If on a winter's night a traveler (22 page)

Or else:

The young woman gets the two manuscripts mixed up.

She returns to the productive writer the tormented writer's novel in the productive writer's manner, and to the tormented writer the productive writer's novel in the tormented writer's manner. Both, seeing themselves counterfeited, have a violent reaction and rediscover their personal vein.

Or else:

A gust of wind shuffles the two manuscripts. The reader tries to reassemble them. A single novel results, stupendous, which the critics are unable to attribute. It is the novel that both the productive writer and the tormented writer have always dreamed of writing.

Or else:

The young woman had always been a passionate reader of the productive writer and has loathed the tormented writer. Reading the productive writer's new novel, she finds it phony and realizes that everything he wrote was phony; on the other hand, recalling the tormented writer's works, she now finds them splendid and can't wait to read his new novel. But she finds something completely different from what she was expecting, and she sends him to the devil, too.

Or else:

The same, replacing "productive" with "tormented" and "tormented" with "productive."

Or else:

The young woman was a passionate admirer, et cetera, et cetera, of the productive writer and loathed the tormented one. Reading the productive writer's new novel she doesn't notice at all that something has changed; she likes it, without being especially enthusiastic. As for the manuscript of the tormented writer, she finds it insipid like all the rest of this author's work. She replies to the two writers with a few polite words. Both are convinced that she can't be a very alert reader and they pay no further attention to her.

Or else:

The same, replacing, et cetera.

I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb "to think" in the impersonal third person: saying not "I think" but "it thinks" as we say "it rains." There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," 'Today it is windy"? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb "write" in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.

And for the verb "to read"? Will we be able to say, "Today it reads" as we say "Today it rains"? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore
it
writes."

This is the special bliss that I see appear in the reader's face, and which is denied me.

On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night...." Every time I sit down here I read, "It was a dark and stormy night. .." and the impersonality of that
incipit
seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the

time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to the first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.

Ever since I have had this poster before my eyes, I have no longer been able to end a page. I must take this damned Snoopy down from the wall as quickly as possible, but I can't bring myself to do it; that childish figure has become for me an emblem of my condition, a warning, a challenge.

The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an
incipit,
that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the
Arabian Nights?

Today I will begin by copying the first sentences of a famous novel, to see if the charge of energy contained in that start is communicated to my hand, which, once it has received the right push, should run on its own.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place

and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.

I will copy out also the second, indispensable paragraph to allow myself to be carried along by the flow of the narration:

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and it was more like a cupboard than a room.
And so on until:
He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

At this point the next sentence attracts me so much that I can't refrain from copying it:
This was not because he was cowardly and abject: quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria.
While I'm about it, I could continue for the whole paragraph, or, indeed, for several pages, until the protagonist introduces himself to the old moneylender.
"Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago," the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.

I stop before I succumb to the temptation to copy out all of
Crime and Punishment.
For an instant I seem to understand the meaning and fascination of a now inconceivable vocation: that of the copyist. The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object.

A man called on me, saying he is my translator, to warn me about an outrageous practice damaging to him and to me: the publication of unauthorized translations of my books. He showed me a volume, which I leafed through without getting much out of it: it was written in Japanese, and the only words in the Latin alphabet were my given name and surname on the title page.

"I can't even figure out which of my books it is," I said, handing the volume back to him. "Unfortunately, I don't know Japanese."

"Even if you knew the language you wouldn't recognize the book," my visitor said to me. "It's a book you have never written."

He explained to me that the great skill of the Japanese in manufacturing perfect facsimiles of Western products has spread to literature. A firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of Silas Flannery's novels, and it manages to produce absolutely new ones, and first-class novels at that, so it can invade the world market. Retranslated into English (or, rather, translated into English, from which they claim to have been translated), they cannot be distinguished, by any critic, from true Flannerys.

The news of this diabolical swindle has profoundly upset me, but it goes beyond my understandable fury at the economic and moral injury: I feel also a timid attraction for these fakes, for this extension of myself that blossoms from the terrain of another civilization. I imagine an old Japanese in his kimono crossing a curved little bridge: he is my Nipponese self imagining one of my stories, and he succeeds in identifying himself with me through a spiritual itinerary that to me is completely alien. Whereby the false Flannerys turned out by the swindling firm in Osaka would be, of course, vulgar imitations; but at the same time they would contain a refined and arcane wisdom that true Flannerys lack completely.

Naturally, in the presence of a stranger, I had to conceal the ambiguity of my reactions, and I acted as if I were interested only in collecting all the data necessary for bringing a lawsuit.

"I will sue the counterfeiters and anyone who cooperates in the dissemination of the faked books!" I said, looking meaningfully into the translator's eyes, because I suspected this young man was not without a role in the shady business. He said his name is Ermes Marana, a

name I had never heard. His head is oblong horizontally, like a dirigible, and seems to hide many things behind the convexity of its brow.

I asked him where he lives. 'For the moment, in Japan," he answered me.

He declares himself outraged that anyone would make improper use of my name, and ready to help me put an end to the fraud, but he adds that in the final analysis there is nothing to be shocked about, since, in his view, literature's worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared.

He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions. I feel I can share many of his affirmations, but I was careful not to let him know this. He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath. And since for him artifice is the true substance of everything, the author who devised a perfect system of artifices would succeed in identifying himself with the whole.

I must stop thinking of my conversation yesterday with that Marana. I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn; but my aim is to capture in the book the illegible world, without center, without ego, without I.

When you think about it, this total writer could be a very humble person, what in America they call a ghost

writer, a professional of recognized usefulness even if not of great prestige: the anonymous editor who gives book form to what other people have to tell but are unable or lack the time to write; he is the writing hand that gives words to existences too busy existing. Perhaps that was my true vocation and I missed it. I could have multiplied my I's, assumed other people's selves, enacted the selves most different from me and from one another.

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living. Perhaps the true book is this diary, in which I try to note down the image of the woman in the deck chair at the various hours of the day, as I observe her in the changing light.

Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

If I think I must write
one
book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block

me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.

The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once—the biographers of the Prophet tell us— while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith.

He was wrong. The organization of the sentence, finally, was a responsibility that lay with him; he was the one who had to deal with the internal coherence of the written language, with grammar and syntax, to channel into it the fluidity of a thought that expands outside all language before it becomes word, and of a word particularly fluid like that of a prophet. The scribe's collaboration was necessary to Allah, once he had decided to express himself in a written text. Mohammed knew this and allowed the scribe the privilege of concluding sentences; but Abdullah was unaware of the powers vested in him. He lost his faith in Allah because he lacked faith in writing, and in himself as an agent of writing.