On one hand the world seems to be a «closed» book, allowing of only one reading. If, for example, there is a law governing planetary gravitation, then it is either the right one or the wrong one. Compared with that, the universe of a book seems to us to be an open universe. But let us try to approach a narrative work with common sense and compare the assumptions we can make about it with those we can make about the world. As far as the world is concerned, we find that the laws of universal gravitation are those established by Newton, or that it is true that Napoléon died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821. And yet, if we keep an open mind, we will always be prepared to revise our convictions the day science formulates the great laws of the cosmos differently, or a historian discovers unpublished documents proving that Napoleon died on a Bonapartist ship as he attempted to escape. On the other hand, as far as the world of books is concerned, propositions like «Sherlock Holmes was a bachelor,» «Little Red Riding-Hood is eaten by the wolf and then freed by the woodcutter,» or «Anna Karenina commits suicide» will remain true for eternity, and no one will ever be able to refute them. There are people who deny that Jesus was the son of God, others who doubt his historical existence, others who claim he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and still others who believe that the Messiah is yet to come, and however we might think about such questions, we treat these opinions with respect. But there is little respect for those who claim that Hamlet married Ophelia, or that Superman is not Clark Kent.
Literary texts explicitly provide us with much that we will never cast doubt on, but also, unlike the real world, they flag with supreme authority what we are to take as important in them, and what we must not take as a point of departure for freewheeling interpretations.
At the end of chapter 35 of The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel goes to the church and shoots at Madame de Renal. After observing that Juliens arm was trembling, Stendhal tells us that the protagonist fires a first shot and misses his target. Then he fires again, and the woman falls. We might claim that his trembling arm and the fact that his first shot missed prove that Julien did not go to the church with firm homicidal intentions, but, rather, was drawn there by a passionate, if vaguely intentioned, impulse. Another interpretation can be placed beside this one, namely, that Julien had originally intended to kill, but that he was a coward. The text allows for both interpretations.
Some people have wondered where the first bullet went—an intriguing question for Stendhal aficionados. Just as devotees of Joyce go to Dublin to seek out the chemist shop where Bloom bought a lemon-shaped bar of soap (and in order to satisfy these literary pilgrims, that chemist’s, which really does exist, has begun to produce that kind of soap again), in the same way one can imagine Stendhal fans trying to find both Verrières and the church in the real world, and then scrutinizing every pillar to find the bullet hole. This would be a rather amusing instance of a literary devotee’s obsession. But let us suppose that a critic wanted to base his entire interpretation of the novel on the fate of that missing bullet. In times like ours this is not impossible. There are people who have based their entire reading of Poe’s «Purloined Letter» on the position of the letter with regard to the mantelpiece. But while Poe makes the position of the letter explicitly relevant, Stendhal tells us that nothing more is known about that first bullet and thus excludes it from the realm of fictitious speculation. If we wish to remain faithful to Stendhal’s text, that bullet is lost forever, and where it ended up is ultimately irrelevant in the context of the narrative. On the other hand, what remains unsaid in Stendhal’s Armance regarding the protagonist’s potential impotence pushes the reader toward frenetic hypotheses in order to complete what the story does not tell us explicitly. Similarly, in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed) a phrase like «the unfortunate woman responded» does not tell us the lengths to which Gertrude has gone in her sin with Egidio, but the dark halo of hypotheses stirred up in the reader is part of the fascination of this highly chaste and elliptical passage.
At the beginning of The Three Musketeers it is said that D’Artagnan arrived at Meung on a fourteen-year-old nag on the first Monday of April, 1625. If you have a good program on your computer, you can immediately establish that that Monday was the 7th of April. A juicy tidbit of trivia for devotees of Dumas. Can one base an overinterpretation of the novel on this detail? I would say no, because the text does not make that detail relevant. Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that D’Artagnan’s arrival on a Monday was not particularly important—whereas the fact that it was in April is quite relevant (one must remember that in order to hide the fact that his splendid shoulder strap was embroidered only on the front, Porthos was wearing a long cloak of crimson velvet, which the season did not justify—so much so that the musketeer had to pretend that he had a cold).
All this may seem quite obvious to many people, but such obvious (if often forgotten) points remind us that the world of literature inspires the certainty that there are some unquestionable assumptions, and that literature therefore offers us a model, however fictitious, of truth. This literal truth impinges on what are often called hermeneutic truths: because whenever someone tries to tell us that D’Artagnan was motivated by a homosexual passion for Porthos, that Manzoni’s Innominato was driven to evil by an overwhelming Oedipus complex, that the Nun of Monza was corrupted by Communism, as certain politicians today might wish to suggest, or that Panurge acts the way he does out of hatred for nascent capitalism, we can always reply that it is not possible to find in the texts referred to any statement, suggestion, or insinuation that allows us to go along with such interpretative drift. The world of literature is a universe in which it is possible to establish whether a reader has a sense of reality or is the victim of his own hallucinations.
Characters migrate. We can make true statements about literary characters because what happens to them is recorded in a text, and a text is like a musical score. It is true that Anna Karenina commits suicide in the same sense that it is true that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in C minor (and not in F major, like the Sixth) and begins with «G, G, G, E-flat.» But certain literary characters—not all of them by any means—leave the text that gave birth to them and migrate to a zone in the universe we find very difficult to delimit. Narrative characters migrate, when they are lucky, from text to text, and it is not that those who do not migrate are ontologically different from their more fortunate brethren; it is just that they have not had the luck to do so, and we do not encounter them again.
Both mythical characters and those from «secular» narratives have migrated from text to text (and through adaptations into different mediums, from book to film or to ballet, or from oral tradition to book): Ulysses, Jason, King Arthur or Parsifal, Alice, Pinocchio, D’Artagnan. Now, when we talk about such characters are we referring to a particular score? Let’s take the case of Little Red Riding-Hood. The most famous scores, Perrault’s and the Grimms’, display profound differences. In the former the little girl is eaten by the wolf and the story finishes there, inspiring severe moralistic reflections on the risks of not being careful. In the latter the huntsman arrives, kills the wolf, and restores the child and her grandmother to life. Happy ending.
Now let us imagine a mother telling the tale to her children and stopping when the wolf devours Little Red Riding-Hood. The children would protest and demand the «true» story, in which Little Red Riding-Hood comes back to life, and it would be pointless for the mother to claim that she was a strict textual philologist. Children know the «true» story, in which Little Red Riding-Hood really does revive, and this story is closer to the Grimms’ version than to Perrault’s. Yet it does not coincide exactly with the Grimms’ score, because it omits a whole series of minor details—on which the Grimms and Perrault disagree in any case (for instance, what kind of gifts Little Red Riding-Hood is bringing to her grandmother)—details children are more than willing to compromise on, because they concern a character who is much more schematic, more fluctuating in the tradition, and who appears in various scores, many of them oral.
Thus Little Red Riding-Hood, D’Artagnan, Ulysses, or
