The island of the previous day

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The island of the previous day is the third novel by Umberto Eco , which was published in 1994 in the Italian original under the title L'isola del giorno prima and in 1995 in the German translation by Burkhart Kroeber . It tells the allegedly true story of the Piedmontese country nobleman Roberto de La Grive , who is said to have disappeared in the South Pacific around the middle of the 17th century while searching for a solution to the longitude problem at the date line .

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The narrator claims to have reconstructed the story as faithfully as possible on the basis of fragmentary notes and letters from the 17th century: In July or August 1643, a young Italian named Roberto de La Grive found himself castawatted on an abandoned ship in the South Pacific Sailing ship called "Daphne", which is anchored within sight of a lonely island, and writes letters to an unspecified "Signora", from which his previous life and the explanation of his strange situation gradually emerge:

Growing up in the area of Alessandria as the son of a small country nobility, Roberto, because he feels lonely, invents himself a half-brother and doppelganger whom he calls Ferrante and later believes he actually sees him. In the spring of 1630, at the age of 16, he rides with his father and his men to Casale in neighboring Monferrato to defend the city that was besieged by the Spaniards during the War of the Mantuan Succession . His father is killed in the fight against the Spaniards, and Roberto feels even more lonely than before. Influenced by a French nobleman whom he met in Casale, he finally went to France, studied in Aix-en-Provence with an unspecified "Canon of Digne" and then came to Paris, where he made contact with free- spirited circles. in the salons of the “Précieuses”, those noble ladies who love witty, unconventional conversations and falls in love with the beautiful Lilia, which he doesn't dare to say to her, but only expresses it in languid, but not sent letters.

In order to impress his beloved, he gave a lecture in a Paris salon at the beginning of December 1642 on love as a material force that was comparable to “sympathetic powder”, a substance with which one could heal wounds at a distance or even aggravate them if one sprinkle it on the blade with which the wound was struck. The evening after this lecture, a captain appears at Roberto's house, arrests him and takes him to Cardinal Mazarin . While Cardinal Richelieu is lying next door on his death bed, Mazarin accuses the arrested man of high treason. His only chance to avoid the death penalty is to carry out a secret mission. A young man in his early twenties by the name of Colbert - who “works in a very promising way into the secrets of state administration”, as Mazarin introduces him - explains to Roberto what it's all about: On the high seas one can indeed with the help of the stars and has been since ancient times known navigation instruments determine the respective latitude , but that is not enough to find a specific island later, for example. To do this, you also have to know the longitude . “Unfortunately,” says Colbert, “every means that has been devised to determine the longitude has proven to be unsuitable.” If one uses not only the local time but also the exact time, e.g. B. in Paris, it would be possible to convert the time difference into an angle or a degree of longitude, because one hour corresponds to 15 degrees of longitude. But there is no clock that is accurate enough, and how are you supposed to know what time it is in Paris somewhere out at sea? You would need a fixed point or Punto Fijo , as the Spaniards call it, but where to get it from? However, the French government has now learned that the English doctor, Doctor Byrd, is preparing for an expedition to research the problem. For camouflage reasons, he will not take an English ship, but a Dutch one, the "Amarilli". Roberto should travel to Amsterdam, go on board the “Amarilli” and secretly observe what Doctor Byrd is going to do.

After a month-long sea voyage across the Atlantic to South America, around Cape Horn and far to the west of the Pacific Ocean (and in the chapter "The Ship of Fools" almost elegiac with echoes of famous South Sea stories - from Robinson Crusoe to the Bounty to those described by Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin ), Roberto finally finds out how Doctor Byrd secretly determines the time in London every night: There is a dog hidden on the ship that you can take with you before you leave London Blade has injured. Apparently Doctor Bryd also sprinkles salt on the gaping wound to keep it from healing. Every midnight someone in London puts “sympathetic powder” on the blade that struck the wound - and at the same moment the dog, who usually only whimpers, howls loudly.

