CARNIVALISATION OF CULTURES: A BAKHTINIAN READING OF UMBERTO ECO’S NOVELS

Dissertation submitted to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Reenu George

Department of English SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT KALADY – 683 574

JANUARY 2017 CARNIVALISATION OF CULTURES: A BAKHTINIAN READING OF UMBERTO ECO’S NOVELS

Dissertation submitted to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Reenu George

Department of English SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT KALADY – 683 574

JANUARY 2017 Dr. N Jenny Rappai Associate Professor Department of English Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Kalady, Kerala

Certificate

This is to certify that the thesis entitled Carnivalisation of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s Novels, is an authentic record of research work carried out by Smt. Reenu George in the Department of English, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, under my guidance and supervision and that no part of the thesis has been presented before for the award of any other degree, diploma, fellowship, title or recognition before.

Kalady 03 January 2017 Dr. N Jenny Rappai Research Supervisor

Declaration

I, hereby declare that the thesis entitled Carnivalisation of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s Novels, submitted by me to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, is a bonafide record of the original work done by me under the supervision and guidance of Dr. N. Jenny Rappai, Associate Professor of English, and that the thesis has not formed the basis for the award of any degree or diploma.

Kalady 03 January 2017 Reenu George

Acknowledgement

The thesis would not have prevailed, but for my firm faith in God. I am indebted to the Almighty for making this possible. I am obliged to my father (late) for his motivation and support during the writing of my thesis.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervising teacher, Dr. N. Jenny Rappai for her guidance, help, encouragement and understanding in the writing of my thesis.

I acknowledge with gratitude the help and encouragement given to me by the faculty members of the Department of English, University of Calicut.

I also record my gratitude to the members on the staff of the English Department Library, CHMK Library, University of Calicut and Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Library, Kalady for the help given to me. I am indebted to the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Department of English and SSUS Kalady for providing all necessary facilities for my work.

I record a special word of thanks to my husband Bijoy and my daughters: Merlin, Sherlin & Jeslin for being an immense source of help and sustenance throughout the period of my research.

Lastly, I express my gratitude to all the people who, in various ways have helped me in completing the thesis.

Reenu George

Preface

The corpus of Umberto Eco’s novels ranges from The Name of the Rose to

Numero Zero. His novels are historiographic in nature as they engage with history and fiction simultaneously. Eco, through his novels, opens up a dialogue between history and fiction. The novels are metafictions as they discuss the textual strategies like ‘the Author’, ‘the text’ and ‘the reader’. The novels, in the process of actualization become ‘virtual texts’ that include not only the writer’s repertoire of knowledge but also the readers’ world knowledge. It becomes an

‘Encyclopedia’ of Knowledge. Eco’s novels are collages of signs and quotations and form linguistic pastiches.

“Canivalization of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s

Novels” has its relevance in the context of Cultural Studies where a text is interpreted in terms of culture. The study aims to analyze the novels of Umberto

Eco from a Bakhtinian perspective employing the concepts: “Heteroglossia”,

“Polyphony”, “Dialogism” and “Carnival”. In the context, the role of the Reader and the concept of the Text are also analyzed.

Contents

Introduction 1 - 16

Chapter 1 Dialogism, Reader and the Text 17 - 59

Chapter 2 Dialogism in Eco’s Novels 60 - 105

Chapter 3 Reader and the Text 106 - 144

Chapter 4 Intertextual Rhizomes 145 - 186

Conclusion 187 - 200

Works Consulted 201 - 217

The postmodern reply to the modern consists in recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed…must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of a postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.

Still, there is a solution. He can say,“As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly−.”

(Eco, The Name of the Rose, pp. 530 – 1) 1

Introduction

"This text is a textile of other texts, a 'whodunit' of quotations, a

book built upon books" (Stephens, 51). This forms the description of

Eco’s first novel The Name of the Rose. This is a mode of writing that has brought him under the category of Post modern writers who perceive text as a fabric of quotations. As Todorov states, "there is no utterance devoid of intertextual dimension," ( 60- 62) there is no literary text without relation to other texts which have preceded it of will follow it.

Eco, in fact, has created ‘postmodernisms’ through his literary corpus and interrogates the concepts of text, history, reality, author function, role of the reader and interpretation. He becomes a successor to Italo Calvino, in his engagement with postmodernism. Eco’s novels are often a ‘montage’ of different cultural artifacts belonging to

both high and low culture. He fuses the ‘academic’ with the ‘popular’

thereby subverting the canon of literature.

Umberto Eco (1932-2006) was born in the city of Alessandria in

Northern Italy. His first novel The Name of the Rose (1980) is a blending of history, semiotics, medieval studies and literary theory. In it, he

discusses the existential experiences of man in a pluralistic society. The 2 novel presents an Italian monastery with a labyrinthine library where

scholars from different parts of the world seek refuge. There are

antiquarians, librarians, lubricators and scribes to pursue their studies of

interest. The narrator Adso, a Benedictine novice, in company with the

protagonist William, a Franciscan monk arrives at the abbey to

investigate the murder of a young monk Adelmo.

During the course of investigation, several other monks die under mysterious circumstances. Since William and Adso belong to two different congregations, they differ in their approach to life. The

Benedictine who has been brought up in strict discipline restricts himself from enjoying the beauty of nature while the Franciscan monk basks in the beauty of the cosmos, enjoying the landscape he sees around. There are also monks of other orders, for instance, Ubertino of Casale of the

Cluniac order who advocates poverty and criticizes the authority of the

Pope. His conversation with William reveals how his ideology is different from that of the free thinking William’s. Ubertino is a simple man strictly adhering to the vow of poverty.

In the novel, the spiritual always remain in dialectic with the secular. Salvatore and Remigeo masquerading spirituality are very much secular within. Salvatore, with his disproportionate appearance, is always the confined in life and his preparation to perform the rustic ritual is his 3 strategy to fight the forces that push him to the periphery. Jorge, the

blind elderly monk, who ardently guards the library, symbolizes the

ancient Christian spirit that equates humans to the fallen beings.

Throughout the novel there is the dialogism between the old generation

Christian belief and the new one. And it reaches its zenith in the final

chapters which portray an open confrontation between these two philosophies. Jorge believes that Aristotle has undone the teachings

Christianity accumulated over centuries. His second book on comedy

elevates laughter to the status of art nullifying fear. Jorge dreads that this

book, once it sees light, will deconstruct the very foundation of

Christianity which is the fear of God. (Proverbs 9:10)

The second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) is a critique on the excess conspiracy theories found in postmodern literature. The very title

‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ is a scientific term which pervades throughout the

narrative. Pendulum is both a signifier and signified in the novel. At the

very outset of the novel, the narrator Casaubon is hiding in the

Conservatoire in Paris and the sequence of events are unfolded in his

flashback. The narrator’s voice is the author’s voice in its refracted form.

But simultaneously it contradicts that of the author. Very often the

readers are made to doubt on the reliability of Casaubon’s narration. 4

Casaubon, Diotellevi and Belbo are associated with the Garamond

Press. They were entrusted with the duty of editing scores of manuscripts submitted by diabolic writers. Colonel Ardenti approaches them with a manuscript. He shows them a message which he claims to have got from a man named Ingolf. He interprets it as a Templar message about the secret of telluric currents guarded by them. He leaves the manuscript with the editors. Later, he is found missing. The trio becomes interested in the message and start working on it. The evolved ‘The Plan’ by feeding words, selected at random from the manuscripts, into their personal computer. They become so obsessed with ‘The Plan’ and started to believe in its existence. The invisible authorial voice that reveals the cabalistic background of Diotellevi, the research interest of Casaubon and the mystical experience of Belbo’s childhood and his creativity failure, indirectly proclaim narrator’s voice as unreliable.

Amparo, who Casaubon meets at Brazil experiences frenzy at the

Umbanda ritual. Being a Marxist, her religious experience contradicts her ideology. Rather than being a victim to the spiritual experience, she prefers to withdraw from it for fear of losing herself. Agile, the elderly man who believes himself to be Comte de Saint Germane and Garamond, the owner of the press become a part of ‘The Plan’ while Belbo and 5

Diotellevi falls victim to it. Belbo is killed, Diotellevi is affected with cancer and Casaubon goes in hiding for fear of being captured and killed.

The Island of the Day Before (1994) is set in the backdrop of seventeenth century Europe engaged in geographical explorations to find the secret of longitude. The protagonist Roberto is commissioned to take part in the expedition to discover the punto Fiji. He is shipwrecked and is washed upon an abandoned ship. The ship is near a harbor through which,

Roberto believes, runs the International Date Line (180º longitude). He sees the land from the ship but is not able to swim. He is marooned in the ship. Trapped in the ship, he begins to reminisce about his love. He imagines a twin brother, a split from his own persona, being responsible for all his misfortunes.

Baudolino (2000) narrates the adventurous history of Baudolino.

He enters Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade when the city is in a chaos. In the confusion he rescues Niketas Choniates who is attacked by the crusaders. He recounts his life story to Niketas, the historian. The story begins in 1155, when Baudlino, a Freschetan boy is sold to

Frederick I. At the court, he learns Latin and about the power struggles of northern Italy. He is sent to Paris for education. In Paris, he meets

Archpoet, Abdul, Boron and Kyot. He comes to know about the legendary Kingdom of Prester John and dreams of reaching the fable 6

Kingdom. In the mean time, Emperor Frederick fights to subdue the independent and assertive states of Northern Italy. After the death of the

Emperor, Baudolino and his friends set off in search of the legendary

Kingdom. Baudolino and his friends return to Constantinople after their adventurous journey. Like Casaubon in Foucault’s Pendulum, Baudolino is also an unreliable narrator as he is a master liar. His line of narration of the story is his attempt to penetrate into the mainstream and to a great extent, he succeeds in holding the reins of history but falls off the moment Frederick I dies. He compensates his failure to get himself associated with the mainstream by setting off in search of the Kingdom of

Prester John. Baudolino’s voice is the voice of a man who when fails to find a place in the recorded history creates a history of his own. The inflated world of his falsehood collapses the moment the Paphnutius reveals to him the secret of Frederick’s death.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004) deals with the life of

Yambo, an antiquarian book dealer who loses his memory due to a stroke.

He remembers everything he has read but does not remember his name, his past and his relations. After his doctor’s advice, he goes to Solara, his childhood home in an attempt to recover his past. He searches his old newspapers, books, magazines and childhood comic books. He fails to regain his memories. He relives the experiences of his generation. Adult 7

Yambo revisits Child Yambo’s notebooks to retrieve his personal memory. Through Yambo, Eco narrates the condition of Italians affected by a cultural amnesia. The historical past is revisited to redeem the present from the schizophrenic experience of the Italian community.

The Prague Cemetery (2010), for most of its part is written in the form of a diary entry. The main character, Simonini jots down his experiences in a diary as a sort of “talking cure” to rid himself off the traumatic experiences of the past. He hates Jews. After the death of his grandfather, Simononi studies law and is employed by a lawyer who teaches him the art of forgery. Piedmont government secret service makes use of him. Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand Red Shirts’ invades Sicily and

Simonini is sent to spy on Garibaldi’s movements. He finds out that

Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand Shirts’ are students and not peasants. At Sicily, he meets the French novelist Alexander Dumas and Italian patriot Nino

Bixo. Simonini blows up a ship to destroy the guarded documents in

Nievo’s possession. He is banished to Paris where he sets up his business of forging documents. He works for French secret service as a forger. Eco makes him responsible for the rumors and forgeries of nineteenth century including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He wakes up one morning

to find that he has lost his memory. Dr. Froide gives him the idea of

“talking cure” and he decides to write his experiences in a diary. 8

Numero Zero (2015) is Eco’s swan-song published during his life

time. It centers on a newspaper called Domani, which will never be

published. Vimercate finances the venture. His aim is to get into the inner

sanctum of power. With the ’zero issues’ in the newspaper, he can

manage to threaten powerful figures in the world of finance and politics.

Colonna is hired by Seimei to work on the newspaper. He meets

Braggadocio who is a paranoid .He finds conspiracy in everything and

comes up with the claim that Mussolini has not been killed but has been

smuggled by the Church authorities to Argentina where he waits for a

fascist coup attack to regain his power. The novel deals with the

continuing confusion and controversy in Italy after the Second World

War regarding the death of Benito Mussolini.

His major theoretical works include: La struttura assente (1968;

literally: The Absent Structure), A Theory of Semiotics(1975), The Role of

the Reader (1979), Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984), The

Limits of Interpretation (1990), Kant and the Platypus (1997), and From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and

Interpretation (2014).

Like Calvino, Eco uses Oulipean narrative especially in Foucault’s

Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Oulipo (Ouvroir de literature

potentielle- The Workshop for Potential Literature) is a group of 9 novelists, poets mathematicians and others who experimented with writing by infusing mathematical or scientific principles into literature.

This narrative gives importance to rules that work to define terrains of the text. Jean Jacques Thomas and Lee Hilliker state, Oulipean texts “not only furnish directions for use but also reveal the code that prescribes a general principle of textual production.”(26) Eco, in his novels makes extensive use of the past/ history to represent the present reality. In his novels, he revisits the past not with innocence but with a sense of humor and parody. The novels question the position of the author, the role of the reader and the authenticity of writing. Thus the study becomes very relevant in the present context where literary studies have adopted the cultural studies paradigm where the author is related to the reader through text/culture.

The thesis tries to analyze how Eco’s novels engage with

Bhaktinian theory of dialogism; how different characters enter into dialogue with one another, with the text, with the author ,with the reader

and how the texts become a carnival of many other texts and of cultures.

It attempts to explore the role of the reader in the intertextual corpus of

Eco’s novels.

Apart from the two edited works by Peter Bondanella (New Essays on Umberto Eco, published in 2009) and Rocco Capozzi (Reading Eco: 10

An Anthology, published in 1997), studies on Eco have been confined to are a very few articles on Eco by Steven Sallis, Carole M Cusak and

Jeffry Garret. Most of the studies are on the earlier works of Eco like The

Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum , Baudolino and The Mysterious

Flame of Queen Loana. They analyze the semiotic, cultural and historical aspects of the novels.

New Essays on Umberto Eco has ten different articles written on

Eco and his writing. “Eco and Popular Culture” by Norma Bouchard focuses on Eco’s engagement with both popular and high cultural artifacts. It examines how Eco has approached the cultural field as a vast domain of symbolic productions where both high and low coexist. The article concentrates on Eco’s non fictional works and observes how among the large corpus of his writing, there are almost equal number of works related to both lofty and popular cultures.

Cinzia Bianchi and Manuela Gieri’s “Eco’s Semiotic Theory” traces the development of encyclopedia in Semiotics and Philosophy of

Language. The idea of unlimited semiosis which is central to Eco’s theory of Semiotics is borrowed from Pierce. The article discusses Eco’s idea of interpretation and his reaction against exaggerated deconstructionist interpretations, Eco discusses the importance of a kind of regulation for interpretation. 11

Indeed he also intended to emphasize the necessity of a constant

dialectic between the initiative of the reader and the fidelity to the

text at a time when most scholars’ seemed to privilege the role of

the reader or the intentio lectoris. Most importantly, Eco deemed

problematic and even questionable the tendency shown by most

deconstructionist thought that considered the text solely as

generated by the initiative of the reader and in so doing exasperated

and multiplied the possible reading paths in order to underscore the

inconsistency of more traditional approaches to literary criticism.

(24)

Guy Raffa’s “Eco’s Scientific Imagination” views how science, both as an object of study and method of inquiry plays an important role in the novels of Umberto Eco.

“From the Rose to the Flame: Eco’s Theory and Fiction between the middle Ages and Postmodernity” by Cristina Farronato deals with unlimited semiosis and the concept of Encyclopedia in all of Eco’s novels. She concludes:

All of Eco’s novels appear to offer the reader the possibility of

searching for more, whether it is personal or universal. In fact, his

five narratives try as much as possible to connect the personal with

the universal, revealing the “elegant hope” for a meaning and 12

exemplifying that often times personal thoughts and actions are

tied to far greater purposes that go beyond our understanding.

Despite this, the characters of Eco’s novels ambitiously make the

effort to offer explanations, most of them incomplete, but all of

them partially illuminating, like every nuance that we can append

to the multiple facets of the sign. This is why the encyclopedic

model of categorizing knowledge, despite its limitations, is more

powerful than the Greimassian dictionary ideal. (68)

“Eco’s Middle Ages and the Historical novel” by Theresa Coletti

analyses how Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Baudolino aptly satisfy y the generic expectations of a postmodern historical novel. She studies how Eco through is historic novels present a revised understanding of the past from a present theoretical framework.

Peter Bondanella’s “Eco and the Tradition of Detective Story” traces Eco’s engagement with the tradition of literary detective genre; records the influence of Conan Doyle, Poe and Borges in his writing. He studies how Eco’s fascination with the detective genre reflects a facet of his interest in popular culture.

“The Subject is in the Adverbs: The Role of the Subject in Eco’s

Semiotics” by Patrizia Violi explains Eco’s words regarding the 13 subjectivity of the author. It “efficiently synthesizes an articulated theoretical position on the theme of subjectivity that we can trace throughout the entire body of Eco’s theoretical works.”(113) Eco’s concept of subjectivity is a diffused one, “inscribed in practices (both interpretative and productive) or, in other words, with semiosis in action.

(117)

Rocco Capozzi’s “Double coding memorabilia in The Mysterious

Flame of Queen Loana” illustrates how “Eco’s hybrid novels often challenge the definition and structure of traditional novels, by embedding manuscripts, digressions, and micro-stories within larger narratives.”

(127). The article concentrates how in The MysteriousFlame of Queen

Loana, Eco gracefully integrates important texts, events and ideas from

the past and makes it “double coded for different model readers who are

able to test their encyclopedic competence against the author’s

overwhelmingly erudite mind, and are constructed, by the author, as

“narrative machines” for generating other texts.”(129-30)

Michael Caesar’s “Eco and Joyce” analyses the influence of Joyce

in Eco’s writings. The article looks into the “patterns of cultural history in

the poetics of Joyce and Eco’s novels.”(149) 14

“Eco on Film” by Torunn Haaland focuses on Eco’s engagement with films and his distinction between cinematic language and written language.

Reading Eco: An Anthology by Rocco Capozzi is a volume of essays based on Umberto Eco’s theory of semiotics. The study looks into the intertextual nature of Eco’s The Island of the Day Before ad his view

of culture as as “always interactive at play and inan endless

continuum.”(403)

All these studies on Eco focus on the semiotic and intertextual

aspects of his early novels and theoretical works. For the study, Capozzi’s

work is preferred as a point of reference; but an attempt is made to

analyze the dialogic aspects of Eco’s novels from The Name of the Rose

to Numero Zero and how the whole corpus of his novel turns out to be a carnival of cultures. For the same, Mikhail Bhaktin’s concepts form the theoretical framework.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bhaktin (1895-1975) is a Russian philosopher literary critic and semiotician who worked on literary theory and Philosophy of language. He being active in the literary debates in

Soviet Russia in the 1920s, due to the Stalinist repression, his works were 15 not widely discussed in the literary circles until they were discovered in the 1960s by Russian scholars.

His major works include Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art (1929) which discusses the concepts of ‘unfinalizable self’, ‘polyphony’ and

‘carnival’ (later included). Rabelais and His World (1968) was his doctoral thesis which then was not accepted then. In it he explains the concepts of ‘carnival’ and ‘grotesque’ in the works of French writer

Francois Rabelais. The Dialogic Imagination (1981) has four essays related to language and novel: "From the Prehistory of Novelistic

Discourse", "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", and

"Discourse in the Novel". The work discusses the concepts of

‘heteroglossia’, ‘dialogism’ and ‘chronotope’. He also discusses the interrelationship between utterances which is further developed by

Kristeva as the theory of intertextuality. Speech Genres and Other Late

Essays (1986) include six essays that discuss the nature of culture.

The present study analyses the novels of Umberto Eco from a

Bhaktinian perspective.

The first chapter titled “Dialogism, Reader and the Text” gives a detailed theoretical framework for analyzing the novels. The chapter 16 discusses Bhaktin’s concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism, polyphony, chronotope and carnival, the role of the reader and intertextuality.

The second chapter “Dialogism in Eco’s Novels” studies the

dialogic aspects of Eco’s novels, at the ideological level. Since the works

selected are written by Eco originally in Italian and the texts used for the

study are English translations of the Italian works, the analysis does not

include the dialogism at the linguistic level.

The third chapter “Reader and the Text” focuses on the role of

the reader in the novels of Eco; how the critical and the naïve reader

merge in the Model Reader.

The fourth chapter “Intertextual Rhizomes” is a detailed study of

the intertextual nature of Eco’s novels.

The concluding chapter summarizes the entire study.

17

Chapter 1

Dialogism, Reader and the Text

A novel is a set of narratives stringed together in some sequence.

Genette defines narrative as “a representation of an event or sequence of events, real or fictitious in nature.” (69). Novel, being a matrix of narrations, is a sphere where different voices engage in interaction with other voices inside the novel itself and with those outside as well. Mikhail

Bhaktin defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.” (674)

In a social context, any utterance is counted as a narrative. It verbalizes an idea or ideas thereby presenting a particular world view.

Different world views represent different ideologies operating in different societies. Every society is stratified on the basis of denominations of class, gender, caste and race. These denominations, to a great extent, determine the ideologies that are functioning in a society. These ideologies get consciously or unconsciously manifested through the use of language. Language is used in accordance with the social rules. It plays an important role in constructing realities be it social, cultural, personal and interpersonal. 18

Any national language is stratified into social dialects, registers, languages of different generations, age groups, authorities and fashions.

There are languages that serve the social, political and economic purposes of each moment. This internal stratification present in everyday language forms the indispensible prerequisite for the genre novel. The novel organizes all its themes, ideas and ideologies by using this stratified speech types.

Bhaktin describes the differentiated speech that operates in a social context using the sociolinguistic term ‘Heteroglossia.’ It is a feature inherent in language itself, that any utterance assumes diverse meanings in different contexts; linguistic, literal and social. It refers to the stratification of language into genre, register, sociolect, dialect and the mutual inter animation of these forms. (White, 248)

Every individual can be perceived as a heteroglot entity for s/he is the sum total of all the languages to which s/he is exposed to. Each character, whether in real life situation or in novelistic space, is a heteroglot himself/ herself. A person speaks with many tongues and the languages within the subject continuously negotiate each other. The words uttered by the subject are the manifestations of heteroglossia within the individual. The languages within a person are formed by various life experiences, learning, exposure to different language 19 situations, ideological positions assumed and the addressee. The origin of the concept ‘Heteroglossia’ may be traced to ancient tower of Babel where God cursed the architects of the tower that each speak different

tongues unintelligible to the other. In this view, no individual/ discourse

is monoglot in itself. Every individual, in that sense, has Babel within

him/her. Heteroglossia enters the novel through the authorial speech, the

speeches of narrators, inserted genres and the speeches of different

characters. Each tolerates a multiplicity of social voices and incorporates

a wide variety of links and interrelationships. These heteroglot varieties

enter the genre novel and negotiate their spaces within the textual matrix.

The author orchestrates the heteroglot that are brought into the novelistic

space.

Bhaktin discusses what happens when heteroglossia enters the

novel. Sue Vice in Introducing Bhaktin quotes:

When heteroglossia enters the novel, it becomes subject to an

artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating

language, all its words and all its forms…are organized into a

structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-

ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his

epoch. (19) 20

Novel serves as the testimony of the different ideological stances assumed by the author in the chaos of heteroglossia of his time and space.

It foregrounds the social differentiation of different discourses that are at

function at a particular point of time through different characters who

occupy different social territories. Novel provides space for interaction

through confrontations of characters and setting the character’s speech

against narrator’s voice and judgment. Heteroglossia is incorporated within the body of each character itself.

The milieu/society in which the consciousness of the author lives is never homogenous. A number of ideologies operate within a social context. The multiple ideologies operating in the societies to which the author is exposed to diffuses into his consciousness. He makes use of the common languages that enters his consciousness through his interaction with the society, his reading of various texts and infuses it with his intentions to be rendered in a refracted manner. Bakhtin states:

Literary language - both spoken and written - although it is unitary

not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its

forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, is itself stratified

and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the

forms that carry its meanings. This stratification is accomplished

first of all by the specific organisms called genres. (1981, 675) 21

Novel as a genre allows the stratified language to enter its novelistic space. Certain features of language like the semantic, lexical and syntactic aspects unite together the intentional aim of the author, specific world views, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the genre.

At any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods of socio ideological life cohabit with one another. Even languages of the day exist and today’s language is different from that of yesterdays and will be different from tomorrows. Every day represents different socio- ideological semantic “state of affairs," another vocabulary, another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of evaluation.

Poetry depersonalizes "days" in language, while prose, as we shall see, often deliberately intensifies difference between them, gives them embodied representation and dialogically opposes them to one another in irresolvable dialogues (676).

An analysis of language at any point of time reveals that it is the culmination of various socio ideological contradictions between past and present, between different eons of the past and between different inclinations of the present. It arbitrates between past present and future:

At any given moment of its historical existence, language is

heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of 22

socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past,

between differing epoch of the past, between different socio

ideological groups in the present, between tendency, schools,

circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These "languages" of

heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new

socially typifying "languages".... (676)

They may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. They coexist in the consciousness of real people, especially in the creative consciousness of people who write novels. These languages live a real life; they struggle and manifest themselves in an environment of social heteroglossia. They enter into the unitary plane of the novel, which binds in itself all these languages. They help the novelist to orchestrate his theme and present his intentions and values in a refracted manner.

