To say that the Holmeslike William of Baskerville represents the modem world which replaces that of the monastery is to put it rather crudely; but he does display a striking acquaintance with semiotic theory (according to Eco’s notes, Franciscan thought of the period shows considerable awareness of the nature of signs) as well as a characteristically modem view, as Eco sees it, of knowledge in general. Not only does he illustrate, through his acts of detection, the essential nature of all semiotic processes according to Eco; he also proposes a theory of detection strikingly similar to Eco’s and Peirce’s, repeating verbatim passages from Eco’s contribution to The Sign of Three, a recent collection of articles on Dupin (Poe’s famous detective), Sherlock Holmes, and C. S. Peirce.» More generally, he seems to share Eco’s view of the essentially unknowable nature of things and of the provisional, hypothetical nature of the structures we find in them.
«Relations,» William says at one point in the novel, «are the ways in which my mind perceives the connections between single entities, but what is the guarantee that this is universal and stable?» (p. 207). This doubt is confirmed for him by his discovery, at the end of the book, that the series of murders was not the product of a single design drawn, as he had supposed, from the book of the Apocalypse, but was in large part determined by chance. «I behaved stubbornly,» he says, «pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe» (p. 492).
His final advice to his pupil Adso of Melk, the narrator, is that the «order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something»; but—and here William quotes a Wittgensteinian «mystic» from Adso’s homeland, Austria—»afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless» (p. 492). Unlike his pupil and the rest of the characters in the book, William is aware, as Eco hints in the Postscript, that our knowledge of reality is a rhizomelike labyrinth and that no single path through it can be said to constitute the truth.
If William of Baskerville is only partially a semiotic theorist, he wholly shares the broad intellectual and political values that Eco’s semiotics carries with it, and that have governed his work from Opera aperta onward. In the face of the conflict between the savagely oppressive representatives of the Papacy and the equally narrow and intolerant Franciscan mendicants, not to mention their outlaw offshoot, the revolutionary followers of the renegade Fra Dolcino (the Red Brigades of the fourteenth century), William’s attitude is to agree with neither side but to see right and wrong in both, to make distinctions where others confuse issues and see similarities where others see utter opposition. Like Eco, he is a doubter by principle who believes in democracy rather than oppression and in discussion rather than revelation, all in accordance with his theoretical recognition of the impossibility of certain knowledge. He dislikes purity, he says (in a phrase which, we learn from the Postscript, Eco is particularly proud of). because it acts in too much haste.
Like Eco, finally, William of Baskerville believes in the salutary power of laughter. As he eventually discovers, most of the murders were caused by the attempt of the blind monk Jorge of Burgos (a name not without reference to that of another writer with an interest in labyrinths) to keep concealed the lost second book of Ariscode’s Poetics, which dealt with the subject of comedy. The danger lay in the book’s potentially corrupting and subversive effect: it made laughter respectable. William’s response is to argue a point that is wholly typical of Eco’s view of his practical duty as an intellectual: «Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth» (P. 491).
The Open Work
I. The Poetics of the Open Work
A number of recent pieces of instrumental music are linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work. Thus, he is not merely free to interpret the composer’s instructions following his own discretion (which in fact happens in traditional music), but he must impose his judgment on the form of the piece, as when he decides how long to hold a note or in what order to group the sounds: all this amounts to an act of improvised creation. Here are some of the bestknown examples of the process.
- In Klavierstiick XI, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer presents the performer a single large sheet of music paper with a series of note groupings. The performer then has to choose among these groupings, first for the one to start the piece and, next, for the successive units in the order in which he elects to weld them together. In this type of performance, the instrumentalist’s freedom is a function of the «narrative» structure of the piece, which allows him to «mount» the sequence of musical units in the order he chooses.
- In Luciano Berio’s Sequence for Solo Flute, the composer presents the performer a text which predetermines the sequence and intensity of the sounds to be played. But the performer is free to choose how long to hold a note inside the fixed framework imposed on him, which in turn is established by the fixed pattern of the metronome’s beat.
- Henri Pousseur has offered the following description of his piece Scambi:
Scambi is not so much a musical composition as a field of possibilities, an explicit invitation to exercise choice. It is made up of sixteen sections. Each of these can be linked to any two others, without weakening the logical continuity of the musical process. Two edits sections. for example, arc introduced by similar motifs (after which they evolve in divergent patterns); another pair of sections, on the contrary, tends to develop towards the same climax. Since the performer can start or finish with any one section, a considerable number of sequential permutations are made available to him. Furthermore, the two sections which begin on the same motif can be played simultaneously, so as to present a more complex structural polyphony. It is not out of the question that we conceive these formal notations as a marketable product: if they were taperecorded and the purchaser had a sufficiently sophisticated reception apparatus, then the general public would be in a position to develop a private musical construct of its own and a new collective sensibility in matters of musical presentation and duration could emerge.
- In Pierre Boulez’s Third Sonata for Piano, the first section (Antiphonie, Formant t) is made up of ten different pieces on ten corresponding sheets of music paper. These can be arranged in different sequences like a stack of filing cards, though not all possible permutations are permissible. The second part (Formant 2, Thrope) is made up of four parts with an internal circularity, so that the performer can commence with any one of them, linking it successively to the others until he comes round full circle.
No major interpretative variants are permitted inside the various sections, but one of them, Parenthese, opens with a prescribed time beat, which is followed by extensive pauses in which the beat is left to the player’s discretion. A further prescriptive note is evinced by the composer’s instructions on the manner of linking one piece to the next (for example, sans retenir, enchainer sans interruption, and so on).
What is immediately striking in such cases is the macroscopic divergence between these forms of musical communication and the timehonored tradition of the classics. This difference can be formulated in elementary terms as follows: a classical composition, whether it be a Bach fugue, Verdi’s A Ida, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, posits an assemblage of sound units which the composer arranged in a closed, welldefined manner before presenting it to the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the composer himself, whereas the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.
They appeal to the initiative of the individual performer, and hence they offer themselves not as finite works which prescribe specific repetition along given structural coordinates but as «open» works, which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as he experiences them on an aesthetic plane.’
To avoid any confusion in terminology, it is important to specify that here the definition of the «open work,» despite its relevance in formulating a fresh dialectics between the work of art and its performer, still requires to be separated from other conventional applications of this term. Aesthetic theorists, for example, often have recourse to the notions of «completeness» and «openness» in connection with a given work of art. These two expressions refer to a standard situation of which we are all aware in our reception of a work of art: we see it as the end product of an author’s effort to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author. The addressee is bound to