In July or August 1643, however, the "Amarilli" got caught in a hurricane and went down with man and mouse. Roberto is able to save himself on a plank and drifts in the water for days until he comes to a ship anchored in a shallow bay: the "Daphne". With the last of his strength, he climbs up a rope ladder and falls asleep exhausted on the deck.

When he wakes up again, he finds that the lifeboats are missing and the ship is intact, but apparently abandoned by the crew. In the east he sees a paradise island, which is however inaccessible for a non-swimmer like Roberto. There is plenty to eat in the galley. When he hears strange noises, he anxiously retreats into the captain's cabin.

Later he dares to follow the noises. He discovered a greenhouse with exotic plants and a bird house full of cages with colorful birds. The plants have obviously been freshly watered and the birds have just been fed! When he looked further, he discovered a room behind the bird house with numerous clocks and other measuring instruments. Has anyone tried to find a method for determining longitude on this ship? Roberto systematically examines the ship and finally finds an old man who introduces himself as the Jesuit Father Caspar Wandering Thrush from Rome. The native German, a Baroque polymath who speaks a distinctive Baroque German (and is modeled on Baroque polymaths like Athanasius Kircher and Caspar Schott ), explains to Roberto that he made the trip to the South Seas to collect exotic animals and plants . Recently, however, he had developed a high fever from an insect bite, and when the captain thought he saw plague bumps on him, the crew fled to the nearby island. There the men were probably killed by "natives" and possibly eaten.

On the basis of his sky observations, Father Caspar is convinced that the 180th degree of longitude runs between the ship and the island in the east, i.e. the date line. So on the island it is, logically speaking, seen from the ship yesterday! For the two castaways, it becomes the “island of the previous day”. However, since neither of them can swim, they would only be able to reach the island with a raft, but to build that they would need tools, and the sailors took them with them to the island. Roberto tries in vain to learn to swim. Then Father Caspar had the idea of ​​building a kind of diving bell in which he wanted to hike over to the island on what is presumably not too deep an ocean floor. The pious father is already afraid of committing the sin of pride, he is so proud to be the first person to descend into the mysterious sea world. He buckles on his diving bell, Roberto heaves him up with a winch and lets him down into the water. Then he waits a long time for Father to reappear, but in vain: Father Caspar Wandering Thrush does not appear again.

In his renewed loneliness, Roberto continues to practice swimming until he comes across a poisonous fish, the touch of which drives him into a feverish fever on the verge of death. He had already started to think of a novel in which his beloved Lilia and his evil doppelganger Ferrante, whom he invented as a child, play the main roles: Ferrante has come to Paris and there pretends to be Roberto, in Roberto's form he approaches Lilia and persuades her to go aboard the pirate ship “Tweede Daphne” with him in order to hunt down a document of the greatest importance for the fortunes of France. In blind hatred he pursues Roberto across the seas. But in the South Seas the tortured crew of the “Tweede Daphne” mutinies, after which the ship gets caught in a hurricane and goes down. Ferrante just manages to tie Lilia to a door that has been pulled off its hinges. So she finally drifts towards the island of the previous day, off whose west coast Roberto is. Ferrante, however, washes up on the beach of another island, which turns out to be hell, where the living dead in various stages of dissolution wait in vain for an end to their torments. There Roberto lets his evil doppelganger end. Meanwhile, Lilia - always in Roberto's imaginary novel - floats on her door leaf in the sea and threatens to die from exhaustion. In order to save her, Roberto makes himself a character in his novel: If he manages to get to the island, he thinks, then thanks to the time jump he will be there one day before Lilia's arrival and can help her as soon as she can has landed. Should he not reach the island, however, then he would be drifting exactly on the 180th degree of longitude, on the borderline between today and yesterday, out of time, and thereby - as he imagines it in his madness - also the time stop on the island and postpone the death of the loved one forever.

