I rewrote hundreds of pages to avoid this kind of lapse, but I do not recall ever realizing quite how I solved the problem. I became aware of it only two years afterward, when I was trying to figure out why the book was being read by people who surely could not like such “cultivated” books. Adso’s narrative style is based on that rhetorical device called preterition or paralepsis, or “passing over.” Here is an example from Tudor times: “I doe not say that thou receaved brybes of thy fellowes, I busie myself not in this thing. . . .” The speaker, in other words, claims he will not speak of something that everyone knows perfectly well, and as he is saying this, he speaks of the thing. This is more or less the way Adso mentions people and events as being well known but still does speak of them. As for those people and events that Adso’s reader, a German at the end of the century, could not know, since they had taken place in Italy at the beginning of the century, Adso discusses them without hesitation, and in a didactic tone, because this was the style of the medieval chronicler, eager to introduce encyclopedic notions every time something was mentioned. After a friend (not the same one as before) had read the manuscript, she told me she had been struck by the journalistic tone of the story, which was not the tone of a novel but that of a newspaper article. At first I was offended; then I realized what she had unwittingly perceived. This is how the chroniclers of those centuries tell things. And if the Italians still use the word cronaca to define the local-news page in the papers, it is because chronicles have gone on being written over the centuries.
Pace
But there was another reason for including those long didactic passages. After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems become when they are recited by actors, who, wanting to “interpret,” ignore the meter of the verse, make dramatic enjambements as if they were declaiming prose, concern themselves with the content and not with the rhythm. To read a classical poem in rhyme, you have to assume the singing rhythm the poet wanted. It is better to recite Dante as if he had written children’s jingles than pursue only his meanings to the exclusion of everything else.
In narrative, the breathing is derived not from the sentences but from broader units, from the scansion of events. Some novels breathe like gazelles, others like whales or elephants. Harmony lies not in the length of the breath but in its regularity. And if, at a certain point (but this should not occur too often), the breathing breaks off and a chapter (or a sequence) ends before the breath is completely drawn, this irregularity can play an important role in the economy of the story; it can mark a turning point, a surprise development. At least this is what we find in great writers. A great novel is one in which the author always knows just when to accelerate, when to apply the brakes, and how to handle the clutch, within a basic rhythm that remains constant. In music there is rubato, but if you rob too much, you end up like those bad performers who believe that exaggerated rubato is all you need to play Chopin. I am not talking about how I solved my problems, but about how I posed them. And if I were to say I posed them consciously, I would be lying. There is a compositive thought that thinks even in the rhythm of fingers tapping on the keys of the typewriter.
I would like to give an example of how storytelling means thinking with your fingers. Obviously, the lovemaking scene in the kitchen is constructed entirely on the basis of quotations from religious texts, from the Song of Songs to Saint Bernard and Jean de Fécamp, or Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval mystics realized this, if they had any ear. But now, if someone asks me the source of the quotations or where one ends and another begins, I cannot answer.
In fact, I had dozens and dozens of file cards with all sorts of texts, and sometimes pages of books, photocopies—countless, far more than I used. But when I wrote the scene, I wrote it all in one sitting (I polished it later, as if to cover it with a uniform finish, so the seams would be less visible). So, as I was writing, I had at my elbow all the texts, flung in no order; and my eye would fall first on this one and then on that, as I copied out a passage, immediately linking it to another. In first draft, I wrote this chapter more quickly than any of the others. I realized afterward that I was trying to follow with my fingers the rhythm of Adso’s lovemaking, and therefore I could not pause to select the most cogent quotation. What made the quotation cogent at that point was the pace at which I inserted it. I rejected with my eyes those quotations that would have arrested the rhythm of my fingers. I cannot say that the writing of the action lasted as long as the action (for there are times when lovemaking lasts fairly long), but I tried to shorten as much as possible the difference between the duration of the scene and the duration of the writing. And I say “writing” not in the Barthesian sense, but in the typewriter’s sense: I mean writing as a physical, material act, and I am speaking of the rhythms of the body, not of emotions. The emotion, filtered at this point, had all come before, with the decision to liken mystic ecstasy to erotic ecstasy; it had come when I first read and chose the texts to be employed. Afterward, there was no emotion: Adso was making love, not I. I had only to translate his emotion into a movement of eyes and fingers, as if I had decided to tell a story of love by playing the drum.
