But, if you remember, the title on the page that talks about the manuscript is “Naturally, a Manuscript.” That “Naturally” has various resonances, because on the one hand it is intended to stress that we are dealing with a literary topos, and on the other it lays bare an “anxiety of influence,” since the reference is intended to be (at least for an Italian reader) to Manzoni, who begins his novel with a seventeenth-century manuscript. How many readers will have grasped or could grasp the various ironic resonances in that “Naturally”? And supposing they have not grasped them, will they still have access to the rest of the story without losing much of its flavor? So we see that that “Naturally” suggests what intertextual irony is.
Let us return to the various characteristics attributed to postmodern fiction. As far as metanarrative is concerned, it is impossible for the reader not to notice metanarrative observations. He might feel disturbed by them, he might ignore (or skip) them, but he notices they are there. The same goes for explicit citationism, as in the Dante example. The reader might not realize that Arnaut Daniel is speaking in his own poetic language, but he will notice that he is speaking in a language that is not that of the Comedy, and that therefore Dante is quoting something else, even if it is only the Provençal way of speaking.
When we come to double coding, we can have (and this tells us how many different profiles this notion can assume): (i) a reader who does not accept the mixture of cultured and popular styles and contents, and who therefore refuses to read it, precisely because he recognizes this mixture; (ii) a reader who feels at home precisely because he enjoys this process of alternating between difficulty and approachability, challenge and encouragement; and lastly (iii) a reader who perceives the entire text as a pleasant invitation and does not in the end realize the extent to which it draws on elite styles (so he enjoys the work, but misses its references).
It is only this third case that introduces us to the strategy of intertextual irony. Faced with that “Naturally,” whoever appreciates its wink establishes a privileged relationship with the text (or the narrating voice); whoever does not continues to read all the same—and will be faced with two choices: either he will understand through his own capacities that the manuscript business must be a literary artifice (he manages to appreciate the game for the first time, thus “growing” as a competent reader), or, as many have done, he will write to the author asking whether that intriguing manuscript really does exist. But one thing should be made clear: in cases, for example, of double coding in architecture, the visitor might not notice that a colonnade with a tympanum is quoting from Greek architecture, but he nevertheless enjoys the harmony and ordered multiplicity of that construction. On the other hand, the reader who does not grasp my “Naturally” knows only that he is reading about a manuscript, but misses the reference and its playful irony.
A work can abound in quotations from other texts without necessarily being an instance of intertextual irony. Just to take one example, The Waste Land requires pages and pages of notes to identify its references not only to the world of literature but also to history and cultural anthropology, but Eliot deliberately provides the notes because he cannot imagine a naive reader who could miss every single reference and yet enjoy his text in a satisfactory manner. I would say that his notes are an integral part of the text. Of course, uncultured readers could limit their appreciation of the text to its rhythm, its sound, to the hint of ghostliness that appears on the level of content, with a vague knowledge that there is something else there, and enjoying the text like someone eavesdropping at a half-open door, glimpsing only hints of a promising epiphany. But for Eliot (I believe) these would be readers who have not yet grown up, not the Model Readers that he aimed at and wanted to form.
But cases of intertextual irony are different, and precisely because of this they characterize literary forms that, however erudite, can also enjoy popular success: the text can be read in a naive way, without appreciating the intertextual references, or it can be read in the full awareness of them, or at least with the conviction that one has to go looking for them. For an extreme example, let us imagine we had to read the Don Quixote that was rewritten by Borges’s Pierre Menard (and that Menard’s text can be interpreted differently from Cervantes’s text, at least to the extent that Borges claimed). Whoever has not heard of Cervantes would enjoy a fascinating story, a series of mock-heroic adventures whose flavor comes across despite the not very modern Castilian in which they are written. But those who catch the constant reference to Cervantes’s text will be able to appreciate not only the correspondences between the original and Menard’s text but also the constant and inevitable irony of the latter.
Unlike more general cases of double coding, intertextual irony, by bringing into play the possibility of a double reading, does not invite all readers to the same party. It selects them, and privileges the more intertextually aware readers, but it does not exclude the less aware. If an author happens to introduce a character saying “Paris à nous deux” the naive reader does not identify the allusion to Balzac and yet can become passionately interested all the same in a character who is keen on challenges and boldness. The informed reader, on the other hand, “gets” the reference and savors its irony—not only the author’s cultured wink, but also the effects of lowering the tone or changing the meaning (when the quotation is inserted into a context that is totally different from that of the source), the general allusion to the endless dialogue that goes on between texts.
If we had to explain the phenomenon of intertextual irony to a first-year university student, or at any rate to someone who is not in the know, we would perhaps have to tell him that, thanks to this citation strategy, a text presents two levels of reading. But if, instead of someone not in the know, we found ourselves facing someone who was a habitué of literary theory, we could be put on the spot by two possible questions.
First question: so then does “intertextual irony” not perhaps have something to do with the fact that a text can have not just two but four different levels of reading, namely, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels, as is taught in Bible hermeneutics and as Dante claims for his own poem in the Letter to Cangrande?
Second question: but does “intertextual irony” not perhaps have something to do with the two model readers that textual semi-otics, and in particular Eco, talk about, the first one known as the semantic reader and the second as the critical or aesthetic reader?
I will try to demonstrate that we are dealing with three quite distinct phenomena. But replying to these two apparently naive questions is not a poindess exercise, because as we shall see, we are facing a cluster of relationships that are not easy to disentangle.
Let us move to the first question, namely, to the theory of the multiple senses of a text. We do not need to think of the four senses of scripture; we just have to think of the moral meaning of fables: of course, a naive reader can interpret the fable of the wolf and the lamb as a quarrel among animals, but even if the author was not keen to tell us “de te fabula narratur” (the story is about you), it would be very difficult not to glimpse some parable in it, a universal moral lesson, just as happens with the parables in the Gospels themselves.
This joint presence of a literal and a moral sense informs all fiction, even fiction that is least concerned with educating its readers, as might be the case with a cheap police thriller: even from this kind of story the clever and sensitive reader could draw a series of moral teachings, such as that crime doesn’t pay, that your deeds will find you out, that law and order are bound to triumph in the end, that human reason can succeed in unraveling the most complex mysteries.
It could even be said that in certain works the moral sense is so identical with the literal one as to constitute the only meaning. But even in so obviously moralizing a novel as The Betrothed, the risk of the reader getting only the story and missing the ethical