Along with this generic stratification, there is the professional stratification of language. The professional stratification of language may or may not coincide with the generic stratification. They differ not only in their vocabulary but also in the specific forms for manifesting intentions and for making conceptualization and evaluation concrete. And even the language of the writer can be taken as a professional jargon on par with 23 professional jargons incorporated in the work. Different characters in the

work bring along with them different professional jargons.

Literary language seems to be frequently socially homogeneous, as

the oral and written language of a dominant social group, but, a certain

degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, exists in it:

Social stratification may here and there coincide with generic and

professional stratification, but in essence it is, of course, a thing

completely autonomous and peculiar to itself. Social stratification

is also and primarily determined by differences between the forms

used to convey meaning and between the expressive planes of

various belief systems - that is, stratification expresses itself in

typical differences in ways used to conceptualize and accentuate

elements of language, and stratification may not violate the

abstractly linguistic dialectological unity of the shared literary

language. (675)

The stratifications of language leave no words neutral. All

languages are shot through with intentions and accent. Every utterance

has some politics implied in it. Each word has the savor of the context or

contexts it has lived its socially charged life. Contextual overtones are

unavoidable in the word. Thus, heteroglossia is not induced upon

language but is a characteristic of language. 24

There is a misguided conception that a writer takes the common language, distances himself from it, objectifies it stuffs it with authorial intentions to refract and diffuse through his work. Instead of violating their socio ideological inclinations, the writer incorporates them into his work and adapts it to serve his own intentions. Bakhtin states:

The prose writer a novelist does not strip away the intentions of

others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not

violate that socio-ideological cultural horizon (big and little

worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages - rather, he

welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of words

that are already populated with the social intentions of others and

compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second

master.... (678)

The divergent languages, once they enter the novelistic discourse, they are subjected to authorial orchestration as their voices are infiltrated by the intentions of the author. Every language in the novel is a point of view, socio ideological conceptual system of real social group. In the discourse of a novel, different points of view exist on the same plane; they interact, compliment and contradict one another.

In a novel heteroglossia appear as a) character’s dialogue and thoughts b) the various kinds of speech genre which exist within a 25 language and c) texts that reproduce a culture’s various dialects, language and customs. In simple terms, authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres and speeches of characters are compositional elements that enables heteroglossia to enter the novel. In a text, these languages are conscious of each other and they interact one another dialogically.

Moreover they change and they are changed by the other. They supplement, contradict and conflict one another, also with the implied author’s language and with the languages outside but surrounding the text.

Heteroglossia is a double voiced discourse as it serves two speakers at the same time and simultaneously expresses two different intentions, the direct intention of the character speaking and the refracted intention of the author. Bhaktin in “Discourse on Novel” states that they are all specific points of view on the world and will “mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically” (1981, 292). These utterances are politically motivated as they articulate different ideologies.

Pam Morris in his The Bhaktin Reader writes of the three types of discourses that Bhaktin discusses in his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s

Poetics: 26

The first is direct discourse which is oriented entirely towards the

object or topic it refers to; it is referentially oriented. Its function is

to name, inform, express and, in novelistic prose and this will

normally be authorial discourse. The second type of discourse

Bhaktin terms objectified or represented discourse, the most

common form of this being the direct speech of characters.

Character speech is also referentially oriented but stylistically it is

subordinated to authorial discourse…an author can also take

someone else’s direct discourse and infuse it with authorial

intentions and consciousness while still retaining the original

speaker’s intention. This is the third type of discourse. (102)

The first two types of discourses are single voiced as they represent a single consciousness and intention and the third one is a double voiced discourse where two consciousness, one, of the author and the other, of the character is represented by a single utterance.

As stated earlier, heteroglossia enters the novel through characters and through a dialogising background. In a novel, the characters bring with them their own ideological discourses and they constantly struggle to establish their voice as a distinctive language in the heteroglot world.

Umberto Eco in his novel The Name of the Rose serves a perfect example

of the heteroglot situation where monks from different parts of the world 27 are brought under a single shelter where they spend years together.

William says, “I know that many monks living in your midst come from

other abbeys scattered all over the world. Some stay here a short time, to

copy manuscripts to be found nowhere else….And so you have among you Germans, Dacians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Greeks”(,33). These

characters bring along with them their own specific points of view about

the world. The abbey becomes a space where different voices coexist.

The setting is such that it reflects the content of the novel.

Bakhtin views that double voiced construction occurs in a novel

through not only characters and author, but also “stylization, skaz or

parody and through the incorporated speech of the individualized

narrator” (1963, 8). Stylization is the conscious imitation or deliberate

reproduction of a certain style to explore the dialogic relation between the

voiced and the unvoiced Skaz is a double voiced discourse in the novel as

there are two voices present in it, the voice representing and the one

represented. Parody is an imitation of another’s text, language, poetic

style. It is a sort of travesty. The concept of heteroglossia subverts the

common view about the use of language in a novel that it serves the

characters using it. Instead, character serves language. Vice writes,

“Novelization dialogises heteroglossia” (1997 21). 28

“Dialogism” is another related term that Bhaktin uses in his analysis of novels and he uses it not merely as a linguistic entity but novelistic too. In the linguistic sense it refers to the defining quality of language itself, the “double voicedness” of language whereas in novelistic sense it refers to the interactions between different ideologies or intentions both of the characters and of the author. Bhaktin writes, “I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them.” (1986,

169).

While heteroglossia refers to the different languages, dialogism describes the way in which these languages interact. In the novelistic sense, dialogism refers to the particular instances of language in novels where a single utterance arbitrates between the intentions of the character and the author. It arbitrates the interaction between different characters, the interaction between its social and historical contexts and the interaction between the text and the readers. In short, dialogism creates meanings that enable the understanding of the text. Formalists view form and content separate in a literary work and form privileges over content.

While Bakhtin views novel as a social phenomenon at the level of both form and content. They are shaped by the external social forces like the

discourses in the open spaces of public sphere and also shape the

external discourses it is exposed to. The novel is thus “multiform in style 29 and variform in speech and voice” (Leitch, 2001, 1191-92). Bakhtin views dialogism as “a struggle among sociolinguistic points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions.” (1981, 273)

It is obvious that a power relation exists between the different voices present inside the text and also with those outside the text.

Hirschcrop argues: “For true dialogue to take place one has to exchange not only statements or sentences but something else- ideas, positions and one has to do so with a willingness to take on board those proffered by your interlocutor.” (103) The languages in a text represent different ideologies that are at function; that is, the languages used by the characters and narrator arbitrate between the different possible ideological stances assumed by the author.

Dialogism not only includes language but also ideas and ideologies embedded in the utterance. This study analyses dialogism at the ideological level taking into consideration the fact that all the primary texts selected are the translations of the novels of Umberto Eco. Novel provides space for different ideologies to coexist, to interact and to contradict each other. Different ideologies enter the novel through different characters. A text thus becomes a dialogism of various discursive practices. Umberto Eco, through his novels, presents the 30 dialogism between different monologic discourses and dialogic ones. The

Name of the Rose is dialogism between the monologic discourse of religion and the dialogic discourse of art. Similarly, Foucault’s Pendulum is a dialogism between monologic discourse of science and dialogic discourse of fiction. Baudolino is dialogism between the monologic discourse of history and the dialogic fiction. In all these cases, dialogism operates at the discourse level and not merely at the linguistic level. In these novels, each character occupies a particular ideological stance which gets displayed explicitly or implicitly through their speech and actions. Thus, the author positions his characters at different points on the larger scale of ideology.

The Name of the Rose foregrounds the underlying dialogic conflict between the two ideologies; one of religion and the other of philosophy.

Jorge believes that the ideas of Aristotle have undermined the teachings of the church. His notion of Aristotle’s book on comedy is:

But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the devil

is wisdom. When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the

villain feels he is master, because he has overturned his position

with respect to his lord….That laughter is proper to man is a sign of

our limitation, sinners that we are….And from this book there could

be born the new destructive aim to destroy death through redemption 31

from fear. And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear,

perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

(578)

Jorge stands at a point nearer to the monologic discursive practice of religion which was at that point of time in opposition with the discursive practices of art. This aspect will be further explored in the succeeding

chapters of analysis.

As discussed earlier, power relations exist among different

ideologies that are at function in a novel and these power relations get

manifested through the character’s use of language. Bhaktin in

“Discourse on Novel” points out that literary language itself is heteroglot:

it is just one among many ‘professional’ languages and “in its turn is also

stratified into languages…” (273) The ideological clashes in a novel are

manifested through dialogism that organizes both polyphony and

heteroglossia in the discourse.

Polyphony refers to the organization of different voices in the novel.

In a polyphonic novel, character and narrator exists on the same plane

and the latter does not predominate over the former, instead they enjoy

equal right to speak. Sue Vice in her Introducing Bhaktin states: “The

polyphonic novel is a democratic one in which equality of utterance is

central.” (112) In a polyphonic novel, the characters have the autonomy 32 to speak and their voices are dialogic in the sense that they interact

dialogically with the other voices that are present and absent in the text.

Heteroglot varieties of languages are arranged in a polyphonic manner to make the work dialogic. Some critics use the terms

“polyphony” and “dialogism” as interchangeable. Katerina Clark and

Michael Holquist view that polyphony and dialogism as terms that are interchangeable: “The phenomenon that Bakhtin calls 'polyphony' is

simply another name for dialogism" (Lodge, 242). He observes:"In

Bakhtin's theory, 'polyphonic' is virtually synonymous with 'dialogic"'

(86). lynne Pearce views dialogism and polyphony as inter related terms but not synonymous . She writes: "'polyphony' is associated with the macrocosmic structure of the text (literally, its 'many voices') and

'dialogue' lo reciprocating mechanisms within the smaller units of exchange, down to the individual word" (qtd in 21). Bhaktin uses the term polyphony to describe the novels of Dostoyevsky that “his novels are organized in a profoundly different way from those that precede them, with the narrator renouncing the right to the last word and granting full and equal authority to the word of characters.”(Dentith 42) The characters of a novel use different kinds of languages to verbalize different views of the world around them. In a polyphonic novel, the characters are the subjects who have their own individualities. They are not the puppets to 33 be manipulated, commented upon and controlled by the omniscient

narrator; instead, they are on equal footing with the narrator. The study uses both these terms relatively but not synonymously. Dialogism makes the novel polyphonic. The next chapter focuses on the dialogic aspects of

Eco’s novels that render them polyphonic.

A polyphonic novel has voices that are present inside the text and those that exist outside it. The reader finds room to interact and even enter into debate with them. The reader’s voice is an absence in the text but it manifests its presence in the actualization of the text. A polyphonic novel is the world of autonomous subjects and not of objects. Bhaktin states:

It might seem that the independence of character contradicts the fact

that he exists, entirely and solely, as an aspect of a work of art, and

consequently is wholly created from beginning to end by the author.

In fact there is no such contradiction, The characters’ freedom we

speak of here exists within the limits of artistic design, and in that

sense is just as much a created thing as is the un freedom of

objectivized hero. (1963, 64)

The characters have their own independent existence and voices. “…the

author causes (the heroes’ world views) all to collide in the “great

dialogue” of the novel, leaves the dialogue open and puts no finalizing 34 period at the end.” (165) The polyphonic novelist uses his effort in representing the self-consciousness of his characters. The characters in a polyphonic novel speak for themselves without the attestation of a narratorial comment. The author can distance himself from the language of his own work and treat it as foreign to him, and at the same time he can compel the language ultimately to serve his own intentions. The author’s role is subverted in the sense that instead of being an authoritative presence, he artistically arranges his characters and orchestrates their dialogues.

Unlike Barthes who proclaims, “…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (148), Bhaktin states: “The issue here is not the absence of, but a radical change in, the author’s position.”

(1963, 67) The concept of the author becomes a space or a function that orchestrates different texts from the textual corpus.

The narrator’s words are not passively accepted; instead the characters directly interact with the readers and the reader contemplates on the words of the characters about themselves and about other characters. In Bhaktin’s words ‘the chief characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels is a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.” (6) He views individual consciousness as inter subjective, that consciousness can 35 realize itself only when it is in dialogue with the other. Bhaktin states:

“Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence.” (252)

Language, for that matter, individual consciousness can never be separated from its social context as they gain meaning only in relation to its social milieu.

The voices of the characters and that of the narrator engage in unfinished dialogue from the beginning to the end of the text. Each act of

reading brings in another voice extraneous to the text. The voice of the

reader is not single or unitary that the readers are multiple and each reader is a heteroglot himself. The term polyphonic novel is applicable to many other European novels of the Victorian, modern and postmodern age. They address the question of narrative authority of the previous realist novels that are made up of a hierarchy of discourse, with the narrator’s discourse at the top that administers the entire events. Bhaktin

says, “To affirm someone else’s “I” not as an object but as another

subject- this is which the principle governing Dostoyevsky’s world

view.” (10) The decent ring of the authorial voice is not something that is

entirely restricted to novel alone but in terms of Derrida, it is the

vibrations of the great event of “rupture” that is continually taking place

in the twentieth century history of western metaphysics. It is the part of 36 the totality of the era where the concept of a single structure with a single centre becomes a myth. (1967,351)

Bhaktin’s argument of an ideal polyphonic novel is one which constitutes a number of equally privileged voices which he celebrates in

Dostoyevsky. Dentith observes that Dostoyevsky, being a journalist, has

strong views and commitments which are expressed through his letters

and journalistic writings. Once these views enter the novels, they are dialogised, become one among the many possible voices. He says:

Perhaps novels can be placed upon a scale, with polyphony at one

extreme and monologism at the other; Dostoyvsky may be near the

polyphonic end of the spectrum, while other novelists-Joyce,

perhaps, or even Dickens are still nearer…in Dostoyevsky’s novels

the words of the characters are highly dialogized …leads him to

insist that the whole novel ought therefore to be dialogic, ought not

to give priority to one dominant voice attitude or idea. (46)

The concept of a purely polyphonic novel is a myth. All voices in the novelistic discourse do not get equal priority. Some voices are undermined by the others. Foucault views every relation in terms of power. “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” (1978, 93) Equality becomes a utopian concept in the context that any structure involves a power 37 relation. A novel is a matrix of different voices engaged in dialogue with one another. A polyphonic novel signifies one which stands nearer to polyphony and farther at monologic discourse.

Heteroglossia and polyphony enters the novel through the process of carnivalization. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives the meaning of

"carnival" as "the merrymaking and festivity that takes place in many

Roman Catholic countries in the last days and hours of the pre-Lenten season" (881) Before beginning the pious lent people engage themselves in all sorts of festive. During the lent season they are supposed to abstain from taking meat and other delicious food. Merry making is also prohibited during this period. So before the holy period, people engage themselves in all sort of merry making and consume huge quantities of food and drink. It is associated with the celebration of feasts of saints. It

may be traced as a Christian assimilation of pagan culture. Bakhtin

defines carnival as:

... A pageant without footlights and without division into

performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active

participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not

contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its

participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are

in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic 38

life is a life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent "life

turned inside out, "the reverse side of the world (monde a' I

'envers). (1965, 122)

The people of the middle Ages had two lives, one official subjected to the law and orders of the Age and the other a carnival life devoid of any law and order. It is a celebration of disorder. It is a topsy-turvy world where everything is upside down. Carnival is a temporary situation and after a short period of time it relapses into the world of order. Carnival is a communal event in which everyone takes part. It nullifies the stratifications of the society. There are no class distinctions. It is a temporary suspension of all prejudices and reservations. Carnival is a festival of laughter. Laughter has the power to obliterate the ambiguous distance and fear associated with an object. Bakhtin states:

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up

close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can

finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer

it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its

center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose

it, examine it freely and experiment with it. (23) 39

Laughter destroys the fear of an object. When the object of fear which is kept at a great distance is brought near, the fear vanishes. It becomes an object of laughter.

The Name of the Rose presents laughter as a discourse that interrogates the Christian ideology. It discusses the fourteenth century conflict between the ideology of laughter and the Christian ideology that advocates the fear of God. According to the Holy Bible, “The fear of the

Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his excepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise.” (Psalms 111:10) During the middle Ages, laughter was forbidden in the public arena. Laughter belongs to the folk culture which is later imbibed by the Christians. The blind monk Jorge in The Name of the Rose, being a medieval ecclesiast condemns laughter. He says:

Laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is

the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; even the

church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival

fair…Still laughter remains a base, a defense for the simple, a

mystery desecrated for plebeians. (577)

Polyphony often has temporal and spatial implications called chronotope. The word chronotope literally means time-space and in this context it refers to the intrinsic relation of time and space that are 40 artistically expressed in literature. The space-time relation is borrowed

from physics, and is used widely in post modern writings. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for literary purposes.

In literature, it is used as a metaphor to express the inseparability of space

and time where time is viewed as the fourth dimension. In that sense, this

study views chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature

and does not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.

“Conceptions of time and space, or chronotopes, Bakhtin emphasizes, are "constitutive" for literature: they not only define "genre and generic distinctions," but also determine "to a significant degree the image of a person in literature as well.” (1981, 248) Every text is aligned spatially and temporally in the same way as it is historically and socially grounded. Michael Holquist talks of the political unconscious and the chronotopic unconscious which are a set of unspoken assumptions about the coordinates of our experience (time-space) so fundamental that they lie even deeper than the prejudices imposed by ideology. At times they are coterminous; multiple chronotopes exist in any particular present merely as reified forms from the past. (Burton1996, 46)

An interconnected sense of space and time exists between the historical sense of chronotope and textual sense of chronotope. In other words, a chronotope exists between the chronotope of history and the 41 chronotope of the text. It is, in fact, the conflict or the dialogic relation between these two senses of time that animates the narration. It may be the dialogism between the internal chronotope of the work and the external chronotope of the world receiving the text that makes the work dynamic.

Eco’s novels, The Name of the Rose and Baudolino can be read in this context. Both the novels are postmodern narrations of medieval life and there exists dialogism between the internal chronotope of the work and the external chronotope of the world receiving them. The medieval world is seen through the perspective of a postmodern subject in whom both worlds converge. The Name of the Rose is the reproduction of a book of eighteenth century which in turn is a reproduction of a fourteenth century manuscript. The internal chronotope of fourteenth century converges with that of the eighteenth century which further gets refracted through the postmodern concept of time and space. In Baudolio, which is set in the year 1204 during the fourth crusade, the internal chronotope of medieval Renaissance enters into dialogism with the postmodern world of time and space. Bhaktin’s view of the world itself is multi temporal. He states:

Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be

interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one 42

another or find themselves in ever more complex inter relationships

… . The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are

dialogical (in the broadest use of the word)... (this dialogue) enters

the world of the author, of the performer, and the world of the

listeners and readers. And all these worlds are chronotopic as well.

(1981, 252)

The world is a chaos of chronotopes; the subjects and the texts are the manifestations of the dialogism of different chronotopes. An individual can be perceived both as the converging and diverging points of different chronotopes. His unconscious is shaped by a number of chronotopes in a way that different sets of co-ordinates meet him. Bhaktin does not explore greatly on the dialogism of chronotopes but in this study his theory is extended to the concept of the dialogic relation between the multiple chronotopes operating in and out of the text.

In a novel the characters continuously communicate with each other and also with the reader. The open endedness of a polyphonic novel invites the reader in the process of actualization of the text. In a polyphonic novel, the reader is not a passive entity, instead plays an active role in the actualization of the text. Reader is not confined to the role of the receiver; on the contrary he is the producer of a wide range of meanings. Reader plays an important role in the case of dynamic texts. 43

Every text not only addresses its prospective readers but interacts with

them to create many unwritten texts. The negotiations between Reader

and the text generate meanings. In The Implied Reader (1972)and The

Act of Reading (1976) Iser views the text as a multilayered structure through which readers wander, constructing projections ("protentions ")

of new experience and reinterpretations ("retentions ") of past

experience. (1972, 49) Iser focuses on the interplay of the text and the reader. He sees a literary text as an artistic venture that is re-experienced by the consciousness of the reader in an act of conversing with the text:

The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into

existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed,

but always must remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either

with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the

reader.(1978, 275)

Iser identifies two major factors in the existence of a text- the artistic and the aesthetic:

The artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the

aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader…the literary

work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the

realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.

( 269). 44

The readers are no more at the receiving end; instead they play a major role in the actualization of a text. “…the text’s potentials, which include indeterminate gaps, blanks, discrepancies, and absences, disturb the structure and stimulate the reader’s activity. (1972, 98–99)

Readers synthesize "perspectives " deriving from the text’s narrator, characters, plot, and explicit reader, but the text still signals, guides, directs, and manipulates them, providing opportunities to reinterpret the text and, more importantly, to produce what it cannot: the experience of a coherent, living whole growing out of "the alteration or falsification of that which is already ours. " (132) Reader’s imagination is kindled by the unwritten parts of the text that creates a “virtual dimension.”(1978, 284)

Hans Robert Jauss is concerned about the historical dimension of

Reader Response theory rather than individual reader. Different generations of readers attribute different range of interpretations to the

same text depending upon the cultural milieu they are exposed to. He

uses the term “horizon of expectations” to describe the cultural

surroundings that enable a reader to understand a literary work of art. A

literary work interacts with the past reading experiences of a reader. He

states: 45

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present

itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but

predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by

announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics,

or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was

already read. (23)

Theorists like Norman Holland observe that the readers’ responses to texts are emotional depending upon the psychological need of the individual. It is a process of identity establishment by the reader. He says that each individual has a distinctive identity theme and what happens in the process of reading is a search for the remnants of self in the text. His theory fails to address the post modern notion of self that is in a continuous state of flux. Stanley fish argues that there is not a single text instead there are texts as there are readers.

Eco views text as open and interpretable. It is a fabric woven out of signs and each text creates its model/implied reader. The text is perceived as a lazy machine waiting for its operators to put it into use. Eco states:

The reader plays an active role in textual interpretation because

signs are structured according to an inferential model…. Text

interpretation is possible because even linguistic signs are not ruled

by sheer equivalence (synonymy and definition); they are not based 46

upon the idea of identity but are governed by an inferential schema;

they are therefore infinitely interpretable. Texts can say more than

one supposes, they can always say something new, precisely

because signs are the starting point of a process of interpretation

which leads to an infinite series of progressive consequences.

(1981, 44)

There are as many texts as there are readers. A text lies dormant unless it is acted upon by a reader. Rosenblatt views: “the text is merely an object of paper and ink until some reader responds to the marks on the page as verbal symbols." (23)A written work does not have the same meaning for all readers, and that each one brings in background knowledge, beliefs, values, cultural expectations, and reading context to the act of reading.

(144) Reading is actually a ‘transaction’ between reader and text wherein both reader and text continuously act and are acted upon each other in an oscillating, to and fro, non-linear process. Eco states: “It is not true that works are created by their authors. Works are created by works, texts are created by texts, and all together they speak to each other independently of the intentions of their authors. So no text exists on its own. It is always connected to other texts.” (1986, 199) He views text as superior to the author since it is created out of many other texts. A text is a mosaic of many texts. 47

Bhaktin does not see the novel as a passive reflector of history that surrounds and produces it instead, it is an active intervention in the heteroglossia in which it lives and moves. The characters of a novel are not mere socio-historic entities but very much humane and display an orientation towards future. Bakhtin’s specific views of language helped his predecessors to articulate the theories of intertextuality. His notion of double voiced discourse and its powerful presence in all dialogic texts brings one closer to the concept of intertextuality. For Bakhtin, every utterance depends on other utterances and no utterance is singular in itself. This stress on otherness, polyphony and dialogism stems from the concept that language is not the possession of any individual as every single utterance is a response to previous utterances and elicits further responses. Bhaktin in “Discouse on Novel” states:

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's

own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention,

his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his

own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of

appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal

language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets

his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other 48

people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there

that one must take the word, and make it one's own. (677)

Bakhtin concentrates on the social aspect of language and hence has a dialogic view of human consciousness, subjectivity and communication. For him, language for individual consciousness lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. Kristeva, in her work

Desire in Language complements Bakhtin for the dimension of dialogism that he used in order to analyze a text. In “The Bounded Text,” Kristeva is concerned with mode of construction of a text with the already existing discourses. Authors do not create their texts from their original minds instead they are the compilers of materials from pre -existing texts. Eco illustrates the role of the author in Foucault’s Pendulum where, Belbo uses his personal computer Abulafia to evolve The Plan to knit the history of Tres. Casaubon says:

What if instead, you fed it a few dozen notions taken from the

works of the Diabolicals- for example, the Templars fled to

Scotland, or the corpus Hermiticum arrived in Florence in 1460-

and threw in a few connective phrases like ‘It’s obvious that’ and

‘This proves that’? We might end up with something revelatory.

Then we fill in gaps, call the repetitions prophies, and-voila- a 49

hitherto unpublished chapter of history of magic, at the very least!

(1989, 375)

In literary and cultural studies arena, the concept of “text” underwent a series of changes through the centuries. First definitions of text in the Oxford Dictionary refer to the Scriptures. In the fourteenth century, text refers to “the very words and sentences of the Holy

Scripture; hence the Scriptures themselves.’’ It also included a short, authoritative passage from Scripture that would be the proper topic for elaboration, as in a sermon. In the fifteenth century these narrow uses were quickly extended to include the ‘‘wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order’’ Thus ‘‘text’’ refers to the original, formal, and authoritative body of any linguistic object. In the seventeenth century ‘‘text’’ is used to refer to the theme or subject on which one speaks. This history reveals two dimensions along which the referent of text was expanded: 1) From the scriptures to a broader range of linguistic objects and 2) From the actual and permanent material words to that which is addressed by the words, their ‘‘subject matter.’’

