I think... You know one of my great friends
was Roland Barthes... died with the remorse
that he didn't write a novel. And, he was wrong because
all his essays were narratively fantastic and beautiful, okay. On the contrary, I realised that
even though I started writing novels at the age of 48, I was always narrating - even my my academic papers
had the form of a narration. So I... satisfied a sort of
narrative impulse in two ways: by giving a narrative form
to my researches and telling stories to my children. Then probably I started writing
a real novel when my children were too old to...
to listen to my stories. I always had this pleasure in telling a story:
maybe they were jokes. Then, when I was a student,
I wrote many texts for musicals. It was another way to tell stories, but without giving
too much importance to that - it was... an amusement. [Interviewer:] What then did decide -
that now you have to write a novel? There is no answer. A very provocative answer I give some time because
I am disturbed by this question. It happens when you feel
that you have to piss and you have to run to the toilet, hahaha! The real episode,
I don't know how much it counts, but it happened that way. A friend of mine, a young lady who was working for a small publisher
went once to me and said: 'We want to start a series
of short detection stories, 'written not by writers,
but by sociologists, politicians... 'Do you want to do... ?' I said: 'No. 'First of all, because I am convinced
I am unable to write dialogues'. It seems that dialogues are
the best part of my novels. 'Second... 'if I had to write a detection story 'it would be 500 pages long 'and take place in a medieval monastery.' And, she said: 'No, it's not what I...
ciao, ciao, ciao! I went home... and I started to write a list
of names of monks. It means that probably
there was something circulating in my belly... without I was conscious of it - otherwise... Otherwise, I could have given
another answer to... but it was unconscious -
there was something... Third explanation: one is two pieces,
the other... Third: at that point, I'm finally seated some years
at my university chair - full professorship. I had published 50 books, I was translated already in English,
in French... so... I was at the point of your life
in which either you like humbly escape to Africa to sell guns or you escape with a Cuban ballerina and abandon the family or you write a novel...
to do something different. The real surprise and the real pleasure was that writing doesn't mean
to take a pen and to trace alphabetical... It's starting a research. For 'The Name of the Rose',
the research was very short - no more than two years -
because it was about the Middle Ages. and I had studied and written about,
so it was enough to open... and I get the files
and files are falling at my feet. But, with the 'Pendulum',
it took eight years. And, for the other novels -
six years per novel. And, that is the fascinating
aspect of the... of telling a story -
to create a world, to decide how our spaces, characters... So, it.. Except for 'The Name of the Rose',
I repeat, for the others, for at least two years I didn't write. I was creating a world in which
my character then could move with ease. That is the most fascinating part
of the story: to stay six years in which
nobody knows what you are doing, but, everything you are doing,
even to drink a coffee, can give you an idea about the story. Then the writing, when it comes,
is pretty felicitous. But, then you have moments in which
you need to close everything in your drawer and to stay 15 days
doing something else - okay. But, that's natural. It was told by many, many, many writers:
you have a moment of crisis in which you don't know how to
get out of a certain situation. At that time, I am usually helped
by swimming, either in a swimming pool or in the sea. You swim and you... and you think. And, when swimming
with your body very relaxed, you have a lot of new ideas. I always repeat it is not the author
who writes the novel - the author posits some starting points. Then, the novel writes himself-- by itself. You have to follow the logic
of the characters. I didn't start this story thinking of a journalist
called Braggadocio: it... he arrived in the middle of the story
and obliged me to follow him. I have first of all to create a world. I have a lot of drawings in which...
for 'The Name of the Rose' I designed all the faces of the monks, which were not so useful because
then I changed it. But, I needed to have points of reference. For the labyrinth of the library I designed, I don't know, 50,
60 different labyrinths. studying all the existing labyrinths. For 'The Island of the Day Before',
I designed all the interior of the ship - very complicated with a staircase,
a ladder there... because I had to know how my character could move. But, when the German publisher - you know the Germans are
always precise and - wanted to reproduce the design
on the book, I said: 'No'. I had to know what happened -
the reader has to be as... as confused as the character. First of all, for me, there is a radical difference between
prose and poetry. In poetry, the words come first... and then, what you have to say follows. There was the great Italian poet,
Eugenio Montale. Another poet who had even
a love affair with Montale wrote recently - before her death - some anecdotal stories about Montale who had disappeared
after the Nobel Prize. And, she remembered that one beautiful poem of Montale
was speaking of certain flowers - I think were anemones,
but it doesn't matter - flowers with a beautiful name. One day, they were walking... and there were anemones there. And, Montale says:
'Ah, how beautiful, what [are they]?' 'You wrote an entire poem about them'. 'Ah', he said, 'my poems
are about words, not about things'. It means that the poems of Montale
are full of references to flowers. He never saw those flowers: he was reacting to the words -
the words started it. With prose it is different. First, there is a world - a WORLD. In this world, there's certain things happen and your language has to
follow the story, so... I am very... I am a chameleon. A chameleon - the animal that...
