The Tourist

On the rôle of erudition in literature.

Umberto Eco, Baudolino (2000)

It is easy to be erudite. All you need is a moderate intelligence, and the time and desire to hunt. For this reason, erudition, in and of itself, does not much impress me. It is, as they say, what you do with it that counts.

I have a history with Eco. I first read The Name of the Rose when I was 18, a page at a time as I worked the scanner or photocopier for my bosses in insurance. It took me two nine-to-fives to finish. I was highly impressed by it: this is the reaction of a young man to an older man. There was a kindly lady at my job who liked to read. I asked her what she thought of Eco's book at an after-work social in a docklands bowling alley. (A bowling alley is one of the worst places in existence, like a multiplex. Off the lane itself, light was scarce; you could smell the ersatz butter in the popcorn, the stale imported beer, and most of all the sweat of feet and oxters. I don't bowl. I think I got one lucky spare.) She said that if you took away all the fancy philosophy and learning, it was just a standard detective novel. I said, Well, yes, but you can't take off the philosophy and learning, that's the whole point of the book. She replied that if you took away all the fancy philosophy and learning, it was just a standard detective novel. I dropped the matter with her. Now I'm inclined to think she was right. I returned to The Name of the Rose years later, and found its philosophical debates trite, and its magisterial erudition, well, a bit less magisterial.

I dare not re-read Foucault's Pendulum, which dazzled me sufficiently to make me quit my insurance job and learn about kabbalah and alchemy.

But lately I was sitting with some friends in the aureate environs of the Blackfriars, after Easter service in St. Paul's, when a couple of them encouraged me to read Baudolino. I had my doubts—my impression of him then was a writer much less clever than he thought himself. But I'd read precious little fiction in years, and so decided to give Baudolino a fair shot. Thus:

*

The novel is set largely in the second half of the twelfth century, told as a flashback to Niketas Choniates during the siege of Constantinople in 1204 AD. The narrator, Baudolino, is an Italian peasant boy adopted since early childhood by Frederick Barbarossa, who finds himself 'behind' many of the great events and texts of the late twelfth century. As a young man he goes to Paris and meets Robert de Boron and the Archpoet, with whom he fabricates the 'Prester John Letter'. He 'discovers' the Grail and composes real love-letters. Later he saves Alessandria—his own hometown and also Eco's—with his father Gagliaudo, in a retelling of a 'genuine' legend. Finally, after witnessing Frederick's death, he sets off for the Kingdom of Prester John, which he himself has fabricated; Baudolino never reaches John, though he has, of course, lots of scrapes and adventures along the way. Baudolino is, in effect, the twelfth-century Forrest Gump.

The narrative is designed to flatter mediaevalists. Look, they will say excitedly, there's Otto of Freising! And he's talking about Abelard! And there's Alexander III—and there's the Archpoet! And when Baudolino reaches the land of Prester John, he encounters the fabulous beasts from Pliny and the Travels of John Mandeville—sciapods, blemmyes, panotians and so on. All those dusty obscurities cherished by the graduate are there revealed in their colours; she reads the book and feels part of a special learned club, just Eco and herself.

And within the special club of mediaevalists, the very special subclub of the broadly educated will twitter even more delightedly to itself—those who think of Quine when they see the name Gavagai, or those who, having read Eco's mediocre book on universal languages—or even a better book—can spot all the references to Dalgarno, Vairasse and other Enlightenment fantasists.

These references are supposed to be fun; but in fact they are smug and pointless. They add nothing to the book. In the Prester John section of the novel, Eco tries to demonstrate that he has digested modern philosophical problems and can redraw them in a fantastical setting; but it only comes across as that brand of science fiction desperate to show off its intellectual credentials. For instance, one of Baudolino's posse debates with the one-legged sciapod Gavagai:

Poet. "You are not friends [with the blemmyae] because you are different?"

Gavagai. "What you say? Different?"

"Well, in the sense that you are different from us and—"

"Why I different you?"

"Oh, for God's sake," the Poet said. "To begin with, you have only one leg! We and the blemmyae have two!"

"Also you and blemmyae if you raise one leg, you have only one."

"But you don't have another one to lower!"

"Why should I lower leg I don't has? Do you lower third leg you don't has?"

Eco's point is that Gavagai doesn't divide the world up into the same conceptual categories as us humans, differentiating individuals not by morphology but, as it happens, by theology. But the philosophical problems and debates instantiated in Baudolino are not only borrowed: they have no relevance to the novel's world, theme, or, worst of all, to its aesthetic, its qualities as an artwork. The best Eco can offer us is a reheated postmodern insistence on the narrative construction of reality—the world is as we tell it, and no more. This is what leads hack-reviews to call Baudolino 'a parable about storytelling, a meditation on truth'. Never trust anything described as a parable.