The common use of ‘‘text’’ has not diverged very much from this etymology. In common use, ‘‘text’’ refers to what the New Critics used to call ‘‘the words on the page.’’ The text is that which fixes some event 50

(such as the speech) and makes it permanent. The text is, in that sense, usually thought of as existing independently of the original context in which it has been produced, making it into an apparently timeless and placeless object that can be widely shared and scrutinized. Since twentieth century text has become a fertile concept that has expanded its terrains in academic, literary and cultural theories. Eliot has justified why originality is preferred over repetition. Julie Sanders quotes Eliot, “No poet, no artist, of any art has his complete meaning alone.”(38) She

observes: “Modernist poetry, not least Eliot’s own practiced

intertextuality in the form of quotation, allusion, collage, bricolage and

fragment… Eliot’s delineation of ‘historical sense’ is helpful; he suggests that meaning stems from the relationships between texts, relations which encourage contrast and comparison.” (8) In the twenty first century, text has come to be associated, with all sorts of new information technologies, as in text processing, text editing, and text messaging. It has even established a presence in the academy, as when the humanities are sometimes described as text-based disciplines.

Kristeva sees a text as “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.”(1980, 36) Each text is an intersection of texts which in turn gives rise to another text/s. She views 51 texts as always in a state of production rather than being products to be quickly consumed. A text is “not merely the object of study that is ‘in process,’ the process of being produced, but also the subject, the author, reader or analyst. Author, reader or analyst join a process of continual production are ‘in process /on trial…over the text.” (Allen 34) Barthes observes: “A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning […] but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture...” (1967, 46).

The notion of intertextuality was first introduced in the twentieth century to highlight the enabling linguistic features shared by all texts, which has been taken up later by Julia Kristeva, (1970), Roland Barthes

(1971, 1975), and Jacques Derrida (1976) as a radical rethinking of the contextuality of texts. Any text is always quite literally a weaving together of other, similarly interconnected, texts. Intertextuality is the inherent quality of literature. Sanders states, “The inherent intertextuality

of literature encourages the ongoing evolving production of meaning and

ever-expanding network of textual relations.” (3) Thus, rather than

having a single or stable meaning the text is engaged in a continuous play

of meaning across the field of intertextuality. Consequently, meaning is 52 mobile, dispersed, and plural, since any text is always subject to the

incessant movement of re contextualization.

At the same time, both Barthes and Derrida are concerned with

demonstrating how the potentially infinite mobility/dispersal of meaning

is always constrained and limited in practice by the act of writing and

reading. These concepts of text and textuality have enabled cultural

theorists to challenge the assumed separation of an empirically available,

non-linguistic material world from its representations in linguistic and

non-linguistic (for instance visual) texts. The concepts have provided

powerful arguments for an understanding of texts as forms of

representation which actively construct and do not just reflect reality.

Derrida’s often-reported statement that ‘‘there is nothing outside

the text’’ is commonly offered as evidence of the idealist denial of

material reality. In fact, the statement, more properly translated as ‘‘the

text has no outside,’’ points to the intertextual and non-referential nature

of the production of meaning. But it still remains true that the theory of

texts and textuality has led the charge against most forms of realist

epistemology and ontology, in the name of a radical theory of linguistic

(or discursive) mediation and construction. In Eco’s The Name of the

Rose, the library is the site where internal and external texts interact, that

is, text and context converse. Adso says: 53

Until then I had thought each book spoke of things, human or

divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently

books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In

the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more

disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old

murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and

another, a living thing … (286)

The abbey in Eco’s text is a meeting point for textual conversation among people. Even the chain of murders becomes textualised as a reference to the seven trumpets of Apocalypse.

The notion of intertextuality can be viewed in two dimensions.

First, it is based on the idea that the text does not function as a closed and self-sufficient system as the author consciously or unconsciously draws upon his previous readings in the act of writing. The second dimension is that intertextuality approaches the text from the point of view of its reader who establishes associations between the text he is reading and other texts he has read in the past. Kristeva views text as not an isolated object or entity but a collection of cultural textuality. In that sense, individual text and cultural text are made from the same textual material and cannot be separated from each other. (36) Every text gains its meaning only in relation to other texts. 54

The act of reading pushes the reader into a world of textual relations, network of texts. “Reading becomes a process of moving between texts. Meaning becomes something that exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates.” (180) Here,

Bakhtin’s view of dialogic has been rearticulated with semiotic attention to text and textuality. While Bakhtin’s theory focuses on actual language structures in actual social situations, Kristeva focuses on more abstract terms, text and textuality. Both viewed a text as an entity that cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality out of which it is constructed. Thus, all texts contain within them the ideological structures and conflicts that exist in society. Allen states: “Texts do not present clear and stable meanings; they embody society’s dialogic conflict over the meaning of words.” (36)

Kristeva incorporates Bakhtin’s insistence of double voiced nature of language into her semiotics. She gives a two dimensional description to literary word; horizontal dimension and vertical dimension. In the horizontal dimension “the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee. In the vertical dimension the word in the literary text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus.” (66) Here, the authors communicate with the readers and their texts communicate with other existing texts. The horizontal and vertical axis of the text 55 corresponds within the work’s textual space. Thus, a text is the text of other text or a text borrows text from pre existing texts.

In order to substantiate her theory of intertextuality she brings in the question of subject positions of the author/character. She introduces the concepts of subject of utterance and subject of enunciation to describe the subject positions. A person speaking directly to someone else is the subject of utterance as the subject spoken is directly associated to the speaker but when these words are indirectly said by another person, the speaker becomes the subject of enunciation. In the latter, the subject’s personal subjectivity is lost. Similar is the case in professional modes of writing, “the ‘I’ of the text cannot be identical to the authorial ‘I’ as we are dealing with the subject of enunciation rather than subject of utterance.” (Allen, 41)

Kristeva’s concepts of subject of utterance and subject of enunciation can be read in the light of Seymour Chatman’s narrative communication model of a narrative text He illustrates this model through a diagram (371)

Real author → Implied author → (Narrator) → (Narratee) → Implied reader → Real reader. 56

Out of these six participants, the first and the last, the real author and the real reader are least important to the poetics of narrative fiction.

The narrator gives voice to the narration and his presence is derived from the reader’s sense of some demons ratable communication. The readers feel that they are being told something. There are instances where the audience directly witnesses the action but how far this witnessing is real is debatable. Naratee is the ideal entity to whom the text is narrated. The narrator narratee relation is an optional one in the actualization of reading a text. The term ‘implied author’ has no voice or does not directly communicate. Instead it instructs us silently, guides us through the whole matrix of voices, that is, it establishes the whole narrative. The implied reader is the counterpart of the implied author. Implied readers are the readers presupposed by the narrative itself. Both are inevitable aspects of a narrative communication situation. (372)

Rimmon Kennen says, “In my view there is always a teller in the tale, at least in the sense that any utterance or record of any utterance presupposes someone who has uttered it…. The same goes for the narratee. For me, the narratee is the agent which is at the very least

implicitly addressed by the narrator.” (qtd in Chatman 89-90) Wayne C

Booth says that the “second self” of the author can be called the implied

author. For this, the writer should assume himself as a man in general and 57 erase his individual being and particular circumstances. This enables him

to overcome the distortions created by prejudices. The reader, in any case,

will construct a picture of the writer since the implied entity can never be

neutral towards all ideologies. The reaction of the readers to his various

positioning, overt or covert, accounts for their response to the work.

Different works of the same author creates different implied versions of

himself. It is created by narrator’s explicit commentary, nature of tale that

he selects to tell, the style, tone and technique employed. (137-38)

Roland Barthes in his memoir Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

refers to himself throughout the text in the third person “he.” This

foregrounds the idea that the person who speaks is not the person who

writes. The subject “he” represented in the work is different from the

subject who performs the act of representation in the text “In language the

subject positions shift; in writing, the subject is lost.” (Allen 42) The

position of the writer/reader depends on the context in which he writes/

speaks.

The writer, after the act of writing, can no more be perceived as

the subject of utterance, instead, he becomes the subject of enunciation.

This view of subject reinforces the intertextual nature of utterance/texts.

Kristeva uses Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic nature of words and

utterances to attack the notions of cohesion that points to 58 authoritativeness, truth, reality and fixity of meaning in a text. Kristeva states:

Intertextuality refers to a kind of language which, because of its

embodiment of otherness, is against, beyond and resistant to

(mono)logic. Such language is socially disruptive, revolutionary

even. Intertextuality encompasses that aspect of literary and other

kinds of texts which struggles against and subverts reason, the

belief in unity of meaning or of the human subject, and which is

therefore subversive of to all ideas of logical and the

unquestionable.” (45)

Kristeva’s work on intertextuality focuses primarily on modern works of

Joyce, Proust and Kafka where she foregrounds the fact that these are not original works written by unique authors of great genius but are the product of subjects split between symbolic and semiotic fields. The symbolic field involves socially signifying language operating under the categories of reason, communication and unity. The semiotic includes the language of drives, erotic impulses, bodily rhythms and movements of infant (retained in later life) before the subject’s splitting during the thetic phase when human subjects enter the social world governed by the monological notions of language. (6, 7) 59

Todorov says, “The most important feature of the utterance, or at least the most neglected, is its dialogism, that is, its intertextual dimension. After Adam, there are no nameless objects, nor any unused words. (28) Wittgenstien views context as a prime factor that gives semantic orientation to any utterance. As the context changes, the meaning of the utterance also changes. Every word has different character in different contexts. (1953, 181)

Every utterance is a response to the utterances that had preceded it

at some time in the past or that proceed it at some time in the

future. Thus, no utterance is independent by itself. It is linked to

other utterances at different points in the axis of time. ( 181)

The fluidity of utterances makes them dialogic.

The concepts discussed so far are further explored and analyzed in detail in the context of the novels of Umberto Eco in the successive chapters.

60

Chapter 2

Dialogism in Eco’s Novels

Novel is an artistic composition of different styles and voices. It

incorporates multiple views and perspectives within a single perspective.

It subverts the notion of original and individual use of language as the

originality is only in organizing or structuring and not in the language

elements used. Language is basically dialogic but the monologic

manifestations of it are the result of hegemony. Bakhtin views novel as essentially dialogic.

As discussed earlier, a text is a site where a number of ideologies coexist, interact, complement and contradict. Characters are the vehicles of these ideologies and their politics is revealed through their utterances.

Language is not a mere tool for communication but is a highly political medium. A text is formed from the interaction of different ideologies brought by different characters who speak for themselves, even against the narratorial voice. Novel forms a plane where multiple consciousnesses enter into dialogue with one another.

A dialogic novel does not represent a single objective world held together by authorial voice rather it includes a plurality of consciousness each with its own world. (Robinson). Eco’s novels are dialogic at the 61 linguistic and the ideological level. This chapter analyses the dialogic aspects of the novels at the ideological level. Different ideologies are manifested through different characters in the novels. The interacting ideologies need not come from different characters, sometimes a single character accounts for the contradiction This chapter is an attempt to

analyze the dialogic aspects of Eco’novel at the ideological, level. The

character Salvatore in The Name of the Rose is a typical example:

Salvatore spoke all languages and no language…he invented for

himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to

which he has been exposed, a language of primeval confusion…he

spoke not one but all languages, none correctly taking words

sometimes from one and sometimes from another (47).

Salvatore is a heteroglot in himself. He is the unconscious of the abbey,

where many monks who claim to belong to different denominations, seek

shelter. There are monks of the Franciscan and the Benedictine

denominations. There are the souls who have undergone torturous trials

and tribulations, belonging to different groups like Fracticelli and

Dolcinians (Minorities). Salvatore and Remigio are refugees who

conveniently satisfy their carnal pleasure by misusing the resources of the

abbey. The live with the identity of Spirituals, Minorities and now in the

abbey using its resources to satisfy their carnal pleasures. Monks like 62

Ubertino are highly idealist in their thoughts and life. The inhabitants of

the abbey range from the materialistic to extremely spiritual ones. They

differ in race, nationality, culture, ideology and spirituality. Each of them

brings in their ideologies into the enclosed space. The abbey becomes

symbolic of the text itself.

The novel centers on the Renaissance/Medieval Christian

controversy. The abbey is the embodiment of both renaissance spirit and

medieval Christian belief. The library is the seat of knowledge where

learning takes place. Forty monks could work at the same time in the

scriptorium. (72) There are the antiquarians, librarians, rubricators and scholars who work at the same time. The monks sit for hours and days and work until their hands go numb. There are monks who copy and translate works from different languages. Venantius of Salvemic is an expert who translates from Greek and is devoted to Aristotle. Aymero of

Alessandria copies works on loan to the library. The monks “were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions. They lived with it, for it and perhaps against it, sinfully hoping one day to violate all its secrets.” (214)

Similarly the library is a site of many ideologies and the books are arranged in a certain way that it reflects the conceptual priorities of the

Christian world. Eco uses library both as a symbol and as a setting in the 63 novel. The library becomes an analogue of the text which is a rhizome of different texts complementing and contradicting one another. In Western literary tradition, library is a temple of wisdom; “the reconstructed tower

(of Babel).” (Castillo, 3) It is a proof for man’s superiority over nature.

The finis africae stacks the forbidden books where none of the monks

could access. All the books of knowledge are translated and preserved in

the library without destroying anything. Jorge says:

Everything that involves commentary and clarification of scripture

must be preserved, because it enhances the glory of the divine

writings; what contradicts must not be destroyed because only if

we preserve it can it be contradicted in its turn by those who can do

so and are so charged in the ways and times that the Lord

chooses.(575)

During the Middle Ages Christian monasteries had magnificent

libraries where books in different languages were preserved and

translated. Such books were appropriated to a great extend so as to suit

the ideology of the translator or the scribe. In the novel the library, a

repertoire of Knowledge, is guarded by a group of monks who conceals it

in the darkness and restricts the monks from using it. William explains to

Adso: “This place of forbidden knowledge is guarded by many and most

cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal rather than to 64 enlighten…A perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library.” (203) Benno and Venantius who meet their end in pursuit of the forbidden book of Aristotle display the Renaissance spirit. William, at one instance says: “I didn’t mean that it is necessary to conceal the sources of knowledge. On the contrary, this seems to me a great evil.”(89) He is the embodiment of Renaissance who believes in the proliferation of knowledge. Even though Eco presents William as a man belonging to Medieval period, his modus operandi is very postmodern.

He employs the method of a detective of the postmodern times to unravel

the mystery. The detective genre emerged during the twentieth century in

Europe and William is even ahead of this period I his way of reasoning.

He criticizes himself for his reliance in a method or a plan behind the

murders. He resembles a postmodern writer in his thinking about the

multiple possibilities while investigating the mystery.

Jorge and Abo are very particular about restricting the monks’

access to the books in the library. The Abbot comments: “Monks finally

are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise task, which requires them to

read certain volumes and not others and not to pursue every foolish

curiosity that seizes them.”(37) Transgressing into the interior secrets of

library to access the forbidden areas of knowledge turns out to be a

punishable offence. A number of monks who pursue Aristotle’s lost book 65 are murdered by the guardians of the secrets of the library. The Church

condemned Aristotle during the 13th century and his books were

forbidden as, they claim, it contaminated the minds of several believers.

Aristotle’s natural philosophy was banned in Paris University. Those who

read Aristotle suffered the threat of excommunication.

During the dark ages (5th- 9th century), the Christian philosophers

denounced the free and independent use of reason, by exalting faith above

everything. Roman Empire disintegrated and a civilization was wiped out

from the earth. West lost all the philosophic and literary works of ancient

pagans. They had only a few teachings of Plato and Aristotle but the

writings of Aristotle were preserved in the non-Christian world, among

the Arabs. The ideas of Plato were popularized through the writings of

the Neo-Platonists, which flourished at that time but were governed by

the thought and framework of the West. Plato’s theory of forms

advocated the idea that things in this world are an imitation of the Ideal.

In this concept the perfect being of God is questioned. The concept of

Demi-urge is against the Christian teachings. After a period of

barrenness, in the century between 1150 and 1250, the West recovered all

the available works of Aristotle from Arabs and translated them into

Latin. It fell as a thunderstorm to the Western theological world due to its

systematic, rational philosophy. The scientific information and the 66 philosophic positions it took on various matters unheard of shook the foundations of the western metaphysics.

Aristotle talks of one reality, the natural physical world. Christianity

teaches of two realities, one being this world and the other God. For

them, the physical world is only a semi real one with metaphysical deficiency. Aristotle argues that this is the real world and permanent too.

He views this world as completely natural and self contained and one

must understand it in terms of natural law. Christianity viewed this world

as temporary backdrop of the drama of salvation and everything in it has

symbolic supernatural significance.

In the case of epistemology, Aristotle believed sensory experience as foundation and logic as method of acquiring knowledge. Christianity believed in faith as the central concept and revelation as the foundation.

In ethics, Aristotle views man as capable of achieving everything and self sufficient entity. On the contrary, Christianity considers man as a fallen being waiting for redemption. Many intelligent minds were drawn to

Aristotelian philosophy.

William of Moerbeke (1286) translated and revised the translations of Aristotle, allowing his fellow-Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, to write important commentaries on the Aristotelian oeuvre on the basis of more 67 reliable established part of the academic curriculum in Paris and else-

where, despite initial (and recurring) reservations about Averroism

(Nieuwenhove,347) Brother Azarias states:

…even when he was handed down in imperfect translation and was

but ill-understood, his genius, though clouded, remained not

without recognition. He was called the Prince of Philosophers; the

Master of them that know the limit and paragon of human

intelligence. Among the lesser intellectual lights, veneration for

him became a superstition, and no word of his would they dream of

disputing. Such over-estimation led to reaction. The pious regarded

him as the root of all heresy. (1988)

Reconciliation between Aristotle and Christianity was essential and

Thomas Aquinas was responsible for this synthesis. A Christian

philosophy within an Aristotelian framework popularized Aristotlianism

to the advanced thinkers of the middle Ages which accelerated the

Renaissance.

Eco, in The Name of the Rose, views the medieval debate between paganism and Christianity from a postmodern perspective. The demarcation between paganism and Christianity is not clear as there are many definitions that overlap with one another. It depends on the question of identification both of the self and the other and the acceptance 68 of this identification. Christians used the term “pagan” to describe the non Christians and non Jews. In the West they use the word “pagan” and in the East “Hellene” or “gentile". “Hellene” literally means Greek and it is the term used by Greek philosophers used the term Hellenists to describe themselves. For the sake of convenience, in this study, the term

“pagan” is used to denote non-Christians who believed in polytheism.

In The Name of the Rose, the argument between William and Jorge regarding Aristotle’s book on Comedy, explicitly portrays the tension between these two- pagan philosophy and Christianity. Jorge says: “The comedies were written by pagans to move spectators to laughter, and they acted wrongly. Our Lord Jesus never told comedies or fables but only clear parables which allegorically instruct us on how to win paradise and so be it.”(130) His words reinforce the Christian teaching that man is a fallen being. He says: “Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of face, makes man similar to the monkey.” (131)

According to the Christian teachings, man is superior race and all the other fauna and flora are created for him and to serve his purposes.

William stands on the other side of the debate. Like Bakhtin, he admires the power laughter in life. He says: “…I believe laughter is a good medicine, like bathes, to treat humors and other afflictions of the body, 69 melancholy in particular.” (131) Jorge condemns laughter. He considers it

as a base emotion that corrupts man. He says:

Laughter frees the villain from fear of the Devil, because in the

feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore

controllable. But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the

fear of the Devil is wisdom. When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in

his throat, the villain feels he is the master, because he has

overturned his with respect to his lord; but this book could teach

the learned men the clever and from that moment illustrious

artifices that could legitimize the reversal.(577)

Aristotle’s rationalism was condemned by the church mainly

because his philosophy was completely this worldly and it went against

the concept of individual intellect, immortality of the soul and the

perfectness of the Creator.

Eco’s character Jorge nurtures the traditional Christian belief that

Aristotle’s works contaminate young minds and so he ardently guards the

work on comedy without giving access to it. He uses every vile means to

deny access to the book. Venantius, Adelmo, Berenger and even Malachi

fall prey to the poison applied on the pages of the book. The inquisitor

William, a character modeled on William of Ockham, with his 70 renaissance ideology criticizes the act of shielding the book from the people. He argues for the right of the readers. He says:

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of

signs, which in turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a

book contains signs that produce no concepts: therefore it is dumb.

The library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it

lives to bury them. (478)

Jorge is one of the older members of the abbey and he sticks on to the traditional belief that the book by a philosopher can undermine the sacred teachings of the Gospel. He goes to the extent of swallowing the pages of the book himself for fear that it may be read by many who gains access to it. He says:

This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new

fire to the whole world and laughter would be defined as the new

art, unknown to Prometheus for cancelling fear…. And from this

book there could be born the new destructive aim to destroy death

through redemption from fear. (578)

Eco has cleverly interwoven history into the texture of his novels. History serves a prominent interest in the work. Rather than recreating the historical past, Eco uses the historical debates to represent the present 71 critical discursive practices. The dialogic representation of the Christian /

Pagan or Art / Religion renders the text dialogic.

The novel engages in a dialogue with the ongoing debate between

Pagan / Christian thought. The dialectics between art and religion is a point of debate in the text. Jorge, the old monk shuns art from spirituality. He is bothered about the possible adverse influence of art on monks who views life from a different perspective. He fears the distortions in art that it could blemish the soul of man. Jorge says:

The man who depicts monsters and portents of nature to reveal the

things of God per speculum et in aenigmate, comes to enjoy the

very nature of the monstrosities he creates and to delight in them

and as a result he no longer sees except through them. (80)

William, a great admirer of art, believes that God can be understood only through such distortions. For him, nature is the manifestation of God and

His love to mankind.

The Name of the Rose narrates the fourteenth century ecclesiastical history from a postmodern temporal context. It employs Aristotle’s lost book on comedy as a textual strategy to incorporate historical discourse into the textual matrix. 72

Baudolino, is another novel that views the medieval period from a different perspective. Emperor Frederick Barbossa is an eponymous character presented in the novel. The title character Baudolino narrates

the secret history of Emperor and his expeditions. Baudolino is a

heteroglot who can speak any language with least exposure. He writes in the paper he had stolen from the cabinet of the Bishop Otto:

My father Galiaudo always use to say must have a gift of Santa

maria of Roberto because since I was a little pupif somebody say

just quinkue fiveV words I could do their talk right off whether

they came from Terdona or from Gavi and even from Mediolanum

where they talk stranger than dogs….(2)

Baudolino is born in Alessandria, brought up in Germany and educated in Paris. He is artistic, imaginative, romantic and chivalrous. By repeatedly saying that he is a liar, Baudolino experiences infinite freedom in his narration. He challenges the monologic discourse of history by narrating his personal history to a court historian. A novel comprises of multiple speech genres which represent the different ongoing debates of particular time periods. In a dialogic novel no single perspective dominates, instead the subject of debate is viewed from different stand points through the consciousness of different characters. The characters consciousness is not subordinated by author’s consciousness. 73

The novel opens with the siege of Constantinople by the Christian soldiers during their fourth crusade. The siege was so savage and barbarous that it lasted for three days. Many Greco roman /pagan medieval Byzantine works of art were destructed. They violated the churches and monasteries, defiled the sacred objects and the statue of the

Goddess. Many civilians were murdered and women were raped. There was havoc everywhere. The crusaders set fire to the pagan churches and history records of the burning of the magnificent Library of

Constantinople. Baudolino, the protagonist of the novel, reports how the statues of Helen of Troy and many others were destroyed by the crusaders during the siege:

…everything, every statue between the Hippodrome and the Forum

- all the metals once away. They climbed on top of them, wound a

rope or a chain around the neck and from the ground, pulled them

down with two or three pairs of oxen. I saw all the statues of

charioteers come down, a sphinx, a hippopotamus and a crocodile

from Egypt, a great she-wolf with Romulus and Remus attached to

the teats, and the statue of Hercules…To melt them down. (24)

Though the crusaders came to defend the city, the destruction they caused was beyond repair. Sir Steven Runciman describes the sack of

Constantinople as one “unparalleled in history:” 74

For nine centuries, the great city had been the capital of Christian civilization. It was filled with works of art that had survived from ancient Greece and with the masterpieces of its own exquisite craftsmen. The Venetians ... seized treasures and carried them great city had been the capital of Christian civilization. It was filled with works of art that had survived from ancient Greece off to adorn ... their town. But the Frenchmen and Flemings were filled with a lust for destruction. They rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder or to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars ... . Neither monasteries nor churches nor libraries were spared. In Hagia

Sophia itself, drunken soldiers could be seen tearing down the silken hangings and pulling the great silver iconostasis to pieces, while sacred books and icons were trampled underfoot. While they drank merrily from the altar-vessels a prostitute set herself on the

Patriarch’s throne and began to sing a ribald French song. Nuns were ravished in their convents. Palaces and hovels alike were entered and wrecked. Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets. For three days the ghastly scenes ... continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles. (123) 75

Eco appropriates History, thereby initiates a dialogue between the two.

In the novel, the description of the siege is followed by the entry of the narrator who rescues Niketas Choniates, the historian. The history of

Crusades and the personal history of Baudolino meet at this point of narration. The history of Frederick Barbossa and the Crusades are filtered through the consciousness of the narrator. The Implied Author, by making his narrator proclaim himself as unreliable, invests him with unlimited freedom of narration. He often negotiates with history and intertwines his own personal experience with history of the Holy Roman

Emperor Frederick Barbossa there by trying to locate his space in the historical discourse.

