I do not know whether I was under the influence of the traditional poetics of the English detective novel, where the murder has to be committed in a vicarage. Perhaps I was following up certain emotions I had felt at sixteen, during a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, where I walked through Gothic and Romanesque cloisters and then went into a dark library where, open on a lectern, I found the Acta Sanctorum, and there I learned that there was not just one Blessed Umberto, as I had been led to believe, with a feast day on 4 March, but also a Saint Umberto, a bishop, whose feast was celebrated on 6 September and who had converted a lion in a forest. But one can see that at that point, while I was leafing through that folio volume open vertically in front of me, in supreme silence, amid shafts of light entering through opaque windows that were almost grooved into the walls and ended in pointed arches, I had experienced a moment of upheaval.
I don’t know. But the fact is that that image, of the monk murdered while reading, demanded at a certain point that I construct something else around it. The rest came bit by bit, in order to make sense of that image, including the decision to set the story in the Middle Ages. Initially I thought it should take place in our own time; then I decided that, since I knew and loved the medieval period, it was worthwhile making it the backdrop of my story. All the rest came on its own, gradually, as I read, looked at images, reopened cupboards where there was a twenty-fiveyear-old pile of filing cards on the Middle Ages, which had been filled out for completely different purposes.
With Foucault’s Pendulum things were more complicated. I had to go and look for the seminal image—or, rather, the two seminal images, as we shall see—like a psychoanalyst gradually extracting the patients secret from some disconnected memories and fragments of dreams. Initially I felt only one anxiety: I’ve written a novel—I said to myself—the first novel in my life, and perhaps the last, because I have the feeling that I put into it all the things that I liked or found intriguing, along with everything that, even indirectly, I could say about myself. Is there anything else that is truly my own that I could narrate? And into my mind came two images.
The first was that of the pendulum, which I had seen for the first time thirty years previously in Paris, and it had made a huge impression on me. I am not saying that I forgot about it over the years. On the contrary, at one point in the sixties I was asked by a film-director friend of mine to write a script for a film. I don’t want to talk about this, since subsequently it was used to make a terrible film that had nothing to do with my original idea, and luckily I managed to ensure that my name did not appear anywhere on it—not to mention the fact that I was paid just a token fee. But in that script there was a scene that took place in a cavern at the center of which hung a pendulum, and someone was clinging to it as he whirled through the darkness.
The second image that imposed itself on me was that of myself playing a trumpet at a funeral of partisans. A true story, which, besides, I had never stopped telling. Not often, but always in situations of great intimacy: late at night, having the last whiskey in a welcoming bar, or during a walk along the water, when I felt that a woman, either opposite or beside me, was just waiting for a good story in order to say «How wonderful» and take my hand. A true story around which other memories clustered, and a story I found beautiful.
That was it, the pendulum and that story in the cemetery on a sunlit morning. I felt that I could tell a story around those two things. There was just one problem: how to get from the pendulum to the trumpet? The reply to this question took me eight years, and became the novel.
Similarly, with The Island of the Day Before I started from two very strong images that had surfaced in instant reply to the question: if I were to write a third novel, what could it be about? I’ve spoken too much about monasteries and museums, I said to myself, too much, that is, about places of culture: I should try to write about nature. Nature and nothing else. And how would I be forced to see nature and nothing else? By placing a shipwrecked man on a deserted island.
Then, at the same time, but for totally independent reasons, I bought one of those worldtime watches, where a middle ring rotates in the opposite direction to the hands in order to make local time line up with a series of places written on the outer ring. These kinds of watches have a sign indicating the international dateline. That this line exists, we all know, if for no other reason than having read Around the World in Eighty Days, but it is not something we think about every day. This provided a flash of inspiration: my man had to be west of that line and see an island to the east, an island distant in both space and time.
It was a short step from here to deciding that he must actually be not on the island but opposite it.
At the outset, since my watch showed, at this fated point, the Aleutian Islands, I could see no good reason for placing someone there to do something. Where was he? Stuck on an oil-rig platform? Moreover, as I will make clear shortly, I only write about places I have been to, and the idea of going to such cold places, looking for an oil-rig platform, did not exactly fascinate me.
Then, as I continued to leaf through the atlas, I discovered that the line also passed through the Fijian archipelago. Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands … At this point other memories intervened, other trails opened up. I read a few things, and then I was in the middle of the seventeenth century, the century when exploration voyages to the Pacific began to proliferate. This stirred the memory of many aspects of my old research on baroque culture. That then led to the idea that the man could be shipwrecked on a deserted ship, a kind of ghost ship … And off I went. By that stage, I would say, the novel could walk on its own two feet.
First of All, Construct A World
But where does a novel walk to? Here is the second problem that I consider fundamental for a poetics of narrative. When interviewers ask me, «How did you write your novel?» I usually cut them short and reply: «From left to right.» But here I have enough space for a more complex reply.
The fact is that I believe (or at least I now understand better, after four attempts at fiction) that a novel is not just a linguistic phenomenon. A novel (like the narratives we construct every day, explaining why we arrived late that morning, or how we got rid of someone annoying) uses a plane of expression (words that are very difficult to translate into poetry because what also counts there is their sound) to convey a plane of content, namely, the narrated facts. But on the level of content itself we can identify two more sides, story and plot.
The story of Little Red Riding-Hood is a pure sequence of actions that are chronologically ordered: the mother sends the little girl into the woods, the girl meets the wolf, the wolf goes to wait for her at her grandmother’s house, eats the grandmother, dresses up as her, etc. The plot can organize these elements differently: for instance, the story could begin with the girl seeing the grandmother, being astonished at how she looks, and then go back to the moment she left home; or with the child returning home safely, thanking the woodsman, and telling her mother the preceding phases of the story….
The tale of Little Red Riding-Hood is so centered on its story (and, through it, on the plot) that it can be rendered in satisfying terms in any discourse, that is to say, using any form of representation: through cinematic images, or in French, German, or in comic strips (all of which has happened).
I have considered the relationships between expression and content in the contrast between prose and poetry on several occasions. Why in the Italian nursery rhyme did «la vispa Teresa avea tra l’erbetta / al volo sorpresa gentil farfalletta» (sparky Theresa catch amid the grass / a gentle little butterfly)? Why did she not catch it in a bush, or among climbing flowers, where it would have found it easier to suck the pollen that inebriates it? Naturally it is because «erbetta» (grass) rhymes with «farfalletta» (butterfly), whereas «cespuglio» (bush) would have rhymed with «guazzabuglio» (a mess). This is not a game. Let us leave sprightly Theresa and move to Montale: «Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato: / era il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia,