because in 'The Name of the Rose', my style was the one of
the medieval chronicle - very simple, very elementary... In 'The Island of the Day Before',
which takes place in the Baroque Era... I did my best to
imitate the Baroque Languages so I read many, many authors
of that time. I paid an enormous attention
not to use words that at that time were not used. So then, after the novel,
I cancelled a lot of words because I realised that they were... posterior, and so,
I had to substitute them with... So, every story demands
its own language. I wrote a book called 'Lector in Fabula' about narrativity in which I make a radical distinction between the empirical reader
and the model reader. The empirical reader is
the reader which exists. So, Barbara Cartland or - I don't know -
the author of pornographic novels or very elementary detection stories, looks at the pre-existing reader: 'I write for the housewife... 'I write for young people'. I think that serious authors,
on the contrary, build up - construct - their reader. The first of my Italian publisher that was immediately enthusiastic of
'In the Name of the Rose', he said: 'But it's a... the initial descriptions
with historical events are too long'. I said: 'No, I want to prepare the reader
to face a narrative situation, 'so he has to make a penitence. 'If it is unable to do, okay, go!' [Interviewer:] That's really the exact
opposite of Dan Brown, for instance. He doesn't do that,
even though some people say that it's the same plot more or less-- [Eco:] Dan Brown writes for
credulous readers. But, once I met him -
he's one of my characters. He's one of the characters of
'Foucault's Pendulum'. Dan Brown and me,
we read the same books, but he took them seriously. On the contrary, I tried to give a grotesque representation
of those stories. He took them seriously who...
he didn't, but he wanted the reader
[to take] them seriously. I don't know if Dan Brown is
a believer or an [artist], but he wants to produce believing. I think that everybody that writes
something hopes to become Homer, but one knows that it is
a sort of imaginary projection. I can only give you a cue. When starting speaking with
some friends about the fact that I had finished a novel, we said we should give it to
Franco Maria Ricci publisher who was a very...
very aristocratic publisher who made a collection of books
directed by Jorge Luis Borges, but few, few thousand copies. Okay, that's the first idea was that So, I wanted to give it to it to
a small publisher. I didn't want to give it to my normal publisher because
I thought it was too easy and he would have
accepted it immediately. No, I wanted to be judged. But... in the space of two weeks,
I received two calls: one from Giulio Einaudi,
the great other publisher, another from the director of Mondadori who said: 'We know you have
written a novel: 'we'll take it without reading it?' At that point I said: 'Nothing to do'. I gave it to my normal publisher
who was enthusiastic and said: 'Ah, we can start with 30,000 copies'. 'You're crazy, okay then'. So then, step-by-step, that 30,000
became 300,000. It was gradual so it gave me time to
adapt myself to this situation. No, it didn't change my life in this sense
because I was... living pretty comfortably even before -
I wrote articles for the newspapers and had my salary as
a university professor... So, I was not poor and I didn't need to buy a yacht. Simply, the success reduced my freedom. Because, you cannot go to the theatre
for the opening because you are besieged,
you cannot... So, I was obliged to live more privately
with friends and in the countryside. My old friend Gabriel García Márquez,
he wrote a lot of beautiful novels, but people asked always him for 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' -
you are condemned. Only some authors can escape this curse if their best novel comes at the end, but if one successful novel comes
at the beginning. you are condemned to speak
all of your life of that one. [Interviewer:] And it's okay with you?
