For if (and here we really are playing, luckily for the history of poetry) a stream that «borbotta» (murmurs) had come along first, then the ills of life would have had to be revealed in the darkness and stench of a «grotto» (cave).
On the other hand, although Verga’s novel begins with «Un tempo i Malavoglia erano stati numerosi come i sassi della strada vecchia di Trezza …» (At one stage the Malavoglia had been as numerous as the stones on the old road to Trezza…) and «ce n’erano persino ad Ognina, ad Aci Castello» (there were even some at Ognina and Aci Castello), he certainly could have chosen some other name for his town or village (and perhaps he might have liked Montepulciano or Viserba), but his choice was limited by the decision to make his story happen in Sicily, and even the simile of the stones was determined by the nature of that place, which did not allow stretches of pastoral, almost Irish, «erbetta.»
Thus in poetry it is the choice of expression that determines the content, whereas in prose it is the opposite; it is the world the author chooses, the events that happen in it, that dictate its rhythm, style, and even verbal choices.
However, it would be a mistake to say that in poetry the content (and along with it the relationship between story and plot) is irrelevant. To give just one example, in Leopardi’s «A Silvia»there is a story (there was a young girl just like that, the poet was in love with her, she died, the poet remembers her), and there is a plot (the poet appears first, when the girl is now dead, and brings her alive again in his memory). It is not enough to say that in a translation of this poem the change of expression means giving up on so many phonic and symbolic values (the play on «Silvia» and » salivi» [you were crossing]), on rhyme and meter. The fact is that no adequate translation would fail to respect both story and plot. It would be the translation of another poem.
This may seem a banal observation, but even in a poetic text the author is speaking to us about a world (there are two houses, one opposite the other, there is a young girl «all’opre femminili intenta» [busy with her girl’s work]). All the more reason then that this should happen in narrative. Manzoni writes quite well (we might say), but what would his novel be if it did not have the Lombardy of the seventeenth century, Lake Como, two young lovers from a humble social background, an arrogant local aristocrat, and a cowardly curate? What would the Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) be if it were set in Naples while Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca was being hanged? Come on.
This is why, when I wrote The Name of the Rose, I spent a full year, if I remember correctly, without writing a line (and for Foucault’s Pendulum I spent at least two, and the same for The Island of the Day Before). Instead I read, did drawings and diagrams, invented a world. This world had to be as precise as possible, so that I could move around in it with total confidence. For The Name of the Rose I drew hundreds of labyrinths and plans of abbeys, basing mine on other drawings and on places I visited, because I needed everything to work well, I needed to know how long it would take two characters in conversation to go from one place to another. And this also dictated the length of the dialogues.
If in a novel I had to write «while the train stopped at Modena station, he quickly got out and bought the newspaper,» I could not do so unless I had been to Modena and had checked whether the train stops there long enough, and how far the newsstand is from the platform (and this would be true even if the train had to stop at Innisfree). All this may have little to do with the development of the story (I imagine), but if I did not do this, I could not tell the tale.
In Foucault’s Pendulum I say that the two publishing houses of Manuzio and Garamond are in two different but adjoining buildings, between which a passage had been built, with a frostedglass door and three steps. I spent a long time drawing several plans and working out how a passage could be built between the two buildings, and whether there had to be a difference of level between them. The reader takes those three steps without realizing it (I believe), but for me they were crucial.
Sometimes I have wondered whether it was necessary to design my world with such precision, seeing that those details were not prominent in the tale. But it was certainly useful for me in gaining confidence with that environment. Moreover, I have been told that if in one of Luchino Viscontis films two characters had to talk about a box full of jewels, even though the box was never opened, the director would insist that there were real jewels in it, otherwise the characters would not have been credible—that is to say, the actors would have performed with less conviction.
So for The Name of the Rose I drew all the monks of the abbey. I drew almost all of them (though not every single one) with a beard, even though I was not at all sure that the
Benedictines wore beards at that time—and this was later a scholarly problem that Jean-Jacques Annaud, when he made the film, had to solve with the help of his learned consultants. It is worth noting that in the novel it is never said whether they were bearded or not. But I needed to recognize my characters as I was making them speak or act, otherwise I would not have known what to make them say.
For Foucault’s Pendulum I spent evening after evening, right through to closing time, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where some of the main events of the story took place. In order to write of the Templars I went to visit the Forêt d’Orient in France, where there are traces of their commanderies (which are referred to in the novel in a few vague allusions). To describe Casaubon’s night walk through Paris, from the Conservatoire to Place des Vosges and then to the Eiffel Tower, I spent various nights between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. walking, dictating into a pocket tape recorder everything I could see, so as not to get the street names and intersections wrong. For The Island of the Day Before I naturally went to the South Seas, to the precise geographical location where the book is set, to see the color of the sea, the sky, the fishes, and the corals—and at various hours of the day. But I also worked for two or three years on drawings and small models of ships of the period, to find out how big a cabin or cubbyhole was, and how one could move from one to the other.
When a foreign publisher asked me recently if it was not worthwhile including a plan of the ship with the novel, as had been done for all editions of The Name of the Rose with the plan of the abbey, I threatened to call a lawyer. In The Name of the Rose I wanted the reader to understand perfectly what the place was like, but in The Island I wanted the reader to be confused, and not be able to find his bearings in the little labyrinth of that ship, which held surprise after surprise in store. But to be able to talk about a dark, uncertain environment, experienced amid dreams, waking, and alcoholic stimulation, to confuse the reader’s ideas, I needed my own ideas to be very clear, and to write constantly referring to a ship’s structure that was calculated down to the last millimeter.
From the World to the Style
Once this world has been designed, the words will follow, and they will be (if all goes well) those that that world and all the events that take place in it require. For this reason the style in The Name of the Rose is—throughout—that of the medieval chronicler, precise, faithful, naive, and amazed, flat when necessary (a humble fourteenth-century monk does not write like Gadda, nor remember things like Proust). In Foucault’s Pendulum, on the other hand, a plurality of languages had to come into play: Aglié’s educated and archaizing language, Ardenti’s PseudoDannunzian, the disenchanted and ironically literary language of Belbo’s secret files, which is both deliberate and tortuous, Garamond’s mercantile
