I do not know how to solve this dilemma in theoretical terms. All I can do is quote Walt Whitman: «Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.» Except that this use of dialect probably took me back to my childhood and my native area, and therefore to a preconstructed world, at least in memory.
Constraints, and time
And yet (world versus language or language versus world) it is not that you spend two or three years constructing a world as though that world existed on its own, independently of the story you want to set in it. This «cosmogonical» phase goes hand in hand with (and in a way that I really could not reduce to a formula or program) a hypothesis about the supporting structure of the novel—and of the world you are creating. This structure consists essentially of constraints and temporal rhythms.
Constraints are fundamental in every artistic operation. A painter who decides to use oil rather than tempera, or a canvas rather than a wall, is choosing a constraint; likewise the composer who opts for one tonality at the outset (he may then modulate it all he likes, but he has to return to that opening tonality), and the poet who builds what is a cage of rhyming couplets or of hendecasyllables. And do not think that avant-garde painters, composers, and poets—who seem to avoid those constraints—do not construct others. They do, but you may not be obliged to notice them.
Choosing the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse as a scheme for the succession of events can be a constraint. But also setting the story at a precise date: you can make some things happen then, but not others. It can be a constraint deciding that, to indulge the magic obsessions of your characters, the number of chapters in Foucault’s Pendulum has to be 120, not one more or one less, and it has to be divided into ten parts, like the Sephiroth in the Kabbalah.
Constraints then gradually determine a temporal sequence. In The Name of the Rose, if the story had to follow a sequence based on the Apocalypse, plot time could coincide (except for substantial digressions) with the time of the story: the story begins with the arrival of William and Adso at the abbey, and ends with their departure. Easy (and easy to read).
With Foucault’s Pendulum the very pendular movement of the eponymous device forced me to adopt a different temporal structure. Casaubon arrives at the Conservatoire one evening, hides there, and conjures up past events, then the story returns to its starting point, etc. If for The Name of the Rose I had gradually built up a kind of sequential timetable or calendar, trying to work out what was to happen each day for a week, for Foucault’s Pendulum I created a sort of serpentine structure, which registered the shifts back to the past and the anticipations of the future. Like a measuring scale, or orthogonal Cartesian axes. The character is here now, but remembers what happened at time X in the past.
The beauty is that these schemes are rigid when you think of them at the time, but I have drawers full of schemes I constantly redid as the novel progressed. I mean, the beauty of the story is that you have to create constraints, but you must feel free to change them in the course of writing. Except that at that point you have to change everything and start again from scratch.
Besides, one of the constraints in the Pendulum was that the characters had to have lived through 1968, but since Belbo then writes his files on computer—which also plays a formal role in the whole story, since it in part inspires its aleatory and combinatory nature—the final events absolutely had to take place between 1983 and 1984 and not before. The reason is very simple: the first personal computers with word-processing programs went on sale in Italy in 1983 (or perhaps 1982). And this is worth bearing in mind by all those who try to explain the success of The Name of the Rose by insisting that it was written by computer. In 1978–79 you could scarcely find in America those cheap little computers called Tandy, and no one would ever have dared write more than one letter on them.
In order to make all that time elapse from 1968 to 1983,1 was forced to send Casaubon somewhere else. Where? Memories of some magic rituals I had witnessed there led me to Brazil (there I knew what I was talking about and what the shape of that world was). And this was the reason and the auspicious origin of what many found too long a digression, and which for me (and for some benevolent readers) was essential, because it allowed me to make happen in Brazil to Amparo, in shortened form, what would happen to the other characters in the course of the book. If IBM, Apple, or Olivetti had started selling word processors six or seven years earlier, my novel would have been different; there would have been no Brazil, to the relief of many superficial readers, but from my point of view it would have been a great loss.
The Island of the Day Before was based on a series of historical constraints and rigid novelistic restrictions. The historical constraints evolved from the fact that I needed Roberto to participate as a young man in the siege of Casale, to be there at Richelieu’s death, and then to arrive at his island after December 1642, but not later than 1643, the year in which Tasman went there, even though this was some months earlier than the time in which my story was set. But I could set the story only between July and August because that was the period when I saw the Fiji islands, and a ship took several months to get there: this explains the mischievous novelistic insinuations that I made in the final chapter, to persuade myself and the reader that perhaps Tasman had come back later to that archipelago without saying anything to anybody. Here one sees the heuristic usefulness of constraints that force you to invent silences, conspiracies, ambiguities.
You will ask me: why all these constraints? Was it really necessary for Roberto to be present at Richelieu’s death? Not at all. But it was necessary for me to set myself constraints. Otherwise the story could not have gone along under its own steam.
As for the novelistic constraints, Roberto had to be on the ship, not be able to get off it, and try in vain to learn to swim in order to reach the island. In the meantime, as he reflected on life and death, he would have to invent bit by bit, and then reject, through lack of intelligence, all the philosophical thought of that century. For the benevolent reader this would be more than just a constraint, placed just to receive stimuli: it would be the very essence of Desire. I would be the last to deny it. But since I am speaking about how I wrote and not what the reader could or should find in what I wrote (because, to say the latter, either the novel is enough on its own, or I have been wasting my time writing it and you reading it—which is not impossible), what I mean to say is that, on the one hand, it is the constraint that allows the novel to develop according to a particular Sense, and on the other it is the still-unclear idea of this Sense that suggests the constraints. Since one of these cannot function without the other, we talk of constraints rather than Sense, which is not something an author should pronounce on a posteriori.
A parenthesis. A rude hack—who wanted to mock Eco the novelist in order to punish Eco the politically committed polemicist—defined the novel as one long act of masturbation. In his crudeness, which was also lexical, the unwitting hack was dead right: the condition of a shipwreck separated forever from the object of desire is certainly, and by definition, onanistic. Except that the scribbler I am talking of, anchored in his own obtuse carnality, saw manna falling from heaven and read it as excreta from foul birds of prey. Nor did he catch the nature of «something mental»—and in the end metaphysical—in that solitary virtue, in that attempt to generate Being by spilling in disordered fashion the seed of a soul exasperated by solitude, until it reaches the point of vision.
But let us get back to the point. The point is that Roberto could not leave the ship (except at the end, but for uncertain objectives and outcomes). Consequently everything that had to be narrated but that did not happen on the ship had to come about via memory, unless the plot was to be flattened into just being the story, and end up relating in every detail how a young man, who went to Paris after his adventures at Casale, found himself on a ship, etc. Try if you like, but I can assure you that however vain my labors have been, yours will be even more so.
This imposed on me not a serpentine temporal sequence, as in the Pendulum, but more one step forward and three back, one step forward and two back, one step forward and one back. Roberto remembers something, and meanwhile something happens on the ship. Something happens on the ship, and Roberto remembers something. Gradually, as Roberto’s memories move from 1630 to 1643, events on the ship happen hour by
