Rocco Capozzi 211 THE RETURN OF UMBERTO ECO. BAUDOLINO HOMO LUDENS: DESCRIBING THE UNKNOWN1 nlike the fanfare2 that surrounded Umberto Eco's second novel, his most challenging and engaging essay-novel Il pendolo di UFoucault (1988; Foucault's Pendulum), or the air of suspense that preceded the publication of his third metafictional novel, L'isola del giorno dopo (1994; The Island of the Day Before), Baudolino came out - relatively speaking - with very little clamour. The question that readers may be asking is whether this novel will also go out with a "whimper", or whether it will go out with a "bang", selling millions of copies around the world, like The Name of the Rose. After three months Baudolino remains on top of the bestseller list in Italy, but it is much too early to speak of its true or lasting success with critics or the general public. Baudolino is unquestionably another example of Eco's well known postmodern encyclopedic pastiche and has plenty of ingredients - humor, intertextuality, filmic effects, funny anecdotes, legends, and a clever fusion of history and elements taken from "pop culture" - for it to become another success story. But, regardless of the number of 1 This is the first of a two-part article on the coherence of Eco's fiction. In the second part I shall deal with specific leitmotifs that link Baudolino to The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. I shall also focus on other features such as levels of laughter, historicity, and how Eco once again deals with a variety of notions of knowledge. The second part of the title of this article refers specifically to Eco's article: "Polo: descrivere l'ignoto" (see Sugli specchi, pp. 61-66) originally published in L'Espresso as "Il Milione: descrivere l'ignoto". All quotations from Baudolino come from the first Bompiani edition and the page references will be indicated in parentheses in the text. For an account of the so-called "caso" or "fenomeno Eco", as it was labelled in Italy, see F. Pansa and A. Vinci, Effetto Eco, Rome: Nuova edizione del Gallo, 1992; M. Ganeri, Il caso Eco, Palermo: Palumbo, 1991; and R. Capozzi, "Troppi movimenti intorno al Pendolo di Eco", in Quaderni d'Italianistica 2 (1998), 301-13. Rocco Capozzi 212 copies that this novel will sell, this is without a doubt the author's most humorous and entertaining fiction so far. It is a great manifestation of combining fiction and metafiction, narration and narrativity. The existence of Baudolino was first made known during the closing ceremony of the Festival of Literature at Mantua (see Laura Lilli's interview in Repubblica, 11 September 2000), two months before its official release. On November 18, the day that Baudolino reached book stores across Italy, national newspapers like Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and Il Messaggero, and the weekly magazine L'Espresso carried the first reviews by reputable critics such as Maria Corti, Roberto Crotoneo, Renato Minore, and Giovanni Mariotti. Thus, twenty years after the publication of the unprecedented international success story of Eco's medieval semiotic sleuth-fiction, The Name of the Rose (1980), comes out another long "quest" novel (526 pages) set in the early Middle Ages. The historical period of Baudolino precedes by over a century the time frame of the adventures of William and Adso (set in 1327), as it spans from 11553, when the main protagonist Baudolino, at the age of twelve or thirteen, is adopted by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to the year 1204, when he meets in Byzantium the historian Niceta Coniate, interlocutor and future narrator of the Gesta Baudolini. Throughout Baudolino we read, among other events, about the Holy Roman emperor Frederick (who drowned in March of 1190 while trying to cross the Selef River on horseback), and the Byzantine empire that is in a state of turmoil and at war with western nations. The novel opens and closes with the sack of Costantinople at the hands of the fourth Crusade in April of 1204. In Italy these are the early days of the età comunale (age of communes) and the establishment of the Lega lombarda, when northern cities continually make and break alliances as they battle one another for territorial and economic supremacy. The XIIth Century is also a century that sees the growing struggle for power between popes and emperors and a period when the universities of Paris and Bologna become famous for the teaching of theology, philosophy, rhetoric, and law. Among the cultural activities of this period especially relevant to Baudolino are the diffusion of the Arthurian chivalric 3 An interesting coincidence that is worth mentioning in relation to Baudolino is that in 1155 a Norman poet called Wace translated Geoffrey of Monmouth's fables of Arthur and Merlin from Latin to French. And so by 1190 "the Tristan romance, the lais of Marie de France and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes