Six Memos for the Next Millennium (15 page)

Flaubert's skepticism and his endless curiosity about the hu-
man knowledge accumulated over the centuries are the very qualities that were destined to be claimed for their own by the greatest writers of the twentieth century. But theirs I would tend to call an active skepticism, a kind of gambling and betting in a tireless effort to establish relationships between discourse, methods, and levels of meaning. Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that binds together the major works both of what is called modernism and of what goes by the name of the
postmodern
, a thread—over and above all the labels attached to it—that I hope will continue into the next millennium.

Let us remember that the book many call the most complete introduction to the culture of our century is itself a novel: Thomas Mann's
Magic Mountain.
It is not too much to say that the small, enclosed world of an alpine sanatorium is the starting point for all the threads that were destined to be followed by the
maitres a penser
of the century: all the subjects under discussion today were heralded and reviewed there.

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the twentieth century is the idea of an
open
encyclopedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun
encyclopedia
, which etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle. But today we can no longer think in terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold.

Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the
Commedia
, where a multiform richness of language converges with the application of a systematic and unitary mode of thought. In contrast, the modern books that we love most are the outcome of a confluence and a clash of a multiplicity of interpretative methods, modes of thought, and styles of expression. Even if the overall design has been minutely planned, what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmo-
nious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it—a plurality of languages as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial. This is proved by the two great writers of our century who really paid attention to the Middle Ages, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, both of them students of Dante and both equipped with a profound consciousness of theology (though with quite different intentions). Eliot dissolves the theological pattern into the lightness of irony and in dizzying verbal magic. Joyce sets out with every intention of constructing a systematic and encyclopedic work that can be interpreted on various levels according to medieval exegetics (drawing up tables of the correspondences of the various chapters of
Ulysses
with the parts of the human body, the arts, colors, and symbols), though what he achieves above all, chapter by chapter in
Ulysses
, is an encyclopedia of styles, weaving polyphonic multiplicity into the verbal texture of
Finnegans Wake.

It is time to put a little order into the suggestions I have put forward as examples of multiplicity. There is such a thing as the unified text that is written as the expression of a single voice, but that reveals itself as open to interpretation on several levels. Here the prize for an inventive tour-de-force goes to Alfred Jarry for
Uamour absolu
(1899), a fifty-page novel that can be read as three completely different stories: (1) the vigil of a condemned man in his cell the night before his execution; (2) the monologue of a man suffering from insomnia, who when half asleep dreams that he has been condemned to death; (3) the story of Christ. Then there is the manifold text, which replaces the oneness of a thinking “I” with a multiplicity of subjects, voices, and views of the world, on the model of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “dialogic” or “polyphonic” or “carnivalesque,” tracing its antecedents from Plato through Rabelais to Dostoevsky.

There is the type of work that, in the attempt to contain everything possible, does not manage to take on a form, to create outlines for itself, and so remains incomplete by its very nature, as we saw in the cases of Gadda and Musil.

There is the type of work that in literature corresponds to what in philosophy is nonsystematic thought, which proceeds by aphorisms, by sudden, discontinuous flashes of light; and at this point the time has come to mention an author I never tire of reading, Paul Valery. I am speaking of his prose work composed of essays of only a few pages and notes a few lines long, found in his notebooks, “line philosophic doit etre portative” (A philosophy should be portable), he wrote
(Cahiers
, XXIV713), but also: “J'ai cherche, je cherche et chercherai pour ce que je nomme le Phenomene Total, c'est-a-dire le Tout de la conscience, des relations, des conditions, des possibilites, des impossibilites” (I have sought, I am searching, and I will search for what I call the Total Phenomenon, that is, the Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, possibilities, and impossibilities; XII.722).

Among the values I would like passed on to the next millennium, there is this above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same time that of science and of philosophy: an intelligence such as that of Valery as an essayist and prose writer. (And if I mention Valery in a context in which the names of novelists prevail, it is partly because, though he was not a novelist and indeed—thanks to a famous quip of his—was thought of as the official liquidator of traditional fiction, he was a critic who understood novels as no one else could, defining their specificity simply as novels.)

If I had to say which fiction writer has perfectly achieved Valery's aesthetic ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that match the rigorous geometry of the
crystal and the abstraction of deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis Borges. The reasons for my fondness for Borges do not end here, but I will mention only the main ones. I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because they are texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures. As an example let us take his most vertiginous “essay” on time, “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan” (The Garden of Forking Paths), which is presented as a spy story and includes a totally logico-metaphysical story, which in turn contains the description of an endless Chinese novel—and all this concentrated into a dozen pages.