Baudolino tries for reconciliation between the Roman emperor Frederick Barbossa and the Alessandrians. Alexandria

(Alessandria) was the seat of ancient Hellenic civilization from 331 BC to

AD 641. The great library of Alexandria was the most significant library in the ancient world. Pagans, Christians and Jews coexisted in Alexandria until Christians rose against pagans after Emperor Constantine of Rome decided to make Christianity the official religion. Though Baudolino was brought up in the German courts and studied in Paris, he hailed from

Alesssandria, the hometown of Eco. Despite the Christian rearing, the pagan roots of Alexandria are deep in him. The Holy Grail that he gifted 76 to his foster father was the cup in which his biological father drank his

wine. This act is culturally significant as it symbolizes the assimilation of

pagan elements into Christianity. Baudolino stands for a synthesis of

these two cultures. Attis and Christ merge in him. Thus, the debate that

Eco starts in The Name of the Rose takes a different dimension in

Baudolino.

Baudolino and his friends set off in their search for the kingdom of

Prester John. Pester John is the legendary Christian Patriarch king who is said to be a descendent of one of the Magi. He has his lands in the East isolated and surrounded by Pagans. Baudolino meets Hypatia whose ideology reinforces the teachings of the Neoplatonic philosopher Hypatia

The philosopher, Hypatia was the head of Neoplatonic School at

Alexandria where she taught Astronomy and Philosophy. She was murdered by a group of Christians who condemned her as a pagan.

Hypatia in the novel is one of the followers of Hypatia the philosopher.

The character Hypatia refutes the teaching of Christianity that God is almighty and He is perfect. She argues: “So God found evil beside him, without wishing it, as the dark part of himself.” (Eco, 2000, 426) She claims that hypatias are dedicated to the salvation of God. She carries forward her argument: 77

Now in God opposites are reconciled and find reciprocal harmony.

when God begins to be emanated, he can no longer control the

harmony of the opposites and this is broken and they fight with

one another; The Demiurge has lost control of the opposites, and

has created a world where silence and noise, yes and no, one good

against another good fight among themselves. This is what we feel

is evil. (430)

Hypatia in Baudolino refutes Jorge’s argument in The Name of the

Rose by presenting the other side of the debate. The omnipotent image of

God in Jorge’s argument is rendered helpless and fragmented in

Hypatia’s argument. Hypatia deconstructs the notion of structure and authority. She holds a post strructualist view of deconstructive and dialogic universe without a powerful structure. The debate is left open for the readers to make their assumptions and render their suggestions. The

Name of the Rose and Baudolino, from a postmodern stand point, incorporate the elements of the medieval history and still more from the ancient historical and political past, where Aristotle and Hypatia were the intellectual icons.

The narrator Baudolino is unreliable as he is good at cooking up stories. On one occasion, Baudolino admits: “I was a liar and had lived the life of a liar to such a degree that even my seed has produced a lie. A 78 dead lie.” (232) The interlocutor, Niketas is a historian who is to make a historical record of the events narrated by the unreliable narrator. This

provides space for a new historicist approach to literary studies. New

historicism erases the line that divides literature and history. They view

history as enmeshed in literature and the other way round. Both become the text and the context. Jean Howard, in his article, “The New

Historicism in Renaissance Studies” states:

A common way of speaking about literature and history is just that

wary: literature and history, text and context. In these binary

oppositions, if one term is stable and transparent and the other in

some way mirrors it, then the other term can be stabilized and

clarified too (1986, 24)

The margin which divides history and fiction disappears and one diffuses into the other. Using the protagonist Baudolino the liar, eco disrupts the grand narrative of history. Many meta narratives including rumors take over the narration of history. Personal history takes over world history. New historicists’ views history as enmeshed in literature.

Baudolino, by making the great Byzantine historian record his story, questions the reliability of history which is also a narrative .The boundary between literature and history fades at the very outset of his narration.

Niketas says: “What struck him about Baudolino was that, whatever the 79 man said, he would glance furtively at his interlocutor, as if warning him not to take him seriously.”(Eco, 200, 13)

The novel engages in a dialogue between literature and history. At one point in the novel, the historian Bishop Otto tells Baudolino that lying is linked with history. ”If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous ( 43). In Foucault’s

Pendulum, Colonel Ardentti says “Official history… is written by the victors. According to official history, men like me don’t exist.” (123).

Colonel, through his manuscript submitted for publication, counters official history by linking his personal history with the history of the

Templar.

The Island the Day Before is set in 17th century Europe, during the

colonial expansion. The Europeans were ardently in search of the secret

of longitude to locate the geography of their travel. Here, the novel

dialogises with the history of colonial expeditions of the seventeenth

century from a post modern standpoint. The novel deals with science/

religion dialectics. The Seventeenth century debate between Science gets

manifested in the novel in the form of religious concept of God as eternal

and omnipresent versus the scientific discovery on the existence of void

/vacuum. Eco presents the argument: 80

… if the world were finished and surrounded by the Void, God

would also be finished: since His task as you say, is to dwell in

Heaven and on earth and in every place; He could not dwell where

there is nothing. The Void is a non-place. Or else, to enlarge the

world He would have to enlarge himself, and be born for the first

time where before he was not, and this would contradict His

proclaimed eternity. (136-37)

The scientific discovery of a heliocentric universe thwarted the ecclesiastical teaching that dictated the notion of geocentric universe.

Moreover, Galileo proclaimed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics and not on biblical terms. His book Dialogue on

Great World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632) was included to the index of banned books. It was only in1984 that the church formally apologized the condemnation of Galileo and accepted his theory of heliocentric universe. Like the other novels of Eco, The Island of the Day

Before also depicts the anti thesis as embedded in the thesis. It illustrates how different episteme emerge in different epochs.

Eco’s widely discussed novel The Prague Cemetery incorporates the history of the nineteenth century Europe. The main character

Simonini is made responsible for many forgeries that happened in the nineteenth century Europe, for instance, Dreyfus affair and the forgery of 81 the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols was a fabricated anti

Semitic document that describes the Jewish plan for global domination.

It was published in Russia in 1903 and later translated into a number of

languages. Some publishers claim that it is the minutes of a meeting held

by the rabbis of twelve different tribes of Jews at the Jewish Prague

Cemetery. Times of London in 1921 exposed the fraudulent nature of the

text. Adolf Hitler was a major proponent of the Protocols. In his Mein

Kampf, he states:

How much the whole existence of this people is based on a

permanent falsehood is proved in a unique way by ‘The Protocols

of the Elders of Zion’, which are so violently repudiated by the

Jews. With groans and moans, the Frankfurter Zeitung repeats

again and again that these are forgeries. This alone is evidence in

favour of their authenticity. What many Jews unconsciously wish

to do is here clearly set forth. It is not necessary to ask out of what

Jewish brain these revelations sprang; but what is of vital interest is

that they disclose, with an almost terrifying precision, the mentality

and methods of action characteristic of the Jewish people and these

writings expound in all their various directions the final aims

towards which the Jews are striving. The study of real happenings, 82

however, is the best way of judging the authenticity of those

documents. (240)

Hitler accuses the Jewish bankers for hyperinflation that forced the

Germans to epidemic hunger. It is viewed as a step to the achievement of their plan. The press is controlled by the Jews, and Hitler believes that the exposure of the fraudulent nature of the Protocols by the press indirectly proclaims that they are true. It became a part of Nazi propaganda effort to justify the persecution of the Jews. It was taught in German classrooms as a factual document after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

In Prague Cemetery, Eco retells the history from the perspective of the forger, Simonini. His narrative continuously dialogises with the historical records. Moreover, as an appendix to the novel, the author has given the historical details and its temporal relation with the plot under the title: “USELESS LEARNED EXPLANATIONS” (433) His alter ego

Abbe Dalla Piccola is a character who fills in the gaps of narration. The plot is unfolded through a series of diary entries by the split personalities of Simonini. The unpleasant experiences and events are conveniently forgotten by Simonini, which is brought out by his “other.” Piccola, thus offers a complimentary narration in the novel. The interactions of these two characters portray the dialogism within the individual. 83

As his earlier novels, The Prague Cemetery is also in continuous dialogue with the history and confers with the present. His novels can often be called historiographic metafiction. Historiographic metafiction is a kind of postmodern novel which rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. It also suggests a distinction between events¨ and

“facts.¨ The documents become signs of events, which the historian transmutes into facts. The past once existed, but that our historical knowledge of it is semiotically conveyed. Linda Hutcheon observes that

Historiographic metafiction often points to the fact by using the paratextual conventions of historiography to both inscribe and undermine the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations. (122-

123) Until the nineteenth century, literature and history were not treated as separate disciplines. Instead they were assertion or celebration of plurality of truths.

Foucault’s Pendulum, is a negotiation between different sets of binaries- history/ fiction, science/ fiction, reality/illusion. Eco narrates an alternative history of The Templar and challenges linear history through his non linear narration. The Plan created by the three editors turns out to be a linguistic reality. As the narration progresses The Plan becomes the guarded secret of The Templar. In the novel, historical reality is replaced 84 by linguistic reality. Eco thus deconstructs the binaries history/ fiction, reality/ illusion and shows how one disseminates into the other.

At the very beginning of the text Casaubon admires the pendulum

which stands for certainty. He wonders: “How could you fail to kneel down before this alter of certitude?”(6) The travel through the museum is a travel through different stages of evolution. The point of certainty amid the fluxities burdens the locus with greater meaning. The point which science claims to be fixed is further questioned by Belbo. He says:

…even the pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it

is the only fixed point in the cosmos, but if you detach it from the

ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel it works just

the same. And there are other pendulums…wherever you put it,

Foucault’s pendulum swings from a motionless point while the

earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point;

all you have to do is hang the pendulum from it….It promises the

infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me.” (237)

At the Conservatoire, Casaubon sees many machines belonging to

different periods of time and space. It is a place where different stages of

civilizations meet. There are the machines that represent modernization

on the one side; and on the other, there are Assyrian idols and idols of

other deities representing different cultures and civilizations. He says: “it 85 is as if the progeny of Reason and Enlightenment has been condemned to stand guard forever over the ultimate symbol of tradition and wisdom.”(8)

The text opens up a dialogue between science and fiction. Science which claims to be objective is subjective in nature. Time and space determines the reality. Post structuralism questions the locus of the centre. It celebrates the possibility of multiple centers. Eco questions the notion of certainty through his discourse on pendulum. In the beginning it stands for certainty but as the narration progresses, its locus is lost and it

becomes the very embodiment of uncertainty. The pendulum resonate the

text which is self voiding in nature. The text proclaims that that there is

no concept at all. It tries to find the fixed point on earth but the fixed

point turns out to in flux. The novel and the characters are highly

introspective in nature. The search for a fixed point questions the notion

of certainty. Self voiding texts prevent stabilization of context, and so it

does not make any closures or settled meanings. Lawson's states:

"Through language, theory and text we close the openness that is the

world. The closures we make provide our world . . . each closure textures

the world and thereby enables us to do things in the 'world'". (129)

Context limits the text by providing stable interpretations. The quest for

meaning culminates into futility and multiple meanings arise. 86

Derrida questions the existence of transcendental signified when there is a free play of signs. He states:

…it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that

the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that

the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a

function, a sort of non locus in which an infinite number of sign-

substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language

invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the

absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse... The

absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the

play of signification infinitely. (353-354)

In the same way, Eco’s novel has multiple centers and voices that coexist within and outside the matrix of the text. Truth, reality and existence become subjective in nature. Author can no longer monopolize and bring in a transcendental conclusion. The narratorial voice is only one among the voices heard in the text. The Plan created by the trio claims its own existence. Though an illusion, it assumes a power greater than reality and at a point its own creators fail to identify that it is a story fabricated by them. They lose their power of reason and The Plan, which is created out of words chosen at random from the diabolical texts they received for editing, seals their fate. The Plan is based on Colonel Ardenti’s secret 87 message. Lia interprets this message as a laundry list which trivializes it.

Both the interpretations of the Ingolf message coexist in the same plane of the novel.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Numero Zero deal with the life of Italians after the Second World War, especially after the death of the fascist ruler Benito Mussolini. Both novels are complementary because they retell the psychological state of the Italians after the reign of the fascist Mussolini. Yambo, the protagonist of The Mysterious Flame of

Queen Loana suffers from amnesia after the traumatic experience of the world war. Similarly, Braggadocio in Numero Zero suffers from paranoia and looks for conspiracy in everything around him. Braggadocio believes that Mussolini is somewhere in hiding waiting for a favorable time for a coup attack to restore his power. The amnesiac Yambo and the paranoiac

Braggadocio are symbolic of the schizophrenic Italian generation who has experienced the trauma of Mussolini’s fascist rule. Both novels thus engage with Italian history during and after the reign of Mussolini. Eco revisits historical events from a psychological perspective. He focuses on the psychological impacts of Mussolini’s rule that has driven a generation schizophrenic and paranoid. Through his “re-visiting” and “narrativizing” the past Eco tries to cure his generation from the schizophrenia. 88

Thus, Eco, in his novels, use historical past to relate to the events

of the present. It attributes a number of possible meanings and anticipates

further interpretations leaving it open to the readers. . In all the cases the novelistic time and space negotiate with the then historical time and space. All these novels provide alternate personal histories that engage into dialogue with official history.

Dialogism occurs between the text and its author and it continuously negotiate with the world extraneous to the text. And the text interacts with its contemporary world, also with the past and continuously negotiates with the future. It becomes dialogic at multiple levels. Bakhtin speaks of chronotopic dialogism where a number of chronotopes interact in the formation and actualization of a text. “A chronotope is a set of reference-points in place and time which constitute the particularity of a way of speaking. It refers to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. Each author or speaker makes use of organizing categories of her or his space and time, which are apparent even in fictional works.” (Robinson) Each character brings in different chronotopes into the novelistic discourse. The chrononotope of a single character is composed of multiple micro chronotopes recorded in his consiousness through his experiences and exposure, interaction with other discourses, literary, social and 89 psychological. Different layers of chronotopes that are in dialogue with one another gets filtered through the consciousness of a character. A number of such characters interact in a novel. Different micro chronotopes enter constantly negotiates or dialogise constantly to form the macro chronotope of a novel. Eco’s novels provide scope for chronotopic dialogism as the characters belonging to different times and space are brought to coexist in the novelistic space.

In The Name of the Rose, monks from different parts of the world are gathered into the enclosed space of the library. Each character brings along with them a world of their experience and in a novel many such worlds interacts one another. In this context, the novel highlights the controversy within Christianity between the Franciscan and Dominican denominations during the fourteenth century. The Spirituals within the

Franciscan order demanded that the church should abandon all wealth.

They were condemned and persecuted on the charge of heresy.

Benedictines protected the Spiritual Franciscans “whose ideas they did not share but whose presence was useful to them since it offered the empire good syllogisms against the over weaning power of the Pope.”

(146).

The protagonist of the novel, William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, is an Englishman based on the character of Sherlock Holmes. He is 90 portrayed as a well read man. Adso describes: “He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of scripture, and how they thought through them.”(24) All he has experienced and learned at different points of time and spaces filter in into the novelistic space through his chronotopic unconscious. He has brought along with him the spirit of Renaissance which gets manifested through his dialogues. He is well versed in optics. He admires the knowledge of Arabs on optics and cryptography. He says: “The best

treatises on Cryptography are the works of infidel scholars, at Oxford I

was able to have some read to me.”(191) He has a broad perspective on

everything he deals with. The English’s prejudice of Italians is evident in his words:

Italians are more afraid of St. Sebastian or St. Antony than

Christ…So the Italians, thanks to their preachers, risk returning to

the ancient superstitions; and they no longer believe in the

resurrection of flesh, but have only a great fear of bodily injuries

and misfortunes, and therefore they are more afraid of St. Antony

than of Christ.” (119)

With the vast knowledge gained through reading he reconstructs the contents of Aristotle’s lost book. The narrator Adso reserves his own prejudices about the French when he meets the difficulty of reference. He 91 comments: “French scholars are notoriously careless about furnishing

reliable bibliographical information but this case went beyond all reasonable pessimism.” (3) On another instance, he says: “the men of the

corrupt land are always inclined to foster the interest or their own people

and are unable to look upon the whole world as their spiritual home.”(12)

Even though Eco sets his character William in a Medieval context, his

modus operandi is of a postmodern intellectual with a great amount of

knowledge in books, its intertextual nature, semiotics and human

psychology.

The narrator Adso of Melk is a Benedictine novice, who is nearing

his end when he starts writing the novel. He recalls his past experience as

a novice when he assisted William to investigate the murders that took

place in the abbey from a postmodern consciousness. He admires William for his abilities and manners, presents him as an epitome of knowledge and benevolence.

Ubertino of the Cluniac order is an ardent supporter of poverty.

Though a refugee in the Benedictine abbey, he fails to enjoy the comforts of it. He shrinks into himself because of all he has learned, preached and observed. He brings in a different chronotope into the space of the novel. 92

Venantius, though a monk, because of his exposure to Hellenistic philosophy, is much attracted to Aristotle and his books. He refuses to be a passive translator; instead he probes into the woks of the great philosopher. Through him enters a set of chronotopic unconscious though fails to survive throughout the narration, leaves a deep mark in the matrix of the novel. Aymaro, being an Italian reserves his provincial views. He rebels the group of foreigners who hold power in the abbey. He wants the abbey to make books for the universities and thus establish its power in the field of academy. Abbot, Servinus the herbalist and Malachi are foreigners. Eco constructs each character in the light of the medieval history. The character William slightly corresponds to William of

Ockham, who put forth the principle Known as Ockam’s razor that states that one should accept the simplest explanation that accounts for all the available facts.

All these characters with their micro chronotopes engage in dialogue with themselves, with the others who are present and absent inside the text and also with those extraneous to the text renders. It is a carnival of dialogues.

The characters in Foucault’s Pendulum are from both east and west. The Brazilian character Amparo, the Jewish character Diotellevi and the Italians like Belbo and Casaubon are brought together through 93 secret societies. Casaubon, once inside the Conservatoire, wonders at the pieces it preserves. Moving through the museum seems to him a travel through different stages of evolution. Time gets frozen in the

Conservatoire. Eco uses the words of Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis

(to describe the Riches of Salomon’s House) as an epigraph of his second chapter in the novel:

Wee haue divers curious Clocks; And other like Motions of

Return….Wee haue also Houses of Deceits of the Senses,where we

represent aqll manner of Feats of Juggling, False Apparitions,

Impostures, and Illusions…These are (my sonne) the Riches of

Salomon’s House.(qtd in 10)

Multiple chronotopes fuse in the Conservatoire -science, mathematics,

culture, cosmology and art of different centuries are brought under a

single roof. But, Casaubon, with his consciousness entrenched with The

Plan views everything as a conspiracy.

Casaubon, being a person who has done research in the history of

The Templar, becomes a source of reference to his fellow editors. He

prompts the Plan and provides information to Belbo and Diotellevi. They

take certain words from the diabolic texts at random and enter into the

Abulafia and they evolved a new plan. Casaubon says: “…the idea is not

to discover the Templar’s secret but to construct it.”(383) Diotellevi’s 94 comment on the endeavor is: ‘Chapter by chapter, we are reconstructing the history of the world…We are rewriting the Book. I like it. I really like it,” (383) shows the excitement of their endeavor. The three, being editors of Garamond press, are good at accumulating words from the manuscripts they receive for editing, those words and reconstructing the Plan. All their learning and experiences with the diabolical authors, secret societies and the editing work culminated into a new work. In the case of Casaubon, diabolics forms the area of research, for Diotellevi, it is his work as an editor that instilled interest in him. In Belbo, his failure of creativity and his editorship paved way for the interest in diabolic literature.

Agile, with his knowledge of different cultures and rituals says:

“…in the loftiest sense of syncerticism is the acknowledgement that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning and all philosophy.”(177). He turns out be the source of information regarding different secret societies and rituals. Amparo, the Brazilian woman, an ardent supporter of Marxism refuses to believe in spiritual experience.

Once at an Umbanda rite she feels embarrassed by the spiritual experience and falls into a trance. She fails to conceal the impressions of her past tribal experience.

All the characters with their chronotopic consciousness make the novel a great dialogue with a number of voices articulated and heard. The 95 negotiations with these voices both present and absent, render meanings to the text.

Child Yambo and Adult Yambo bring in different sets of chronotopes in to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Chlid Yambo

is influenced by the fascist ideology that operated through books, comic

strips, cartoons, magazines and radio songs. He is a caterpillar in the

cocoon and the cocoon breaks into a pupae when “ The Unbreakable

Glass” breaks. He narrates his change in thoughts:

I had become the narrator of a failure, whose breakable objective

correlative I represented. I had become existentially, if ironically,

bitter, radically skeptical, impervious to all illusion. How can a

person change so much in the course of nine months? Natural

growth, no doubt, one gets clever with age, but there was more: the

disillusionment caused by broken promises of glory….” (210-11)

The broken glass becomes symbolic of the broken faith in the fascist

ideology. Adult Yambo considerably differs from Child Yambo in the

sense that he has grown up into a book dealer who encompasses

“Encyclopedic Knowledge.” He revisits all the cultural artifacts of the

childhood, from a post modern standpoint, of that of Eco. Thus, two

different consciousnesses coexist in the novelistic discourse. 96

Simonini in The Prague Cemetery is an Italian brought up by his grandfather who nurtured anti Jewish sentiments in him. He says:

All I know about the Jews is what my grandfather taught me.

“They are the most godless people,” he used to say. “They start off

from the idea that good must not happen here, not beyond the

grave. Therefore they work only for the conquest of this world.”

(5)

The anti Jewish sentiments that Simonini nurtures throughout his life is a lineage from his grandfather. It results in the murder of a number of people he comes across. Through the writing of the report from the

Prague Cemetery that is modeled on Protocols of the Elders of Zion the anti Jewish ideology is brought into the novelistic space by the character

Simonini. He is a misanthrope and has prejudices about the whole of humanity. He expresses his prejudices about Germans and French too. He says: “The German lives in a state of perpetual intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of beer and pork sausages on which he gorges himself.”

(6) He considers the compositions of Wagner, Bach and Beethoven as trivial and even the language itself is vague. According to him the French are gluttons and greedy people.

Layers of microchronotopes fuse to form the macrochronotope of the novel. Any work of art is in dialogue with the world extraneous to it. 97

A dialogic novel, in that sense interacts with politics and history of different time periods. Eco’s novels are vigorously dialogic that it interacts with history, philosophy, theology and science. The Prague

Cemetery continuously interacts with the historical past and creates a different understanding of history. It includes eponymous characters from history. As an appendix to the novel, Eco says:

The only fictitious character in this story is the protagonist, Simone

Simonini- his grandfather, Captain Simonini, is not invented, even

if he is known to history as the mysterious author of a letter to

Abbe Barruel…I have made one single (invented) character say

and do what was in fact said and done by two (historically real)

characters. (433)

History of the Nineteenth century Europe is retold from the point of view of a single man Simone Simonini.

Similarly, Baudolino retells the history of crusades, the fall of

Constantinople and the death of Frederick Barbossa from a different point of view. He colours his imagination with history. The narration is an attempt of a man from the margins to assert his presence in the mainstream. A dialogic relation is established between his narrative and official history. 98

The Island the Day Before is supposed to be the diary entries of the protagonist who lived during the 17th century and is edited by a twentieth

century author which is further written from a postmodern view. Though

it is said to be the diary entries of a 17th century Roberto, towards the end

of the novel, when he is struck by a stone fish contemplates or dreams of

his existence. It seems that Roberto the lover, for the moment, becomes

Roberto the philosopher who raises a number of questions regarding his

existence. He says, “Therefore I am not I who think, but I am the Void, or

extension, that thinks me.” (481) He comes up with the Cartesian

argument of time and space and ponders on the concept of freedom and

choice which are existential concerns. He says, “But I can wish to stop

being in my condition, the stone cannot. Therefore freedom is a passion,

whereas the will to be free is an action and this is the difference me and

the stone. I can will.”(478-79)Roberto ponders on the concept of freedom

and compares, his freedom with that of the stone. Eco fuses multiple

chronotopes in the novel that the chronotope of the seventeenth century

protagonist is filtered through the chronotope of the twentieth century

editor.

Existentialism as a philosophical movement started during the late

half of the nineteenth century and early half of the twentieth century. The

key concept of existential philosophy is freedom. The main idea behind 99 existential philosophy is “existence precedes essence.”(Sartre, 22) Man is what he makes of himself. He is responsible for himself. Towards the end of the novel, the implied author put forth the multiple possibilities of how the papers have reached him. Eco is not assertive; instead he leaves it open ended making the author diminishing and the reader proliferating.

Bakhtin views that dialogic novels are essentially polyphonic. He states, “The polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through" (1963 ,40)

A polyphonic text grants infinite freedom to its characters. Author does not overpower the other characters in the text. The characters have their own existence. The author does not arbitrate between the characters and the reader.

In Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator Casaubon though presented as a scholar in the area of Diabolics and initiates the Plan, is unaware of the creative work of Belbo. It is only when he searches Abulafia that he realizes the creative attempts made by Belbo. The Plan which the trio creates slips out of their control and reaches a stage that their life is determined by the existence of the Plan. In an instance, Diotellevi says,

“What our lips said, our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a different Plan, and now they are proceeding on their own, creating a history, a unique private history.”(566) All the three were

highly obsessed with the plan that it assumed life. Once the idea of the 100 plan is conceived, it starts to take it’s on course and even gains the power to determine the course of life of its creators. Casaubon says:

I was becoming addicted, Diotellevi was becoming corrupted,

Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing

the intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from

identical, the metaphorical from the real. (468)

Foucault’s Pendulum turns out to be a critique on the art of writing

novels. The Plan becomes a metaphor for any modern creative work of

art that takes its own independent existence. Neither the narrator nor the

implied author gives the final word in the text. Gaps and silences are

purposefully induced in the text so that it may be filled with a wide range

of possibilities. Lia’s interpretation of the Ingolf message is a typical

example for such an interpretation.

