For the rest the narrator described (and drew) the island he ruled, its woods, lakes, coasts, and mountainous regions, dwelled on his own social reforms, his people’s rites and myths, introduced his own ministers, and spoke of wars and pestilences…. The text alternated with drawings, and the story (which did not follow the rules of any genre) turned into an encyclopedia —and with hindsight one can see how the child’s boldness presaged the adult’s weaknesses.
Until the point where, no longer knowing what to make happen to the king and his island, I ended the tale on, saying: «I will go on a long voyage…. Perhaps I will not even come back; just one small confession: in the early days I declared myself to be a wizard. This is not true: I am only called Pirimpimpino. Forgive me.»
After these experiments I decided that I would have to go over to comics, and I did produce some. If photocopiers had existed at that time, I would have distributed them widely; instead, in order to make up for my limitations as amanuensis, I proposed that my school friends give me a number of pages from their squared paper notebooks, which amounted to the number of pages for the volume, plus some more as compensation for my expenses in ink and labor, promising to produce several copies of the same adventure. I drew up all the contracts without realizing how laborious it was to copy the same story ten times. In the end I had to give the notebooks back, humiliated by my failure, not as an author, but as a publisher.
At middle school I wrote narratives because by that time «essays» (where there was no choice of subject) had been replaced by «chronicles» (where we had to recount «a slice of life,» but there was an element of choice). I excelled in humorous sketches. My favorite author then was P. G. Wodehouse. I still have my masterpiece: a description of how I prepared, after many experiments, to demonstrate to neighbors and relatives a technological wonder, namely, one of the first unbreakable glasses; I dropped it triumphantly on the ground, where, of course, it smashed into pieces.
Between 1944 and 1945 I turned to epic, with a parody of The Divine Comedy and a series of portraits of the gods of Olympus, all portrayed in the style of that dark period, when we were coping with rationing, blackouts, and Rabagliati’s songs.
Finally in my first two years of high school, I wrote an «Illustrated Life of Euterpe Clips»
(with illustrations), and at that stage my literary models were the novels of Giovanni Mosca and Giovanni Guareschi. In my final years there I wrote some stories with more serious literary ambitions. I would say that at that time the dominant tone was a magic realism a la Bontempelli. For a long time, I would get up early and plan to rewrite «The Concert,» which contained an interesting narrative idea. A certain Mario Tobia, a failed composer, gathered together all the mediums of the world to produce onstage, in the form of ectoplasms, the greatest musicians of the past, to play his «Conradino of Swabia.» Beethoven conducting, Liszt on the piano, Paganini on the violin, and so on. Just one contemporary, Louis Robertson, on the trumpet. There was quite a good description of how gradually the mediums were unable to keep their creatures alive, and the great composers of the past slowly dissolved, amid the whines and dissonances of dying instruments, leaving on its own up there, shrill, magical and unopposed, Robertsons trumpet.
I ought to leave to my faithful readers (all twenty-four of them, I would say, in order not to compete with the Great Manzoni’s twenty-five readers, since I want to outdo him only in modesty) the job of recognizing how both episodes were exploited forty years later in Foucault’s Pendulum.
I also wrote some «Ancient Stories of the Young Universe,» whose protagonists were the earth and the other planets, just after the birth of the galaxies, as they were seized by reciprocal passions and jealousies: in one story, Venus fell in love with the Sun and with a huge effort managed to remove herself from her own orbit to go and annihilate herself in the incandescent mass of her beloved. My little, unaware Cosmicomics.
At sixteen my love for poetry began. I devoured the Hermetic poets, but my own taste was more for Cardarelli and the classicism of those who wrote for La Ronda. I no longer know whether it was the need for poetry (and the contemporary discovery of Chopin) that caused the flowering of my first, platonic, and unspoken love, or vice versa. In either case, the mixture was disastrous, and not even the most tender and narcissistic of nostalgias would allow me to revisit those efforts now without feeling deep and thoroughly deserved shame. But a severe critical sternness must have emerged from that experience: that was what drove me, in the space of a few years, to decide that my poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne. Hence the resolution (kept for over thirty years) to abandon so-called creative writing, and to limit myself to philosophical reflection and the writing of essays.
The Essayist and the Fiction Writer
This was a decision that I have never regretted for thirty years or more. What I mean is that I was not one of those who are condemned to write about science while burning with desire to write about art. I felt totally fulfilled doing what I was doing, and what’s more, I looked with a touch of Platonic disdain at poets, prisoners of their own lies, imitators of imitations, unable to attain that vision of the hypercelestial Idea with which I—as a philosopher—believed I had chaste, peaceful, and daily intercourse.
In reality, I now realize, I was satisfying my passion for narrative, without noticing it, in three different ways. First of all, through a constant exercise of oral narrativity (I missed enormously our young children when they grew up, because I could no longer tell them stories). Second, by playing with literary parodies and pastiches of various types (a period documented in my Misreadings [New York: Harcourt, 1993], written in the late fifties and early sixties. And third, by making a narrative out of every critical essay. I have to explain this point because I think it is essential for understanding both my activity as an essayist and my (subsequent) future as a narrator.
When I was examined for my graduating thesis on the problem of aesthetics in Thomas Aquinas, I was struck by one of the criticisms of the second examiner (Augusto Guzzo, who, however, later published my thesis as it was): he told me that what I had actually done was to rehearse the various phases of my research as if it were an inquiry, noting the false leads and the hypotheses that I later rejected, whereas the mature scholar digests these experiences and then offers his readers (in the final version) only the conclusions. I recognized that this was true of my thesis, but I did not feel it to be a limitation. On the contrary, it was precisely then that I was convinced that all research must be «narrated» in this way. And I think I have done so in all my subsequent works of nonfiction.
As a result, I could refrain peacefully from writing stories because in fact I was satisfying my passion for narrative in another way; and when I would later write stories, they could not be anything other than the account of a piece of research (only in narrative this is called a Quest).
Where Did I Start From?
Between the ages of forty-six and forty-eight I wrote my first novel, The Name of the Rose. I do not intend to discuss the (how shall I say, existential?) motives that led me to write a first novel: they were numerous, probably cumulative, and I believe the fact that I felt a desire to write a novel is motivation enough.
One of the questions that the editor of this volume has put to the writers she has contacted is: What are the phases one goes through in the genesis of a text? The question blithely implies that writing goes through phases. Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.
There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules; and there is no hot magma of inspiration. But it is true that there is a sort of initial idea and that there are very precise phases in a process that develops only gradually.
My three novels stemmed from a seminal idea that was little more than an image: that was what seized me and made me want to go on. The Name of the Rose was born when I was struck by an image of the murder of a monk in a library. When I wrote in the Reflections on «The Name of the Rose» that «I wanted to poison a monk,» this provocative formula was taken literally, unleashing a series of follow-up questions on
