The first-level reader follows the one or two possible readings of each single pun, then breathlessly comes to a halt, gets lost, moves to the second level to admire the cleverness of an unexpected and insoluble combination of etymologies and possible readings, gets lost again, and so on. Finnegans Wake does not help us to understand the distinctions we are talking about but, rather, puts them all into question, and confuses our ideas. But it does so without deceiving the naive reader by allowing him to proceed without noticing the game he is caught up in. Instead it grabs him by the throat and kicks him out the back door.
In attempting these definitions, one notices, I think, that the plurality of meanings is a phenomenon that is set up in a text even if the author was not thinking about it at all and has done nothing to encourage a reading on a multiplicity of levels. The worst hack telling stories of blood, horror, or death, or of sex and violence, cannot avoid leaving a moral sense fluctuating in the text, even if it is none other than the celebration of indifference toward evil, or of sex and violence as the only values worth pursuing.
The same can be said of the two levels of reading, the semantic and the aesthetic. In the end this possibility exists even for railway timetables. Two different timetables give me the same information on a semantic level, but I might value the first as better organized and easier to consult than the second, thus moving on to a judgment about their organization and functionality that looks more at the how than the what.
This does not happen with intertextual irony. Unless one goes looking for plagiarism or unconscious intertextual echoes, usually reading as a form of hunt-the-quotation exists in the form of a challenge between the reader and a text (leaving aside the author’s intentions): the text somehow solicits the discovery of its secret dialogue with other texts.
As an author of novels that play very much on intertextual quotation, I am always happy for the reader to catch the reference, the wink; but, without calling the empirical author into question, whoever has recognized, let’s say, in The Island of the Day Before nods in the direction of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (for instance, the opening question about whether it was an island or a continent) must want other readers also to notice this allusion in the text.
Of course, if there is intertextual irony, it is because one must admit as legitimate even the reading of those who only want to follow the plot about a shipwreck and who do not know whether he has landed on an island or a continent. The duty of the aesthetic reader is to decide that even that first kind of reading is independent and legitimate, and that the text allows it. If in the same novel I introduce a double, I admit that there is a reader who will be amazed and excited by this situation, but I obviously am aspiring to a reader who realizes that the presence of a double is almost obligatory in a baroque novel.
When in Foucault’s Pendulum the protagonist, Casaubon, spends his last night in Paris at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, he sees, from below, this construction as a monstrous being and becomes almost hypnotized by it. To write that passage I did two things: On the one hand, I spent some nights underneath the tower, trying to put myself at the center of its “paws” and to look at it from all possible angles, but always from the bottom upward. On the other hand, I looked up all the literary passages that had been written about the tower, especially while it was being built; these were mostly indignant, violent attacks on it, and what my protagonist sees and feels is a highly worked collage of a whole range of texts in both prose and verse. I was not anticipating that my reader could find all these quotations (and I myself am now unable to identify them and distinguish between them), but I certainly wanted the more subtle readers to sense the shadow of something déjà vu. At the same time I allowed the naive reader to live through the same sensations I had experienced at the foot of the tower, even though he did not know that they were bolstered with so much previous literature.
It is pointless concealing the fact that it is not the author but the text that privileges the intertextual reader over the naive one. Intertextual irony is a “classist” selector. You can have a snobbish reading of the Bible that is satisfied only by its literal sense, or at most appreciates the rhythmic beauty of the Hebrew text or of the Latin Vulgate (thus certainly bringing into play the aesthetic reader), but there cannot be a snobbish reading of an intertextually ironic text that ignores its dialogical element. Intertextual irony calls together the happy few—except that the more there are of these happy few, the happier they will be.
However, when a text unleashes the mechanism of intertextual irony, it has to expect that it will not produce just the allusions intended by the author, since the possibility of having a double reading depends on the breadth of the readers own textual ency clopedia, and this encyclopedia varies from reader to reader. In a conference held in Louvain in 1999, Inge Lanslots made a number of very acute observations on the many allusions to Verne that run throughout The Island of the Day Before, and she was certainly right in this. In the course of her oral presentation she found references to another novel by Verne (that I was frankly unaware of) where many mechanical clocks are described, as in my novel.
I did not mean to use the intentions of the empirical author as a parameter for validating interpretations of the text, but I had to reply that the reader ought to recognize the many quotations from baroque literature that are scattered throughout that text. Now the topos of mechanical clocks is typically baroque (just think of Lubrano’s poems). It is difficult to ask a foreign critic who is not a specialist in Italian baroque literature to recognize one of its minor poets, and I admitted that her approach was not, so to speak, prohibited. If one goes hunting subterranean allusions, it is difficult to say whether the person that is right is the author who was unaware of them or the reader who has found them. However, I pointed out that recognizing an allusion to baroque literature went with the grain of the general characteristics of the text, whereas identifying an allusion to Verne, at that point, did not lead anywhere.
In any case, the discussion clearly convinced the speaker, because I cannot find any trace of her observation in the proceedings of that conference.*
There are other cases where it is much more difficult to keep a check on the reader’s encyclopedia. In Foucault’s Pendulum I named the hero Casaubon, and I was thinking of Isaac Casaubon, the man who stripped the Corpus Hermeticum of its mythical status with impeccable critical arguments. My ideal second-level reader, who has access to intertextual irony, could identify a certain analogy between what the great philologist understood and what my character understands at the end of the novel. I was conscious of the fact that few readers would be able to recognize the allusion, and I believed that this was not essential in terms of textual strategy (in other words, one can read my novel and understand my Casaubon even without knowing about the historical Casaubon).
Before finishing my novel, I discovered by chance that Casaubon was also a character in Middlemarch; I had read this novel some time before, but that detail of nomenclature had left no trace in my memory. In certain cases the Model Author wants to ration interpretations that seem pointless to him, and I made an effort to eliminate a possible reference to George Eliot. Thus on there is the following dialogue between Belbo and Casaubon:
“By the way, what’s your name?”
“Casaubon.”
“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”
“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we are not related.” However, along came a clever reader, David Robey, who pointed out that, clearly not by chance, Eliot’s Casaubon was writing a Key to All Mythologies, and I have to admit this does seem to fit my character. Later Linda Hutcheon devoted even more attention to this connection, and found other affinities between the Casaubons, which apparently increased the ironicintertextual temperature of my novel.* As the empirical author I can say that this analogy had never even crossed my mind, but if the format of the encyclopedia of Hutcheon the reader is such as to allow her to see this intertextual relationship, and my text encourages it, then it must be said that the operation is objectively (in the sense of culturally and socially) possible.
An analogous case is that of Foucault. My novel is entitled Foucault’s Pendulum because the pendulum I talk about was invented by Léon Foucault. Had it been invented by Franklin, the title would have been