In Baudolino, while the narrator narrates his story to the historian,

the inter locator often comments on the unreliability of the narration. The

narration proceeds smoothly until the entry of Paphnutius into the field of

the story. His revelation that Frederick was killed by the man, who threw

him into water, becomes a thunderbolt to Baudolino. Till then he believed that he had avenged his foster father’s death. The moment he realizes he is responsible for the death of the emperor, he is shattered. All that he has done to avenge the death burdens him. In Eco’s novels, each character 101 has his/her voice articulating his/her ideology, independent of the narrator.

Eco, in his The Island the Day Before says: “He did not know that

especially when their authors are now determined to die, stories often

write themselves, and go where they want to go.”(482) In a polyphonic

novel, once the characters are born, they have their own life. The

narration slips from the hands of the narrator and often it reaches the

hands of the readers.

One of the primary characteristics of a polyphonous text is that

they are open texts. They provide multiple possibilities of interpretation.

Foucault’s pendulum is a text with an open ending. Casaubon who is in the Conservatoire bears witness to the deeds of the secret societies. He is shocked by the murder of Belbo. He has lost his presence of mind that he fails to identify what he witnessed is real or only a hallucination. The novel concludes at a point where Casaubon is fearfully hiding in Belbo’s country house with the knowledge that he will also be hunted down by the murderers of Belbo. Even the readers are at a loss whether what

Casaubon claims to have witnessed and experienced is real or an illusion created by an imaginative mind. The trio started their work to prove that the conspiracy theories that are taken seriously by many are fake stories 102 created by some imaginative minds. But the Plan itself was viewed with reverence by a group of people. Cameron observes:

The Plan created by Casaubon and his friends begins to be believed

in by fanatics and conspiracy theorists in much the same way as

The Protocols has managed to maintain a core of believers despite

all of the overwhelming evidence that it is a hoax. Part of the

reason for its pernicious resiliency is, as Eco and others have noted

its obvious fictional underpinnings. The very elements that make

people believe in its reality are actually most fictitious. And so,

while fiction can often allow us to tap into our dreams, it also has

the power to create nightmares.

An open text provides multiple possibilities of interpretation. The gaps and silences created in the texts are filled in a range of possible ways in the process of actualization of the text. Eco, in The Open Work discusses the characteristic features of open works as:

(I) "open" works, insofar as they are in movement, are

characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the

author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species

"work in movement") there exist works which, though organically

completed, are "open" to a continuous generation of internal

relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of 103

perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art,

even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit

poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited

range of possible readings, each of which causes to acquire new

vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal

performance. (21)

An open work provides space for a wide range of possible interpretations. Any work of art, for that matter, becomes dynamic only when it offers multiple sets of meanings. Eco’s Baudolino is also presented as an unreliable character that sets off on a perpetual quest for the kingdom of Prester John. The medieval debate on the existence of vacuum and the forgery associated with the creation of relics triggers the readers from Middle Ages to the postmodern period. During the Middle

Ages, Europe flourished in relic trade. Relics were bought by the

Europeans. The relics were fake, because there was more than one relic of the same type. In the novel, Eco describes this situation. Even in the postmodern period relics play an important in the religious arena. It also discusses the relation between literature and history and Pagan/Christian controversy. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the Ingolf message is cryptic that it generates infinite meanings. Meanings are attributed according to the experience of the reader. The novel is highly self-reflective that it lays 104 bare the consequence of over interpretation. But such interpretation

attributes power to the texts.

The Island the Day Before deals with a wide range of subjects;

colonial expansion, the psychological condition of schizophrenia and

existential philosophy. The readings of the text take multiple dimensions.

One dimension is from a postcolonial perspective as a colonial enterprise

for discovering longitude for the expansion of empires. Another is a

psychological study on schizophrenic personality. The text, for that

matter is a collection of signs that represent different concepts at different

point of time. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana discusses the

operation of Colonial ideology. Yambo views how text books portray

Italians as beautiful, pure blooded, Negros ugly, Jews repugnant and the

British ridiculous. (188-89) At one level, the novel is a psychological

study of an amnesiac character. At the same time, it discusses how colonial and fascist ideologies are manifested through comic books and other pop literatures. It is a study on how colonial ideology operates

through Ideological State Apparatuses.

Thus, Eco’s novels are copiously dialogic and are engaged in

different controversies that have been relevant during the different

epochs; be it between philosophy and religion, science and fiction, and 105 history and fiction. The revisiting of historical past makes sense of the

present notion of author, text and reader.

Open texts bring in the role of the reader. The reader is not

perceived as a passive entity that receives the message, instead he/she is

at the creative end. The role of the reader is discussed in detail in the next

chapter.

106

Chapter 3

Reader and the Text

“Words are symbols that assume a shared memory,” (48) says

Borges. A text is made up of a number of words and words are messages that are left to be interpreted in different ways. Post structuralism brought about a radical change in the role of the reader. Reader assumes a greater role in decoding the message of a text. Barthes says: “…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”(1967) In a polyphonic novel, once the text is born the author recedes and the reader emerges. Eco in The Island of the Day Before responds to the concept of

The Death of the Author by addressing the reader as well as the protagonist of the novel: “He did not know that especially when their authors are now determined to die, stories often write themselves, and go where they want to go.”(482)

In all his novels Eco presupposes the kind of readers who read his works. Capozzi states:

Every text presupposes and constructs always a double Model

Reader (let us say, a naive and a "smart" one).The former uses the

work as semantic machinery and is the victim of the strategies of

the author who will lead him little by little along a series of 107

previsions and expectations; the latter evaluates the work as an

aesthetic product and enjoys the strategies implemented in order to

produce a model reader of the first level. This second-level reader

is the one who enjoys the seriality of the series, not so much for the

return of the same thing (that the ingenuous reader believed was

different) but for the strategy of the variations; in other words, he

enjoys the way in which the same story is worked over to appear to

be different. (1997,25)

There is a possibility that both the readers overlap one another. Eco’s mode of narration crosses the border between the two and nullifies the gap between the naïve and critical reader. For the convenience of analysis, each novel is analyzed from the point of view of a naïve reader and a critical reader. But at times they overlap one another.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Eco identifies two types of texts: the closed texts and the open texts:

A closed text is designed by the author to elicit a specific response

from the reader. However, Eco maintains, the closed text is

actually open to several possible interpretations. The text is

considered closed precisely because it does not adequately take the

reader's ability to interpret a variety of readings into account The

reader of the open text, on the other hand, feels comfortable with 108

"the maze-like structure of the text." A reader can use the open

text, however, only as the open text wants to be used. (Sallis, 4)

Eco views the author as an active entity who influences the act of

reading. In Eco’s novels, the author can be viewed as a reader. For Eco, a

text is an accumulation of signs. And signs demand the role of the reader.

The theory of Semiotics provides the reader with infinite possibilities to

interpret a text. Eco uses the term “Model Reader” to imply the possible

reader. He states: “The Model Reader and the author thus co-operate in

discovering the codes of a text.”(1979, 7) Each text has a Meta text which

is open and closed at the same time.

Similarly, to decode a text both the critical and the naive reader should unite in the Model Reader. While the author predicts the Model reader of his text, the text creates the reader’s competence. Eco states:

In the process of communication a text is frequently interpreted

against the background of codes different from those intended by

the author. Some authors do not take into account such a

possibility. They have in mind an average addressee referred to a

given social context […]. Those texts that obsessively aim at

arousing a precise response on the part of more or less precise

empirical readers […] are in fact open to any possible ‘aberrant’ 109

decoding. A text so immoderately ‘open’ to every possible

interpretation will be called a closed one ( 8).

Closed texts guide the reader upon a predetermined path and the reader has not many choices. The Model Reader for Open texts deals with the text as with a maze of many issues.” (9)Open texts guarantee a proliferation of interpretations and the responsibility of decoding is entrusted to the readers. In order to get out of the maze the reader should decode the text as well as the intention of the author.

Eco’s works, with its intertextual nature, prompts the reader to read it in the background of the author’s literary and personal experience.

In such a view, the author himself steps into the shoes of the reader in the

process of writing the work. Barthes’ idea of the Death of the Author can

be re-visioned in this perspective. The concept of intertextuality brings

into consideration the reading experience of the author that enables a

revisioning of the role of the author. A text is formed from the literary

and imaginative repertoire of the author. In this regard, the author

becomes the first reader in the process of writing and reading, that is in

the formation of a text.

Eco’s novels entrust a major role to the reader. The Name of the

Rose deals with the Middle Ages in Europe with special focus on the 110 ecclesiastic life. A postmodern reader who approaches the book is expected to be equipped with a minimum knowledge of medieval history and its nature. The views of William regarding the concept of “heresy” and the relevance of the meeting held at the abbey assumes greater significance in the light of the history of Christianity during the medieval period. The novel deals with a wide range of subjects from library science to optics. A reader who expects an easy reading of the text may either turn back disappointed or move forward only through the plot line of the novel. On the contrary, a critical reader drenches in the world of dialogics where different ideologies manifest themselves in the novelistic space.

The narrator, in the beginning of the novel, says that the readers of this book are the third readers as the book is being reproduced for the third time. Eco envisages a Model Reader in the narrator as he reproduces the work after reading some of the notes of Adso of Melk. In advance, he says that the bibliographic entries mismatch. The author directly addresses the reader in several instances. For instance, in the beginning of the novel, he asks: “What style should I employ?”(4) He decides to retain some of the passages in Latin perhaps to preserve the ambience of the period or to show fidelity to the source. The narrator is least bothered about time. He says: “I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness.” (5) He claims that he writes for sheer narrative pleasure. 111

These are the textual strategies employed by the writer to distance his personality from the authority of the text. By making such claims, he becomes less assertive and this opens up a space for the reader to complement and contradict with him.

The novel can be explored at different levels. Readers interested in

Fourteenth century history find the history of Papacy, Church-State conflict, conflict between different denominations of monastic orders, heresy and history of Minorities. For those interested in the Renaissance, there are discourses on cataloguing, herbs, medicines, and Optics. The role of Christian monasteries in translating and preserving the books of

Knowledge is highlighted in the novel. At a deeper level, as described in the previous chapter, the novel is notoriously dialogic at different levels.

For a naïve reader the text forms a detective fiction with a series of murders, clues and a detective monk to unravel the mystery. Steven identifies two types of readers, both naïve and critical, within the novel:

Eco reveals the two kinds of readers through two characters in the

novel who explore the world within the text by discovering the

meaning of signs just as a naive or a critical reader outside the text

could discover the meaning of the metatext. Adso, the narrator,

represents the naive reader. William represents the critical reader

who recognize various levels of signs in the universe (the great 112

book of nature) and in books. Just as a critical reader is able to find

a way through the maze-like structure of a text, so William is able

to find his way through the maze of clues in order to solve the

mystery he has been asked to solve.(5)

William prompts Adso to think critically and it is only when

William gets a clue from Adso that he is able to solve the mystery. At the

superficial level the novel is the story of its characters. A Franciscan monk William and his assistant Adso visit a Benedictine abbey where a murder has taken place. Abbot asks William to investigate the crime.

Later, a series of four strange murders follow. William investigates these murders and discovers the murderer who commits suicide in the end. In the act, accidentally the library catches fire and it burns. A deeper reading reveals the intertextual nature of the novel. A number of texts are woven into the matrix of the novel. History is amalgamated into the novel. While going through the novel, the reader is led to the history of the Middle

Ages. The work assumes meaning only in relation with texts outside it.

The novel forms a plane for ideological clashes. It is a text that deals with multiple events. The readers, with their previous reading experience, decipher the codes and symbols incorporated in the text. Eco writes against over interpretation of a work. He focuses on guided interpretation. A text becomes dynamic only if it calls for different 113 interpretations. The Name of the Rose provides ample space for the reader to act on it and generate meanings. The Rose is left to the readers to decipher it and produce meanings.

Foucault’s Pendulum is an open text that deals with a very wide range of subjects. At one level, it deals with conspiracy theories and secret societies. It employs many esoteric secret societies like the

Templar, The Rosicrucian, the Cabbala, the Umbanda to critique the

postmodern notions of interpretation and intertextuality. As every text bears a critique on itself, Foucault’s Pendulum is a critique on writing

and interpreting of a text.

A naïve reader views the novel as the experiences of three

Milaneese editors who are engaged in reading and editing scores of

manuscripts by paranoid writers about esoteric societies, the Kabala, the

Rosicrucian and the Templar. The editors, who have Colonel Ardenti’s

manuscript and a fourteenth century document of fifteen lines about the

Templar plot for controlling the telluric currents of the earth, start to work

on it. They try to recreate the plan from the historical knowledge they

have and also from the information they have got by reading other

diabolical works received for publication. They hatch out a Plan that

included the secret to possess the telluric currents that control the world.

By working out the Plan, they happen to probe into the secret of an occult 114 group who started hunting them one by one. Diotellevi is affected by cancer; Belbo is captured and killed by the occultists when he refuses to reveal the secret of the plan which is non-existent. The novel ends with the narrator waiting in fear that he too will be tracked down by the occultists.

As far as a critical reader is concerned, Foucault’s Pendulum is a self voiding text. The concept of the text is that that there is no concept at all. It tries to find the fixed point on earth but the fixed point turns out to be death. The novel and the characters are highly self reflexive. By trying to find a fixed point it questions the notion of certainty. The quest for meaning becomes futile. In the beginning chapter of the novel, the narrator Casaubon is awe stricken by the sight of the pendulum. He says:

The pendulum told me that, as everything moved- earth, solar

system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great

cosmic expansion- one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt or hook

around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part

in the supreme experience. (5)

Casaubon, at the outset of the novel embodies the reader who searches for fixed concepts in a text. He says: “How could you fail to kneel down before this alter of certitude?”(6) A reader who approaches the text for meaning is enthralled by the words of the narrator. Casaubon who is 115 fascinated by the sight of the pendulum moves into the hall of mirrors that reflects an image in different ways; creates many illusions. Standing in front of the mirror, he ponders:

Consider an individual looking back at you, condemned to

perpetual left-handedness, every morning when you shave. Was it

worth the trouble of setting up this hall just to tell us this? Or is the

message really that we should look at everything in a different way,

including the glass cases that supposedly celebrates the birth of

Physics and enlightened chemistry? (13)

The pendulum, in this part of narration appeals to the expectation of the reader who approaches the text for some fixed realities or truth.

The hall of mirrors and its illusion is a technique used to steer the reader accordingly to the nature of the text ahead , and it enables the reader to adjust their mental configuration to suit the task ahead, that of reading:

When you see a mirror- it’s only human-you want to look at

yourself. But here you can’t. You look at the position in space

where the mirror will say “you are here, and you are you,” you

look craning, twisting, but nothing works, because Lavoisier’s

mirrors, whether concave or convex disappoint you, mock you.

You step back, find yourself for a moment, but move a little and 116

you are lost. This catoptrics theatre was contrived to take away

your identity and make you feel unsure not only of yourself but

also of the very objects standing between you and the mirrors. (13)

The working of the mirrors often reflects the working of the text. The fixity of the pendulum is interrogated by the illusion created by the mirrors. A reader eager to devour the concepts in the text is repeatedly confronted by the illusion or void they create.

Self voiding texts prevent stabilization of context, and so it does not make any closures or settled meanings. Lawson's states: "Through language, theory and text we close the openness that is the world. The closures we make provide our world . . . each closure textures the world and thereby enables us to do things in the 'world'" (129). Context limits the text by providing stable interpretations. It becomes a critique on postmodern theories of deconstruction and the concept of the Death of the

Author.

The reader in the process of reading has to retreat occasionally to comprehend the intention of the author. It is only after reading a good amount of the text that the reader is able to decipher the meaning of the conservatoire episode. Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum, says: “The belief that time is linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the 117 cause….” (207) Reading the text is also a nonlinear activity where the

reader, more than once retreat, reread, modify and correct the

assumptions formed during the process of reading. At a later stage in the

novel, Belbo realizes:

…even the pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think

it’s the only fixed point in the cosmos, but if you detach it from the

ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just

the same. And there are the other pendulums: there’s one in New

York, in the UN building, there’s one in the science museum in

San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you

put it, Foucault’s pendulum swings from a motionless point while

earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point:

all you have to do is hang the pendulum from it…. That’s why the

pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the

infinite is left to me….you still have to make a decision, you have

to find the best point for it. (237)

The pendulum which represents certainty in the beginning of the novel

turns out to be an analogue for the text that confuses the reader by its self

voiding character. The reader is caught in a maze of different cultures

across the world as presented in the novel negotiating in different terms 118 between these cultures and finally realizing the futility of attempting to interpret in terms of reason.

Casaubon, the narrator also assumes the role of a reader who reads

through different texts and browses Abulafia for the final Plan. He feels

baffled and says: “But now I have come to believe that the whole world is

an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own attempt to

interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”(95) These words form a

signpost for a reader who approaches the novel with an intention to

interpret the underlying truth. The reader is confronted with multiple

truths and perspectives that make the undertaking all the more complex.

Towards the end of the novel, Casaubon says: “And the answer, the key to knowledge, was “No.” Not only does the magic word not exist, but we do not know that it does not exist. Those who admit their ignorance therefore, can learn something, at least what I was able to learn.”(623)

The editors Casaubon, Belbo and Diotellevi conjure a world with a secret plan which is not a secret. They claim that they hold the secret

when there is no secret. Here the secret becomes the language which has

a fluid existence. The fluidity of the language and the context inflame

infinite possibilities of interpretation. Colonel Ardenti leaves with the

editors, a photocopy of a fragmentary nineteenth century manuscript

which he claims to be a reproduction of a fourteenth century text thereby 119 bringing in multiple chronotopes into the field of the text. The editors, after the disappearance of the colonel started to work on it considering it as the Plan developed by the Templers. The message is:

a la…Saint Jean / 36 p charrete de fein / 6…entiers avec saiel /

p…les blancs mantiax / r…s…chevaliers de Pruins pour a ….j.nc /

6 foiz 6 en 6 placesl / chascune foiz 20 a…120a… / iceste est

l’ordonation / al donjon li premiers / it li secunz joste iceus

qui…pans / it al refuge / it a Nostre Dame d l‘altre part d l’iau /

it a l’ostel des popelicans / it a la pierre / 3 foiz 6 avant la feste la

Grant Pute.(534)

The three editors fill the gaps and try to recreate historical events in the light of this text. The message stands as an analogue to the novel and

Casaubon, Belbo Diotellevi and Lia stand for different readers. Lia,

Casaubon’s girlfriend, following the model of Ockham’s razor gives the simplest explanation to it. She interprets: “…the message is ordinary. It’s a laundry list.”(FP534). It is the list prepared by a merchant, calculating how much he is going to make on the orders he has received and is making the list of deliveries he has to make. She reads as:

In Rue Saint Jean: / 36 sous for wagons of hay. / Six new lengths

of cloth will seal / to rue des Blancs-Manteaux. / Crusaders’ roses

to make a jonchee: / Six bunches of six in the six following places, / 120

each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all. / Here is the order: /

the first to the fort / item the second to thosein Porte-aux-Pains /

item to the Church of the Refuge / item to the Church of Notre

Dame, across the river / item to the old building of the Cathars /

item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde. / And three bunches of six before

the feast, in the whores’ street. (536)

Lia becomes one among the possible readers of the encoded text who perceives it as merely a list of deliveries. Colonel Ardenti,

Casaubon, Belbo and Diotellevi belong to the group of sophisticated readers who with their knowledge on post modern concepts like intertextuality, new historicism and dialogism decodes it as the key to the secret guarded by the Templar. The trio, Casaubon, Belbo and Diotellevi are convinced by the interpretation of the Colonel who asserts the message as the secret code of the Templar. Ardenti decoded the message as:

The night of Saint John’s Eve, thirty-six years after the hay wain.

The Templar charged with keeping the order alive escaped capture

in September 1307 in a hay wain. At that time the year was

calculated from Easter to Easter. So 1307 would end at what we

would consider Easter 1308.Count thirty-six years after Easter

1308 and you arrive at Easter 1344…” (136) 121

The role of the reader in attributing meaning to a text is fore grounded through this episode. Different levels of readers interpret the text differently. The novel envisages different types of readers who interpret the text according to their experience and interest. The novel thus becomes a critique on the practice of over interpretation.

Eco perceives a text as an organic whole and every interpretation should take this fact into consideration. Foucault’s pendulum points out

the dangers of reader’s desires and uncontrolled interpretation for which

the three editors pay the price with their life. It can be seen as a text

which analyses the textual practices by turning on itself. The self

reflexivity of the text leaves it all the more complex, loaded with

meanings, and forms a muddle for one who approaches it for a meaning.

The text reads against itself thereby questions every notion of certainty

and presence. Thus the novel, while proclaiming the futility of

interpretation opens up the infinite possibilities of it.

Casaubon’s words about the tower are also applicable to the text.

He says:

From the distance it winks affectionately, but should you approach,

should you attempt to penetrate its mystery, it will kill you, it will

freeze your bones, simply by revealing the meaningless horror of

which it s made.(618) 122

For a reader who approaches the text passively finds the novel opaque and intricate. On the contrary, a critical reader finds the text entrenched with a multiplicity of cultural and ideological signs that need great effort to decipher. At times the demarcation between the author and the reader perishes in the process of actualization of the text. The influence of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction led to over interpretation of many texts. Eco who advocated open texts, talks of authorial intention to prevent such practices of over interpretation Bondanella states:

The Empirical Author is never, in Eco’s view a privileged

interpreter of his or her text but becomes a potential Model Reader

offering possible explanation for his or her creation. Unlikely,

improbable or impossible readings constitute over interpretation

and in certain extreme instances- best reflected by the crack pot

theories held by many of the “diabolicals” in Foucault’s

Pendulum-such readings may become paranoid over

interpretations. ( 286)

Baudolino, set in the backdrop of the thirteenth century crusades incorporates historical events that happened in Germany and

Constantinople. A naïve reader finds it as the adventurous story of young

Italian, Baudolino, who is adopted by Frederick I. He is capable of learning languages within half an hour of his exposure to it and of telling 123 lies. He is sent to Paris for education where he comes to know of the legendary Kingdom of Prester John. Baudolino takes part in the Crusades with his adoptive father. During the second crusade, Frederick is murdered in a locked room and his body is thrown into the river.

Baudolino and his friends set off in search of the Kingdom of Prester

John. After his return from the kingdom, he is in search of his father’s murderer. He finds the murderer and kills him. But finally, Niketas, reveals the fact that Frederick was really drowned in water and Baudolino

himself is responsible for the death. Remorse stricken, he meditates on

top of a tower and transforms into a truth teller. Towards the end of the

novel, he sets off to east in search of more adventures.

The unreliability of the narrator and the loose thread of historical events lead a critical reader from the text to history. The narrator assumes his freedom declaring himself as a liar and knits a satirical history of

Frederick I. Baudolino becomes symbolic of a postmodern author, eco himself, who brings historical accounts into his narration so as to animate it. The unreliability of the narrator is a literary technique adopted by the author to confer infinite freedom to the narrator. Niketas, the interlocutor accuses Baudolino openly:

You… are like a liar of Crete, you tell me you’re a confirmed liar

and insist I believe you. You want me to believe you’ve told lies to 124

everybody but me…And you’re asking me to construct the story

that eludes you. But I’m not a liar of your class. In my life I have

questioned the stories of others in order to extract the truth.

Perhaps you are asking me for a story that will absolve you of

having killed someone to avenge the death of your Frederick. You

building step by step, this story of love for your emperor so that it

will be natural to explain why it was your duty to avenge him-

assuming that he was killed, and that he was killed by the man you

have killed. (40)

Baudolino often confuses what he saw with what he wanted to see. The distinction between reality and imagination disappears in him.

The use of historical characters with a blend of imagination engages the reader with the new historic reading of a literary text. The novel serves as a metafiction that openly discusses the novelistic discourse. Eco disrupts the static view of history by breaking the grand narratives of wars into meta narratives. Wars with Milan, Genoa and other Italian city States are reduced to rumors. He creates an alternative history of rumors and jealousies. The cultural effacement of paganism by the Christians is highlighted through the siege.

The suspicious words of the historian lead the reader to the intention of the author that they prompt the reader to negotiate literature 125 in terms of history and history in terms of literature. New historicism

focuses on the role of historical contexts in interpreting literary texts and

the role of literary texts in interpreting history. Such an analysis

neutralizes the distinction between history and literature. Instead, it opens

up a dialogue between literature and history.

The novel discusses the practice of Simony which was rampant

during the Middle Ages. During the journey to the Kingdom of Prester

John, Baudolno and his group carry seven heads of John the Baptist to be

sold at different places. Ardzrouni says: “I fabricate relics, true, and they

are much in demand both in Asia and Europe. I have to sell one of these

heads at a great distance from the other: for instance, one in Antioch, and

the other in Italy and nobody would realize that there are two of

them.”(298) Simony was very popular during the Middle Ages. After

each crusade the soldiers brought back a number of relics to the Catholic

land. They sold the relics at a higher price. Simony was an industry that

flourished during the period. In Eco’s novel, it serves to critique the

present capitalist society that concentrates exclusively on the utilitarian

value of every commodity.