The hypotheses on the subject of time enunciated by Borges in this story, each one contained (and virtually hidden) in a handful of lines, are as follows. First there is an idea of precise time, almost an absolute, subjective present: “reflexione que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y solo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mi” (I reflected that everything, to everyone, happens precisely, precisely now. Century after century, and only in the present, do things happen. There are innumerable men in the air, on land and on sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me). Then there is a notion of time as determined by the will, in which the future appears to be as irrevocable as the past; and finally the central idea of the whole story—a manifold and ramified time in which every present forks out into two futures, so as to form “una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos
divergentes, convergentes y paralelos” (a growing and bewildering network of divergent, convergent, and parallel forms of time). This idea of infinite contemporary universes in which all possibilities are realized in all possible combinations is by no means a digression in the story, but rather the very reason why the protagonist feels authorized to carry out the absurd and abominable crime imposed on him by his spy mission, perfectly sure that this happens only in one of the universes but not in the others; and indeed that, if he commits this crime here and now, in other universes he and his victim will be able to hail each other as friends and brothers.

The scheme of the network of possibilities may be condensed into the few pages of a story by Borges, or it may be made the supporting structure of immensely long novels, in which density and concentration are present in the individual parts. But I would say that today the rule of “Keep It Short” is confirmed even by long novels, the structure of which is accumulative, modular, and combinatory.

These considerations are at the basis of what I call the “hyper-novel,” which I tried to exemplify in
If on a winter's night a traveler (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore).
My aim was to give the essence of what a novel is by providing it in concentrated form, in ten beginnings; each beginning develops in very different ways from a common nucleus, and each acts within a framework that both determines and is determined. The same principle, to sample the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated, forms the basis of another of my books,
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
, which is intended to be a kind of machine for multiplying narratives that start from visual elements with many possible meanings, such as a tarot pack. My temperament prompts me to “keep it short,” and such structures as these enable me to unite density of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities.

Another example of the hyper-novel is
La vie mode d'emploi
(Life, Directions for Use) by Georges Perec. It is a very long novel, made up of many intersecting stories (it is no accident that its subtitle is
Romans
, in the plural), and it reawakens the pleasure of reading the great novelistic cycles of the sort Balzac wrote. In my view, this book, published in Paris in 1978, four years before the author died at the early age of forty-six, is the last real “event” in the history of the novel so far. There are many reasons for this: the plan of the book, of incredible scope but at the same time solidly finished; the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of a narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of “today” that is made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void; the continual presence of anguish and irony together—in a word, the manner in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.

The element of “puzzle” gives the novel its plot and its formal scheme. Another scheme is the cross-section view of a typical Parisian apartment house, in which the entire action takes place, one chapter to each room. There are five storeys of apartments for each of which we are told about the furnishings and fittings, the changes of ownership and the lives of the inhabitants, together with their ancestors and descendants. The plan of the building is like a bi-square of ten squares by ten, a chessboard on which Perec passes from one pigeonhole (room, chapter) to another as the knight moves in chess, but according to a scheme that enables him to land on each of the squares in turn. (So are there a hundred chapters? No, only ninety-nine. This ultra-completed book has an intentional loophole left for incompleteness.)

So much for the container of things. As for the content, Perec
drew up lists of themes, divided into categories, and decided that, even if barely hinted at, one theme from each category ought to appear in each chapter, in such a way as constantly to vary the combinations according to mathematical procedures that I am not able to define, though I have no doubts as to their exactitude. (I used to visit Perec during the nine years in which he worked on the novel, but I know only a few of his secret rules.) These categories number no fewer than forty-two and include literary quotations, geographical locations, historical facts, furniture, objects, styles, colors, foodstuffs, animals, plants, minerals, and who knows what else—and I have no idea how he managed to respect all these rules, which he did even in the shortest and most compressed chapters.

In order to escape the arbitrary nature of existence, Perec, like his protagonist, is forced to impose rigorous rules and regulations on himself, even if these rules are in turn arbitrary. But the miracle is that this system of poetics, which might seem artificial and mechanical, produces inexhaustible freedom and wealth of invention. This is because it coincides with something that had been Perec's passion ever since his first novel
(Us choses
, 1965): a passion for catalogues, for the enumeration of objects, each defined both in itself and by its belonging to an epoch, a style, a society; a passion extending to menus, concert programs, diet charts, bibliographies real or imaginary.

The demon of “collectionism” is always beating its wings over Perec's pages, and of the many collections conjured up by this book the one that is most personal and “his,” I would say, is a passion for the
unique
, that is, the collection of objects of which only one specimen exists. Yet a collector he was not, in life, except of words, of the data of knowledge, of things remembered. Terminological exactitude was his way of possessing things. Perec collected and gave a name to whatever comprises
the uniqueness of every event, person, or thing. No one was ever more immune than Perec to the worst blight in modern writing— which is vagueness.

I would like to stress the fact that for Perec the construction of a novel according to fixed rules, to constraints, by no means limited his freedom as a storyteller, but stimulated it. It was no coincidence that Perec was the most inventive of the members of Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature), founded by his mentor Raymond Queneau. Many years earlier, when he was quarreling with the automatic writing of the surrealists, Queneau wrote: