The Historical Novel
For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of “Is your novel an open work or not?” How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or “With which of your characters do you identify?” For God’s sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.
Of all idle questions the most idle has been the one raised by those who suggest that writing about the past is a way of eluding the present. “Is that true?” they ask me. It is quite likely, I answer: if Manzoni wrote about the seventeenth century, that means the nineteenth century did not interest him. Shakespeare rewrote medieval subjects and was not concerned with his own time, whereas Love Story is firmly committed to its own time, yet La Chartreuse de Parme told only of events that had occurred a good twenty-five years earlier. . . . It is no use saying that all the problems of modern Europe took the shape in which we still feel them during the Middle Ages: communal democracy and the banking economy, national monarchies and urban life, new technologies and rebellions of the poor.
The Middle Ages are our infancy, to which we must always return, for anamnesis. But there is also the Excalibur-style Middle Ages. And so the problem is something else and cannot be skirted. What does writing a historical novel mean? I believe there are three ways of narrating the past. One is romance, and the examples range from the Breton cycle to Tolkien, also including the Gothic novel, which is not a novel but a romance. The past as scenery, pretext, fairy-tale construction, to allow the imagination to rove freely. In this sense, a romance does not necessarily have to take place in the past; it must only not take place here and now, and the here and now must not be mentioned, not even as allegory. Much science fiction is pure romance. Romance is the story of an elsewhere.
Then comes the swashbuckling novel, the cloak-and-dagger stories, like the work of Dumas. This kind of novel chooses a “real” and recognizable past, and, to make it recognizable, the novelist peoples it with characters already found in the encyclopedia (Richelieu, Mazarin), making them perform actions that the encyclopedia does not record (meeting Milady, consorting with a certain Bonacieux) but which the encyclopedia does not contradict. Naturally, to corroborate the illusion of reality, the historical characters will also do what (as historiography concurs) they actually did (besiege La Rochelle, have intimate relations with Anne of Austria, deal with the Fronde). In this (“real”) picture the imaginary characters are introduced, though they display feelings that could also be attributed to characters of other periods. What d’Artagnan does, in recovering the Queen’s jewels in London, he could have done as well in the fifteenth century or the eighteenth. It is not necessary to live in the seventeenth century to have the psychology of d’Artagnan.
In the historical novel, on the other hand, it is not necessary for characters recognizable in normal encyclopedias to appear. Take The Betrothed: the best-known real character is Cardinal Federigo, who, until Manzoni came along, was a name known only to a few people (the other Borromeo, Saint Charles, was the famous one). But everything that Renzo, Lucia, or Fra Cristoforo does could be done only in Lombardy in the seventeenth century. What the characters do serves to make history, what happened, more comprehensible. Events and characters are made up, yet they tell us things about the Italy of the period that history books have never told us so clearly.
In this sense, certainly, I wanted to write a historical novel, and not because Ubertino or Michael had really existed and had said more or less what they say, but because everything the fictitious characters like William say ought to have been said in that period.
I do not know how faithful I remained to this purpose. I do not believe I was neglecting it when I disguised quotations from later authors (such as Wittgenstein), passing them off as quotations from the period. In those instances I knew very well that it was not my medieval men who were being modern; if anything, it was the moderns who were thinking medievally. Rather, I ask myself if at times I did not endow my fictitious characters with a capacity for putting together, from the disiecta membra of totally medieval thoughts, some conceptual hircocervuses that, in this form, the Middle Ages would not have recognized as their own. But I believe a historical novel should do this, too: not only identify in the past the causes of what came later, but also trace the process through which those causes began slowly to produce their effects.
If a character of mine, comparing two medieval ideas, produces a third, more modern, idea, he is doing exactly what culture did; and if nobody has ever written what he says, someone, however confusedly, should surely have begun to think it (perhaps without saying it, blocked by countless fears and by shame).
In any case, there is one matter that has amused me greatly: every now and then a critic or a reader writes to say that some character of mine declares things that are too modern, and in every one of these instances, and only in these instances, I was actually quoting fourteenth-century texts.
And there are other pages in which readers appreciated the exquisite medieval quality whereas I felt those pages are illegitimately modern. The fact is that everyone has his own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages. Only we monks of the period know the truth, but saying it can sometimes lead to the stake.
Ending
I found again—two years after having written the novel—a note I made in 1953, when I was still a student at the university.
Horatio and his friend call the Count of P. to solve the mystery of the ghost. The Count of P., eccentric and phlegmatic gentleman. Opposed to him, a young captain of the Danish guards, with FBI methods. Normal development of the action following the lines of the tragedy. In the last act the Count of P., having gathered the family together, explains the mystery: the murderer is Hamlet. Too late, Hamlet dies.
Years later I discovered that Chesterton had somewhere suggested an idea of the sort. It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group10 has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.
Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.
NOTE TO THE NEW EDITION
In this revised and corrected edition of my novel of thirty years ago, the various occasional modifications I have made to the original text do not change either the narrative structure or the style—which must inevitably be that of a medieval chronicler. I have removed various repetitions of the same word within a few pages and I have often worked on rhythm, since it is enough to get rid of an adjective or take out a parenthesis to make a whole sentence lighter. I have done what a dentist does when, having fitted a set of teeth, the patient feels he has a large boulder in his mouth, and he gives the teeth a very light drilling so that they seem to fit better.
I have eliminated a few mistakes due to an over-hasty translation of medieval sources; for example I had found mention of cicerbita (a type of chicory) in an herbal of the time and had read it as cucurbitan, making it become a pumpkin—but the pumpkin wasn’t known in the Middle Ages, since it arrived later from the Americas. The same happened with an improper mention of peppers and of a violin—which at that time must have been a viella, a sort of viola. At one point Adso says that he did something in a few seconds whereas time wasn’t measured in seconds in the Middle Ages. It is true that, since the story appears as the translation of the nineteenth-century French version of a medieval text, the seconds could very well have been ascribed to my Abbé Vallet, and I could have left it at that. But as soon as the decision is made to revise and correct, one tends to become pedantic.
Perhaps the most substantial variations (but we are still talking about just a few lines) relate to the description of the face of the librarian, where I wanted to remove a glaring neo-Gothic reference, and certain Latin quotes and expressions. Latin was and still is fundamental in giving the story its monastic flavor and providing evidence that certain references to ideas of the time are reliable and authentic; there again I am always anxious to submit my reader to a little punishing discipline. But I was disturbed when several people told me they felt obliged to go to a Latin dictionary to look up certain phrases. That was too much, they were losing the flow of the story.
I wasn’t worried then—nor am I now—whether the Latin references are understood, especially when they are simply the titles of books; they are there to give the feeling of historical distance. But I realized in some cases that if the Latin wasn’t understood then the story I was
