And should it turn out that a stopgap can never, despite many rereadings, be redeemed at any cost (because it is genuinely evidence of a distraction or weakness), its very presence would be there to testify how and to what extent the interrogation of the work can be collaborative and charitable, can identify a pattern drawn even where it was only a sketch, a wish, an intention, left as a bequest to the infinite work of interpretation.
INTERTEXTUAL IRONY AND LEVELS OF READING
I apologize if in the course of this talk I will have to quote, among my various examples, some that come from my own work as a storyteller as well, but I shall have to dwell on certain characteristics of so-called postmodern narrative, which some literary critics and theoreticians, in particular Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Remo Ceserani,* have found to be not only present in my fiction but also explicitly theorized in my Reflections on “The Name of the Rose.” These features are metanarrative, dialogism (in Bakhtin’s sense, in which, as I said in the Reflections, texts talk to one another), “double coding,” and intertextual irony.
Although I do not yet know what exactly the postmodern is, nevertheless I have to admit that the above-mentioned characteristics are present in my novels. However, I would want to distinguish between them, because it often happens that these are understood as four aspects of the same textual strategy.
Metanarrative, inasmuch as it is a reflection that the text carries out on itself and its own nature, or the intrusion of the authorial voice reflecting on what it is narrating, and perhaps appealing to the reader to share its reflections, is much more ancient than the postmodern. Deep down, metanarrative in this sense is already present in Homer’s “Sing, Muse…,” and—to come closer to our own time—is evident in Manzoni’s reflections, for instance, on the suitability of talking about love in the novel. I admit that in the modern novel metanarrative strategy is present with greater insistence, and it has happened to me that, in order to highlight the reflection the text is carrying out on itself, I have turned to what I would call “artificial dialogism,” namely, the fiction of a manuscript on which the narrating voice reflects, and tries to decipher and judge at the very moment when it is narrating (but as is all too clear, this strategy, too, was already present in Manzoni).
Even dialogism, especially in its most obvious form of “citationism,” is neither a postmodern vice nor virtue; otherwise Bakhtin would never have been able to discuss it so far ahead of its time. In Purgatorio canto 26 Dante meets a poet who begins “freely to say:” Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman, qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire. leu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan… (So much does your courteous request please me, that I cannot and do not want to conceal myself from you.
I am Arnaut, who weeps and goes on his way singing…)
Dante’s contemporary reader would have recognized easily that this Arnaut was Arnaut Daniel, but only and precisely because he is brought on stage speaking Provençal (and with lines that, although invented by Dante, are modeled on the troubador tradition). The reader (whether modern or of that time) who is incapable of recognizing this kind of intertextual quotation is excluded from an understanding of the text.
Let us now come to so-called double coding. The man who coined the expression was Charles Jencks, for whom postmodern architecture speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life.* The postmodern building or work of art addresses simultaneously a minority, elite public, using “high” codes, and a mass public using popular codes.†
This idea can be understood in many ways. In architecture we all know examples of socalled postmodernism, which abound in quotations from the Renaissance or baroque, or some other epoch, blending “high” cultural models into an ensemble that nevertheless turns out to be pleasing and imaginative also for the popular user—often to the detriment of functionality and while reinstating the value of decoration and ornamentation. For instance, there are countless allusions to and components of extreme avant-gardism present in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which nevertheless also attracts visitors who have no knowledge of architectural history but who nonetheless say (as the statistics also show) they “like it.” In any case, this element was also present in the music of the Beatles, which was also—and not accidentally—arranged in Purcell’s style (in an unforgettable disk by Cathy Berberian) precisely because these melodies, so tuneful and pleasant, used cultured phrasing and echoes of other times, which are noticeable to the educated ear.
Examples of double coding can be found today in many advertisements, which are constructed like experimental texts that at one stage would have been understandable to only small groups of cineasts, and which nevertheless attract all types of spectators because of their various “popular” motifs, such as the allusion to erotic situations, the appeal of a well-known face, the rhythm of the editing, the musical accompaniment.
Many works of literature, because of their rediscovery of typical novel plots, have been appreciated even by the wider public, which ought to have been put off by avant-garde stylistic elements, such as the use of interior monologue, metanarrative play, the plurality of voices that are nested inside each other in the course of the narration, the unhinging of temporal sequences, leaps in stylistic register, intermingling of third- and first-person narration, and free indirect speech.
But this seems to mean only that one of the characteristics of so-called postmodernism is to provide stories that are capable of attracting a wide public even though they employ learned allusions and “arty” stylistic devices; in other words (in the most successful cases) if they can blend the two components in a nontraditional way. It is undoubtedly an interesting feature, and it is no accident that it has aroused perplexed attempts at explanations from theoreticians of the socalled quality best seller, a work that pleases even though it contains some artistic virtues and involves the reader in problems and procedures that were once the exclusive prerogative of high literature.
It has never been clear whether a quality best seller is to be understood as a popular novel that uses some “cultured” strategies, or as a “cultured” novel that for some mysterious reason becomes popular. In the first case the phenomenon should be explained in terms of a structural analysis of the work, concluding, for example, that its appeal to popular taste is due, say, to the reworking of a “plot,” maybe a thriller plot, that hooks the reader and allows him to overcome the stylistic or structural difficulties. In the second case the phenomenon comes under the rubric of reception aesthetics, or, rather, reception sociology.
One ought, for instance, to say that a quality best seller depends not on the poetics of the project but on a transformation of the reading public’s tendencies, seeing that (i) one cannot underestimate the growth of a category of “popular” readers who, sated with “easy” and instantly consolatory texts, realize the fascination of works that challenge them to a more demanding though somehow more satisfying experience, and agree to reread them several times; and (ii) many readers, whom the publishing industry obstinately still considers “naive,” have absorbed many of the techniques of contemporary literature through various channels, and consequently feel less embarrassed when faced with a quality best seller than some sociologists of literature.
In this sense the quality best seller appears to be a phenomenon that is as old as the world. Certainly The Divine Comedy was a quality best seller, if we are to give credence to the legends that say Dante took revenge on the blacksmith who sang his poetry badly (even if he did sing it badly, the fact is he sang it and therefore knew it). Shakespeare was also a quality best seller, judging by the size of the audience that followed him, even though they did not perhaps catch many of his subtleties and recycling of previous texts. Manzoni’s The Betrothed was also a best seller, even though, with its at times essaylike qualities, it conceded very little to the tastes of those who had up until then fed themselves on gothic novels and popular romances—and yet it was the victim of countless pirated editions, and Manzoni was persuaded to accommodate popular tastes by personally supervising Gonin’s illustrations for the 1840 edition. In fact, when you think carefully about it, the definition of quality best seller applies to all the great works that have come down to us in multiple manuscripts and printed editions on the wave of a success that has affected more than an elite readership, from the Aeneid to Orlando Furioso to Pinocchio. Consequently, this is not a unique phenomenon but a recurrent one in the history of art and literature, even if it must be accounted for in a different way in each individual age.
Now, in order to underline the differences between double coding and intertextual irony, allow me to reflect on my personal experience as a writer. The Name of the Rose begins by telling how the author came across an ancient manuscript. We are in full citationism
