of one who understands nothing.
Reading the reviews, I realize that this is one of the aspects of the novel that impressed cultivated readers least; or, in any case, I would say that few made a point of it. But I wonder now if this was not one of the features that made the novel readable for unsophisticated readers. They identified with the innocence of the narrator, and felt exonerated even when they did not understand everything. I gave them back their fear and trembling in the face of sex, unknown languages, difficulties of thought, mysteries of political life. . . . These are things I understand now, après coup; but perhaps I was then transferring to Adso many of my adolescent fears, certainly in his amorous palpitations (but always with the assurance that I could act through another person; in fact, Adso experiences his love sufferings only through the words with which the doctors of the Church discussed love). Art is an escape from personal emotion, as both Joyce and Eliot had taught me.
The struggle against emotion was hard. I wrote a beautiful prayer, modeled on the Plaint of Nature by Alanus de Insulis, to be said by William in a crucial moment. Then I realized that both of us would be overcome by emotion, I as author and he as character. I as author should not succumb, for reasons of poetics. He as character could not, because he was made of different stuff, and his emotions were all mental, or repressed. So I cut that page. After a friend of mine had read the book, she said to me, “My only objection is that William never has a twinge of pity.” I quoted this to another friend, and he said, “That’s right, that is the style of his pity.” Perhaps this is so. And so be it.
Preterition
Adso was also useful to me in dealing with another matter. I could have had the story unfold in a Middle Ages where everyone knew what was being talked about, as in a contemporary story, in which, if a character says the Church would not approve his divorce, it is not necessary to explain what the Church is and why it does not approve the divorce. But in a historical novel this cannot be done, because the purpose of the narration is also to make clearer to us contemporaries what happened then and how what happened then matters to us as well.
Hence the risk of what I would call Salgarism.8 When the characters in Emilio Salgari’s adventures escape through the forest, pursued by enemies, and stumble over a baobab root, the narrator suspends the action in order to give us a botany lesson on the baobab. Now this has become topos, charming, like the defects of those we have loved; but it should not be done.
I rewrote hundreds of pages to avoid this kind of lapse, but I do not recall ever realizing quite how I solved the problem. I became aware of it only two years afterward, when I was trying to figure out why the book was being read by people who surely could not like such “cultivated” books. Adso’s narrative style is based on that rhetorical device called preterition or paralepsis, or “passing over.”
Here is an example from Tudor times: “I doe not say that thou receaved brybes of thy fellowes, I busie myself not in this thing. . . .” The speaker, in other words, claims he will not speak of something that everyone knows perfectly well, and as he is saying this, he speaks of the thing. This is more or less the way Adso mentions people and events as being well known but still does speak of them. As for those people and events that Adso’s reader, a German at the end of the century, could not know, since they had taken place in Italy at the beginning of the century, Adso discusses them without hesitation, and in a didactic tone, because this was the style of the medieval chronicler, eager to introduce encyclopedic notions every time something was mentioned.
After a friend (not the same one as before) had read the manuscript, she told me she had been struck by the journalistic tone of the story, which was not the tone of a novel but that of a newspaper article. At first I was offended; then I realized what she had unwittingly perceived. This is how the chroniclers of those centuries tell things. And if the Italians still use the word cronaca to define the local-news page in the papers, it is because chronicles have gone on being written over the centuries.
Pace
But there was another reason for including those long didactic passages. After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems become when they are recited by actors, who, wanting to “interpret,” ignore the meter of the verse, make dramatic enjambements as if they were declaiming prose, concern themselves with the content and not with the rhythm. To read a classical poem in rhyme, you have to assume the singing rhythm the poet wanted. It is better to recite Dante as if he had written children’s jingles than pursue only his meanings to the exclusion of everything else.
In narrative, the breathing is derived not from the sentences but from broader units, from the scansion of events. Some novels breathe like gazelles, others like whales or elephants. Harmony lies not in the length of the breath but in its regularity. And if, at a certain point (but this should not occur too often), the breathing breaks off and a chapter (or a sequence) ends before the breath is completely drawn, this irregularity can play an important role in the economy of the story; it can mark a turning point, a surprise development.
At least this is what we find in great writers. A great novel is one in which the author always knows just when to accelerate, when to apply the brakes, and how to handle the clutch, within a basic rhythm that remains constant. In music there is rubato, but if you rob too much, you end up like those bad performers who believe that exaggerated rubato is all you need to play Chopin. I am not talking about how I solved my problems, but about how I posed them. And if I were to say I posed them consciously, I would be lying. There is a compositive thought that
