The Island of the Day Before
By Umberto Eco
Translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace, 531 pages, $25
The time is the 17th Century, a period of critical change in western Europe. The Renaissance is winding down amidst seagoing explorations, unsettling scientific advances, spiteful religious conflicts and grievous political controversy. The Thirty Years’ War (sometimes called the “first world war” because of its extent and savagery) has just ended. Galileo has died but his faith in a heliocentric universe has vigorously survived him, much to the trepidation of many, even the irreligious.
Columbus has discovered America but there remains another bright and very new world, the yet uncharted Pacific. Out there somewhere waiting to be discovered is the unique meridian that divides one day from the next, and near it are the islands belonging to “The Day Before,” from whence this novel by Umberto Eco derives its puzzling but apt title.
To travel these islands, our author has created his own unlikely hero, Roberto della Griva, a naive Italian nobleman, green in youth and inexperience but thirsting for intelligence. Like a 17th Century Forrest Gump, he blunders through these troubled times, savoring the best and worst of his era with its uneasy blend of the bizarre and sublime.
A veteran of the Thirty Years War, Roberto has, in the service of the French army, recently survived the siege of Casale and helped thwart the path of the Spanish infantry, which seeks to keep northern Italy in its sway. The war over, Roberto moves on to France to educate himself in the ways of love, court life and the latest fashions.
There he meets the rich and famous, including Cardinal Richelieu, and indulges in the latest crazes–coffee for one, the new panacea that “dries cold humors . . . restores the heart, relieves bellyache.” For no practical reason, he acquires a “barbarous” tongue, English. He also learns about science, both the new buzz of modern astronomy, which would tilt man’s world dangerously askew, as well as the leftover theories of Ptolemy and the hocus-pocus of magic balms like the “unguentum armarium.”
Those bits of knowledge soon prove both useful and dangerous. Learning of his unusual linguistic skill and his grasp of science, the French coerce him into service as a spy. He ships out with English scientists in order to be there when they solve the riddle of measuring longitude, a secret surprisingly enough still outside man’s grasp but one that will make the country that possesses it master of the seas and of the island riches.
So begin Roberto’s travels, only to finish abruptly when he is shipwrecked. But now he embarks on his true quest. The solitary survivor on what appears to be an enchanted vessel, he keeps a journal, sorts through his life and searches for his identity amid a hodgepodge of confusing and contrary encounters with Copernican theory, superstitions, Newtonian physics, Roman Catholicism, baroque love poetry and, inevitably, man’s abiding existential angst.
Among his personal conflicts, the one with his alter ego, whom he calls Ferrante, looms large. Even as a child Roberto had blamed his missteps–acts of selfishness, lust, deception and so forth–on this mythical figure. Now, like Dr. Jekyll, Roberto will have to face his inner Mr. Hyde, duel him to the death and reclaim his integrity.
Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is not the only work that Eco insinuates into what rightly could be called an encyclopedic romance. Roberto’s small craft (unaccountably brimming with living creatures, some, like the kangaroo, completely unknown to him) simultaneously brings to mind both Noah’s Ark and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus.
While the “island of the day before,” which the hero glimpses each morning on the horizon, alluring but unattainable, might be that of Robinson Crusoe, it seems more than likely it refers to Dante’s Paradiso or the Garden of Eden–for to Roberto’s mind it promises an end to death and a peaceful reconciliation of the discordant notes which have marked his life. Getting there is the problem that gnaws at him and that coaxes the reader through a text more deeply philosophical than most historical novels.
Much like his phenomenal best seller “The Name of the Rose,” this Eco novel is history with a difference. Eco is not eager merely to entertain. Nor is he only interested in seamlessly fusing fact and fiction in order that the reader might vicariously live through an engaging adventure set in the forgotten past. Quite the opposite. The author has deliberately chosen a controversial century as his metaphor, one that points to our own similarly anxious times.
Like the present era, Roberto’s was jolted by a sudden surge of secularism and technology. Reason and science, men thought (and still think today), would make man captain of his soul and answer the important questions regarding the world, or the “Res Extensa,” as Eco puts it. Ironically, however, such was not to be the case. Instead of glorifying man, Eco says, many of the answers came then (and still come) at the heavy price of more doubts and lost self-esteem. The heliocentric theory, for instance, implicitly leaves man diminished before the Grand Mechanism of the universe.
Early on, Roberto’s friend, Saint-Savin (clearly Eco’s spokesman), warns him against the treachery of “the great machine of the world, plagued by the iniquities of chance,” and cautions him pessimistically to beware of “adolescent dreams of heroic feats” and of “the human invention” that is God. Later, aboard ship and alone save for the company of the vaulted heavens above–the expanse of the mighty Pacific around him and a cargo full of ticking clocks, all of them marking life’s brisk passage–the much humbled Roberto bravely faces his destiny unarmed.
Even mighty Science fails him before the eternal questions: the why of his being in the first place and the meaning of the “very small space” he occupies in the “abyss of the years.” Stripped of resources outside his unquenchable zeal to know, Roberto decides to see his quest through, and he does so in a singular way that the reader must be left to discover.
“The Island of the Day Before” is a complex and provocative novel. Like many postmodern works, it is a hybrid piece designed to bridge the gap between commercial best sellers and highbrow literature. And judging from the success of “The Name of the Rose,” no one leaps this gap better than Eco. He does this, he admits, by outwitting the reader, first snaring his attention with a formula plot and then moving on to what he considers to be more urgent metaphysical and philosophical concerns.
Eco’s nostalgia for the past is also a postmodern trait. According to the author, today’s “quest for our roots” is symptomatic of our anxious search for reliability, which we hope can be found in bygone times. Through his works, Eco would illumine those times for us, but more importantly he would also use those moments to critique the frailties of our present and parallel world.
Umberto Eco began his career as an Italian scholar and semiotician–a student of communication through signs and symbols–taking up fiction as a second calling. With this book he again reveals himself to be more than up to his role as novelist. Intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing, “The Island of the Day Before” is a masterpiece.
