Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the twenty-first century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes their meaning. Postmodernism may be seen as the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world.
Perhaps the first text in which all these problems are present at the same time is Balzac's Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece). And it is no coincidence that what we may call a prophetic insight came from Balzac, situated as he was at a nodal point in the history of literature, in a liminal experience, now visionary and now realistic, now both together—always apparently drawn by the forces of nature, though always very much aware of what he was doing.
L· chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, on which he worked from 1831 to 1837, at first carried the subtitle of “conte fantastique,” while in the final version it figures as an “etude philosophique.” What happened in between was that—as Balzac himself puts it in another story—literature had killed the fantastic. In the first version of the story (published in a magazine in 1831), the elderly painter Frenhofer's perfect picture, in which only a woman's foot emerges from a chaos of color, from a shapeless fog, is both understood and admired by the artist's two colleagues, Pourbus and Nicholas Poussin: “Combien de jouissances sur ce morceau de toile!” (How many delights on this small piece of canvas!). And even the model, who does not understand it, is nonetheless impressed in some way.
In the second version, still 1831 but in book form, a few added scraps of conversation reveal the incomprehension of Frenhofer's colleagues. He is still an inspired mystic who lives for his ideal, but he is condemned to solitude. The final version (1837) adds many pages of technical reflection on painting, and an ending that makes it clear that Frenhofer is a madman doomed to lock himself up with his supposed masterpiece, then to burn it and commit suicide.
Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu has often been commented on as a parable of modern art. Reading the latest of these studies, by Hubert Damisch (in Fenetre jaune cadmium, 1984), I realized that the story can also be read as a parable of literature, about the unbridgeable gulf between linguistic expression and sense experience, and the elusiveness of the visual imagination. Balzac's first version contains a definition of the fantastic as indefinable: “Pour toutes ces singularites, Pidiome moderne n'a qu'un mot: cetait indefinissable … Admirable expression. Elle resume la litterature fantastique; elle dit tout ce qui echappe aux perceptions bornees de notre esprit; et quand vous Pavez placees sous les yeux d'un lecteur, il est lance dans Pespace imaginaire” (For all these remarkable things, modern idiom has but the one word: it was indefinable … An admirable expression. It sums up the literature of the fantastic; it says everything that eludes the limited perceptions of our spirit; and when you have placed it before the eyes of a reader, he is launched into imaginary space).
In the years that followed, Balzac rejected the literature of fantasy, which for him had meant art as the mystical knowledge of everything, and turned to the minute description of the world as it is, still convinced that he was expressing the secret of life. Just as Balzac himself was for a long time uncertain whether to make Frenhofer into a seer or a madman, so his story continues to contain an ambiguity in which its deepest truth resides. The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.
A writer—and I am speaking of a writer of infinite ambitions, like Balzac—carries out operations that involve the infinity of his imagination or the infinity of the contingency that may be attempted, or both, by means of the infinity of linguistic possibili- ties in writing. Some might object that a single lifetime, from birth to death, can contain only a finite amount of information. How can the individual's stock of images and individual experience extend beyond that limit? Well, I believe that these attempts to escape the vortex of multiplicity are useless. Giordano Bruno explained to us that the spiritus phantasticus from which the writer's imagination draws forms and figures is a bottomless well; and as for external reality, Balzac's Comedie humaine starts from the assumption that the written world can be homologous to the living world, not only that of today but also of yesterday or tomorrow.
As a writer of fantasy, Balzac tried to capture the world soul in a single symbol among the infinite number imaginable; but to do this he was forced to load the written word with such intensity that it would have ended by no longer referring to a world outside its own self, like the colors and lines in Frenhofer's picture. When he reached this threshold, Balzac stopped and changed his whole program: no longer intensive but extensive writing. Balzac the realist would try through writing to embrace the infinite stretch of space and time, swarming with multitudes, lives, and stories.
But could it not happen as it does in Escher's pictures, which Douglas Hofstadter cites as an illustration of Godel's paradox? In a gallery of paintings, a man is looking at the landscape of a city, and this landscape opens up to embrace the gallery that contains it and the man who is looking at it. In his infinite Comedie humaine Balzac should also have included the writer of fantasy that he was or had been, with all his infinite fantasies; and he should have included the realistic writer that he was or wanted to be, intent on capturing the infinite real world in his “human comedy.” (Though maybe it is the infinite inner world of Balzac the fantasist that includes the inner world of Balzac the realist, because one of the infinite fantasies of the former coincides with the realistic infinity of the Comedie humane)
Still, all “realities” and “fantasies” can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses—pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.
