On Literature Read online

  Both mythical characters and those from "secular" narratives have migrated from text to text (and through adaptations into different mediums, from book to film or to ballet, or from oral tradition to book): Ulysses, Jason, King Arthur or Parsifal, Alice, Pinocchio, D'Artagnan. Now, when we talk about such characters are we referring to a particular score? Let's take the case of Little Red Riding-Hood. The most famous scores, Perrault's and the Grimms', display profound differences. In the former the little girl is eaten by the wolf and the story finishes there, inspiring severe moralistic reflections on the risks of not being careful. In the latter the huntsman arrives, kills the wolf, and restores the child and her grandmother to life. Happy ending.

  Now let us imagine a mother telling the tale to her children and stopping when the wolf devours Little Red Riding-Hood. The children would protest and demand the "true" story, in which Little Red Riding-Hood comes back to life, and it would be pointless for the mother to claim that she was a strict textual philologist. Children know the "true" story, in which Little Red Riding-Hood really does revive, and this story is closer to the Grimms' version than to Perrault's. Yet it does not coincide exactly with the Grimms' score, because it omits a whole series of minor details—on which the Grimms and Perrault disagree in any case (for instance, what kind of gifts Little Red Riding-Hood is bringing to her grandmother)—details children are more than willing to compromise on, because they concern a character who is much more schematic, more fluctuating in the tradition, and who appears in various scores, many of them oral.

  Thus Little Red Riding-Hood, D'Artagnan, Ulysses, or Madame Bovary become individuals with a life apart from their original scores, and even those who have never read the archetypal score can claim to make true statements about them. Even before reading Oedipus Rex I had learned that Oedipus marries Jocasta. However fluctuating, these scores are not unverifiable: anyone who claimed that Madame Bovary reconciles with Charles and lives happily ever after with him in the end would meet with the disapproval of people of sound common sense, who share a set of assumptions regarding Emma's character.

  Where exactly are these fluctuating individuals? That depends on the format of our ontology, whether it also has room for square roots, the Etruscan language, and two different ideas on the Most Holy Trinity—the Roman one, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son ("ex Patre Filioque procedit"), and the Byzantine one, which has it that the Spirit proceeds only from the Father. But this region has a very imprecise status and contains entities of varying substance, for even the Patriarch of Constantinople (who is ready to fight the Pope over the "Filioque" question) would agree with the Pope (at least I hope he would) in saying that it is true that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street, and that Clark Kent is the same person as Superman.

  Nevertheless, it has been written in countless novels or poems that—I'm inventing examples at random here—Hasdrubal kills Corinna or Theophrastus is madly in love with Theodolinda, and yet no one believes that true statements can be made on these matters, because these ill-starred characters have never left their native text or managed to become part of our collective memory. Why is the fact that Hamlet does not marry Ophelia any more true than the fact that Theophrastus married Theodolinda? What is that part of our world where Hamlet and Ophelia live but not poor old Theophrastus?

  Certain characters have become somehow true for the collective imagination because over the course of centuries we have made emotional investments in them. We all make emotional investments in any number of fantasies, which we dwell on either with open eyes or half-awake. We can be moved by thinking about the death of someone we love, or experience physical reactions when imagining ourselves having an erotic relationship with that person. Similarly, we can be moved by Emma Bovary's fate through a process of identification or projection, or, as happened to several generations, be drawn toward suicide by the misfortunes of young Werther or Jacopo Ortis. However, if someone were to ask us if the person whose death we imagined was really dead, we would reply no, that it was a totally private fantasy of our own. Whereas if someone asks us whether Werther really did kill himself, we reply yes, and the fantasy we are talking about here is not private, it is a real fact on which the entire community of readers agrees. So much so that anyone who killed himself just because he had imagined (being well aware that this was simply the product of his imagination) that his loved one was dead would be judged by us to be mad, while somehow or other we try to justify someone killing himself because of Werther's suicide, knowing full well that the latter was a fictional character.

  We will have to find a space in the universe where these characters live and shape our behavior to such an extent that we choose them as role models for our life, and for the life of others, so that we are clear about what we mean when we say that someone has an Oedipus complex or a Gargantuan appetite, that someone behaves quixotically, is as jealous as Othello, doubts like Hamlet, is an incurable Don Juan, or is a Scrooge. And in literature this happens not only with characters but also with situations and objects. Why do the women who come and go, talking of Michelangelo, Montale's sharp shards of bottles stuck in the wall in the dazzling sun, Gozzano's good things of bad taste, Eliot's fear that is shown us in a handful of dust, Leopardi's hedge, Petrarch's clear cool waters, Dante's bestial meal, become obsessive metaphors, ready to tell us over and over again who we are, what we want, where we are going, or what we are not and what we don't want?