Medieval myths such as the Kingdom of Prester John and The

Holy Grail are used extensively in the novel. The search for the legendary

Kingdom becomes a replica of the Plan in Foucault’s Pendulum. 126

Presbyter Johannes, the legendary Christian Patriarch who ruled over a

Nestorian Christian nation was lost amid the Muslims and pagans of the

Orient. He was a popular figure in the European chronicles and tradition

from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Many fantasy works

presented him as one of the descendents of the Three Magi ruling a

kingdom full of riches, marvels and strange creatures. The Deacon John in Baudolino says: “The Kingdom of the Priest… is very ancient and it has been the refuge over the centuries for all the sects excluded from the

Christian world of the Occident.”(401) Eco presents the Kingdom as the

‘other’ of the European Christian world. The Kingdom represents a secular world of the occident, probably India, where everyone enjoys the rights to practice their culture and pursue their view of life. “The Priest was unwilling to take from any of these exiles their own faith, and the preaching of many of them has seduced the various races that inhabit the kingdom.”(402)

On their way to the Kingdom Baudolino and his companions meet different disproportionate creatures like the skiapods, blemmys, pygmies, giants, panoians, tongueless, nubians, eunuchs and the satyrs. These creatures are born out of the colonial fantasy about the east that is assumed as the uncivilized part of human world. Reading the novel demands active involvement of the reader in decoding the textual signs in 127 relation to its historical and cultural relevance. The confrontation between the East and the West that gave rise to the Oriental Discourse is represented by Eco in terms of the protagonist’s adventure to the legendary kingdom. Eco uses the myth of Prester John to describe

Orientalism. The process of reading establishes a dialogic relation among the author, text and the reader. Reading creates an ongoing dialogue between the text and the reader. This process takes the reader to a world of signs extraneous to the text.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the encounter between

Baudolino and Hypatia has a cultural significance. Readers are carried from The Name of the Rose to Baudolino, where the debate between

Christianity and paganism is carried over to. The arguments put forth by

Hypatia attacks the Christian notion of omnipotent perfect God. She

claims that hypatias are dedicated to the salvation of God. She says:

We will give the Unique One the strength to take that great breath

that enables him to absorb into himself the evil he has

exhaled…Then proving that from the multiplicity of the suffering

world it is possible to return to the Unique, we will have given

back to God peace and security, the strength to recompose himself

in his own center, the energy to resume the rhythm of his own

breath. (435) 128

Hypatia’s argument deconstructs the Christian omniscient God who has created everything. The very concept of greatness renders him imperfect and helpless. This argument leads the reader to the theory of deconstruction proposed by Derrida. In his “Structure Sign and Play”

(1967), he talks of centre losing its focus and moving to the margins which results in multiple centers.

Unlike the traditional novel that has a well defined plot; Eco’s novels have several loose ends. The gaps and silences are deliberate that it is the reader who fills in the gaps during the process of reading.

Baudolino is a novel where a number of micro narratives are linked together by the title character. The narrator of the novel remains obscure.

Niketas hears the story of Baudolino with the perfect knowledge that the speaker is a liar. The blind detective Paphnutius advises Niketas to tell the true story of the Roman Empire and not a fabricated adventure of a liar in the far off Barbarian lands. He says: “You surely don’t believe you are the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone- a great liar than Baudolino will tell it.” (521) The credibility of the story is lost as it is told by unreliable Baudolino and what becomes when it is told by a greater liar than Baudolino. These words prompt the reader to go through the text for a second time to negotiate with it in terms of historicism and new historicism. 129

The Island of the Day Before describes the life of an Italian who travels around the world on a mission to find the longitude. The narrator of the story is a reader of the journal entries of Roberto. The letters supposedly written by Roberto are highly artificial. The narrator says:

He wrote the first missive later, and before writing it, he had a look

around; and in subsequent letters he will relate what he saw. But

those, too, raise the question of how to treat the diary of a man with

poor vision, who roams during night, relying on his weak eyes. (6)

As in Baudolino, the reliability of the source is suspected thereby providing the narrator infinite freedom of narration. The novel is an open text where it is “…essentially the story of the reader who is expected to walk in and out of the text transcending the boundaries between fiction and reality, while exploring the numerous possibilities and possible worlds that alternative readings can bring about.”(1)

The narrator knits the novel from some letters and diary entries of

Roberto and in the process of narration he expresses his doubts regarding the authenticity of the source. The narrator himself becomes the first reader of the memoirs. The readers read the interpretation of an interpretation. As discussed earlier, the unreliability of the source is a textual device that gives infinite freedom to the Author and the reader is 130 forced to negotiate between the narrator and author. The novel deals with a wide range of subjects: literature, science, navigation, geography, magic, psychology, philosophy, politics and colonialism. The reader

encounters different Meta narratives which s/he could decode with his or her knowledge in different areas. The reader becomes an active entity

searching for meanings outside the text. The process of reading makes the

text dynamic.

A naïve reader views the novel as the story of an Italian young man

Roberto who is sent by the French Cardinal to explore the lands of East

Asia, along the coast of Pacific and to discover the mystery of longitude.

He is ship wrecked and is washed into an abandoned ship in the harbor.

From the abandoned ship, he can see the land but his inability to swim

leaves him marooned. Trapped in the ship, he begins to recall about his

life. He imagines of a twin brother who is responsible for all the

misfortunes in his life. He believes that all his troubles will end once he

reaches the land.

The author, from a postmodern perspective writes the novel with a

narrator who uses modernist narrative techniques like stream of

consciousness and mnemonic mode of narration to reconstruct the diary

entries of Roberto who lived in the seventeenth century. The concept of

linear time is broken and the reader is navigated back and forth into past 131 and present, to the siege and the shipwrecked state of schizophrenic

Roberto who is afraid of his “other” Ferrante. The narrator creates the character Ferrante to guide the readers through the gaps and delays left by

Roberto in the course of narration. “Ferrante had thrust himself into this

story playing on Roberto’s absences, his delays, his early departures and

at the right moment had garnered the reward for Roberto’s speech on

Powder of Sympathy” (178)

A critical reader looks at the text as a site of different ideologies.

The mention of the debate centering on Galileo and his heliocentric theory takes the reader outside the text to the history of the early seventeenth century debate on Galileo affair which began around 1610 culminating with the trial and condemnation of Galileo by the Roman

Catholic Inquisition in 1663 for his support of the theory of heliocentric universe propounded by Copernicus. The exchanges between Saint

Savian and the Abbe on heliocentric universe and void are to be read in the context of seventeenth century history which records the condemnation of Galileo by the Church.

The existence of void or vacuum was another subject for argument.

The question on the existence of vacuum dates back to ancient Greece, to

Aristotle who believed that nature abhors vacuum and air has not weight

nor does it exert pressure. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the 132

Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman accepted the existence of vacuum and recognized that air exerts pressure in every direction. Later in the seventeenth century Toricelli in an important experiment conducted at

Florence in 11644 proved the existence of vacuum. He further

demonstrated that it is easy to produce vacuum. The discovery resulted in

a deep scientific, philosophic and religious trauma. The assertion of the

existence of void put forth the argument that the creation of God is

imperfect which was against the Christian idea of a perfect God. The

seventeenth century history becomes the framework of the text where Eco

carries forward the discussion on Void that has its counterpart in

Baudolino.

The protagonist of the novel, Roberto is commissioned to discover

the mystery of longitude. Seventeenth century was a period of discovery

in Europe. The discovery of means to measure longitude was a revolution

in the history of colonization.

With the Age of Discovery came colonization by European

countries, first of America and then subjugation of the producers

of wealth in the East. The struggle for a monopoly of trade with the

East lasted several centuries…Great Britain finally succeeded in

establishing a world-wide empire by the nineteenth century.

(Sinha.68-69) 133

With the intertexts of History and Geography, the reader is navigated out of the novel into the historical world of seventeenth century for a proper

contextual orientation.

Eco envisages a Model Reader in the narrator. He says: “Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond

which there was no longer an Author: or if there was, He seemed lost in

the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives.”(The Island, 146)

More than once, Eco turns to the reader to discuss the advancement of the

plot. in chapter fifteen he says: “WHY, THE READER may ask, have I

been speaking for a hundred pages at least, of so many events that

preceded Roberto’s behind wrecked on the Daphne, while on Daphne

itself I have made nothing happen.”(147). Addressing the reader directly,

the author is involving the participation of the readers in the narrative. He

says: “…a story teller resorts to every artifice to see not only that the

reader enjoys imagining what has not happened but also ant certain point

he forgets that he is reading and believes it really did happen.”(368) Like

Eco’s other novels, The Island of the Day Before becomes a metafiction

as the narrator discusses with the reader about the techniques involved in

the act of storytelling. The reader is simultaneously engaged and

disengaged with the work, in the sense that the reader’s focus is diverted

from the novel per se to the genre of novel by deliberately creating a 134 critical distance between the text and the reader. Again in Chapter

Twenty two, the writer says:

So we may assume that gradually, perhaps through the therapeutic

action of that balmy air or that sea water, Roberto was cured of a

complaint that real or imagined had turned him into a lycanthrope

for more than ten months (unless the reader chooses to insinuate

that because from now on I need him on deck full time, and finding

no contradiction among his papers, I am freeing him from all

illness, with authorial arrogance. (280)

Eco allies narrator’s voice with that of the readers by the use of the personal pronoun “we”. He intentionally reminds the reader that he is reading a novel and often he discusses the proceedings with the reader there by eliciting desired responses. By addressing the reader and at times, he distances the reader from the events and at the same time endorses a thread of narration in the hands of the reader. The reader has a choice that s/he can either assume Roberto is dead or leave the novel at this juncture or proceeds reading. For a reader who proceeds, towards the end of the novel the author places a number of possibilities. The reader can assume that the pages were written by Roberto or someone else wrote them, and the author pretends to tell true things. The novel ends with the words: 135

“The author is unknown,” I would however expect him to say.

“The writing is graceful, but as you see, it is discolored, and the

pages are covered with water-stains. As for the contents, from the

little I have seen, they are mannered exercises. You know how they

wrote in that century…People with no soul.”(513)

In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, the protagonist Yambo suffers from amnesia. Time and space flout in Yambo who no longer lives in time. Author contrives his amnesiac character as one who remembers every book he has read but has forgotten everything else from his life, with a specific intention. In an attempt to relocate himself and retrieve his memory, he revisits every book he has read since his childhood. This is a textual technique employed by the author to incorporate diverse texts into the matrix of the novels to recreate the cultural past of Italy. Yambo goes through the pages of his school note books- the elementary ones that have instilled Fascist ideologies into the tender minds to glorify chivalry, bloodshed and war. In the middle school and high school books, there is no mentioning of war. The present is seen as a moment of hatred. At this point, the narrative becomes a collage of different texts-comics, novels, cigarette cases, journals, magazines, news paper cuttings, notebook entries and phonetics. 136

Adult Yambo, searching through the note books of child Yambo performs the role of a reader who analyses the ideologies that operated the in the then society. Yambo represents the postmodern reader who analyses how the fascist ideologies percolated the minds of the Italians during the 1940s, the relevance of war, bloodsheds, and the stand point of citizens, children, adults, teachers and headmasters of the period. He views the cartoon characters- Phantom, Mandrake everything from the postmodern standpoint:

There are other heroes…such as Mandrake the Magician who,

though he treated his Negro servant, Loather, as a friend, seemed to

use him as a body guard and faithful slave…He was a bourgeois

hero, with no black or red uniform, though he was always

impeccable in his tailcoat and top hat. (240)

The novel carries nearly a hundred illustrations from popular children’s classics. Capozzi observes:

The illustrations in Part ii, for instance, provide an additional

cognitive framework for the reader. Depending on the reader’s

ability to perceive, recognize, remember, and interpret several of

these images (potentially loaded with historical and ideological

realism), such images of memorabilia can function simply as

documentary sources. On another and more sophisticated level of 137

reading however, they may serve as micro-narratives that can

produce numerous other stories…After examining the first few

illustrations in the novel, the astute reader realizes that in the

myriad of images, only a few are directly related to Yambo’s

personal life. Consequently, the reader’s task is not so much a

question of perceiving and interpreting the illustrations strictly in

relation to Yambo’s private stories, as it is concerned with

applying his or her own encyclopedic competence to the

exploitation of the dynamics of visual and auditory stimulations

provided by the hypertext facing him. Thus, the perceptive reader

soon appreciates how The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

provides the material for the generation of thousands of different

stories.es and anecdotes by readers who wish to generate their own

stories. (2009, 129)

Adult Yambo represents the critical reader who analyses how

Colonial and fascist ideology operate through Ideological State

Apparatuses like school text books comics and cartoons. He views every discussions of the past from a standpoint different from that of the child

Yambo. He is occupied in unraveling the politics behind portrayal of heroes in children’s classics and prompts the reader to revision different images and icons presented by the dominant culture. He says: 138

Clearly I was encountering heroes in those ungrammatical albums

differed from the ones put forward by the official culture, and

perhaps in those garish (yet so mesmerizing) cartoons I had been

initiated into a different vision of good and evil. (211)

He deconstructs all that he has learned as a child. He says, “…children are manipulative bastards.”(213) The amnesiac adult Yambo represents the schizophrenic Italians who have lived in the fascist Italy during the time of Mussolini. They were subjected to a sort of cultural amnesia. In the attempt to retrieve memory Eco revisits the cultural artifacts that have been instrumental in perpetuating the colonial fascist ideology.

Eco envisages different levels of readers in the novel. Child Yambo stands for a child reader of 1940’s who fails to see the discourses in relation to the historical context. He is fascinated by the cartoon pictures of heroes who instill pride and self confidence in him. A reader interested in popular culture like comics, cartoon strips are engaged with pictures, cover pages and comic strips in the text. The readers interested in the historical relevance of these inter texts are supplied with such information in the appendix of the novel. The text accommodates different levels of readers catering to their interests.

Like his other novels, in Prague Cemetery Eco addresses the reader directly and presents the narrator as one who would summarize the diary 139 written by the elderly man. He takes the readers into confidence by a frank admission that even the narrator does not know who the writer is and he is trying to find this out along with the Reader. (3) Eco contrives in Simonini a forger of many documents that circulated in Europe during the nineteenth century. The narrator exposes the anti Jewish sentiments nurtured by SimoninI throughout his life. He identifies the roots for his anti Jewish attitude to his grandfather. He writes: “All I know about Jews is what my grandfather taught me. ‘ They are the most godless people,’ he used to say.”(5) Though Simonini claims to have no bias towards any race, his writing betrays the misanthrope in him. To him, as far as

Germans are concerned, their language is vague. He considers the compositions of Wagner, Bach and Beethoven are trivial. According to him, the French are gluttonous and greedy. Thus the author slowly builds up the character investing in him many vices.

The reader having more knowledge about the character than the character himself assumes a sort of superiority and views Simonini as the

‘other’ of himself/herself. As the novel proceeds, the readers are shocked by the cruelty of Simonini who holds no personal relationship above money. He even blows up the ship in which Neivo is sailing and feels no remorse for taking away many innocent lives. 140

For a naïve reader Prague Cemetery is a novel that tells the story of

the misanthrope Simonini who was born in Turin in 1830. He loses his mother during his birth and his father is killed in 1848 fighting for a united Italy. He is brought up by his grandfather who provides refuge to the Jesuit priests and hates Jews. Simonini studies law and masters the skill of forgery. He is banished to Paris where he sets up business of forging documents. At one point, he finds he has lost his memory. On the advice of his doctor, he decides to write down all he can remember in the form of a diary. He works long hours on his life story and fall asleep due to exhaustion. Every time he wakes up to find someone else, a mysterious

Abbe Dalla Piccola has written in his diary.

Eco has given certain cues at the end of the novel, for the readers, giving a chapter wise outline of the plot and the related historical events under the title “USELESS LEARNED EXPLANATIONS (433). He writes:

The Narrator is aware that, in the fairly chaotic plot sequence of the

diaries reproduced here(moving back and forth, using what

cineastes call flashbacks), the reader might have difficulty in

following the linear progression of events, from Simonine’s birth

to the end of his diaries…. The Narrator, to be honest, has often

found it difficult finding his own way around, but feels a 141

competent reader need not become lost in detail and should enjoy

the story just the same. However, for the benefit of the overly

meticulously reader, or one who is not so quick on the uptake, here

is a table which sets out the relationship between the two levels

(common in truth to every well-made novel, as it used to be

called).(433-34)

This appendix forms a guide for the readers who has no other source of reference immediate at hand. The author establishes direct contact with the reader in the text and guides the reader when needed. For instance, in the beginning the implied author presents an elderly man, sitting at the table:

… writing what we are about to read, and which the Narrator will

`summarise from time to time, so as not to unduly bore the Reader.

Nor should the Reader expect the Narrator to reveal, to his surprise,

that this figure is someone already named, since this being the very

beginning of the story) no one has yet been named. And the

Narrator himself does not know who the mysterious writer is,

proposing to find this out (together with the reader)while both of us

look on inquisitively and follow what he is noting down on those

sheets of paper.(3) 142

The author identifies with the reader as he uses the personal pronoun ‘we.’ The author, the narrator and the reader stand on the same plane at this point of narration. There is yet another instance where the readers are baffled by the diary entries of two persons the author says:

The narrator will now summarize them, or rather to carry out the

proper amplification, so that this game of cues and responses

become more coherent and in order not to burden the reader with

sanctimonious tone the abbe employed, in his account, to censure

the past errors of his alter ego with excessive unction. (83)

The author and the narrator merge in the voice of narration and the readers at this point is confused whether the narrator and the author are single or two different entities. The relations between the two persons who write in the diary are revealed in the above extract. This gives a hint to the reader about the schizophrenic personality of Simonini and the reader is given an idea about the proceeding part of the plot where the unpleasant experiences that Simonini conceal from his own conscious mind finds expression through his alter ego Abbe Dalla Paccola. The act of writing his life story cures him of his split personality.

A critical reader dives in and out of the text as the text interweaves the nineteenth century world of forging documents and other historical records into its fabric. Eco strings all the forgeries by creating a single 143 person responsible for all the forged documents. He places Simonini in

the wider canvas of nineteenth century history and thereby connects

different isolated events through this character. Eco questions the

concepts of originality and interrogates the credibility of history by using

forged documents as a source for his novel. He displays his new

historicist outlook in the treatment of the documents.

Like his other novels, Prague Cemetery also engages in the technicalities of storytelling especially a story of conspiracy. The author anticipates the responses of his readers when he says:

… if I wanted to sell the story of a conspiracy, I didn’t have to

offer the buyer anything original, but simply something he already

know or could have found out more easily in other ways. People

only believe what they already know, and this is the beauty of the

Universal Form of Conspiracy.”(78)

Eco draws the psychology of the common readers of the novels dealing

with conspiracy. From a postmodern perspective, he redefines the readers

as ‘the buyers’ and publishing industry as a part of the culture industry.

He presents the contemporary scenario of culture industry where literary

productions become a cultural commodity launched in the cultural

market. Eco critiques the culture industry in general and conspiracy

novels in particular. 144

Eco in his The Role of the Reader states that the author has to presuppose a model of possible reader for his work who can identify authorial intention while interpreting the work. He states: “You cannot use the text as you want but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it be cannot afford whatever interpretation.”(7) In this respect, he has formulated his characters as model readers to direct the process of reading and to reveal the authorial intention. Thus, in The

Name of the Rose, Baudolino and The Island of the Day Before, the narrator himself assumes the role of the model reader. In other novels like

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Foucault’s Pendulum and

Prague Cemetery the characters undertake the role of the model reader.

145

Chapter 4

Intertextual Rhizomes

Intertextuality forms a major focus in the postmodern literary theory as it discusses the hybrid nature of a text. It has become a methodology for the analysis of a literary work. Post modernism views a text as a mosaic of quotations. They use intertextuality as a literary device to construct an interrelation between different texts and there by create a related understanding of the work with reference to other works. It includes quotations, allusions, pastiche, plagiarism, translation and parody. It adds layers of meaning to the text based on the reader’s previous reading experience. It opens up a dialogic relation between different texts- source text and the target texts.

Intertextuality becomes a major theme in Eco’s novels. Through his novels, he creates a world by stringing fragments from different cultural artifacts. Most of his novels are historiographic in nature as they retell histories using historical texts as their source. For Eco, intertextuality becomes an inherent characteristic while writing historically oriented novels. Allen states:

Eco makes it plain that in writing a historically-oriented text the

principal problem is intertextual: the ‘already written’ and ‘already 146

said’ threaten to turn one’s narrative and narrative voice into a

mere repetition of previous utterances and previous texts…Eco ,

however is not describing literary techniques which finally allow

for a direct and a wholly serious representation of the past. On the

contrary, the need to ironize historical representation means that

the narrative necessarily becomes charged with intertextual traces

of the past, the present and the historical periods between the two.”

(194-95)

Reading Eco’s novels turn out to be a journey through a number of texts ranging from literary to multimedia iconoclasts. Eco’s strategy of incorporating texts parallel to Bakhtin’s description of the writer’s practice in the Middle Ages of quoting another’s word. Bhaktin states:

The relationship to another's word was ... complex and ambiguous

in the Middle Ages. The role of the other's word was enormous at

that time: there were quotations that were openly and reverently

emphasized as such, or that were half-hidden, completely hidden,

conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted,

deliberately reinterpreted and so forth. The lines between someone

else's speech and one's own speech was invisible, ambiguous, often

deliberately distorted and confused. Certain types of texts were

constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others. (1981, 69) 147

His first and most popular novel, The Name of the Rose discusses the nature of texts and their intertextual existence. From the very beginning of the novel, it incorporates and alludes to other texts; academic, philosophic, ancient, modern, religious, scientific heretic and even pulp.

They do not contradict one another; instead they supplement one another in formulating a better understanding of how text speaks of texts.

William, in the novel speaks of books. He says: “The good of a book lies

in its being read. A book is made up of signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.” (478)

The description of a text as an intertextual entity gives the reader a

space to analyze the work. The novel is a metatext that explains itself.

Eco’s theoretical orientation regarding the role of the reader, intertextuality and semoiotics form the subtext of the novel. In this regard the text concentrates on the nature of texts and the process of reading.

The conversation between Adso and William becomes a discussion on intertextuality:

“Why? To know what one book says you must read others?”

“At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a

harmless book is like a seed that will bloom into a dangerous book,

or it is the other way around. It is the sweet fruit of bitter stem. In 148

reading Albert, couldn’t I learn what Thomas might have said? Or

in reading Thomas, know what Averroes said?”

“…until then I had thought each book spoke of things, human or

divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently

books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among

themselves.”(342)

The whole conversation explains the postmodern concept of intertextuality. In the conversation, Adso assumes the role of a Model

Reader, being thrown into a maze of intertextual relations. Eco recreates the medieval monastic life from a post modern view, using fragments of different texts as a cultural background.

The novel centers on the lost book of Aristotle which deals with

Comedy and Laughter. William has reconstructed the book from other books that are present in the library. This endeavor shows how an absent text is reconstructed from the texts that are present; a text leads to other texts and context leads to other contexts.

Eco has incorporated the ideas of William of Occam, Jorge L

Borges, Conan Doyle, Mikhail Bhaktin, Roland Barthes and his own theoretical concepts of semiotics and the role of the reader. The central character William of Baskerville is modeled on the character of the 149 legendary detective Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle’s works. Likewise, the narrator Adso resembles Dr. Watson who acts as a scribe in Doyle’s detective novels. William and his way of reasoning reinforce the idea of

Occam’s razor which resorts to the shortest and easiest mode of

explaining things. Lia in Foucault’s Pendulum also follows a similar

mode of reasoning especially in interpreting the Ingolf message. The

blind monk Jorge from Burgos alludes to the Argentinean writer Jorge

Luis Burgos, who has been a major influence on Eco. Borges has been

the director of Argentina’s National library and in his later years he has

lost his eyesight. His short story, “The Secret Miracle” portrays a blind

librarian. The labyrinth of the library is modeled on the library in “The

Library of Babel” written by Borges.

The Book of Revelation in the New Testament which describes the

destruction of the world becomes a pattern for the crimes. Eco uses this

pattern to frame a religious pervert as the murderer. The paintings in the

church, especially the painting of heaven become a visual representation

of the last book in the New Testament that describes St. John’s vision.

The sermon Jorge delivers after the death of Malachi is also based on the

book of Revelation in the Bible that gives a description of the end of the

world: 150

...the Antichrist will defeat the West and will destroy the trade

routes; in his hand he will have sword and raging fire, and in

violent fury the flame will burn: his strength will be blasphemy, his

hand treachery; the right hand will be ruin, the left the bearer of

darkness. These are the features that will mark him: his head will

be of burning fire, his right eye will be bloodshot, his left eye a

feline green with two pupils, and his eyebrows will be white, his

lower lip swollen, his ankle weak, his feet big, his thumb crushed

and elongated. Even the serial murders committed in the abbey

follows the apocalyptic pattern, with the seven trumpets that

announces the end of the world. (403)

The Book of Revelation is used to build an enigmatic fear and mystery regarding the crimes committed in the abbey. Later, in the novel, Jorge himself assumes the role of Antichrist and destroys the library by fire.

Bhaktin’s writings on dialogism and carnival gains deeper significance in the Name of the Rose. Bhaktin’s theory of carnival highlights the importance of laughter which nullifies the fear associated with an object. The fear about an object is overcome by making it a subject of laughter.

In this sense Carnival is a festival of laughter and merry making.

