I was wrong: many readers did just that. Linda Hutcheon more than anyone else, and she actually identified precise correspondences between elements of the novel and the four figures of similitude listed by Michel Foucault in the chapter in his The Order of Things entitled “The Prose of the World.” Needless to say, I had read The Order of Things when it came out in 1966, almost twenty years before starting to write my novel, and in the meantime I had come across the ghosts of analogy in the tradition of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Hermeticism, so that when I was writing I was thinking about these direct sources, or the deranged use of such sources in current texts on commercial occultism.
Probably if the novel had been entitled Franklin’s Pendulum, no one would have felt authorized to link the references to the theory of library classification to Michel Foucault; it would have been easier to think of Paracelsus. But I admit that the title of the book, or at any rate the name of the inventor of the eponymous pendulum, constituted too attractive a trail for a hunter of intertextual traces, and Linda Hutcheon was perfectly within her rights to find all she did find. And who knows whether, at least on the level of a psychoanalysis of the author, she is not in fact right, and that my interests in certain aspects of Hermeticism were stimulated by my early reading of Foucault (Michel).
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to establish whether my appeal to Foucault was a case of intertextual irony or simply one of unwitting influence. Up until now I have perhaps allowed people to think that intertextual irony depends on the author’s intention, but I have theorized too much on the prevalence of intentio operis over intentio auctoris to allow myself to indulge in such naivete. If a possible quotation appears in the text, and this quotation seems to go with the grain of the rest of the text (and other citations from it), the intentions of the empirical author count for little. The critic (or reader) is right, then, to talk of “citationism,” and of the “textual echo” (I am using another of Linda Hutcheon’s terms and am not playing on my own name) that the work encourages.
The fact is that once you start playing with intertextual irony it is difficult to resist the appeal of such echoes, even though some might be totally fortuitous, like the reference to Jules Verne’s clocks. Linda Hutcheon, again, cites from page 378 of the American edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, “The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect,” and finds an intertextual echo of E. M. Forster’s “Connect, only connect.” Acute critic that she is, she has the prudence to say that this “ironic play” exists in the English: for the Italian text (and it is not clear whether she had this to hand when she was writing) does not contain this intertextual reference since it says, “sospettare, sospettare sempre.” The reference, which was certainly conscious, was inserted by the translator, Bill Weaver. We have to be honest, the English text does contain this echo, which means that translation can not only alter the play of intertextual irony, it can also enrich it.
In other instances you can come across the possibility of choosing between a reading that is squared and one that is cubed. In one passage from chapter 30 of the Pendulum, where the protagonists imagine that even the entire story told by the Gospels is an effect of an invention like that of the Plan they are hatching, Casaubon comments: ” Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.” I do not recall what I was thinking about when I wrote this, but I probably would have been happy with the intertextual allusion to Baudelaire, which was already enriched by the allusion to the apocryphal Gospels. Linda Hutcheon, however, defines the phrase as “a parody of Baudelaire by Eliot” (in fact, if you remember, Eliot quotes this line from Baudelaire in The Waste Land), and certainly if this is so, it all becomes even richer. What are we to do? Divide readers into those who get as far as Baudelaire and those who come all the way up to Eliot? And what if there was a reader who found the “hypocrite lecteur” in Eliot, and remembered it, but did not know that Eliot was quoting Baudelaire?
Everyone noticed that The Name of the Rose begins with a quote from the Gospel according to Saint John (“In the beginning was the Word,” etc.). But how many noticed that this can also be seen as a quote from the beginning of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, which opens with a (very respectful) imitation of Saint John: “In principio era il verbo appresso a Dio / ed era Iddio il verbo e il verbo lui. / Quest’era nel principio alparer mio / e nulla si pub far senza costui” (In the beginning the word was with God / and God was the Word and the Word was God. / This was in the beginning, it seems to me, / and we cannot do anything without Him)?
However, when you really think about it, how many readers did notice that my novel begins with a quotation from Saint John? I have found Japanese readers (and perhaps I did not need to go that far) who attributed those very virtuous thoughts to good old Adso, and yet despite this they did not miss the religious afflatus that animates the words of the young monk.
In fact, to be precise, intertextual irony is not, strictly speaking, a form of irony. Irony consists in saying not the opposite of the truth but the opposite of what one presumes the interlocutor thinks is true. It is ironic to define a stupid person as very intelligent, but only if the addressee knows that the person is stupid. If he does not know, then the irony is missed, and what one has is only false information. Thus irony becomes simply a lie when the addressee is not aware of the game.
On the other hand, in terms of intertextual irony, I can tell the story of a double without the addressee sensing the reference to the baroque topos, yet despite this the addressee will not have enjoyed any less this very respectable, literal story about a double. In The Island of the Day Before there are some coups-de-scène that are clearly modeled on Dumas, and my quotation of them is sometimes literal, but the reader who does not get the reference can still enjoy the coupsde-scène, even though in a naive fashion. Thus if I said previously that the game of intertextual irony is snobbish and aristocratic, I should correct myself, because it does not set up a “conventio ad excludendum” as regards the naive reader. It is like a banquet where the remains of the dinner served on the upper floor are distributed on the lower floor, but not the remains from the dinner table, rather the remains in the pot, and these are also set out nicely, and, since the naive reader thinks the feast is happening on only one floor, he will enjoy these for what they are worth (and, when all’s said and done, they will be tasty and plentiful) without supposing that anyone has enjoyed more.
This is exactly what happens to the naive reader of Dante’s sonnet” Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare” who does not know how much its language has changed from Dante’s time to ours, and what were the philosophical postulates of Dante’s poetry. He will enjoy an elegant declaration of love, and will derive great gain from it just the same, both emotional and intellectual gain. This shows that my culinary analogy was perhaps provocative, but it was not intended to place art and gastronomy on the same level.
And lastly, not even the most naive of readers can pass through the meshes of the text without entertaining the suspicion that sometimes (or often) it refers to something beyond itself. Here one sees then that intertextual irony not only is not a “conventio ad excludendum,” but a provocation and invitation to include, such that it can gradually transform the naive reader into a reader who begins to sense the perfume of so many other texts that have preceded the one he is reading.
Links between intertextual irony and biblical or Dantesque allegory? Some. Intertextual irony provides an intertextual second sense for readers who have been secularized and who no longer have any spiritual senses to look for in the text. The biblical and poetic second senses stemming from the theory of the four meanings allowed the text to flower vertically, each sense allowing us to approach ever closer to some Afterlife. The intertextual second sense is horizontal, labyrinthine, convoluted, and infinite, running from text to text—with no other promise than the continual murmuring of intertextuality.
Intertextual irony presupposes an absolute immanentism. It provides revelations to those who have lost the sense of transcendence. However, I would not take too seriously anyone who started to moralize about this