With this idea in mind, Roberto rises from his feverish dream, lets the birds go free, sets the "Daphne" on fire, lets himself slide into the water and pushes himself off, "towards one of the two bliss that certainly awaited him".

In the final chapter, the narrator considers that the "Daphne" may not have been completely burned, otherwise Roberto's notes would not have been found. Later South Seas explorers like Abel Tasman or Captain Bligh could have discovered the wreck and found the papers. But how they finally got into his hands, the narrator leaves open.

Style and structure

Stylistically, Last Day's Island is probably Eco's most demanding novel. It is not only set in the Baroque era, it is also written in the spirit of the Baroque and in part even in Mannerist-Baroque language. Even the narrator is complex: there is an undefined first-person narrator who tries to reconstruct Roberto's story from a bundle of yellowed papers (the fiction of the manuscript found so often is here by the talk of a “bundle of washed out and scratched autographs "), but for a long time the plot is also presented in the tone of a classic authorial narrator, with lively dialogues, effective pauses, colored descriptions of moods, etc. Now and then, as the third narrator instance, Roberto himself appears to the word, be it through inserted quotations from his letters, be it through such a strong identification of the first-person narrator with his protagonist that he practically empathizes with him. The structure of the whole thing is anything but simple: the plot is often narrated broken, in intricately intertwined flashbacks and with the narrator's reflections on the validity or questionability of his reconstruction of the story, often inserted. Sometimes he even suggests alternative solutions in the middle of the process so that the reader can choose how to proceed.

In addition, linguistically, the contrast between the flowery (some also find pompous) expression of the baroque hero and the dry language of the modern narrator is often played with, whereby the boundaries are fluid. Even the first quote from Roberto's letters, which is like a motto at the beginning, contains a number of typically baroque figures of thought or meaning (“ Concetti ”), and in the first sentence of the novel the reader is immediately warned against “incorrigible mannerism”:

"And yet my humiliation fills me with pride, and since condemned to such a privilege, I now enjoy a loathed salvation, as it were: I believe that since time immemorial I have been the only creature of our species who was castwrecked on an abandoned ship."
So, in incorrigible mannerism, Roberto de La Grive, probably in July or August 1643.

Complex games of words and concepts pile up, the text is teeming with hidden allusions to the most diverse poets and thinkers of the 17th century, from those only recognizable to specialists like Pierre Gassendi or Giambattista Marino or Cyrano de Bergerac to world-famous (but all the better hidden ) like Shakespeare or Pascal . The headings of the 40 chapters cite more or less veiled - with a few significant exceptions - a lot of titles from works from the Baroque period, most of which are only known to specialized antiquarians today, and thus result in a very unique, almost private story. Philosophical reflections mix, especially towards the end of the book, between the more narrative chapters, such as a large meditation entitled “Paradoxical Exercises on Thinking Stones” (Chapter 37), in which the feverish Roberto imagines he is one Stone, only to then discover unexpected complexities in the essence of the supposedly dead minerals (once he even tries to imagine himself as a stone in a volcanic crater, i.e. as liquid magma, and decides, frightened, to think again as hard stone). Time and again there is thought about the nature of space and time, especially in Father Caspar's adventurous speculations about Genesis and the Flood (Chapter 21, “Sacred Theory of the Earth”), and the consequences of the multitude of possible worlds for Christian salvation doctrine become almost obsessive discussed (especially original in Chapter 14, “Treatise on the Science of Weapons”, where a duel between two French officers in Casale is told, which is strongly reminiscent of the duel scene at the beginning of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac , in which Cyrano is just as adept at Words like fighting with a sword, except that with Eco, Monsieur de Saint-Savin, modeled after Cyrano, does not write a sonnet during the duel , but rather extemporates a theological treatise on the salvation-historical consequences of the multitude of possible worlds - and then after the gloriously won duel by one stupid coincidence dies).