Laura Lilli: This book is an apology for the lie?

Umberto Eco: Rather it is an apology for utopia, for those inventions that move the world. Columbus discovered America by mistake: he thought that the earth was much smaller. It is not true that he was the only one thinking it was round, as people still say; that it was round they knew before Plato. And what can be said about El Dorado? A continent is conquered following a myth.

'Coincidentally', Eco had already published a scholarly work about influential mistakes, Serendipities (1998). It is a saunter around well-trodden academic fields, peeking into some pleasant books and episodes with only the pretence of original insight. It is a tourist's guide to scholarship, without any guts.

Eco has no serious prose style—at least, not in Weaver's English—no special gift for plot or character, no worthwhile message: and so in Baudolino he has to rely on his game of references with the reader. All the erudition is fine. But, like I said, erudition is easy. The problem is that he is no good at the game. He fails in two ways. Firstly, he's patronising. The conceit of the first chapter is that a fourteen year-old Baudolino snatches a bit of used parchment and writes some of his own macaronic Latin over it—the joke being that the original parchment, still legible in fragments, contains the opening of Otto of Freising's The Two Cities (1145). But in the next chapter he spoils the joke by telling you that the parchment contained The Two Cities. Eco is not confident enough to pitch the ball down the field—he has to roll it. The effect is nothing less than humdrum.

Again and again, Eco explains his references. When Baudolino meets Niketas, we get this sentence: 'Niketas Choniates, former court orator, supreme judge of the empire, judge of the Veil, logothete of secrets or—as the Latins would have said—chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, as well as historian of many Comneni and Angelus emperors, regarded with curiosity the man facing him.' When Baudolino goes to Paris, we are told: 'Baudolino arrived in Paris a bit late: in those schools, students entered before they were fourteen, and he was two years older.' There is no immersion in Eco's world because is constantly feeding us facts and gobbets from the history books. Wanting to be storyteller and teacher at the same time, he fails at both.

The erudition is not just spoon-fed: it is also unimaginative. This is his second, and more serious failure. Eco reads, again, like a tourist in his own library. Thus, because he has chosen the period 1155-1204, his canvas is dictated: it includes all the famous kings, philosophers and poets. Eco wants to give us a panorama of the political and intellectual climate of his period; but this requires justice to each part of the picture. He has abdicated control. He is liberal and tolerant towards his world—not a tyrant, as the true artist must be. And so his description of twelfth-century history is unable to go very deep. You can get most of the references simply by reading Southern or Cantor.

Still worse. We are told repeatedly and with no subtlety that Baudolino is a liar, and that he may have fabricated some or all of his tale. The mediaevalist Tom Shippey, in his TLS review, writes:

Baudolino is in the habit of inventing works, sometimes only as titles, but also referring to them and quoting from them. But which are made up and which are genuine? A perfect reader, the perfect reader as constructed by the author in Eco's own theories, would know the answer, but who would care to declare himself perfect? I am fairly sure that the Venerable Bede did not write a work on the best kind of tripe (De optimitate triparum), and the Ars honesti petandi sounds securely spurious as well. . .

It is true that Bede did not write a De optimitate triparum, or an Ars honesti petandi. But then, Eco could not have come up with these either: he had to borrow them from a far better fantasist. Similarly, the only creature in the land of Prester John not plucked from the standard mediaeval bestiary is a female satyr called a 'hypatia'. The hypatia is Eco's invention, but only sort of. After all, she is named after the first philosopheress and feminist icon, Hypatia of Alexandria, and she expounds to Baudolino, with no narrative relevance, a doe-eyed version of Neoplatonist-Gnostic theology. It's all second-hand. Nothing in Eco's world is invented—this is what I mean when I say he is a tourist, or a slave to his erudition. He would rather be learned, with his allusions to Rabelais and Hypatia, than imaginative. He has no mastery over the material. And he does not have the cojones to make Baudolino a real liar.

Why I am bothering to complain about the poor standard of Eco's erudition? Can I not appreciate the book as a mere flight of literary fancy, with vivid colours and a few in-jokes? No. Eco is, in literary terms, a man's man—we are told his English grew up on Marvel comics and Finnegans Wake, those twin poles of the male reading spectrum—and he wants a man's response from his reader. He wants not to charm or delight us, but to impress us. This mood is present in all his writing. Consider this, from the New York Times, on the subject of Eco's 'inside jokes':

Take for instance, the love letters written by Baudolino, the new novel's title character, to the entrancingly beautiful wife of his patron, the Emperor Frederick. Many critics seized on these as obvious allusions to, or imitations of, what are known as the most famous love letters of the Middle Ages, those exchanged between Abelard and Heloïse.

