Only the arrival of the mother thwarts the owls’ will to power; so she can be seen as a negation of the nihilism of the essence of the West, a reference to the «second corsair» and the «will of Destiny.» But to accept this the owls must necessarily understand that only by renouncing dominion over the world can they comprehend the falsehood of the second utterance, according to which it cannot be true that it is not true that being is nothingness.
What is willed is impossible, and the sense of truth is eternally what cannot now or ever succeed in being. Thus the initial Ambaraba and the final Ambaraba confirm, as scansion of an eternal return, the nothingness of becoming as the irruption of the unheard-of. And the mother only makes evident how predictable the unpredictable was for those who had and cherished a desire to anticipate, ante-capere, pre-capture the owls and their defeat. Whence, as at the beginning, always and again Ambaraba. The whole is unchangeable.
The chronicler of this critical adventure would like, if he might, to stop at this point, for chronicle is not tautology of the factual, but interrogation and drift; the supreme condition (interrogative arrest) remains that of going forward, and proceeding to return to the origin, and saying not to say, and not saying to be and to remain in the identity of the different. To the point where (the owls have spoken for us, or we for them, and/or the language for all, or silence for the word) no voice will be able to remain silent in the full ef-fability of its own void.
This, and only this, is what Poetry demands of us.
1982
Editorial Revision
These days, especially in the United States, implacable copy editors demand of authors not only stylistic revisions but even changes in plot, new endings, whatever commercial necessity dictates. But when we Italians recall—for example—the summary way the novelist-editor Elio Vittorini dealt with young writers some decades ago, can we honestly say that they ordered things so differently in the past?
Take the usually overlooked fact that the first version of a well-known poem by Philip Larkin originally went: «They do you harm, your father and mother.» It was only the insistence of Larkin’s editor that inspired the now-famous variant. And the first draft of Eliot’s Waste Land opened: «April is the cruellest month. And March isn’t all that great, either.» Weakened in its impact by this peevish insistence on climatic details, the earlier text denied April any implied link with the rites of vegetation. As everyone knows, Ariosto at first submitted to his publisher a very brief poem that went: «Of women and knights, arms, loves, courtly rituals, and bold ventures I have nothing to say.» And that was that.
«How about developing it a bit?» the editor suggested. And Messer Ludovico, who was having enough trouble as civil governor of a remote Tuscan province, said, «What’s the use? There are dozens of epics of chivalry already. Leave it. I want to urge poets to try new genres.» And the editor replied, «Yes, of course, I understand, and, personally, I agree with you. But why not try approaching the form from another angle? With irony, for instance. Anyway, we can’t sell a one-page book, particularly one with only two verses on the page. It looks like imitation Mal-larmé. It would have to be a limited, numbered edition. So unless we can get Philip Morris to sponsor it, we’re screwed.»
The Manzoni case is important. He began the first version of his novel with «That stretch of Lake Garda.» It seems simple enough, but if he had stuck to that lake, he might have written the whole history of the Venetian Republic and never got beyond Riva. You can imagine how long it would have taken Renzo to get to Milan. He’d never have made it in time for the bread riot. And afterwards nothing significant would have happened to the poor youth. Lucia would have sought protection from the Nun of Rovereto, an abbess of impeccable behavior; the whole novel would have ended after a few trivial mishaps before the happy wedding…. Even Brother Cadfael has more exciting adventures.
The Leopardi story is still more serious. The wandering shepherd of Asia, in the first draft, cried: «What are you doing, Jupiter, in heaven? Tell me, what are you doing, silent Jupiter.» Nothing wrong with that excellent planet, of course, but it is visible only during certain seasons and has hardly any emotional or metaphysical connotations. In fact, Leopardi’s composition consisted of just a few verses, at the end of which the shepherd concluded that, as far as he was concerned, Jupiter didn’t amount to much. Luckily, the editor’s intervention saved the day: «Professor Leopardi, give me a break! Use the old imagination. Why not try one of Jupiter’s satellites?» «Oh, please!…that would only make things worse. What would a wandering shepherd of Asia know about satellites? Maybe the moon … at most. You want me to have him cry out to the moon? Really! I do have some self-respect.» «Well, you never know. Run it through the machine.»