The symbol of the dove

The figure of the "flame-colored pigeon" plays a special role. At first glance it is just a particularly beautiful tropical species of pigeon that Father Caspar saw with his telescope on the island and that Roberto called it “because of its glowing red color and its lightning-fast flight” Flaming Dove ”describes. But Roberto perks up immediately, asks what kind of dove it is and learns that the sight of it from a distance is “like seeing a fiery ball of gold, or of golden fire, which soars from the top of the tallest trees to heaven an arrow". At these words of the priest Roberto suffers a “anxious restlessness”, which the narrator perceives as “exaggerated” and comments: “As if the island had promised him a dark emblem for some time, which now suddenly shines brightly”. In order to define the exact red tone of this ember or flame-colored dove, the two shipwrecked men conduct an excited dialogue:

“Purple red, ruby ​​red, rose red, blood red, lip red, salmon red, crab red, brick red, suggested Roberto. No, no, cried the father angrily. And Roberto: strawberry-red, raspberry-red, cherry-red, geranium-red, radish-red, tomato-red, rowanberry-red, holly-berry-red, robin-throated-red, red throttle-bellied red, redstart-red ... No, no, insisted Father Caspar, fighting with his and all languages ​​to find the right word. "

Finally they come to an agreement

“The brilliant color of a bitter orange [...] a glowing red or a flame red, yes, it was a winged sun: When you saw it in the white sky, it was as if the dawn were throwing a pomegranate into the snow. And when she catapulted herself into the sun, she was more glistening than the cherubim! "

And Father Caspar adds that this pigeon could

“Certainly only live on the Insula Salomonis, for in the canticum of that great king there is talk of a dove rising like the dawn, shining like the sun, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata - terrible as an army gazing at arms . And in another psalm it is said that their wings are covered with silver and their feathers with the shimmer of gold. "

This is an important keyword that is not only informative for Roberto's further behavior, but also indicative of Eco's literary approach: The same passage from the Canticum Salomonis (or " Song of Love ") is already at a central point in Eco's name quoted from the rose , namely in the emphatic description of the nameless girl whom young Adson encounters at night in the kitchen, a description which he composes entirely from quotations from the Song of Songs and ends with the words: "And I wondered, as carried away as I was afraid, who might be there, who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, shining as the sun, 'terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata'. ”In fact, Roberto sees the flame-colored dove in the further course - very much like Adson the girl - always more as an emblem or ideal embodiment of his longings for love, which affect both the distant Lilia in Paris and the near, but likewise inaccessible island. The deeper Roberto sinks into his feverish dreams, the more the objects of his desire merge into one, which appears to him as the flame-colored dove. Chapter 26, “Emblematic Lust Cabinet,” fades in a veritable treatise on the dove as a symbol, emblem and allegory in cultural history from antiquity to modern times, and in the last sentence of the novel (before the epilogue) the dove appears again (in the original even as the last word of the novel) when Roberto, while swimming towards his uncertain fate, sees her hopefully soaring into the sky:

"There, above the line that was drawn by the tops of the trees, he should have seen, with now overly sharp eyes, how the flame-colored dove rose like a spear aimed at the sun."

In the epilogue u. a. explains that there is actually a bright red pigeon on the Fiji island of Taveuni , called Flame Dove or Orange Dove in English and Ptilinopus Victor in Latin . That is where the "island of the previous day" in reality would be located. Originally, Eco had planned to call the novel La Colomba Color Arancio rather than L'isola del giorno prima . In the German version it would have been called Die Flammenfarbene Taube .