Constructing the Reader
Rhythm, pace, penitence . . . For whom? For me? No, certainly not. For the reader. While you write, you are thinking of a reader, as the painter, while he paints, is thinking of the viewer who will look at the picture. After making a brush stroke, he takes two or three steps back and studies the effect: he looks at the picture, that is, the way the viewer will admire it, in proper lighting, when it is hanging on a wall. When a work is finished, a dialogue is established between the text and its readers (the author is excluded). While a work is in progress, the dialogue is double: there is the dialogue between that text and all other previously written texts (books are made only from other books and around other books), and there is the dialogue between the author and his model reader. I have theorized about this in other works, such as The Role of the Reader and, before that, in Opera aperta; nor was I the inventor of the idea.
It may be that when he writes the author has a certain empirical audience in mind; this is how the founders of the modern novel wrote—Richardson, Fielding, Defoe—who were writing for merchants and their wives. But Joyce, too, is writing for an audience, imagining an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In both cases, whether the writer believes he is writing for a public standing there, money in hand, just outside the door, or whether he means to write for a reader still to come, writing means constructing, through the text, one’s own model reader.
What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the first hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing one hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.
Is there a writer who writes only for posterity? No, not even if he says so himself, because, since he is not Nostradamus, he can conceive of posterity only on the model of what he knows of his contemporaries. Is there a writer who writes only for a handful of readers? Yes, if by this you mean that the model reader he imagines has slight chance of being made flesh in any number. But even this writer writes in the hope, not all that secret, that his book itself will create, and in great quantity, many new exemplars of this reader, desired and pursued with such craftsmanlike
precision, and postulated, encouraged, by his text.
If there is a difference, it lies between the text that seeks to produce a new reader and the text that tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street. In the latter case we have the book written, constructed, according to an effective, mass-production formula; the author carries out a kind of market analysis and adapts his work to its results. Even from a distance, it is clear that he is working by a formula; you have only to analyze the various novels he has written and you note that in all of them, after changing names, places, distinguishing features, he has told the same story—the one that the public was already asking of him.
But when a writer plans something new, and conceives a different kind of reader, he wants to be, not a market analyst, cataloguing expressed demands, but, rather, a philosopher, who senses the patterns of the Zeitgeist. He wants to reveal to his public what it should want, even if it does not know it. He wants to reveal the reader to himself.
If Manzoni had been thinking of the public’s wishes, he would have had the formula handy: the historical novel with a medieval setting, with illustrious characters as in Greek tragedy, kings and princesses (and is this not what he did in Adelchi?), great and noble passions, heroic battles, and a celebration of Italian glories from a period when Italy was a land of the strong. Is this not what so many historical novelists, now more or less forgotten, had done in his day, or before him: writers like the artisan d’Azeglio, the fiery and lutulent Guerrazzi, the unreadable Cantù?
But what does Manzoni do instead? He chooses the seventeenth century, a period of servitude, and lowly characters, and the only swordsman is a scoundrel. Manzoni tells of no battles, and dares weigh his story down with documents and proclamations. . . . And people like him, everyone likes him, learned and ignorant, old and young, devout and anticlerical, because he sensed that the readers of his day had to have that, even if they did not know it, even if they did not ask for it, even if they did not believe it was fit for consumption. And how hard he had to work, with hammer and saw and plane, and dictionary, to make his product palatable. To force empirical readers to become the model reader he yearned for.
Manzoni did not write to please the public as it was, but to create a public who could not help liking his novel. And woe to them if they had not liked it. With supreme hypocrisy and serenity he referred to his “twenty-five readers”; it was twenty-five million he wanted.
What model reader did I want as I was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game. I wanted to become completely medieval and live in the Middle Ages as if that were my own period (and vice versa). But at the same time, with all my might, I wanted to create a type of reader who, once the initiation was past, would become my prey—or, rather, the prey of the text—and would think he wanted nothing but what the text was offering him. A text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader. You believe you want sex and a criminal plot where the guilty party is discovered at the end, and all with plenty of action, but at the same time you would be ashamed to accept old-fashioned rubbish made up of the living dead, nightmare abbeys, and black penitents. All right, then, I will give you Latin, practically no women, lots of theology, gallons of blood in Grand Guignol style, to make you say, “But all this is false; I refuse to accept it!” And at this point you will have to be mine, and feel the thrill of God’s infinite omnipotence, which makes the world’s order vain. And then, if you are good, you will realize how I lured you into this trap, because I was really telling you about it at every step, I was carefully warning you that I was dragging you to your damnation; but the fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
And since I wanted you to feel as pleasurable the one thing that frightens us—namely, the metaphysical shudder—I had only to choose (from among the model plots) the most metaphysical and philosophical: the detective novel.