5
MULTIPLICITY
Let us begin with a quotation, from the novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda:
“Nella sua saggezza e nella sua poverta molisana, il dottor In-gravallo, che pareva vivere di silenzio e di sonno sotto la giungla nera di quella parrucca, lucida come pece e riccioluta come d'a-gnello d'Astrakan, nella sua saggezza interrompeva talora codesto sonno e silenzio per enunciare qualche teoretica idea (idea ge-nerale s'intende) sui casi degli uomini: e delle donne. A prima vista, cioe al primo udirle, sembravano banalita. Non erano ba-nalita. Cosi quei rapidi enunciati, che facevano sulla sua bocca il crepitio improvviso d'uno zolfanello illuminatore, rivivevano poi nei timpani della gente a distanza di ore, o di mesi, dalla enun-ciazione: come dopo un misterioso tempo incubatorio. “Gia!' ri-conosceva Pinteressato: ‘il dottor Ingravallo me Paveva pur detto.’ Sosteneva, fra Paltro, che le inopinate catastrofi non sono mai la conseguenza o Peffetto che dir si voglia d'un unico motivo, d'una causa al singolare: ma sono come un vortice, un punto di depressione ciclonica nella coscienza del mondo, verso cui hanno co-spirato tutta una molteplicita di causali convergenti. Diceva an-che nodo o groviglio, o garbuglio, o gnommero, che alia romana vuol
dire gomitolo. Ma il termine giuridico 'le causali, la causale' gli sfuggiva preferentemente di bocca: quasi contro sua voglia. Copinione che bisognasse ‘riformare in noi il senso della catego- ria di causa’ quale avevamo dai filosofi, da Aristotele o da Em-manuele Kant, e sostituire alia causa le cause era in lui una opi-nione centrale e persistente: una fissazione, quasi: che gli evaporava dalle labbra carnose, ma piuttosto bianche, dove un mozzicone di sigaretta spenta pareva, pencolando da un angolo, accompagnare la sonnolenza dello sguardo e il quasi-ghigno, tra amaro e scettico, a cui per Vecchia' abitudine soleva atteggiare la meta inferiore della faccia, sotto quel sonno della fronte e delle palpebre e quel nero piceo della parrucca. Cosi, proprio cosi, avveniva dei 'suoi' delitti. ‘Quanno me chiammeno! … Gia. Si me chiammeno a me … puo sta ssicure ch'e nu guaio: quacche gliuommero … de sberreta … ’ diceva, contaminando napolitano, molisano, e italiano.
“La causale apparente, la causale principe, era si, una. Ma il fattaccio era l'effetto di tutta una rosa di causali che gli eran soffiate addosso a molinello (come i sedici venti della rosa dei venti quando s'avviluppano a tromba in una depressione ciclo-nica) e avevano finito per strizzare nel vortice del delitto la de-bilitata ‘ragione del mondo.’ Come si storce il collo a un polio. E poi soleva dire, ma questo un po‘ stancamente, ’ch'i‘ femmene se retroveno addo’ n'i vuo truva.' Una, tarda riedizione italica del vieto 'cherchez la femme.' E poi pareva pentirsi, come d'aver calunniato 'e femmene, e voler mutare idea. Ma allora si sarebbe andati nel difficile. Sicche taceva pensieroso, come temendo d'aver detto troppo. Voleva significare che un certo movente affet-tivo, un tanto o, direste oggi, un quanto di affettivita, un certo ‘quanto di erotia,’ si mescolava anche ai ‘casi d'interesse,’ ai delitti apparentemente piu lontani dalle tempeste d'amore. Qualche collega un tantino invidioso delle sue trovate, qualche prete piu edotto dei molti danni del secolo, alcuni subalterni, certi uscieri, i superiori, sostenevano che leggesse dei libri strani: da cui cavava tutte quelle parole che non vogliono dir nulla, o quasi nulla, ma servono come non altre ad accileccare gli sprovveduti, gli ignari. Erano questioni un po' da manicomio: una terminologia da me-dici dei matti. Per la pratica ci vuol altro! I fumi e le filosoficherie son da lasciare ai trattatisti: la pratica dei commissariati e della squadra mobile e tutt'un altro affare: ci vuole della gran pazienza, della gran carita: uno stomaco pur anche a posto: e, quando non traballi tutta la baracca dei taliani, senso di responsabilita e de-cisione sicura, moderazione civile; gia: gia: e polso fermo. Di queste obiezioni cosi giuste lui, don Ciccio, non se ne dava per inteso: seguitava a dormire in piedi, a filosofare a stomaco vuoto, e a fingere di fumare la sua mezza sigheretta, regolarmente spenta.”
“In his wisdom and in his Molisan poverty, Officer Ingravallo, who seemed to live on silence and sleep under the black jungle of that mop, shiny as pitch and curly as astrakhan lamb, in his wisdom, he sometimes interrupted this silence and this sleep to enunciate some theoretical idea (a general idea, that is) on the affairs of men, and of women. At first sight, or rather, on first hearing, these seemed banalities. They weren't banalities. And so, those rapid declarations, which crackled on his lips like the sudden illumination of a sulphur match, were revived in the ears of people at a distance of hours, or of months, from their enunciation: as if after a mysterious period of incubation. That's right!' the person in question admitted, That's exactly what Ingravallo said to me.' He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. He also used words like knot or tangle, or muddle, or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein. But the legal term, 'the motive, the motives,' escaped his lips by preference, though as if against his will. The opinion that we must “reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of cause,” as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation, which melted from his fleshy, but rather white lips, where the stub of a spent cigarette seemed, dangling from one corner, to accompany the somnolence of his gaze and the quasi-grin, half-bitter, half-skeptical, in which through ‘old’ habit he would fix the lower half of his face beneath that sleep of his forehead and eyelids and that pitchy black of his mop. This was how, exactly how he defined ‘his’ crimes. ‘When they call me … Sure. If they call me, you can be sure that there's trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle,’ he would say, garbling his Italian with the dialects of Naples and the Molise.