  These literary entities are here among us. They were not there from the beginning of time as (perhaps) square roots and Pythagoras's theorem were, but now that they have been created by literature and nourished by our emotional investment in them, they do exist and we have to come to terms with them. Let us even say, to avoid ontological and metaphysical discussions, that they exist like a cultural habitus, a social disposition. But even the universal taboo of incest is a cultural habitus, an idea, a disposition, and yet it has had the power to shape the destinies of human societies.

  However, as some people today claim, even the most enduring literary characters risk becoming evanescent, mobile, and shifting, losing that fixity which forced us to acknowledge their destinies. We have now entered the era of electronic hypertext, which allows us not only to travel through a textual labyrinth (be it an entire encyclopedia or the complete works of Shakespeare) without necessarily "unraveling" all the information it contains but to penetrate it like a knitting needle going into a ball of wool. Thanks to hypertext, the phenomenon of free creative writing has become a reality. On the Internet you can find programs that let you write stories as a group, joining in narratives whose denouement one can change ad infinitum. And if you can do this with a text that you are jointly creating with a group of virtual friends, why not do the same with already existing literary texts, buying programs that allow you to change the great narratives that have obsessed us for millennia?

  Just imagine that you are avidly reading War and Peace, wondering whether Natasha will finally give in to Anatoly's blandishments, whether that wonderful Prince Andrej will really die, whether Pierre will have the courage to shoot Napoléon, and now at last you can re-create your own Tolstoy, conferring a long, happy life on Andrej, and making Pierre the liberator of Europe. You could even reconcile Emma Bovary with poor Charles and make her a happy and fulfilled mother, or decide that Little Red Riding-Hood goes into the woods and meets Pinocchio, or rather, that she gets kidnapped by her stepmother, given the name Cinderella, and made to work for Scarlett O'Hara; or that she meets a magic helper named Vladimir J. Propp in the woods, who gives her a magic ring that allows her to discover, at the foot of the Thugs' sacred banyan tree, the Aleph, that point from which the whole universe can be seen. Anna Karenina doesn't die beneath the train because Russian narrow-gauge railways, under Putin's government, are less efficient than their submarines, while away in the distance, on the other side of Alice's looking-glass, is Jorge Luis Borges reminding Funes the Memorious not to forget to re
turn War and Peace to the Library of Babel...

  Would this be so bad? No, in fact, it has already been done by literature, from Mallarmé's notion of Le Livre to the surrealists' exquisite corpses to Queneau's One Hundred Million Million Poems and the unbound books of the second avant-garde. And then there are the jam sessions of jazz music. Yet the fact that the jam session exists, where every evening a variation on a particular musical theme is played, does not prevent or discourage us from going to concert halls, where every evening Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor, op. 35, will finish in the same way.

  Some say that by playing with hypertexts we escape two forms of oppression: having to follow sequences already decided on by others, and being condemned to the social division between those who write and those who read. This seems silly to me, but certainly playing creatively with hypertexts—changing old stories and helping create new ones—can be an enthralling activity, a fine exercise to be practiced at school, a new form of writing very much akin to the jam session. I believe it can be good and even educational to try to modify stories that already exist, just as it would be interesting to transcribe Chopin for the mandolin: it would help to sharpen the musical brain, and to understand why the timbre of the piano was such an integral element of the Sonata in B-flat Minor. It can be educational for one's visual taste and for the exploration of forms to experiment with collages by putting together fragments of The Marriage of the Virgin, of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the latest Pokémon story. This is essentially what great artists have always done.

  But these games cannot replace the true educational function of literature, an educational function that is not simply limited to the transmission of moral ideas, whether good or bad, or to the formation of an aesthetic sense.

  Jurij Lotman, in his Culture and Explosion, takes up Chekhov's famous advice, namely, that if a story or play mentions or shows a shotgun hanging on the wall, then before the end that gun has to go off. Lotman suggests that the real question is not whether the gun will actually be fired or not. The very fact that we do not know whether it will be fired confers significance on the plot. Reading a story means being seized by a tension, a thrill. Discovering at the end whether the gun has gone off or not involves more than a simple piece of information. It is the discovery that things happen, and have always happened, in a particular way, no matter what the reader wants. The reader must accept this frustration, and through it sense the power of Destiny. If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: "So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it?" Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants.

  Think of Victor Hugo's description of the battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables. Unlike Stendhal's description of the battle through the eyes of Fabrizio del Dongo, who is in the midst of it and does not know what is going on, Hugo describes it through the eyes of God, seeing it from above. He is aware that if Napoleon had known that there was a steep descent beyond the crest of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau (but his guide had not told him so), General Milhaud's cuirassiers would not have perished at the feet of the English army; and that if the little shepherd guiding Bülow had suggested a different route, the Prussian army would not have arrived in time to decide the outcome of the battle.