The Detective Metaphysic
It is no accident that the book starts out as a mystery (and continues to deceive the ingenuous reader until the end, so the ingenuous reader may not even realize that this is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated). I believe people like thrillers not because there are corpses or because there is a final celebratory triumph of order (intellectual, social, legal, and moral) over the disorder of evil. The fact is that the crime novel represents a kind of conjecture, pure and simple. But medical diagnosis, scientific research, metaphysical inquiry are also examples of conjecture. After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty? To know this (to think you know this), you have to conjecture that all the events have a logic, the logic that the guilty party has imposed on them. Every story of investigation and of conjecture tells us something that we have always been close to knowing (pseudo-Heideggerian reference). At this point it is clear why my basic story (whodunit?) ramifies into so many other stories, all stories of other conjectures, all linked with the structure of conjecture as such.
An abstract model of conjecturality is the labyrinth. But there are three kinds of labyrinth. One is the Greek, the labyrinth of Theseus. This kind does not allow anyone to get lost: you go in, arrive at the center, and then from the center you reach the exit. This is why in the center there is the Minotaur; if he were not there the story would have no zest, it would be a mere stroll. Terror is born, if it is born, from the fact that you do not know where you will arrive or what the Minotaur will do. But if you unravel the classical labyrinth, you find a thread in your hand, the thread of Ariadne. The classical labyrinth is the Ariadne’s-thread of itself.
Then there is the mannerist maze: if you unravel it, you find in your hands a kind of tree, a structure with roots, with many blind alleys. There is only one exit, but you can get it wrong. You need an Ariadne’s-thread to keep from getting lost. This labyrinth is a model of the trial-and-error process.
And finally there is the net, or, rather, what Deleuze and Guattari call “rhizome.” The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space. The labyrinth of my library is still a mannerist labyrinth, but the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured definitively.
A seventeen-year-old boy told me he understood nothing of the theological arguments, but they acted as extensions of the spatial labyrinth (as if they were the “suspense” music in a Hitchcock film). I believe that something like this happened: even the ingenuous reader sensed that he was dealing with a story of labyrinths, and not only of spatial labyrinths. We could say that, strangely, the most ingenuous readings were the most “structural”: the ingenuous reader entered into direct contact, beyond any mediation of content, with the fact that it is impossible for there to be a story.
Enjoyment
I wanted the reader to enjoy himself, at least as much as I was enjoying myself. This is a very important point, which seems to conflict with the more thoughtful ideas we believe we have about the novel.
The reader was to be diverted, but not di-verted, distracted from problems. Robinson Crusoe is meant to divert its own model reader, telling him about the calculations and the daily actions of a sensible homo oeconomicus much like himself. But Robinson’s semblable, after he has enjoyed reading about himself in the novel, should somehow have understood something more, become another person. In amusing himself, somehow, he has learned. The reader should learn something either about the world or about language: this difference distinguishes various narrative poetics, but the point remains the same. The ideal reader of Finnegans Wake must, finally, enjoy himself as much as the reader of Erle Stanley Gardner. Exactly as much, but in a different way.
Now, the concept of amusement is historical. There are different means of amusing and of being amused for every season in the history of the novel. Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement. As a great admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot.
There is no question that if a novel is amusing, it wins the approval of a public. Now, for a certain period, it was thought that this approval was a bad sign: if a novel was popular, this was because it said nothing new and gave the public only what the public was already expecting.
I believe, however, that to say, “If a novel gives the reader what he was expecting, it becomes popular,” is different from saying, “If a novel is popular, this is because it gives the reader what he was expecting of it.”
The second statement is not always true. It is enough to recall Defoe and Balzac or, more recently, The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It can be said that the “popularity = lack of value” equation was supported by the polemical attitudes of some writers, including me, who formed the Gruppo 63 in Italy. And even before 1963 the successful book was identified with the escape novel, and the escape novel with the plot novel; while experimental works, novels that caused scandal and were rejected by the mass audience, were praised. These things were said, and there was a reason for saying them. These were the statements that most shocked respectable readers, and reporters have never forgotten them—and rightly, because these things were said precisely to achieve such an effect. We were talking about traditional novels with a fundamentally escapist structure, with no interesting innovations with respect to the problems discussed in nineteenth-century novels. And inevitably factions were formed, and good and bad were often lumped together, sometimes for reasons of factional dispute. I remember that the enemies then were Lampedusa, Bassani, and Cassola. Today, personally, I would make subtle distinctions among the three. Lampedusa had written a good, anachronistic novel, and our dispute was with those who hailed it as the opening of a new path for Italian literature, whereas it was, on the contrary, the glorious conclusion of an old path. My opinion of Cassola has remained unchanged. With Bassani, on the other hand, I would now be far more cautious; and if we were back in 1963, I would greet him as a fellow traveler. But the problem I want to discuss is something else.