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