The Proust story, finally, is tragic. In the first version he had written: «Longtemps je me suis couché après minuit.» You know what happens to a growing boy who stays up till all hours. The Narrator succumbed to a cerebral inflammation that virtually destroyed his memory. He saw the Duchesse de Guermantes the next day and asked, «Who are you, Madame?» He was banished from all the salons of Paris, because certain faux pas are beyond forgiveness in that world. In this Ur-version, the Narrator was even incapable of expressing himself in the first person, and La Recherche boiled down to a brief case history à la Charcot.
On the other hand, after I ended a novel of mine with the verse of Bernard de Morlay beginning, «Stat rosa pristina nomine,» I was informed by some philologists that certain other extant manuscripts read, on the contrary, «Stat Roma,» which, for that matter, would make more sense because the preceding verses refer to the disappearance of Babylon. What would have happened if I had in consequence entitled my novel The Name of Rome? I would have had a preface by John Paul II, who no doubt would have made me a Papal Count. Or someone would have made a movie with Sean Connery in a toga.
1990
Sequels
In 1991 the Italian novelist Laura Grimaldi wrote a Monsieur Bovary, recounting what happened to Charles after Emma’s death; and at about the same time, a Ms. Ripley (probably a character invented by Patricia Highsmith) made a killing with her Scarlett, a continuation of Gone with the Wind. For that matter, from Oedipus at Colonus to Twenty Years After, the tradition of the sequel has earned a certain nobility.
Giampaolo Proni, with his The Case of the Asia Computer, showed that he knows how to invent narrating machines; and he suggested that I offer some other possible continuations of famous novels.
Marcel Who?
Proust’s Narrator, having concluded his work with the seal of Time, exhausted by asthma, decides to visit a celebrated allergy specialist on the French Riviera and travels there by motorcar. An inexperienced driver, he is involved in a frightful accident: severe concussion, almost total loss of memory. He is treated by Aleksandr Luria, who advises him to develop the technique of the interior monologue. Since the Narrator no longer has a store of memories to monologue about and can barely assimilate his present perceptions, Luria suggests he extend the interior monologues in Joyce’s Ulysses.
The Narrator struggles through the unbearable novel, and reconstructs a fictitious ego for himself, beginning with the memory of his grandmother’s visits to him in boarding school at Clongowes Wood. He regains a fine synesthetic ability, and the slightest whiff of mutton fat from a shepherd’s pie brings to his mind the trees of Phoenix Park and the spire of the church at Chapelizod. He dies, a Guinness addict, in a doorway on Eccles Street.
Molly
Waking from a troubled sleep on the morning of June 17, 1904, Molly Bloom goes down to the kitchen and finds Stephen Dedalus there, making himself some coffee. Leopold has gone out on one of his vague business errands; perhaps he has deliberately left the two alone. Molly’s face is puffy from sleep, but Stephen is immediately fascinated, seeing her as a kind of wondrous whale-woman. He recites some cheap poems to her and Molly falls into his arms. They run away together to Pula, on the Istrian coast, and then to Trieste, with Bloom pursuing them the whole time, disguised as the man in the mackintosh.
In Trieste, Italo Svevo advises Stephen to write down his story, and Molly, who is very ambitious, chimes in. Over the years, Stephen writes a monumental novel, Telemachus. When he has completed the last page, he abandons the manuscript on his desk and elopes with Sylvia Beach. Molly discovers the manuscript, reads it, and becomes completely engrossed in it, finding herself back at the exact point where everything started, stirring restlessly in her bed in Dublin, on the night between June 16 and 17, 1904.
Crazed with rage, she follows Stephen to Paris. At the door of Shakespeare & Co., rue de l’Odèon, she offs him with three pistol shots, shouting «Yes,