“The apparent motive, the principal motive was, of course, single. But the crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind (like the sixteen winds in the list of winds when they twist together in a tornado, in a cyclonic depression) and had ended by pressing into the vortex of the crime the enfeebled ‘reason of the world.’ Like wringing the neck of a chicken. And then he used to say, but this a bit wearily, ‘you're sure to find skirts where you don't want to find them.’ A belated Italian revision of the trite ‘cherchez lafemme.’ And then he seemed to repent, as if he had slandered the ladies, and wanted to change his mind. But that would have got him into difficulties. So he would remain silent and pensive, afraid he had said too much. What he meant was that a certain affective motive, a certain amount or, as you might say today, a quantum of affection, of ‘eros,’ was also involved even in 'matters of interest,' in crimes which were apparently far removed from the tern- pests of love. Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our times, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than others to dazzle the naive, the ignorant. His terminology was for doctors in looneybins. But practical action takes something else! Notions and philosophizing are to be left to scribblers: the practical experience of the police stations and the homicide squad is quite another thing: it takes plenty of patience, and charity, and a strong stomach; and when the whole shooting match of the Italians isn't tottering, a sense of responsibility, prompt decision, civil moderation: yes, yes, and a firm hand. On him, on Don Ciccio, these objections, just as they were, had no eflFect; he continued to sleep on his feet, philosophize on an empty stomach, and pretend to smoke his half-cigarette which had, always, gone out.”*
I wished to begin with this passage from Gadda because it seems to me an excellent introduction to the subject of my lecture—which is the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world.
I could have chosen other novelists to exemplify this “calling” so typical of the present century. I chose Gadda because he wrote in my own language and is relatively little known in the United States (partly because of the particular complexity of his style, difficult even in Italian); also because his philosophy fits in very well with my theme, in that he views the world as a “system of systems,” where each system conditions the others and is conditioned by them.
Carlo Emilio Gadda tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity or, to put it better, the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event. He was led to this vision of things by his intellectual training, his temperament as a writer, and his neuroses. As an engineer, Gadda was brought up on the culture of science, equipped with technical know-how and a positive fervor for philosophy. The last of these, incidentally—his passion for philosophy—he kept a secret: it was only among the papers discovered after his death in 1973 that we learned of his rough draft for a philosophical system based on Spinoza and Leibniz. As a writer—thought of a
s the Italian equivalent to James Joyce—Gadda developed a style to match his complicated epistemology, in that it superimposes various levels of language, high and low, and uses the most varied vocabulary. As a neurotic, Gadda throws the whole of himself onto the page he is writing, with all his anxieties and obsessions, so that often the outline is lost while the details proliferate and fill up the whole picture. What is supposed to be a detective novel is left without a solution. In a sense, all his novels are unfinished or left as fragments, like the ruins of ambitious projects that nevertheless retain traces of the splendor and meticulous care with which they were conceived.
To get an idea of how Gadda's “encyclopedism” works in terms of a finished structure, we should turn to shorter texts, as for example his recipe for “Risotto alia Milanese,” which is a masterpiece of Italian prose and practical advice in its descriptions of the grains of rice still partly in their husks (“pericarps,” as he calls them), the most appropriate casseroles to use, the saffron, and the successive phases of cooking. Another text is devoted to building techniques where the use of prestressed concrete and hollow bricks no longer isolates houses either from heat or from noise. There follows a grotesque description both of his life in a modern building and of his obsession with all the noises that assault his ears.
In these brief pieces, as in each episode in one of Gadda's novels, the least thing is seen as the center of a network of relationships that the writer cannot restrain himself from following, multiplying the details so that his descriptions and digressions become infinite. Whatever the starting point, the matter in hand spreads out and out, encompassing ever vaster horizons, and if it were permitted to go on further and further in every direction, it would end by embracing the entire universe.
The best example of this web radiating out from every object is the episode of finding the stolen jewels in chapter nine of That Awful Mess. We are told about every single precious stone, its geological history, its chemical composition, with historical and artistic references and all the possible uses to which it might be put, together with the associations of images that these evoke. The most important critical essay on the epistemology implicit in Gadda's writing, Gian Carlo Roscioni's “La disarmonia pres-tabilita” (Deliberate Disharmony), begins with an analysis of those five pages on gems. Starting from there, Roscioni explains how for Gadda this knowledge of things—seen as the convergence of infinite relationships, past and future, real or possible— demands that everything should be precisely named, described, and located in space and time. He does this by exploiting the semantic potential of words, of all the varieties of verbal and syntactical forms with their connotations and tones, together with the often comic effects created by their juxtaposition.
Six Memos for the Next Millennium Page 10