[Eco:] No, because I - for instance - I think that the best novel I wrote
was the 'Pendulum' and not 'The Name of the Rose' -
that the other ones were... But, okay, I am...
in this moment before you arrived I was reading a treatment that
Italian television want to make ten episodes out of
'The Name of the Rose'. You cannot escape it. No, you try to escape
but your publisher says: 'No, please do it'. After 'The Name of the Rose', I start... usually... a book - not only a novel -
is like a child: it [takes] two years to grow it up,
to follow it... This is a case of: 'I am following my book - 'I cannot think of another...
of another one'. Two years: like a child. So, after the second year, you start... to say 'ah' and
if I had to write another novel... And I... the first time I said:
'but, I think that 'in "The Name of the Rose"
I have proved everything: 'there is nothing else I can tell'. And, suddenly I was struck
by two images. One was the one of the pendulum that
I saw at the age of 20 in Paris. And, the other was the image of a boy
playing the trumpet in the cemetery. That was an event that
really happened to me. And, I said: 'Ah, a novel
starting with the pendulum 'and ending with the cemetery - fine'. What to put in between:
it took me eight years to discover. But, at that moment,
I realised that to write a novel meant to start from an image. In 'The Name of the Rose'
was the image of a monk being poisoned while reading a book. For 'The Island of the Day Before' was to discover that there were
marvellous watches with the world time and the date - 'ah' - and so on and so on. You start from a poignant image. I mean - me. Probably another author has
another procedure. I don't know - it's not my... problem. But, for me, it happened always like that. You start from the image and then -
I repeat - the novel goes by itself. If you have time -
if you don't want to do it immediately. I am... a devotee of the great Indian proverb: 'Sit on the banks of the river and wait - 'the corpse of your enemy will pass
one day or another'. They computer changed a lot. For instance, but I... I consider the computer
a very spiritual engine... because you can write at
the speed of your thought. Sometimes you need
the resistance of matter - you would like to carve
what you think on a stone. and sometimes you need a pen, but usually with the computer
you follow the speed of your thought. Then you have all the time you need
to correct, to cancel, to remake... In this sense, at least,
it helped me a lot. 'The Name of the Rose'
was not written on the computer because it didn't exist at that time. It was not in commerce -
the personal computer. But, immediately after,
I was helped I think - yes... a lot. That can increase your productivity because you are asked to write
a lot of things and you recycle always the same article
changing the beginning and the end. Okay. And then it can help your
research obviously. For instance, why did this novel
[take] me only one year? First, because part of the events were
belonging to my personal memory. Second, because if you wanted
the autopsy of Mussolini you find it immediately in the internet -
you have not to make remote research. Sometimes, on the contrary,
you have to... to walk through libraries or to places -
places for me is very important - to visit the places. When I wrote 'The Island of
the Day Before' I spent... one month about in the southern islands otherwise I couldn't have
described the colours. So, visiting places and... which is a part of the research. I always say if, in a novel,
I have to write 'once arrived at the station of Lyon 'he stepped down from the train
to buy a newspaper', I have to know if there is a kiosk -
if there is a newsstand - close to the train. I have to go to Lyon
even though the episode is not so important for the story. I have to know the number of
steps in a staircase in order to make my character climb up. Being a philosopher... and a semiotician
studying science and communication, I know how it is difficult to
establish if something is true, while it's less difficult to
establish that something is false. So, passing through the study of
fakes and false, it's easier to understand
what can be probably true. And, that's why I was
always fascinated by by those things. I am a rare books collector too. And, my collection concerns only... fake books - books that say
the contrary of... So, I don't have Galileo Galilei but I have Ptolemy because
it was wrong about the movement of the Earth. All together in different places
there should be about 50,000. Here, when I arrived 25 years ago
there were 30,000, but since, many of them...
and I think... I have no more time to count them, but I think there are 35,000 - 35,000-- [Interviewer:] Do you have time to read... alot or... Another provocative way to
answer such a question is: I don't read - I write. You have to take into account that one [who] has - by age - has worked as
a university professor sometimes is able to understand
what the book says after the first ten pages. You know if you have to go on
or if it is enough. You are helped also by
your experience in reading. There is a cursory reading -
not the quick reading of which... once Woody Allen said:
'I am using the quick reading - 'I read "War and Peace" - 'he speaks of Russia'. There are my books -
translations and... From there to... and they are books on me. [Interviewer:] About you, yes, okay.