had all seen the light of day" (Matarasso 11). Theoretically then, Baudolino does not invent the cultural events in his fabulation but merely appropriates them. Baudolino homo ludens 213 romances following Chrétien de Troves' publication of the legend of the Grail (Le Conte du Graal, 1190), and an increase in the number of students and clerics (whom Eco calls vagantes4) engaged in travelling, studying, discovering, interpreting, and discussing manuscripts and texts. Furthermore, it is also important to mention at this point that the saga of Baudolino takes place nearly a century before the publication of Marco Polo's Il Milione5. The first reviewers of the novel have not failed to mention Eco's narrative skills or the picaresque and autobiographical features of his writing. To some extent the author may have encouraged readers to see a connection between Baudolino and Eco when he, in his interview with Laura Lilli and in his article "Baudolino, c'est moi!", boasted, much the same way as the protagonist does in the novel, about his capacity to tell stories, such as the one about the birth of his native city of Alessandria. Readers of How to Travel With a Salmon (1994; 234- 48) may recall that in the final chapter of this collection Eco talks about the "Miracle of Saint Baudolino" and the history of Alessandria while making some autobiographical remarks6. But, if we are to focus on the autobiographical allusions in this novel, then we should perhaps consider that Baudolino is not that much different from the other main protagonists of Eco's previous novels and thus we should examine in greater depth the links between the semiotic detective William of Baskerville and Eco, the Sam Spade of publishing houses Casaubon and Eco, as well as the links between the shipwrecked metafictional narrator Roberto della Griva and Eco. The title of my article refers to the return of the renowned semiotician narrator to the art of constructing entertaining encyclopedic fiction dealing with epistemological and semiosic processes. It also paraphrases an essay by Eco on Marco Polo ("Il Milione: descrivere l'ignoto", written in 1982; see Sugli specchi 61-66), which I shall refer to in my discussion. Before entering into an analysis of Eco's newest possible world that is full of humor, irony, history, anecdotes, books and pop culture, I shall outline some of the implications in my expression "the return of Eco". 4 See section 8, "I Vagantes", in "Verso un nuovo medioevo" (1977; 202-03); also in Travels in Hyperreality, p. 80. 5 Originally published in French, in 1298. The first Italian edition appears in 1309. 6 Just as interesting here we find several elements that are used for the novel, such as the fog, the hero Gagliaudo, Frederick Barbarossa, and the Lega Lombarda. Rocco Capozzi 214 I feel that Baudolino (re)confirms Umberto Eco's remarkable coherence in his treatment of themes and leitmotifs that have also appeared in previous books. I am referring especially to those issues and debates of a linguistic, theological, and philosophical nature that in earlier works had also sent us, intratextually, back to such texts as The Role of the Reader (1979) and Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984), as well as, intertextually, to a myriad of other books and authors from Aristotle to the present. As I have argued elsewhere (Capozzi, 1989, 1997, 2001), the masterful exploitation of these intra- and intertextual "inferential walks" illustrates well Eco's art of docere et delectare within a brilliantly constructed encyclopedic fiction, where underneath witty narrative lies we can detect many truths about our (notions of) culture. What I am suggesting is that in Baudolino we can find many of the motifs and narrative strategies that readers have been accustomed, and even expect, to find in Eco's novels. For example, the reader will discover: a detective story, an anti-Bildungsroman7,an historical fiction, the fabrication of a plan, the art of plotting a claim to know a secret, the importance of common sense, the ability to perceive and interpret signs, metafictional narratives, a pastiche of texts including (in the tradition of Borges) apocryphal ones8, narrators winking at readers, a need to create and narrate stories, and the presence of the past in our present. Naturally, this is by no means a complete list. With the expression "the return of Eco" I am also referring to the author's overwhelming erudition and his ability to narrate the Middle Ages as a period of history, and culture, when society was undergoing massive changes. And although in this article I do not discuss Baudolino as an intertextual machine, an important and familiar practice in Eco's narrative strategies, I am certain that readers will have no difficulty in recognizing a variety of intertextual echoes pertaining most to the early Middle Ages, but also to more recent times.