Where exactly are these fluctuating individuals? That depends on the format of our ontology, whether it also has room for square roots, the Etruscan language, and two different ideas on the Most Holy Trinity—the Roman one, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son («ex Patre Filioque procedit»), and the Byzantine one, which has it that the Spirit proceeds only from the Father. But this region has a very imprecise status and contains entities of varying substance, for even the Patriarch of Constantinople (who is ready to fight the Pope over the «Filioque» question) would agree with the Pope (at least I hope he would) in saying that it is true that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street, and that Clark Kent is the same person as Superman.
Nevertheless, it has been written in countless novels or poems that—I’m inventing examples at random here—Hasdrubal kills Corinna or Theophrastus is madly in love with Theodolinda, and yet no one believes that true statements can be made on these matters, because these illstarred characters have never left their native text or managed to become part of our collective memory. Why is the fact that Hamlet does not marry Ophelia any more true than the fact that Theophrastus married Theodolinda? What is that part of our world where Hamlet and Ophelia live but not poor old Theophrastus?
Certain characters have become somehow true for the collective imagination because over the course of centuries we have made emotional investments in them. We all make emotional investments in any number of fantasies, which we dwell on either with open eyes or half-awake. We can be moved by thinking about the death of someone we love, or experience physical reactions when imagining ourselves having an erotic relationship with that person. Similarly, we can be moved by Emma Bovary’s fate through a process of identification or projection, or, as happened to several generations, be drawn toward suicide by the misfortunes of young Werther or Jacopo Ortis. However, if someone were to ask us if the person whose death we imagined was really dead, we would reply no, that it was a totally private fantasy of our own. Whereas if someone asks us whether Werther really did kill himself, we reply yes, and the fantasy we are talking about here is not private, it is a real fact on which the entire community of readers agrees. So much so that anyone who killed himself just because he had imagined (being well aware that this was simply the product of his imagination) that his loved one was dead would be judged by us to be mad, while somehow or other we try to justify someone killing himself because of Werther’s suicide, knowing full well that the latter was a fictional character.
We will have to find a space in the universe where these characters live and shape our behavior to such an extent that we choose them as role models for our life, and for the life of others, so that we are clear about what we mean when we say that someone has an Oedipus complex or a Gargantuan appetite, that someone behaves quixotically, is as jealous as Othello, doubts like Hamlet, is an incurable Don Juan, or is a Scrooge. And in literature this happens not only with characters but also with situations and objects. Why do the women who come and go, talking of Michelangelo, Montale’s sharp shards of bottles stuck in the wall in the dazzling sun, Gozzano’s good things of bad taste, Eliot’s fear that is shown us in a handful of dust, Leopardi’s hedge, Petrarch’s clear cool waters, Dante’s bestial meal, become obsessive metaphors, ready to tell us over and over again who we are, what we want, where we are going, or what we are not and what we don’t want?
These literary entities are here among us. They were not there from the beginning of time as (perhaps) square roots and Pythagoras’s theorem were, but now that they have been created by literature and nourished by our emotional investment in them, they do exist and we have to come to terms with them. Let us even say, to avoid ontological and metaphysical discussions, that they exist like a cultural habitus, a social disposition. But even the universal taboo of incest is a cultural habitus, an idea, a disposition, and yet it has had the power to shape the destinies of human societies.
However, as some people today claim, even the most enduring literary characters risk becoming evanescent, mobile, and shifting, losing that fixity which forced us to acknowledge their destinies. We have now entered the era of electronic hypertext, which allows us not only to travel through a textual labyrinth (be it an entire encyclopedia or the complete works of Shakespeare) without necessarily «unraveling» all the information it contains but to penetrate it like a knitting needle going into a ball of wool. Thanks to hypertext, the phenomenon of free creative writing has become a reality. On the Internet you can find programs that let you write stories as a group, joining in narratives whose denouement one can change ad infinitum. And if you can do this with a text that you are jointly creating with a group of virtual friends, why not do the same with already existing literary texts, buying programs that allow you to change the great narratives that have obsessed us for millennia?
Just imagine that you are avidly reading War and Peace, wondering whether Natasha will finally give in to Anatoly’s blandishments, whether that wonderful Prince Andrej will really die, whether Pierre will have the courage to shoot Napoléon, and now at last you can re-create your own Tolstoy, conferring a long, happy life on Andrej, and making Pierre the liberator of Europe. You could even reconcile Emma Bovary with poor Charles and make her a happy and fulfilled mother, or decide that Little Red Riding-Hood goes into the woods and meets Pinocchio, or rather, that she gets kidnapped by her stepmother, given the name Cinderella, and made to work for Scarlett O’Hara; or that she meets a magic helper named Vladimir J. Propp in the woods, who gives her a magic ring that allows her to discover, at the foot of the Thugs’ sacred banyan tree, the Aleph, that point from which the whole universe can be seen. Anna Karenina doesn’t die beneath the train because Russian narrow-gauge railways, under Putin’s government, are less efficient than their submarines, while away in the distance, on the other side of Alice’s lookingglass, is Jorge Luis Borges reminding Funes the Memorious not to forget to return War and Peace to the Library of Babel…
Would this be so bad? No, in fact, it has already been done by literature, from Mallarmé’s notion of Le Livre to the surrealists’ exquisite corpses to Queneau’s One Hundred Million Million Poems and the unbound books of the second avant-garde. And then there are the jam sessions of jazz music. Yet the fact that the jam session exists, where every evening a variation on a particular musical theme is played, does not prevent or discourage us from going to concert halls, where every evening Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat Minor, op. 35, will finish in the same way.
Some say that by playing with hypertexts we escape two forms of oppression: having to follow sequences already decided on by others, and being condemned to the social division between those who write and those who read. This seems silly to me, but certainly playing creatively with hypertexts—changing old stories and helping create new ones—can be an enthralling activity, a fine exercise to be practiced at school, a new form of writing very much akin to the jam session. I believe it can be good and even educational to try to modify stories that already exist, just as it would be interesting to transcribe Chopin for the mandolin: it would help to sharpen the musical brain, and to understand why the timbre of the piano was such an integral element of the Sonata in B-flat Minor. It can be educational for one’s visual taste and for the exploration of forms to experiment with collages by putting together fragments of The Marriage of the Virgin, of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the latest Pokémon story. This is essentially what great artists have always done.
But these games cannot replace the true educational function of literature, an educational function that is not simply limited to the transmission of moral ideas, whether good or bad, or to the formation of an aesthetic sense.
Jurij Lotman, in his Culture and Explosion, takes up Chekhov’s famous advice, namely, that if a story or play mentions or shows a shotgun hanging on the wall, then before the end that gun has to go off. Lotman suggests that the real question is not whether the gun will actually be fired or not. The very fact that we do not know whether it will be fired confers significance on the plot. Reading a story means being seized by a tension, a thrill. Discovering