Similarly the argument between Jorge and William on the second part of 151

Aristotle’s book on Comedy reflects Bhaktin’s theory of Carnival. Jorge argues:

…here the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the

doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the

object of philosophy and of perfidious theology…This book could

strike a Lucifrine spark that would set a new fire to the whole

world and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even

to Prometheus for cancelling fear. (577-78)

Jorge’s arguments on laughter and its features reflect the discussion on laughter by Bhaktin in his work Rabelais and His world:

The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees

them completely from all religious and ecclesiastic dogmatism

from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of

the character of magic and prayer: they do not command nor do

they ask for anything. Even more, certain carnival forms parody

the Christian cult. All these forms are placed systematically outside

the church and religiosity. They belong to an entirely different

sphere. (7)

The novel also discusses Bhaktin’s concepts of heteroglossia and

polyphony. Salvatore, the monk who often swears”Penitenziagite!”(46) is 152 a heteroglot in himself.Adso says: "…And yet I did understand what

Salvatore meant and so did the other…he spoke not one but all languages,

none correctly, talking words sometimes from one and sometimes from

another.”(1980, 47) The relation between Knowledge and Power as

formulated in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison is

elaborated by the role of the library in the abbey. The monk who gains

access to the interiors of the library exerts certain powers on others. Jorge

gains superiority and outshines Alinardo by his act of bringing many rare

books to the collection in the library. Knowledge becomes an analogue of

Power. The library itself exerts power on the inhabitants of the abbey.

The monks who visit the library for reference may remain their till there

death.

The inclusion of different discourses into the body of the novel

needs to be analyzed in the context of intertextuality. For that matter, The

Name of the Rose contains discourses on, architecture, library

cataloguing, painting, heresy, literature, history, optics, medicinal herbs.

At the very outset of the novel, there is the sketch of the Abbey. Later,

Adso describes the architectural beauty of the Aedificium:

This was an octagonal construction that from a distance

seemed a tetragon (a perfect form, which expresses the

sturdiness and impregnability of the City of God)…Three 153

rows of windows proclaimed the triune rhythm of its

elevation, so what was physically squared on the earth was

spiritually triangular in the sky. As we came closer, we

realized that the quadrangular form included, at each of its

corners, a heptagonal tower, five sides of which were visible

on outside- four of eight sides, then, of the greater octagon

producing four minor heptagons, which from the outside

appeared as pentagons. (21 -22)

The architectural design of library is discussed in detail by William while explores the way to enter finis Africa. Even Geometrics come into play in the process of deciphering the secret about the building. William prepares the sketch of the library from outside the building. Regarding library cataloguing, William reconstructs Aristotle’s book on comedy from the library catalogue. He talks of the hidden book of Aristotle from the available catalogue in the library. Painting forms another intertext in the novel. The church with its sculptures and paintings of heaven and other apocalyptic paintings supplement to the pattern of crime committed in the abbey .They form a visual text /sign that leads to the secret that underlies in the abbey. (40-45)

William’s discussion on heresy deals with the politics behind the term and its usage. In his argument with the abbot, he explains how the term is 154 used by the powerful to eliminate the ones that threaten their position.

(145-46) Eco depicts the working of any society or culture where creating

“other” becomes the first step towards elimination; how such processes create new episteme/ discourse in different epochs.

Servinus brings in the text of herbal medicine. He explains different herbs and is medicinal value:

…ahhalingho pesto comes from Cathy: I received it from a learned

Arab. Indian aloe, excellent cicatricizant. Live arient revives the

dead, or rather, wakes those who have lost their senses. Arsenacho:

a very dangerous, a mortal poison for anyone who swallows it.

Borage, a plant good for ailing lungs. Betony, good for fractures of

the head. Mastic calms pulmonary fluxions and troublesome

catarrhs…. (107-8)

William’s conversation with the master glazier Nicholas about different

lenses and its application form a wonderful text on optics. Eco artistically weaves his novel using strands of different texts. It forms a matrix in

which many other texts are embedded. The text provides a space for a

number of texts to enter into dialogue and thereby produce infinite set of

meanings. Capozzi observes: 155

In fact, Eco's text is a perfect example of conscious (and

unconscious) "hybridization"; it is a text in which many other texts

merge, fuse, collide, intersect, speak to, and illuminate, one

another-each with its own language and "ideologue." The Rose,

succinctly put, is a skillful ( con)structure of an intentionally

ambiguous, polyvalent, and self-reflexive novel intended to

generate multiple meanings. Moreover, it is a novel which wishes

to be: an intersection of textual "traces" and” textures”;a dialogue

with many texts; and a literary text generated through the endless

process of writing and reading, re-writing, etc.(413)

Foucault’s Pendulum contains fragments of a number of diabolic

texts belonging to the occult series. Like his other novels, Foucault’s

Pendulum deliberately shows how a text is made out of a number of

existing texts and how it influences other texts. Eco uses Oulipean

narrative especially in Foucault’s Pendulum and The Island of the Day

Before. Oulipo (Ouvroir de literature potentielle- The Workshop for

Potential Literature) is a group of novelists, poets mathematicians and others who experimented with writing by infusing mathematical or scientific principles into literature. This narrative gives importance to rules that work to define terrains of the text. Jean Jacques Thomas and

Lee Hilliker state, Oulipean texts “not only furnish directions for use but 156 also reveal the code that prescribes a general principle of textual

production.”(26)

The acts of reading and writing are no longer the monopoly of

humans, Instead computers and other machines with specifically designed

programmes accomplish the predefined task of reading and writing. In

this process, it takes away the imaginative and inspirational aspects from

the text and the writing becomes what one calls ‘mechanical. ’Thus the

concept of Death of the author is exemplified in the novel.

The Plan formulated by the trio is a collage of a number of other texts

dealing with occult subjects. Belbo selects some words at random from

the manuscripts that are submitted by authors for editing, types it in the

Abulafia and the outcome is The Plan. The novel becomes a meta text

that discuses the formation of a text and deconstructs the text to reveal its

intertextual strands. Belbo believes that it is “better to rewrite the book of others, which is what a good, editor does.”(23) This forms an explanation to the concept regarding the role of the authors as compilers. Having access to a number of texts they produce one out of it, a different but related one.

Each section in the novel begins with a quote from different texts in different languages. Eco uses these quotes from different cultures to 157 demonstrate the intertextual nature of the work. The form reflects the

content of the novel. The text becomes a celebration of hybridity. The

trio finds connection among different concepts and for that matter they

are continuously engaged in finding ways to connect different concepts.

The novel discusses different ways to connect concepts:

Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at

once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree

everything is connected to everything else. For example, potato

crosses with apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape.

From apple to snake by Biblical association. From snake to dough

nut by formal likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from

life preserver to bathing suit, then bathing to sea, sea to ship, ship

to shit, shit to toilet paper, toilet to cologne, cologne to alchahol to

drugs, drugs to syringe. Syringe to hole, hole to ground ground to

potato…. (618)

This mode of connection is extended to texts as different texts are

connected by means of analogy. Eco, here, focuses on the formation of

texts and at the same time critiques the concept of intertextuality.

The novel traces the connections between different texts related to

conspiracy theories. The trio discusses how they differ from other writers: 158

The books of the Diabolicals must not innovate; they must repeat

what has already been said….And that is what we did. We didn’t

invent anything. We only arranged the pieces. Colonel Ardenti

hadn’t invented anything either, but his arrangement of pieces was

clumsy. Furthermore, he was much less educated than we, so he

had fewer pieces. They had all pieces…They didn’t know the

design of the crossword. We-once again- were smarter. (618)

As discussed in chapter one, the author orchestrates the heteroglossia as it enters the novelistic discourse. Eco, in the novel negotiates authorial position and shows how the concept of intertextuality is extended to Barthes’ idea of “The Death of the Author”. When text is perceived as a tissue of quotations, these quotations are to be arranged artistically in a work. The selection of these quotations is based on the reading and experience of the author. In that sense, the presence of author is reinforced. The author, in that sense becomes a function rather than a person; the spatial and temporal dimensions of the author are reinstated and the author as a persona is erased from the text. In order to find the analogical connections between different texts, the presence of authorial intention becomes crucial. The novel forms a complementary text to

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author, Jacques Derrida’s “Structure and

Sign and Play.” 159

After reading Belbo’s diary, the narrator realizes that Death is the only reality. He says:

I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the

reader to become aware of this truth. The pendulum which haunted

Jacopo Belbo all his adult life, had been- like the lost address of his

dream- the symbol of that other moment, recorded and then

repressed, when he truly touched the ceiling of the world… it did

not stand for anything else. At that moment there was no longer

any deferment, and the score was settled. (633)

Death becomes the only point of certainty and it adds new meanings

to the uncertainties that prevailed during lifetime. Belbo’s search for truth ended up in nothing and what is left is chaos. Foucault’s Pendulum is a text that proclaims the void nature of texts and in that sense, a self

voiding text as it proclaims that there is no concept at all.

The trio that has invented the Plan is obsessed with it and they

view everything as related to it. They connect everything; books, traditions, religion, science and even technology to the Plan. They linked

Bacon, Napoleon, Galileo and different sects of Jesuits, Rosicrucian,

Pulicans, Freemasonry, cabalists, Baconians and even Hitler to the string

of The Plan. They go to such an extent that they believe “The Communist

Manifesto is alluding sarcastically to the secret hunt for the Plan, which 160 has agitated the country for centuries. The Templars of the world unite!

The map to the workers! Splendid! What better historical justification for communism?”(468) Eco uses The Plan as a textual device to bring in multiple texts into the novelistic space. The Pan itself serves as a text and the whole novel centers on the Plan. The tripolar axis involving Author, text and reader is incorporated into the novel. The novel becomes a deconstructive reading of itself, in other terms, it is self reflexive.

Intertextuality, explicitly starts from the title of the novel

“Foucault’s Pendulum” that alludes to the French Physicist Leonard

Foucault who has demonstrated the rotation of the earth by means of a

pendulum. Foucault’s pendulum is used as a symbol indicating both

certainty and uncertainty. It could be a reference to French philosopher

Michel Foucault and his The Order of Things. The novel begins with the

description of the pendulum, its oscillation, the bob, its radius and the

length of the wire, the constant π, and the formulae to calculate the time period .Casaubon says: “The Pendulum told me everything that, as everything moved-earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great comic expansion- one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move.”(5)

A visit to the museum seems to be a travel through different stages of evolution. Casaubon views an entire conspiracy in the Conservatoire 161 which holds diverse things- iron dinosaurs, reptiles, archaeopteryx, bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles , planes, Assyrian idols,

Chaldean and, great Baals. (7) The conservatoire becomes an analogue

to the text that holds numerous diverse texts of past and present. Science

and legal metrology that advocates objectivity is rendered meaningless.

The fluxity of language is contrasted with the objectivity of science. The

museum is described by words that Francis Bacon has used to describe

the House of Solomon in his New Atlantis. The reference to Bacon’s text

guides the reader’s imagination about the conservatoire. In the same

manner, at times, Eco brings in other texts to serve as a context to read

the novel so as to guide the reader.

Baudolino is a fictional version of Frederick Barbossa’s reign, his death, Byzantine Empire that is in continuous war with the Western countries and the sack of Constantinople in April 1204.It was a period when the Italian states continuously made and broke alliances with each other and fought for economic and political supremacy. Twelfth century marks the supremacy of University of Paris for teachings in theology, philosophy and rhetoric. Baudolino goes to Paris for his studies, where he meets Robert de Boron and Kyot. Both Boron and Kyoto are poets who wrote about Holy Grail and Perceval. Boron is a French poet of the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries who authored Joseph d’ 162

Animate and Merlin. Kyot is yet another French poet whom Wolfram von

Eschenbach claims to have been the source for his poetic epic Parzival.

The interlocutor Niketas Choniates is the historian Niketas Akominatos who wrote the history of the Roman Empire from 1118 to 1207. Apart from this novel, he is a major character in Alan Gordon’s A Death in the

Venetian Quarter (2002). History becomes the source text from where the novel begins. It brings in the medieval world where Eco sets his story.

The novel also explores the relation between literature and history as it shows how one extends to the other. He says:

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some

Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales; otherwise

your history would become monotonous. The world condemns liars

who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, as it

rewards poets, who lie about the greatest things. (43)

Apart from history, the novel incorporates mythologies from different cultures. It includes several myths that the Europeans have about Asia and its people. For instance, Baudolino’s description of the

“strange’ creatures he confronts in his journey to the East, parallels colonizers’ description of the orients. The novel also employs the

Christian myth of the Kingdom of Prester John and the Jewish myth of 163 the ten lost tribes and the river Sambation beyond which these ten tribes were banished by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V.( Alder, 1964). Eco supplements history with mythical discourses to fictionalize the text. It is an act of orchestration performed by the author to create a novelistic discourse.

The journey to the Kingdom of Prester John has remnants of

Arthurian chivalric romances. Baudolino learns about the legendary

Kingdom from Bishop Otto who speaks of two cities- the city of

Jerusalem and the city of Babylon. The text that Baudolino claims to have destroyed becomes the very source of the legend. Description of the journey to the legendary Kingdom uses a number of allusions. The legendary Kingdom of Prester John alludes to the third century work Acts of Thomas supposed to be written by Saint Thomas, Alexander

Romance (the fabulous account of Alexander the Great‘s conquest) and other literary works by the occidents about the East.

One of the creatures Baudolino describes during his journey to the legendary Kingdom is Satyrs. In Greek mythology, satyrs are the male companions of Dionysius. They are depicted as creatures having goat like features and a permanent erection. The satyrs are a prominent presence in the satyr plays of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Eco, by knitting together a number of texts enables the reader to recall the archetypal 164 world that lies dormant in the subconscious mind and to graft the protagonist in it.

At the outset of the novel, Baudolino is writing his story on a parchment he has stolen from Bishop Otto’s cabinet and he has “scraped clean almost all of them excepting where the writing would not come off et now I have much parchment to write down what I want which is my own story even if I don’t know to write Latin.”(1) Bishop Otto of

Freising is a historian who chronicled the life of his nephew Frederick 1 commonly called Barbossa . His two major works Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus (Chronicle or history of the two cities) and Gesta

Friderici imperatoris (Deeds of Emperor Frederick) become sources for the novel. The act of scraping the parchment and writing on it has a symbolic significance. Though it is made clean, there are traces and words that are not erased. This act establishes the novel as a re-creation of the story of Frederick and the legend of Prester John from a different perspective. The intertextual nature of the novel is emphasized by the

‘stolen’ parchment. Coletti writes:

Baudolino’s personal narrative is already compromised by the

circumstances under which it comes into being, inscribed on a

stolen parchment scraped clean of the text that had previously

covered it: Otto of Freising’s Chronicasive Historia de duabus 165

civitatibus. Traces of that prior text remain in the palimpsest of

Baudolino’s writing … asserting the authority of Otto’s fugitive

Latin chronicle as official history and thereby its difference from

the vernacular author’s idiosyncratic story. This erasure of textual

and cultural hegemony that must occur if the vulgar peasant is to

tell his tale effectively figures the historical perspective on the

Middle Ages that we encounter in Baudolino(2009,75)

The novel is a pastiche of detective fiction, chivalric romance and historiographic fiction. It has in it the formulation of a plan and metafictional narratives. Capozzi observes:

The novel is another brilliant demonstration of the author's

remarkable art of narrating a great deal of the same subject matter

that he has been theorizing about for over four decades. By this I

mean his theories on language, communication, narratology, and

above all, on that vast interdisciplinary field of science called

semiotics. Semiotics combined with narratology in Eco's fiction

becomes a field of cognition that, as we again see in Baudolino,

includes History, history of culture, history of language(s), history

of ideas, as well as the history of the novel as a wide ranging genre

that encompasses different forms such as romance, epic, realism, 166

meta-narrrative, historicity, and postmodern encyclopedic

fiction.(2000, 217)

Eco, in this novel, uses popular literature, comics, cartoons and even films as a parallel in narration. On his journey to the Kingdom of

Prester John , at Pendapetzim, Baudolino meets strange creatures- skiapods, blemmys, pygmies, giants, panotian, tongueless, Nubians, urchins and satyrs. This becomes parallel to the journey of Gulliver, in

Gulliver’s Travels 1726), where he meets strange creatures as yahoos and houyhnhnms. The description of Panozi with large ears reminds of

Disney’s flying elephant Dumbo. Baudolino’s escape on the Roq birds in the novel resembles Aristo’s Astolfo flying towards the moon on a hippogriff. Movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) relates to the Holy Grail legend becomes a related text in the novel.

The novel is often analyzed to find out similarities between

Baudolino and the author as both are the inhabitants of Alessandria and shares a common consciousness of the city. Baudolino’s claim of himself a liar becomes the claim of his author who often distorts history and fictionalizes the aspects of it by adding to and deleting it. Through the protagonist, Eco questions the credibility of history and fiction, at the same time, proclaims his ability to lie. 167

The novel carries intertextual elements of Eco’s other works; both theory and novels. For example, Eco in his work How to Travel with a

Salmon, writes about Saint Baudolino and Alessandria. (1994, 234-48)

Baudolino becomes a reliving of his past experiences in his hometown.

With Baudolino, Eco presents a text that becomes the culmination of all his works including novel and theories.

The Island of the Day Before has the features of a baroque style literature. It uses exaggerate description to the details that it often turns to be satirical and evokes laughter. The narration of the siege of Casale resembles the adventures of Don Quixote by Cervantes.

Eco’s novel has traces of a number of other novels written during the baroque age. The epistolary love affair of the protagonist has petrarchan elements where the lady is admired and praised in her physical absence. Roberto writes: “Ah sweetest Lilia/ hardly had I plucked a flower when I lost it! / Do you scorn to see me? / I pursue you and you flee/ I speak to you and you are mute….” (159). The novel is related to Eco’s prose work Six Walks in the Fictional Woods where he discusses the techniques of fiction, narration and other his theoretical stand points regarding the role of the reader. 168

The novel belongs to the tradition of novels with doppelganger effect where the character has a double. Roberto creates his double

Ferrante who is responsible for all his misfortunes. Similarly in Robert

Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1886) where

Dr Jekyll suffers split personality disorder. Mr. Hyde is an embodiment of all cruelties and ugliness whereas Dr Jekyll is one who has an impressing personality. Italo Calvino’s novel The Cloven Viscount (1952) describes the life of two characters Gramo and Buono where Gramo always causes damage and pain and Buono does only good deeds.

Many subjects that were relevant during the seventeenth century were brought into the novel. The debate on Void that started in Foucault’s

Pendulum is further carried through Baudolino and finally into this novel.

Eco uses the concept of “Powder of Sympathy” in the novel. Roberto talks of the Powder of Sympathy at a salon and he is sent on a mission to spy on a secret English vessel where the concept is tested in the attempt to find the longitude. Powder of Sympathy was a superstition that was rampant in the seventeenth century in Europe. According to this concept, a remedy is applied to the weapon that caused a wound with the belief that the injury will be healed. This concept is discussed in Thomas Pettigrew’s

Superstitions Connected with Medicine and Surgery. (Spense 725) Eco must have read the anonymous pamphlet that circulated in the seventeenth 169 century Europe entitled “Curious Enquiries: Being Six Brief Discourses” published by Randal Taylor, London in 1688:

Sir Kenelem Digby in his Difcoufe of the Sympathetick

Powder,tells us how he made Mr. Howel ftart ,upon his putting a

bloody Garter, with which Mr. Howel’s wounded Hand had been

bound up withal into a Bafon of Water mixed with that Powder: If

such a ftarting could be made to an Inferiour Creature at a great

diftance, and by often doing it, it would not in two or three months

lofe its power, we might at Sea with great Eafe and Pleafure know

when the Sun was upon the Meridian at London or any other

appointed Time; and confequently by the difference of Longitude.

Fye! fays one or other, you would not fure put a Dog to mifery of

having always a Wound about him to ferve you, would you? Why

not as well as to keep a Dog two or three days together ftarving that

he may give his Mafter an hour or two’s Pleafure the better after

it.(2)

Back in 1663, Samuel Butler in his Hudibras makes fun of Sympathetic

Powder.

Learned he was in med'c'nal lore, / For by his side a pouch he

wore, / Replete with strange hermetic powder, / That wounds nine 170

miles point-blank would solder; / By skilful chymist, with great

cost, / Extracted from a rotten post; (223-228)

These texts are made use of by Eco in his novel while describing the barbaric methods adopted by the Europeans in their attempt to find the punto fijo. The concept of punto fijo echoes The Plan in Foucault’s

Pendulum, the lost book in The Name of the Rose and the face of the girl in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

The novel becomes a meta text as it explores the possibility of storytelling. Roberto feels that romance is the best suited form of narration as he is describing his love to Lilia. So he starts the narration romantically but at one juncture, when he feels that the story wandering somewhere in the distant future, he thinks of resorting to realism. The narrator says:

It almost seems that Roberto, after his meditations on infinite

worlds, no longer wanted to imagine a plot unfolding in the Land

of Romances but, rather, a real story in a real land a land he also

inhabited, except that- as the Island lay in the simple past- his

story could take place in a not distant future, which could satisfy

his desire for a space less confined than that to which his

shipwreck has sentenced him. (441) 171

In Romances, the characters live in the imaginary world the author creates. The narrator feels: “Perhaps conceiving Romances means living through our own characters, making them live in our world, delivering ourselves and our creatures to the minds of those to come…” (482) At this point, the narrator intrudes to say: “He did not know that, especially when their authors are now determined to die, stories often write themselves and go where they want to go.”(482) Lugi Pirandello in his play Six Characters in Search of an Author(1921) establishes that the characters have their own existence and once they are born they live their own life independent of the author.

In the novel Eco traces the history of the development of the novel since the Seventeenth Century. The final chapters addresses the existential concerns of the Protagonist thereby presents it from a modernist point of view and finally leaving it open ended for the reader to decide. In this aspect it resembles post modern novels like The French

Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) written by John Fowles where the readers can enter the novel through different gaps left and analyze the possibilities thereby proclaiming the role of the reader.

As in Foucault’s Pendulum Eco resorts to the Oulipean mode of narration. He uses the symbol of a wheel “Cynora Lucensis”(444) to indicate how stories are knitted out of experiences and how one text is 172 related to the other. The sixth islanders are concerned about inventing stories one different from the other:

That is why they had constructed a great wheel Cynora Lucensis.

Erected in the village square, it was made up of six concentric

circles that revolved separately. The first was divided into twenty

four slots or windows, the second into thirty six, the third into forty

eight and the fifth into seventy two, eighth into eighty four. In the

various slots… were written actions (such as come, go, die),

passions (such as hate, love, indifference), then manners (good or

ill), sorrow or happiness, and places and times (at home or next

month).Spinning the wheels create stories… (444-45)

The wheel resembles Abulafia in Foucault’s Pendulum where different stories are created by feeding certain words at random to the word processor that process them to give umpteen numbers of stories. Roberto finds an analogue between making cakes and writing stories like how different cakes can be made by altering the proportions of the ingredients, different stories can be cooked by slight alterations. “And this led

Roberto to think that the Universe could be a pan in which different stories were cooking at the same time, each at its own rate but perhaps all with the same characters.”(435). Eco asserts the role of the Author as a compiler who compiles different texts to produce a new one which is 173 different but inclusive. Abulafia in Foucault’s Pendulum and Cynora

Lucensis in The Island of the Day Before are contrived as symbols to discuss intertextuality.

The narrator, who is the first reader of Roberto’s papers, discloses the intertextual nature of the work. He says: “… Roberto has borrowed from other novelists of his century the habit of narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread.”(423).

Intertextuality begins from the title in The Mysterious Flame of

Queen Loana as it is taken from an Italian pre-war comics album based on the American comic strip Tim Tyler’s Luck. The protagonist Yambo revokes a number of real life characters. He could be a fictional version of Giambattista Bodoni , a typographer and an editor or could be Enrico

Novelli, a journalist and an illustrator of children’s classics. Capozzi observes: “Eco employs such images to provide the historical and cultural background within which Yambo’s second re(awakening)- that is, the temporary reacquisition of his autobiographic memory- occurs along with his rediscovery of his anti-Fascism.”(2009, 128)

The first part of the novel is full of allusions, borrowings from other texts, description of fog that serves as a symbol for memory. 174

Throughout the novel, Eco uses “fog” as a metaphor for memory. Yambo who suffers from amnesia tries to reconstruct his memory through the books he has read since childhood. The novel becomes an attempt to string different cultural artifacts to retrace the personal memory of the protagonist. In this sense the personal memory ceases to be personal, instead it takes the form of cultural and political consciousness.

The title of each chapter alludes to different works. For example, the first chapter with the title “The Cruellest Month” alludes to Eliot’s

The Waste land which is a collage of a number of texts that portray the decline of a civilization. It includes descriptions of fog borrowed from diverse texts. The first description of fog is from Georges

Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte. The passage:

I was chewing fog. Phantoms were passing, brushing me, melting.

Distant bulbs glimmered like will-o'-the-wisps in a graveyard.

Someone is walking by my side, noiselessly, as if in bare feet,

walking without heels, without shoes, without sandals. A patch of

fog grazes my cheek, a band of drunks is shouting down there,

down by the ferry. (4)

It is a re-visioned reading of Ines from Gabriele D'Annunzio's Notturno:

Commentario delle tenebre or Nocturne. The description of fog proceeds: 175

“The fog comes/on little cat feet. /It sits looking/over harbor and city on silent haunches/and then moves on.”(4)

The Italians who have come out of the Fascist rule of Mussolini suffer a trauma that leaves the whole generation schizophrenic. The descriptions of fog in different literary works are incorporated into the texture of the novel to depict the fog that covers the consciousness of the protagonist. Eco, by bringing in fragments from different culture to depict the amnesia suffered by Yambo, is universalizing the experience. It becomes a part of any civilization that has undergone such cultural and ideological trauma. It becomes a common denominator for any culture during the process of transition.

