In 1955 Borges’s Ficciones came out in Italy, with the title La biblioteca di Babele in Einaudi’s Gettoni series. It had been recommended to Einaudi by Sergio Solmi, a great poet whom I really loved, particularly for an essay of his on science fiction as a version of the fantastic, which he had written some years before. You see the role the Zeitgeist plays: Solmi discovers Borges while he is reading American writers of science fiction, who write (perhaps consciously) in the tradition of the Utopian tale that begins in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Let us not forget that Wilkins also wrote a book on the inhabitants of the moon, and therefore he too, like Godwin and others, was already traveling to other worlds.
I think it was one evening in 1956 or ’57 that Solmi told me as we strolled together in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan: “I advised Einaudi to publish this book; we have not managed to sell even five hundred copies, but you should read it because it is very good.” That was how I first fell in love with Borges, and I remember going to friends’ houses and reading them excerpts from Pierre Menard.
At that time I was beginning to write those parodies and pastiches that later would become Diario mínimo (Misreadings). Influenced by what? Perhaps the strongest influence there was Proust’s Pastiches et mélanges, so much so that when Diario min imo came out in French I chose the title Pastiches et postiches. But I recall that when I later published Diario minimo, in 1963, I thought of giving it a title that alluded to a title of Vittorini’s, Piccola borghesia, except that I would have liked to change the title to Piccola Borgesia. The point of this, then, is to explain how a network of influences and echoes began to come into play.
However, I could not have allowed myself a reference to Borges at that time, because in Italy he was still known to very few people. It was only in the following decade that the publication of all his other works established Borges definitively in Italy, principally thanks to Domenico Porzio, a very dear friend of mine and a man of great intellectual openness and wide reading, though a traditionalist critic. While polemics about the neo-avanguardia raged in Italy, Borges was not considered an avant-garde writer. This was the time when the poetry anthology / novissimi appeared and then the Gruppo 63, and their models were Joyce and Gadda.
The neoavant-garde was interested in an experimentalism that worked on the signifier (their model was that of the illegible book); Borges, on the other hand, who wrote in a classical style, worked on the signifieds, and therefore as far as we were concerned at the time he was beyond the pale, a disturbing presence, one not easily categorized. In crude terms, while Joyce or Robbe-Grillet was on the left, Borges was on the right. And since I would not want this distinction to be understood in political terms, we could also say the opposite, and their opposition would stay the same.
In any case, for some of us Borges was a “secret love.” He was reclaimed only later by the neo-avant-garde, after a lengthy and circuitous process.
In the early 1960s fantasy was either traditional fiction or science fiction, so it was possible to write an essay on science fiction and the fantastic without addressing the theory of literature. I believe that interest in Borges began midway through the sixties, with what was called the structuralist and semiological movement.
Here I must correct another error that is continually made, even in what claim to be scholarly works: today it is said that the Italian neo-avant-garde (Gruppo 63) was structuralist. In truth, nobody in that group was interested in structuralist linguistics except myself, but in my case it was a private hobby that began in university circles, between Pavia (Segre, Corti, Avalle) and Paris (my own and others’ encounters with Barthes).
Why do I say that the interest in Borges began with structuralism? Because Borges carried out his experimental work not on words but on conceptual structures, and it was only with a structuralist methodology that one could begin to analyze and understand his work.
When I later wrote The Name of the Rose it was more than obvious that in constructing the library I was thinking of Borges. If you go and read my entry “Codice” (Codex) in the Einaudi Encyclopaedia, you will see that in one of its sections I carry out an experiment on the Library of Babel. That entry was written in 1976, two years before I began The Name of the Rose, which indicates that I had been obsessed by Borges’s library for some time. When I began the novel later, the idea of the library came naturally to me and with it the idea of a blind librarian, whom I decided to call Jorge da Burgos. I really do not remember whether it was because I had decided to give him that name that I went to see what was happening at Burgos, or whether I called him that because I already knew that in that period pergamino de paño, that is to say, paper instead of parchment, had been produced at Burgos. Sometimes things happen very quickly, as one reads here and there, and one cannot remember what came first.
After that everyone asked me why Jorge becomes the “bad guy” in my story, and I could only reply that when I gave my character this name I did not know what he would do later (and that is what happened in my other novels as well, so that the game of finding precise allusions to this or that, which many people play, is generally a waste of time). Nevertheless, I cannot rule out the possibility that at the point when this ghost of Borges appeared I was influenced by the plot of his “Death and the Compass,” which certainly had made an enormous impression on me. But you see how strange the game of influences is: if someone had asked me about influences at the time when I was depicting the mutual seduction between Jorge and William, I would have said that I was thinking of Proust, of that scene where Charlus tries to seduce Jupien, which is described with a metaphor of the bee buzzing around the flower.
I also had other models. For instance, the model of Mann’s Doctor Faustus was fundamental, because the way Adso relives his own story as an old man, telling us how he saw it as a young man, was in some sense the way old Serenus Zeitblom looked at the story of Adrian Leverkühn. Here is another good example of unknown influences, because few critics have spotted the Doctor Faustus model, whereas many have seen instead an allusion to the dialogues between Naphta and Settembrini in The Magic Mountain.
To turn to other examples, I was grateful to the speaker who underlined the possible influence of Bouvard et Pécuchet on Foucault’s Pendulum. For the fact is that while writing that novel, I thought a lot about Flaubert’s book. I even promised to go and reread it, but then in the end I decided not to, because in some sense I wanted to be its Pierre Menard.
An opposite case is provided by my encounter with the Rosicrucians, which determined the structure of Foucault’s Pendulum. Right from my youth I had devoted a shelf of my library to occult sciences; then one day I came across a totally stupid book on the Rosicrucians, and that was where I got the idea of doing a Bouvard and Pécuchet for occult idiocy. After that I collected texts by second-rate occultists on one hand, and on the other historically reliable literature on the Rosicrucians. Only when my novel was far advanced did I reread “Tlôn,” where Borges talks of the Rosicrucians—as he often did, taking information at second hand (from De Quincey) and yet understanding everything about it better than scholars who have dedicated their whole lives to the subject.
In the course of this research I found a photocopy of an out-of-print book, Arnold’s monograph. When the Pendulum eventually came out, I said that Arnold’s old work should be translated into Italian; immediately afterward a French publisher decided to reprint the book and asked me to write a preface for it, and only in that preface do I refer, this time consciously, to
Borges, beginning precisely with “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
But who can deny that from the time I read “Tlön” so many years previously, the word “Rosicrucian” might have lodged in some remote corner of my brain, so that decades later (when I read the book by the idiotic Rosicrucian) it reappeared thanks also to a Borgesian memory?
These past few days I have been led to reflect instead on how much I have been influenced by the “Pierre Menard model.” This is a story that I have never tired of quoting since I first read it. In what sense has it determined the way I write? Well, I would say that the real Borgesian influence on The Name of the Rose does not lie in having imagined a labyrinthine library; after all, the universe is full of labyrinths from the time of Cnossos onward, and theorists of postmodernism regard the labyrinth as a recurring image in almost all contemporary literature. It lies rather in the fact that I knew I was rewriting a medieval story, and that this rewriting of mine,
