Then for The Island of the Day Before it was the very nature of the world it took off from that determined not just the style but the very structure of dialogue and the constant conflict between narrator and character, with the subsequent participation of the reader who is continually appealed to as a witness and accomplice in that conflict. In fact, in Foucault’s Pendulum the story takes place in our time, so there was no problem of recovering a language that was no longer used.
In The Name of the Rose the story is set in fairly remote centuries, but at a time when people spoke a different language, the ecclesiastical Latin that appears so often (according to some, too often) in the book to remind us that the story took place in a distant time. For this reason the stylistic model was indirectly the Latin of the chroniclers of the time, but directly it was the modern translations that are commonly read (and in any case I had taken the precaution of warning the reader that I was transcribing from a nineteenth-century translation of a medieval chronicle).
In The Island, however, my character could not but talk in a baroque way, though I myself could not do so, except by parodying the manuscript that Manzonirejects at the beginning of his transcription of it in The Betrothed. So then I had to have a narrator who at times gets irritated with the verbal excesses of his character, at times indulges in them himself, and at times tempers them with appeals to the reader.
Thus three different worlds imposed three different «exercices de style» on me, which then, in the course of writing, became three ways of thinking and seeing, and I was almost led to translate my own daily experiences at that time into those terms.
Baudolino the Exception
Up to this point I have said that (i) one starts with a seminal idea, and that (ii) the construction of the narrative world determines the style. My latest experience in fiction, Baudolino, seems to contradict these two principles. As for the seminal idea, for at least two years I had many, and if there are too many seminal ideas it is a sign that they are not seminal. In fact, each one of them gave rise not to the general structure of the book but only to situations that were limited to just a few chapters.
I wont say what my first idea was, because I abandoned it—for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because I was unable to develop it—and perhaps I will keep it in reserve, who knows, for a fifth novel. This idea was accompanied by a secondary idea, which can be connected in a banal way with the topos of a murder in a closed room, and as you will see if you read the novel, I took up the topos only in the chapter on Fredericks death.
The second idea was that the final scene should take place among the mummified corpses in the Capuchin church in Palermo (in fact, I had been there several times and had collected many photographs of the place and of the individual mummies). Whoever has read the book knows that this idea is exploited in the final confrontation between Baudolino and the Poet, but in the economy of the novel it has only a marginal, or, rather, purely scene-setting, function.
The third was that the novel was to be about a group of characters who made forgeries. I had dealt with the semiotics of the fake on several occasions, of course.* Initially the characters were to have been contemporaries who decided to found a daily paper and who experimented, in a series of dummy numbers, with how they could create scoops. In fact, I thought of entitling the novel Numero Zero (Dummy Run). But even then there was something that did not convince me, and I was afraid I would find myself dealing with the same set of characters as in Foucault’s Pendulum.
Until I thought of what was one of the most successful fakes of Western history, namely, the Letter of Prester John. This idea fructified a series of memories and reading experiences. In 1960 I edited the Italian edition (Le terre leggendarie) of Lands Beyond by Ley and Sprague du Camp for Bompiani. There was a chapter on Prester John’s kingdom and another on the lost tribes of Israel. On the cover they had put a skiapod, or shadow-footed monster (from a fifteenth-century engraving, I think, with fake coloring and done with a stencil). Years later I bought a colored map from an Ortelius atlas that had been cut up, the very map representing the lands of Prester John, and I hung it in my study. In the 1980s I read various versions of the letter.† In short, Prester John had always intrigued me, and I was attracted by the idea of making the monsters that populated his Kingdom come alive again, as well as those spoken of in the various Alexander Romances, Mandeville’s travels, and a whole series of bestiaries. And finally it was a good opportunity to return to my beloved Middle Ages. So my seminal idea was that of Prester John. But I had not started with this idea, I had simply arrived at it.
Perhaps all this would not have been enough for me had the letter not been attributed (it is one possible hypothesis) to the Imperial Chancery of Frederick Barbarossa. Now Frederick Barbarossa was another magical name for me, because I was born in Alessandria, the city that was founded in order to oppose the emperor. That led to a series of instinctive decisions, like a chain reaction: to discover a Frederick that went beyond the traditional clichés, seen by a son rather than by his enemies and courtiers (and off I went with further reading on Barbarossa), to tell the origins of my city and its legends, including that of Gagliaudo and his cow.
Years earlier I had written an essay on the foundation and history of Alessandria (entitled, as it happens, «The Miracle of San Baudolino»),* and from there came the idea to have this history lived through by a character called after the patron saint of the city, Baudolino, to make Baudolino the son of Gagliaudo, and to give the story a popular, picaresque thrust—thus creating a sort of counterpoint to The Name of the Rose, since the latter was a story of intellectuals talking in the high style, whereas this was a tale about the people and military men who were on the whole rather crude, talking in a style that was almost like dialect.
But here too, what was I to do? Make Baudolino talk in his Po Valley twelfth-century pseudodialect, when we have very few vernacular documents from that period, and none of them from the Piedmont area? Make a narrator talk, and have his modern style spoil Baudolino’s spontaneity? However, suddenly at this point another obsession came to my rescue, one that had been going through my head for some time, without my ever thinking that it would be of use to me on that occasion: narrate a story set in Byzantium. Why? Because I knew very little about Byzantine civilization, and I had never been to Constantinople. To many this might seem a rather weak motive for deciding to narrate something that happened in Constantinople, all the more so since Constantinople had only a tangential link with Frederick Barbarossa’s story. But sometimes one decides to tell a story only to get to know it better.
No sooner said than done. Off I went to Constantinople. I read many things about ancient Byzantium, mastered its topography, and came across Nicetas Choniates and his Chronicle. I had found the key, the way to articulate the «voices» of my story: an almost transparent narrator recounts the discussion between Nicetas and Baudolino, alternating Nicetas’s learned, high-flown reflections with Baudolino’s picaresque tales, without Nicetas, or the reader, ever being able to tell if and when Baudolino is lying, the only fixed point being that he maintains he is a liar (the paradox of the liar and the Cretan Epimenides).
I had this play of «voices,» but not Baudolino’s voice. Here I contradicted the second of my two principles. When I was still reading the chronicles of the Crusaders’ capture of
Constantinople (and I decided that I would have to narrate the story of that event which already appears so novelistic in the texts of Ville-hardouin, Robert de Clary, and Nicetas), just to pass the time I wrote out in pen, in the country, a sort of diary by Baudolino, in a hypothetical twelfthcentury Po Valley pidgin, which then became the opening of the novel. It is true that I rewrote those pages several times in subsequent years, after consulting historical and dialect dictionaries, and all the documents I could lay my hands on, but already in that first draft, through its linguistic style, it became clear to me how Baudolino would think and speak. Thus, in the end, Baudolino’s language was not born from the construction of a world, but a world was created from the stimulus