In the second part of the novel Eco includes a number of illustrations from comics and other popular literatures. These illustrations simultaneously serve as allusions and as micro narratives within the matrix of the novel. They, being the cultural works of the past, conjure up a world that has been dominated by the fascist ideology. He uses the diverse artifacts to present the cultural milieu of the past generation.

Yambo’s search for his past identity serves as the connecting link for all these little narratives. Capozzi observes that in the third part of the novel, the boundary between personal history and political history is erased and one flows into the other: 176

The boundaries between autobiography, history, and reality are

masterfully blurred in order to give space to Eco’s version of

neorealist fiction. Here the reader encounters Yambo’s traumatic

experiences with war and love… In this section of the novel, the

mysteries surrounding the deadly “gorge” engulfed by real “fog,”

as well as Yambo’s first love (Lila) are resolved: Yambo’s

unrequited love story contains echoes of −Nerval’s short story

Sylvie, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Cyrano of Bergerac, as well as

Dante’s Vita Nuova, and his Paradise. In Part iii, Eco’s images

come mainly from the world of entertainment, fiction, and comic

books. (2009, 130-31)

The amnesia suffered by the character becomes the amnesia of a generation exposed to cultural fascism. The personal story of Yambo becomes the history of a generation which Yambo describes as

“schizophrenic.” (205,231,242) The novel contains personal experiences anecdotes, comics, and school notes. The protagonist goes through all these narratives at a later stage in life. He says:

Some of the mysteries of my childhood schizophrenia began to

resolve themselves. I had been reading school books, and it was

probably through the comic books, and it was probably through the 177

comics that I had laboriously constructed as social

conscience.”(242)

Through the act of reading his school notes and classics of his childhood, he is trying to recreate his past identity and also the consciousness of a generation. He says:

What I had rediscovered were the things I had read, which

countless others had also read. All my archeology boiled down to

this: except for the story of the unbreakable glass and a charming

anecdote about my grandfather (but not about me), I had not

relived my own childhood so much as that of a generation. ( 272)

The novel focuses highly upon the history of the fascist regime in

Italy under Benito Mussolini (1922-42) Eco uses artifacts from popular

mass culture to show how cultural hegemony was established during the

fascist regime. It serves as a record of the cultural past of Italy. Eco has

incorporated a number of comic strips, cover pages of music albums and

stories that have archetypal characters to illustrate how fascist ideology

has been inculcated in the young minds of the Italians during the period.

The novel can otherwise be read as a re-visioning of the old literatures

from a postmodern perspective. The re-visioning of the cultural pieces of

the past unfolds the cultural values that have operated in the society

during the period of fascism. By deconstructing the super heroes he is 178 trying to find the cause for the schizophrenic existence of the past. Eco,

himself spent his childhood in Fascist Italy and in one of his interviews,

he says:

It was a strange time. Mussolini was very charismatic, and like

every Italian schoolchild at that time, I was enrolled in the Fascist

youth movement. We were all obliged to wear military-style

uniforms and attend rallies on Saturday, and we felt happy to do so.

Today it would be like dressing up an American boy as a marine—

he’d think it was amusing. The whole movement for us as children

was something natural, like snow in the winter and heat in the

summer. We couldn’t imagine that there was another way of living.

I remember that period with the same tenderness with which

anyone remembers childhood. I even remember the bombings, and

the nights we spent in the shelter, with tenderness. When it all

ended in 1943, with the first collapse of Fascism, I discovered in

the democratic newspapers the existence of different political

parties and views. To escape the bombings from September 1943

to April 1945—the most traumatic years in our nation’s history—

my mother, my sister, and I went to live in the countryside, up in

Monferrato, a Piedmontese village that was at the epicenter of the

resistance. (2008) 179

The second part of the novel titled “Paper Memory “is notoriously intertextual as the title indicates. The memory of Yambo is mapped using papers from different books he has read as a child. This section becomes

a collage of all that he has read. But only a single image of a woman’s

face on the cover of a magazine leaves a deep impression on Yambo’s

mind. Yambo’s attic at Solara serves as a metaphor for cognitive

structure which has impressions of several texts and images. This points

to the concept of a structure of memory as text made of words symbols

and images perceived by senses.

As an appendix to the novel, the author has incorporated “Sources

of citations and Illustrations” to aid the reader to unravel the intertextual

matrix of the novel. The texts included are used to illustrate how the

Ideological State apparatuses functions in establishing fascist hegemony:

“Italians were all beautiful. Beautiful Mussolini himself, who

appeared on the cover of Tempo, an illustrated weekly , on the

horseback, sword raised high (an actual photo, not some artist’s

allegorical invention- does that mean he went around carrying a

sword?) to celebrate our entry into war…”(189)

Even the school curriculum is used as a tool to inculcate Italian Fascist

nationalist values. In the beginning of Yambo’s school days, the fascist

ideology has remained like The Unbreakable Glass. But it broke all on a 180 sudden as he threw it, and he says, and in 1942, he describes: “I had

become the narrator of a failure whose objective correlative I

represented.”(210). His re-readings of his childhood books helps Yambo

to negotiate between different ideological positions he is exposed to. The

ideological position one assumes plays an important role in determining

the identity of a person. This purpose links different texts incorporated

within the matrix of the novel.

The Prague Cemetery is to be read as an extension of Eco’s previous novel Foucault’s Pendulum that uses conspiracy as one of its element. The plan in the earlier novel is substituted by Protocols of

Elders of Zion. Both are forgeries with great deal of imaginative content.

As in The Mysterious flame of Queen Loana, this novel also interlaces graphic images with the literary text. Eco incorporates certain historical accounts related to the unification of Italy, Franco-Prussian war, the Paris

Commune, the Dreyfus affair and so on as end notes to guide the reader.

The section ends with a statement regarding the famous Protocols :

“They can be regarded as the most widely circulated work in the world after the Bible.” (437) Eco strings the historical events novel through

Simonini.

The plot centers on Captain Simonini , a sixty seven year old man who suffers personality disorder and memory loss. Discussing with an 181

Austrian psychologist Dr. Froid who is studying illness like hysteria, depression and other personality disorders, Simonini comes to know of

“talking cure” (42). According to him, talking to a trusted person cures personality disorders. So Simonini decides to write his experiences in a dairy. Dr. Froid could be could be none other than Sigmund Freud who in his Studies on Hysteria (1895/93)Freud along with his friend Breuer explains how talking to a psychologist cures a person from his personality disorder.

Simonini resembles Yambo, as both suffer memory loss at a certain point in life. While Yambo tries to retrieve his memory by reading comics and notebooks of his childhood, Simonini writes his personal experiences in a diary to cure them of the amnesia.

Eco frames Simonini as a character who hate Jews. To render perfection to the characterization of Simonini, he brings in the fictional

Protocols that have left deep impressions on the collective subconscious of nations. In the novel, Eco frames Simonini as the one responsible for the forged document that is used as a Nazi propaganda for the Jewish genocide. In the section “A Night in Prague” (86-205), he has made his character forge the Protocols and this section gives a gist of the forged text. For example, in the protocol four, it states: 182

It is in the Press that the triumph of freedom of speech finds its

incarnation. But the goyim States have not known how to make use

of this force; and it has fallen into our hands. Through the Press we

have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in

the shade; thanks to the Press we have got the gold in our hands,

notwithstanding that we have had to gather it out of oceans of

blood and tears. (Bronner, 13)

In the novel Eco adapts the above protocol as:

If gold is the first power in this world, the second is the press. We

must take over the running of all daily newspapers in every

country. Once we are in absolute control of the press, we can

change public ideas about honour, virtue, integrity, and carry out

our first attack on the family as an institution. Let us appear to be

concerned about social questions of current interest. We have to

maintain control over the proletariat, plant our agitators in social

movements so that we can stir up trouble when we want to, driving

workers to the barricades, to revolution. (204)

The Protocols resonates the Jewish Plan in Foucault’s Pendulum that both aim at acquiring supreme power to rule the world.

Apart from history and forgeries during the nineteenth century,

Eco, in this novel, includes various discourses like culinary texts, Black 183 mass, Freemasonry and even the working of a Daniel cell. Simonini, in

his description of his childhood, recalls the recipe of bollito misto as instructed by his grandfather:

It required at least half a kilo of shin of beef, an oxtail, a piece of

rump, a small salami, a calf’s tongue and head, cotechino sausage,

a boiling fowl, an onion, two carrots, two sticks of celery and a

handful of parsley. All left to cook for various lengths of

time….Not much vegetable, except for a few potatoes….a handful

of parsley, a few anchovy fillets fresh bread crumbs, a teaspoon

full of capers, a clove of garlic, the yolk of hardboiled egg, all

finely chopped with olive oil and vinegar.(64)

The extensive recipe is included to show Simonini’s appetite from the childhood and how gluttonous he turns out to be. It also points to the predominance of death instinct or “thanatos” ( Freud,1920) in the character. Gluttony is a suicidal behavior as it adversely affects one’s health. Simonini is portrayed as a character whose whole life energy is channelized as “thanatos”

One of the major criticisms about the novel is that it nurtures anti

Jewish sentiments. But the motto of incorporating the protocols and the process of writing is to depict the hatred that Simonini carries in his heart 184 towards the Jews. Eco portrays Simonini as a misanthropist and the act of forgery manifests his hatred and repugnance towards the Jews.

Spruyt views the novel as a demonstration of Freudean and

Jungean theories on personality and collective consciousness. Simonine’s lodging represents human mind that has unconscious, subconscious and conscious realms:

The sewer where the evidence of his crimes are becoming

mummified and the underground labyrinth that will eventually

become the metro system, in Jungian terms signify the

subconscious mind and its archetypes… Simonini’s apartment is

on street level and represents the conscious mind; underneath lies

the sewer – his unconscious mind and burial place of his personal

misdeeds. Below that the metro is being excavated – the collective

unconscious with its neural pathways, a metaphor for tunnels and

railway lines that will take passengers (and their knowledge) to all

corners of Europe. (6)

Eco’s novels are fundamentally based on the theory of intertextuality but they take a slight deviation from the contemporary theories regarding the role of the author. The modern theories of intertextuality focus on reader’s role in generating the meaning, but they undermine the role of the author as a reader who constructs a text from 185 the texts he has read. Eco’s novels indirectly proclaim the role of the author as reader that is neglected by the other postmodern theorists while discussing intertextuality. Thus, the intertextual references brought into the texts bears its relation to the reading experience of the author. Thus,

For Eco, a postmodern artist is a bricoleur for whom citation and quotation replace originality and invention.

Eco’s novels are historiographic metafiction that brings in historic text into the novelistic discourse. Often it turns out to be secret histories as in Baudolino, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero. Allen states that, Eco identifies the principal problem in writing a historically- oriented text the principal problem as “being intertextual: the ‘already written’ and ‘already said’ threaten to turn one’s narrative and narrative voice into a mere repetition of previous utterances and previous texts.”

(194). The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, Mysterious Flame of

Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery explicitly discuss the intertextual

existence of texts. In The Name of the Rose, Eco states, “Often books speak of other books; it is as if they spoke among themselves.”(342)

Intertextuality becomes a theme in Eco’s novels. He knits his world using fragments from other texts. Eco states, “Text could generate, by further semantic disclosures, every other text" ( 1979, 24). Eco, by bringing in fragments of other texts belonging to different cultures into 186 his novels is creating the ambience of a number of texts into his novelistic space. Thus, they become carnivals of different cultures.

187

Conclusion

The objective of the study has been to analyze the novels of

Umberto Eco from a Bhaktinian perspective. This chapter re-asserts the position of Umberto Eco’s novels as a carnivalisation of different cultures. Novel as a genre is a set of narratives stringed together by some sequence. It is a space where multiple voices interact with other voices inside the novel and also with those outside it.

Bhaktin uses the term Heteroglossia to describe the different voices that function in any discourse. Heteroglossia is brought into the novelistic discourse through the authorial words, the words of the narrators, dialogues of characters or other incorporated texts. Every language or voice represents a point of view: social or, ideological of a real social group. Novel provides a matrix for different ideologies to coexist, interact, compliment and contradict one another. Multiple consciousnesses enter into dialogue with one another in a novel. The way in which the multiple voices interact is called dialogism. It generates meanings that enable the understanding of a text. As stated, the study analyses dialogism at the ideological level and not at the linguistic level.

Umberto Eco’s novels present the dialogic relation between different monologic discourses and dialogic ones. His novels highlight 188 the debate between reason and non-reason that prevailed during the whole of the middle ages. They deal with the controversy that existed between

reason and non reason throughout the ages irrespective of time. Eco

employs the cultural debates of different periods to interrogate the

present. The Western history of debate between reason and non reason

had its inception during the classical ages. The classical philosophers

considered faith as something that emerges from rational or reasonable

thinking. With the rise of Christianity, faith and reason became separate

realms of thought. St. Paul, in the beginning shows some tolerance to

pagan beliefs and idol worship (Acts 17:18) but later became less

obliging to non Christians. (Romans 1: 20). Again in I Corinthians 1:23,

he claims that world did not come to know God through wisdom; God

chose to reveal Himself to those with simple faith. St. Augustine in the

fourth century, advocated that reason could be used to clarify and

illuminate Christian faith. Later with the retrieval of Greek thinking,

especially of Aristotle, the foundations of religion began to be

interrogated.

Thomas Aquinas develops a strong compatabilism between faith and reason by acknowledging both philosophy and religion as two different truths. The Renaissance period heralds the autonomy of empirical science. There has been a renewed interest in Greek humanism. 189

The tension between faith and reason, for the first time took the form of conflict between science and religion. In the seventeenth century,

Galileo’s hypothesis of ‘heliocentric universe’ challenged the teachings of the Church that was based on ‘geocentric universe’. In the

Reformation, the Protestants believed that faith is beyond human reason.

Physics and astronomy were the primary concerns of the theologians

during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Romanticism viewed religious experience as different from scientific truths.

In the nineteenth century, Freud and his Psychoanalysis and

Darwin’s Evolution of Species and Theory of Natural Selection

challenged the religious foundation of the West. Modernism attempted

reconciliation between faith and science while Postmodernism

interrogated the concepts of truth and reason to encompass subjectivity

and non Reason.

Eco, through his novels, intertwines history with literature to open up a dialogue between the two. The Name of the Rose is dialogism between religion and art whereas Foucault’s Pendulum is dialogism between science and fiction. Eco’s characters divide themselves to take different ideological positions in the matters regarding art, religion and philosophy. His novels accommodate all their views and initiate dialogue among the characters. 190

Eco’s novels represent dialogic worlds where a number of ideologies interact one another and also with the world outside the text.

His first novel The Name of the Rose articulates the Renaissance /

Medieval Christian controversy. The library and the monks William,

Benno and Venantius represent the Renaissance ideology whereas Abo and Jorge the Medieval Christian. The library which is the repertoire of

Knowledge embodies the Renaissance spirit while the guardians of the library restrict the monks from accessing it. The debate reaches its zenith in the argument between William and Jorge that culminates in the destruction of the library. The novel deals with the Pagan –Christian controversy that pre dominated the philosophical and theological realm of the Fourteenth century. The conflict between Aristotle and Christian

Church becomes the focus of Jorge’s argument. Aristotelian rationalism was condemned by the early Christian Church as they considered the philosophy completely mundane.

The pagan Christian debate recurs in Baudolino with a difference that the pagan part is introduced by the Neo Platonic philosopher,

Hypatia. The novel establishes dialogic relation between art and history.

The historian Bishop Otto says to Baudolino “If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some histories one day, you must lie and invent tales, otherwise your history would become monotonous.”(43) The 191 margin that divides literature and history disappears, instead they engage in a dialogue with each other. Eco disrupts the grand narrative of history by using his protagonist Baudolino. He accomplishes it by incorporating many Meta narratives including rumors in the narration of history.

As the title suggests, Foucault’s Pendulum opens up a dialogue between science and fiction; reality and illusion. The Hall of Mirrors and the Foucault’s Pendulum exist in the same enclosed space of the

Conservatoire. It is an analogue to the novelistic terrain where illusion and reality coexist. As the narration progresses, illusion take the form of reality and the trivial turns out to be the serious. The Plan, in the beginning has an illusory existence but, gradually it becomes a linguistic reality that controls the life of its creators.

Similarly The Island of the Day Before is a fictional re-creation of the European explorations during the Seventeenth Century debate to discover the longitude. It centers on the debate between Science and

Religion during that period.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a preoccupation with the fascist Italy from a postmodern perspective. Eco, through his novel challenges the monolithic notion of history and presents it as narratives.

Thus, Eco’s novels are dialogic at the ideological level. 192

Eco’s novels are historiographic in nature. He revisits historical

past from a postmodern perspective. All his novels engage in a dialogue

with history. From a Bakhtinian perspective, Eco’s novels analyze the

dialogic relation between the monologic historical discourse and the

dialogic fictional discourse. Eco’s treatment of history is non linear and

discontinuous. Like Foucault, he treats history as different epochs which

give rise to different episteme.

Dialogic novels are essentially polyphonic as the narrator and the characters enjoy equal right to speak. A polyphonic novel has voices inside and outside the text. The reader’s voice is an absence in the text but becomes apparent in the process of actualization. In a polyphonic novel, the narrator’s words are not taken for granted, instead the characters directly interact with the readers and the reader has to rely on the words of the characters about themselves and about other characters.

The open ended nature of a polyphonic novel invites the reader in the process of actualization of the text. Polyphony often has temporal and spatial implications called chronotope.

The word “chronotope” literally means time-space and in this context it refers to the intrinsic relation of time and space that are artistically expressed in literature. The Name of the Rose is the reproduction of a book of eighteenth century which in turn is a 193 reproduction of a fourteenth century manuscript. The internal chronotope

of fourteenth century converges with that of the eighteenth century which further gets refracted through the postmodern concept of time and space.

In Baudolino, the internal chronotope of Renaissance enters into dialogism with the postmodern world of time and space. The interaction between different chronotopes becomes chronotopic dialogism.

In a polyphonic novel the role of the reader is predominant. The reading experience of the reader converses with the text and produce interpretations of the text. In Eco’s novels, reader is not confined to the role of a receiver; instead he is at the producing end. Eco, in The Role of the Reader discusses how the author presupposes a model of possible reader who identifies the authorial intention and interprets the work. He says, “You cannot use the text as you want but only as the text wants you to use it.”(7)

Eco’s novels navigate the reader from the text to the world of histories knitted carefully into the texture of his novels. The Name of the

Rose and Baudolino deal with the secret history of the Medieval Age. Eco has created his world out of his reading and understanding of Medieval history. It is a revisit to the past from a present point of time. Similarly,

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, becomes a postmodern narration of Fascist Italy during the time of Mussolini. Thus, a reader cannot be a 194 passive entity while reading Eco’s novels. The reader make assumptions and re assumptions, while reading, in order to generate meanings. The text lies as a “lazy machine” waiting to be operated by its readers. Rocco

Capozzi observes

Since his first novel, Eco has been constructing ingenious possible

worlds… rich with historical, philosophical, theological and

semiotic inquiries with at least two type of readers in mind; one

erudite and more knowledgeable of intertextuality, metafiction,

semiotic and literary theories; the other, more familiar with

different elements of popular culture ranging from comic books to

music, theater, films and TV shows. This, however, does not imply

that one category excludes the other. (622)

Eco identifies two types of readers; the critical and the naïve. Both merge in the Model Reader whom the Author presupposes in the text. Eco’s novels are complex and challenge the reader.

Model Reader is not the one who makes only the correct interpretation. Guillemette and Cossette views Model Reader as one who

“is capable of trying out several interpretations when he is confronted

with several fabula or possible worlds.” (2006) Different interpretations

arise on contrary to the intention of the author but focusing on the

reader’s intention. The text may convey elements of which the author was 195 unaware, and still result in interpretive cooperation that has a happy

ending (Eco 1985, 73–74).

Eco views author as an active entity that influence the act of

reading. In this context, the Author is the first reader and the text is

formulated out of the reading experience of the author. And the author infuses the text with signs. They (signs) are open devices that induce meaning to the reader as it demands the role of the reader. The theory of

Semiotics provides the reader infinite possibilities to interpret a text. Eco uses the term “Model Reader “to imply possible reader. He writes, “The

Model Reader and the author thus co-operate in discovering the codes of a text.”(1979, 7) Each text has a Meta text which is open and closed at the

same time. Similarly, to decode a text both critical and naïve reader should unite in the Model Reader. Both naïve readers and critical readers are embedded in the work itself. Eco states:

The ideological reader, or Model Reader (developed by Peirce,

1931, cited by Guillemette & Cossette 2006), has the ability to fill

in gaps in the story to the best of his knowledge, using his

encyclopaediae, social background, cultural conventions and

knowledge of the world. The author in fact anticipates a Model

Reader who is able to cooperate in the text’s actualization in a 196

specific manner, and who is also able to deal interpretively with the

text in the same way as the author produced the text (7).

For instance, Foucault’s Pendulum is an open text that deals with very many subjects ranging from science to occult studies. The editors represent the critical readers and the character, Lia represents the naïve reader. Both unite in a model reader to decipher the text. At one level, the novel deals with conspiracy theories and secret societies like the Templar,

The Rosicrucian, the Cabbala, the Umbanda to critique the postmodern notions of interpretation and intertextuality. As every text bears a critique of itself, Foucault’s Pendulum is a critique on writing and interpreting a text. A naive reader views the novel as the experiences of three Milaneese editors who are engaged in reading and editing scores of manuscripts by paranoid writers about esoteric societies, the Kabala, the Rosicrucian and the Templar. As far as a critical reader is concerned, Foucault’s

Pendulum is a self voiding text. The concept of the text is that that there is no concept at all. Search for finding a fixed point turns out to be an interrogation on the notion of certainty.

Similarly in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, child Yambo and adult Yambo represent the naïve and critical reader respectively. In 197

The Name of the Rose, Adso and William represent these two types of readers.

Eco, through his writings demonstrates the role of the author. His works explicitly proclaim t the author as not insignificant but he is a guide who takes the reader by hand into the world of text(s). Without the author the text writes itself but it results only in chaos. In Foucault’s

Pendulum, he discusses the consequences of over interpretation and insists on guided interpretation of a work. The texts incorporated in his novels are based on the reading experience of the author. The Island of the Day Before, highlights the independence of the characters, once they are born. The author directly discusses the progress of the story with the reader without the knowledge of the narrator protagonist. “… especially when their authors are now determined to die, stories often write themselves, and go where they want to go.”(482)

Eco’s novels are sprouted from the literary and imaginative repertoire of the author. Eco views the author as a function; the author becomes a spatial and temporal entity rather than a personal one. Thus, the author functions as that factor that orchestrates different temporal and spatial experiences into the text. 198

Bhaktin’s concept of dialogism is further developed by Kristeva using the term “intertextuality”. As seen in the fourth chapter, Eco’s works are highly intertextual in the sense that he strings fragments from different texts to create his novelistic world. Different texts bring in different cultural and temporal ambience into the texture of the novel.

Allen states:

Eco makes it plain that in writing a historically-oriented text the

principal problem is intertextual: the ‘already written’ and ‘already

said’ threaten to turn one’s narrative and narrative voice into a

mere repetition of previous utterances and previous texts… (194)

Reading the novels of Eco is a travel through the literary worlds of different times and spaces. Since most of his novels are historiographic meta fiction, history is artistically woven into the narration. The Name of

the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Mysterious Flame of Queen

Loana discuss the text, its nature and characteristics. For instance, Eco, in

The Name of the Rose says: “Often books speak of other books. Often a

harmless book is like a seed that will bloom into a dangerous book, or it

is the other way around.” (342)

Eco employs unreliable narrators in his novels as textual strategy to

grant them infinite freedom of narration. The Name of the Rose is a 199 palimpsest which is recreated out of a torn manuscript. Casaubon in

Foucault’s Pendulum is so obsessed with The Plan that he fails to distinguish between reality and illusion. Baudolino, the narrator in

Baudolino, repeatedly proclaims himself a liar. The Island of the Day

Before is a narrative re-created out of a few diary entries procured from an abandoned ship. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is the story of an amnesiac character Yambo. The Prague Cemetery is a narrative knitted out of the diary entries of the forger Simonini and Numero Zero is

the story narrated by a paranoid Braggadocio. Thus, Eco endorses them

with the freedom to deviate from history to create their own “histories”.

Eco’s novels are transtextual in nature. The discussion on optics in

The Name of the Rose is carried forward in Foucault’s Pendulum. The debate on the existence of void in Foucault’s Pendulum is to be read along with those in Baudolino and The Island of the Day Before.

Similarly The Plan in Foucault’s Pendulum becomes The Protocols in

The Prague Cemetery. The theoretical framework postulated in his non fictional works: The Role of the Reader, Travels in Hyper Reality, and Six

Walks in a Fictional Wood, resonate throughout his novels.

Eco’s novels become a celebration of intertextuality as they

provide a space for the coexistence of a number of texts belonging to

different cultures. His novelistic world is a carnival where a number of 200 literary works, history, science, philosophy, rumors and popular cultural artifacts like music, cartoons, comic strips, graphics and magazines find space; dialogises one another erasing every stratifications of high and low cultures. As Norma Bouchard observes:

Eco is neither an apocalyptic intellectual who rejects all forms of

contemporary culture and despises everything that is not high brow

in nature, nor is he an integrated intellectual who uncritically

praises all forms of mass culture and equates comic strips to

Shakespeare in terms of importance.(4)

201

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