The Detective Metaphysic
It is no accident that the book starts out as a mystery (and continues to deceive the ingenuous reader until the end, so the ingenuous reader may not even realize that this is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated). I believe people like thrillers not because there are corpses or because there is a final celebratory triumph of order (intellectual, social, legal, and moral) over the disorder of evil. The fact is that the crime novel represents a kind of conjecture, pure and simple. But medical diagnosis, scientific research, metaphysical inquiry are also examples of conjecture. After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?
To know this (to think you know this), you have to conjecture that all the events have a logic, the logic that the guilty party has imposed on them. Every story of investigation and of conjecture tells us something that we have always been close to knowing (pseudo-Heideggerian reference). At this point it is clear why my basic story (whodunit?) ramifies into so many other stories, all stories of other conjectures, all linked with the structure of conjecture as such.
An abstract model of conjecturality is the labyrinth. But there are three kinds of labyrinth. One is the Greek, the labyrinth of Theseus. This kind does not allow anyone to get lost: you go in, arrive at the center, and then from the center you reach the exit. This is why in the center there is the Minotaur; if he were not there the story would have no zest, it would be a mere stroll. Terror is born, if it is born, from the fact that you do not know where you will arrive or what the Minotaur will do. But if you unravel the classical labyrinth, you find a thread in your hand, the thread of Ariadne. The classical labyrinth is the Ariadne’s-thread of itself.
Then there is the mannerist maze: if you unravel it, you find in your hands a kind of tree, a structure with roots, with many blind alleys. There is only one exit, but you can get it wrong. You need an Ariadne’s-thread to keep from getting lost. This labyrinth is a model of the trial-and-error process.
And finally there is the net, or, rather, what Deleuze and Guattari call “rhizome.” The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space. The labyrinth of my library is still a mannerist labyrinth, but the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured definitively.
A seventeen-year-old boy told me he understood nothing of the theological arguments, but they acted as extensions of the spatial labyrinth (as if they were the “suspense” music in a Hitchcock film). I believe that something like this happened: even the ingenuous reader sensed that he was dealing with a story of labyrinths, and not only of spatial labyrinths. We could say that, strangely, the most ingenuous readings were the most “structural”: the ingenuous reader entered into direct contact, beyond any mediation of content, with the fact that it is impossible for there to be a story.
Enjoyment
I wanted the reader to enjoy himself, at least as much as I was enjoying myself. This is a very important point, which seems to conflict with the more thoughtful ideas we believe we have about the novel.
The reader was to be diverted, but not di-verted, distracted from problems. Robinson Crusoe is meant to divert its own model reader, telling him about the calculations and the daily actions of a sensible homo oeconomicus much like himself. But Robinson’s semblable, after he has enjoyed reading about himself in the novel, should somehow have understood something more, become another person. In amusing himself, somehow, he has learned. The reader should learn something either about the world or about language: this difference distinguishes various narrative poetics, but the point remains the same. The ideal reader of Finnegans Wake must, finally, enjoy himself as much as the reader of Erle Stanley Gardner. Exactly as much, but in a different way.
Now, the concept of amusement is historical. There are different means of amusing and of being amused for every season in the history of the novel. Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement. As a great admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot.
There is no question that if a novel is amusing, it wins the approval of a public. Now, for a certain period, it was thought that this approval was a bad sign: if a novel was popular, this was because it said nothing new and gave the public only what the public was already expecting.
I believe, however, that to say, “If a novel gives the reader what he was expecting, it becomes popular,” is different from saying, “If a novel is popular, this is because it gives the reader what he was expecting of it.”
The second statement is not always true. It is enough to recall Defoe and Balzac or, more recently, The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It can be said that the “popularity = lack of value” equation was supported by the polemical attitudes of some writers, including me, who formed the Gruppo 63 in Italy. And even before 1963 the successful book was identified with the escape novel, and the escape novel with the plot novel; while experimental works, novels that caused scandal and were rejected by the mass audience, were praised. These things were said, and there was a reason for saying them. These were the statements that most shocked respectable readers, and reporters have never forgotten them—and rightly, because these things were said precisely to achieve such an effect. We were talking about traditional novels with a fundamentally escapist structure, with no interesting innovations with respect to the problems discussed in nineteenth-century novels.
And inevitably factions were formed, and good and bad were often lumped together, sometimes for reasons of factional dispute. I remember that the enemies then were Lampedusa, Bassani, and Cassola. Today, personally, I would make subtle distinctions among the three. Lampedusa had written a good, anachronistic novel, and our dispute was with those who hailed it as the opening of a new path for Italian literature, whereas it was, on the contrary, the glorious conclusion of an old path. My opinion of Cassola has remained unchanged. With Bassani, on the other hand, I would now be far more cautious; and if we were back in 1963, I would greet him as a fellow traveler. But the problem I want to discuss is something else.
Nobody remembers what happened in 1965 when the Gruppo met a second time, in Palermo, to discuss the experimental novel (and yet the proceedings are still in print, entitled Il romanzo sperimentale, published by Feltrinelli, with the date 1965 on the cover and 1966 in the colophon). Now, in the course of that debate many interesting things emerged. First of all, in his opening paper, Renato Barilli, theoretician of all the experimentalism of the Nouveau Roman, had to come to grips with Robbe-Grillet, with Grass, with Pynchon (it must not be forgotten that though Pynchon is now considered one of the inventors of postmodernism, the term did not exist then—not in Italy, anyway—and John Barth was just getting started in America).
Barilli mentioned the rediscovered Roussel, who loved Verne, but he did not mention Borges, because his rediscovery was yet to come. And what did Barilli say? That till then the abolition of plots and action had been encouraged, in favor of the pure epiphany in its extreme form of “materialistic ecstasy” (we might say, “I will show you the heavens in a handful of dust,” as in the paintings of Pollock or Dubuffet or Fautrier). But now a new phase of narrative was beginning: action was being sanctioned again, even though it was an autre action.
I was analyzing the impression we had got the previous evening, watching a curious collage movie by Baruchello and Grifi called Verifica incerta, a story composed of fragments of stories, or, rather, of standard situations, topoi, from commercial cinema. And I pointed out that the places where the spectators had reacted with the greatest pleasure were those where, until a few years ago, they would have reacted with shock and outrage—namely, where the logical and temporal consequences of traditional action were omitted and the public’s expectations might have seemed violently frustrated.
Avant-garde was becoming tradition: what had been dissonance a few years before was turning into a balm for the ears (or for the eyes). And from this observation only one conclusion could be drawn: unacceptability of the message was no longer the prime criterion for an experimental fiction (or any other art), since unacceptability had now been codified as entertaining. And I remarked that whereas at the time of the futurists’ programs it had been indispensable for the audience to boo, “sterile, today, and foolish is the polemic of those who consider an experiment a failure because of the fact that it is accepted as normal: this means going backward to the worn-out Utopia of