Inclusion in the criticism

The publication of the German edition in March 1995 was preceded by months of media coverage which, in various interviews, hints and advance reports, fueled the tension on the long-awaited third novel by the author of the two world successes The Name of the Rose and The Foucault Pendulum, which was called " Chronicle of an announced bestseller “had been mocked. As early as two months before the publication, when it was reported that the original Italian edition was not selling as well as expected, some newspapers wrote that the new Eco had suffered a “premature media death”. When the novel was released, the media reaction was mixed. Some critics found it rambling and overloaded, some rejected it outright harshly. Others, on the other hand, praised him for his original and exciting plot, narrative richness and the wide range of his allusions and references. Still others, more in the academic world, were encouraged to undertake detailed analyzes and profound essays, which were later collected in book form (see below the secondary literature). The ambiguous reception has to do not only with the previous media hype, but also with the deliberately baroque character of the novel: Anyone who rejects this style as "pompous" can hardly warm to Eco's novel, and anyone who has a sense for artful linguistic structures and mannerist figures of thought will appreciate him. Eco was precisely about revaluing the baroque style and gusto a little bit , which in Italy as in the German cultural area had fallen into disrepute as "pompous" and "ornate" since the subsequent classical period - it was after all an expression of a time when who seemed to throw the world out of joint and the traditional certainties all seemed shaken, starting with the usual image of the world (and ergo of humans) in the center of the universe. Hence the numerous meditations and speculations about space and time and their complex interrelationships, for which the central plot idea of ​​the “island that lies in yesterday” already gives a plastic (admittedly not “realistic”) picture.

The history of philosophy Kurt Flasch wrote in the FAZ on March 18, 1995: “Eco's new book tells the odyssey of the 'great century': The age of reason seeks its definitive hold and gets to the edges of its world and its thinking. Reason, just led by Galileo and Descartes to triumph over old prejudices, gave birth the next day to utopian visions and dreams of metaphysical horror. She learns how random this world is and therefore how she herself is. Roberto moves on the edge of space and time; he records the failure of a self-confident reason. It no longer encounters anything clearly solid in nature. Instead of well-formed things, she sees random vortices of atoms; looking up from earth, she sees random vortices of galaxies. The retreat of the thinker on himself no longer offers any support: he is Roberto and Ferrante; he can think Ferrante's thoughts and thereby destroys the Cartesian certainty 'I think therefore I am'. "

expenditure

  • Umberto Eco, L'isola del giorno prima , Bompiani, Milan 1994
  • Umberto Eco, The island of the previous day , trans. v. Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-446-18085-0 ; dtv, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-12335-4

Secondary literature

  • Thomas Stauder (Ed.): “Amazement about being”. International contributions to Umberto Eco's “Island of the previous day” . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1997, ISBN 3-534-13028-6
  • Günter Berger: Approaches to the island. Readings from Umberto Eco's “The Island of the previous day” , Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 1999, ISBN 3-89528-223-5

To the background:

Remarks

  1. ↑ Alessandria is Umberto Eco's birthplace.
  2. ↑ Behind this is the atomistic philosopher and natural scientist Pierre Gassendi, who was born in Digne in 1592 .
  3. ↑ This absurd method of determining the longitude was actually proposed in 1687 in a leaflet entitled Curious Inquiries , see Dava Sobel, Längengrad , Berlin 1996.
  4. ↑ In the Italian original he speaks an Italian with German word order (the verbs at the end etc.), which in Italy has a long tradition in parodic and satirical literature as "tedesco maccaronico" .
  5. ↑ So once again confirming this on the last page of the book.
  6. ↑ Pointing out that most German readers would hardly recognize one of these titles, Eco replied that it was not a problem, and most Italians didn't say anything either.
  7. ↑ In the original Colomba Color Arancio , literally "orange pigeon".
  8. ↑ Der Name der Rose , Hanser, p. 315; dtv, p. 328.
  9. ↑ So z. B. the Wiener Kurier of January 6, 1995.
  10. ↑ “Pure Trivial Baroque”, according to Der Spiegel 11/1995, and: “From every pore of a novel, the academic eagerness for teaching of the secondary literary writer, which unfortunately is also eco, oozes out of every novel pore,” said Sigrid Löffler in the weekly newspaper “ Die Woche ” from 10 March 1995.