  With a hypertextual structure we could rewrite the battle of Waterloo, making Grouchy's French arrive instead of Blücher's Germans. There are war games that allow you to do such things, and I'm sure they are great fun. But the tragic grandeur of those pages by Hugo resides in the notion that things go the way they do, and often in spite of what we want. The beauty of War and Peace lies in the fact that Prince Andrej's agony ends with his death, however sorry it makes us. The painful wonder that every reading of the great tragedies evokes in us comes from the fact that their heroes, who could have escaped an atrocious fate, through weakness or blindness fail to realize where they are heading, and plunge into an abyss they have often dug with their own hands. In any case, that is the sense conveyed by Hugo when, after showing us other opportunities Napoleon could have seized at Waterloo, he writes, "Was it possible for Napoleon to win that battle? We reply no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God."

  This is what all the great narratives tell us, even if they replace God with notions of fate or the inexorable laws of life. The function of "unchangeable" stories is precisely this: against all our desires to change destiny, they make tangible the impossibility of changing it. And in so doing, no matter what story they are telling, they are also telling our own story, and that is why we read them and love them. We need their severe, "repressive" lesson. Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are "already made" also teach us how to die.

  I believe that one of the principal functions of literature lies in these lessons about fate and death. Perhaps there are others, but for the moment none spring to mind.

  Lecture given at the Literature Festival, Mantua, September 2000.

  A READING OF THE PARADISO

  "As a result, the Paradiso is not read or appreciated very much. Its monotony is particularly tedious: it reads like a series of questions and answers between teacher and pupil." Thus Francesco De Sanctis in his History of Italian Literature (1871). He articulates a reservation many of us had in school, unless we had an outstanding teacher. Whatever the case, if we look through some more recent histories of Italian literature, we find that Romantic criticism downgraded the Paradiso—a disapproval that also carried weight into the next century.

  Since I want to maintain that the Paradiso is the finest of the three canticas of The Divine Comedy, let us go back to De Sanctis, a man of his time certainly, but also a reader of exceptional sensibilities, to see how his reading of the Paradiso is a masterpiece of inner torment (on the one hand I say one thing, on the other another), a revealing mixture of enthusiasm and misgivings.

  De Sanctis, a very acute reader, immediately realizes that in the Paradiso Dante speaks of ineffable things, of a spiritual realm, and wonders how the realm of the spirit "can be represented." Consequently, he says, in order to make the Paradiso artistic Dante has imagined a human paradise, one that is accessible to the senses and the imagination. That is why he tries to find in light the link with our human potential for comprehension. And here De Sanctis becomes an enthusiastic reader of this poetry where there are no qualitative differences, only changes in luminous intensity, and he cites "the throngs of splendours" (Par. 23.82), the clouds "like diamonds whereon the sun did strike" (Par. 2.33), the blessed appearing "like a swarm of bees delving into flowers" (Par. 31.7), "rivers from which living flames leap out, lights in the shape of a river that glows tawny with brightness" (Par. 30.61–64), the blessed disappearing "like something heavy into deep water" (Par. 3.123). And he observes that when Saint Peter denounces Pope Boniface VIII, recalling Rome in terms that smack more of the Inferno: "he [Boniface] has made a sewer of my burial-place, a sewer of blood and stench" (Par. 27.25–26), all the heavenly host expresses its contempt by simply turning red in color.

  But is a change in color an adequate expression of human passions? Here De Sanctis finds himself a prisoner of his own poetics: "In that whirlwind of movement, the individual disappears. [...] There is no change in features, just one face, as it were. [...] This disappearance of forms and of individuality itself would reduce the Paradiso to just one note, if the earth did not come into it, and with the earth other forms and other passions. [...] The songs of the souls are devoid of content, mere voices not words, music not poetry. [...] It is all just one wave of light. [...] Individuality disappears in the sea of being." If poetry is the expression of human passions, and if human passion can only be carnal, this is an unacceptable flaw. How can this compare with Paolo and Francesca kissing each other "on the mouth, all tremb
ling"? Or with the horror of Ugolino's "bestial meal," or the sinner who makes the foul gesture toward God?

  The contradiction in which De Sanctis is caught rests on two misunderstandings: first, that this attempt to represent the divine merely through intensity of light and color is Dante's original but almost impossible attempt to humanize what human beings cannot conceive; and second, that poetry exists only in representations of the carnal passions and those of the heart, and that poetry of pure understanding cannot exist, because in that case it would be music. (And at this point, we might well pause to mock not good old De Sanctis but the "Desanctism" of those fools who assert that Bach's music is not real poetry, but that Chopin's comes a bit closer, lucky for him, and that the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations don't speak to us of earthly love, but the Raindrop Prelude makes us think of George Sand and the shadow of consumption hanging over her, and this, for God's sake, is true poetry because it makes us cry.)

  Let us begin with the first point. Cinema and role-playing games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a series of "dark" centuries; I don't mean this in an ideological sense (which is not important in the cinema anyhow) but rather in terms of nocturnal colors and brooding shadows. Nothing could be more false. For while the people of the Middle Ages certainly did live in dark forests, castle halls, and narrow rooms barely lit by the fire in the hearth, apart from the fact that they were people who went to bed early, and were more used to the day than to the night (so beloved by the Romantics), the medieval period represents itself in ringing tones.