But no, said a gleeful Mr. Eco in an interview. . . ''These love letters exist,'' he said, clearly pleased to have planted such a successful trap. ''Someone said Abelard and Heloïse, but no. It is a real epistolary exchange of love letters that was discovered recently.''

Eco does not name his source—but he is evidently referring to the love-letters published by Ewald Koensgen as Epistolae duorum amantium in 1976. These were taken from a 1470 manuscript (Troyes BM 1452) penned by Johannes de Vepria, and attributed by Koensgen to Abelard and Heloise, albeit with a twinkling question-mark. Constant Mews added his voice to this attribution in a well-known 1999 book; nonetheless, few are really convinced. So when Eco says that 'the German scholar' [Koensgen] 'was the only person in the whole world who could probably recognize' the letters in Baudolino, he is playing up the obscurity of his text. This is also why he is 'gleeful' and 'pleased' that he might have fooled his readers and one-upped his critics. (He seems a little unsure on the attribution, as he does accept Abelard-Heloise authorship here.) Here's an example of Eco's reuse. Vepria Letter 20 runs:

Stella polum variat et noctem luna colorat,
Sed michi sydus habet, quod me conducere debet.
Nunc mea si tenebris oriatur stella fugatis,
Mens mea iam tenebras meroris nesciet ullas.
Tu michi Lucifer es, que noctem pellere debes.
Te sine lux michi nox, tecum nox splendida lux est.

Eco has rendered this: 'The star illuminates the pole, and the moon colors the night. But my guide is a sole star and if, when the shadows have been dispelled, my star rises from the East, my mind will ignore the shadows of sorrow. You are my radiant star, who will dispel the night, and light itself without you is night, whereas with you night is splendid radiance.' Can we quibble? Polum is really 'sky', not 'pole'; Lucifer is specifically the morning-star, and there is no reason for the final lux to be translated 'radiance' and not 'light'. (Perhaps Weaver is to blame for inaccuracies—I have not seen the Italian.) The overall effect is a competent translation: nothing more. Again, Eco has not worked his material: it merely sits there in his book, translated but otherwise native. Lazy.

Now, I have no problem with erudition in literature, and no problem with books wanting to impress me, even by their authors' own admission. Hey, I'm game. I want to be impressed, not charmed or delighted. But if you are going to play a man's game, you'd better play it right—not botch a penalty and spend all night crying. And Umberto Eco is the John Terry of erudition.

*

There is a great history of erudition in literature. The first modern landmark is Gargantua and Pantagruel. In English, we have had Sterne, Carlyle and Joyce, most of all. There have even been brilliant novels of erudition in our time: the classic example for me is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat—more on that next time—and to a lesser extent Pynchon's various books. These writers have all done what Eco has not: they have created a vocabulary of erudition. Their books are not mere heavens of references—they are constellations, with distinctive shape and character. Consider the rôle of classical medicine and law in Rabelais, idealist philosophy in Carlyle, Irish literature and the Jesuit curriculum in Joyce. In each case, raw materials of learning are picked out and wrought into an original perspective. As Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver, 'I would not pay overmuch attention to [Vico's] theories, beyond using them for all they are worth'. Contrast Eco's genuflection before modern philosophy to Rabelais's parodic reinvention of scholastic logic:

Which was first, thirst or drinking? Thirst, for who in the time of innocence would have drunk without being athirst? Nay, sir, it was drinking; for privatio praesupponit habitum.

Contrast the exuberant and aggressive lists of books still to be found in Theroux, to the complacent and collusive winks glancing from the pages of Baudolino. The grand érudits ravish you: Eco tickles you. His is a limp handshake; instead of a confident argot of learning, he has a tourist's pidgin. The function of putting books into a novel is to create light and depth, personality through reach and considered choice. To put books into a novel is tell your reader who you are. This stamping of character is a practice of modernity, and of modernism. But Eco is decidedly a postmodern. Baudolino ends: 'You surely don't believe that you're the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone—a greater liar than Baudolino—will tell it.' For Eco we are all storytellers, and so none of us is. By telling stories we create a world, but at the same time we take ourself out of that world, or rather we become just another part of it, indistinguishable from the rest.