The Name of the Rose (74 page)

Now, the concept of amusement is historical. There are different means of amusing and of being amused for every season in the history of the novel. Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement. As a great admirer of Aristotle's
Poetics,
I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot.

There is no question that if a novel is amusing, it wins the approval of a public. Now, for a certain period, it was thought that this approval was a bad sign: if a novel was popular, this was because it said nothing new and gave the public only what the public was already expecting.

I believe, however, that to say, “If a novel gives the reader what he was expecting, it becomes popular,” is different from saying, “If a novel is popular, this is because it gives the reader what he was expecting of it.”

The second statement is not always true. It is enough to recall Defoe and Balzac or, more recently,
The Tin Drum
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It can be said that the “popularity = lack of value” equation was supported by the polemical attitudes of some writers, including me, who formed the Gruppo 63 in Italy. And even before 1963 the successful book was identified with the escape novel, and the escape novel with the plot novel; while experimental works, novels that caused scandal and were rejected by the mass audience, were praised. These things were said, and there was a reason for saying them. These were the statements that most shocked respectable readers, and reporters have never forgotten them—and rightly, because these things were said precisely to achieve such an effect. We were talking about traditional novels with a fundamentally escapist structure, with no interesting innovations with respect to the problems discussed in nineteenth-century novels. And inevitably factions were formed, and good and bad were often lumped together, sometimes for reasons of factional dispute. I remember that the enemies then were Lampedusa, Bassani, and Cassola. Today, personally, I would make subtle distinctions among the three. Lampedusa had written a good, anachronistic novel, and our dispute was with those who hailed it as the opening of a new path for Italian literature, whereas it was, on the contrary, the glorious conclusion of an old path. My opinion of Cassola has remained unchanged. With Bassani, on the other hand, I would now be far more cautious; and if we were back in 1963, I would greet him as a fellow traveler. But the problem I want to discuss is something else.

Nobody remembers what happened in 1965 when the Gruppo met a second time, in Palermo, to discuss the experimental novel (and yet the proceedings are still in print, entitled
Il romanzo sperimentale,
published by Feltrinelli, with the date 1965 on the cover and 1966 in the colophon). Now, in the course of that debate many interesting things emerged. First of all, in his opening paper, Renato Barilli, theoretician of all the experimentalism of the Nouveau Roman, had to come to grips with Robbe-Grillet, with Grass, with Pynchon (it must not be forgotten that though Pynchon is now considered one of the inventors of postmodernism, the term did not exist then—not in Italy, anyway—and John Barth was just getting started in America). Barilli mentioned the rediscovered Roussel, who loved Verne, but he did not mention Borges, because
his
rediscovery was yet to come. And what did Barilli say? That till then the abolition of plots and action had been encouraged, in favor of the pure epiphany in its extreme form of “materialistic ecstasy” (we might say, “I will show you the heavens in a handful of dust,” as in the paintings of Pollock or Dubuffet or Fautrier). But now a new phase of narrative was beginning: action was being sanctioned again, even though it was an
autre
action.

I was analyzing the impression we had got the previous evening, watching a curious collage movie by Baruchello and Grifi called
Verifica incerta,
a story composed of fragments of stories, or, rather, of standard situations, topoi, from commercial cinema. And I pointed out that the places where the spectators had reacted with the greatest pleasure were those where, until a few years ago, they would have reacted with shock and outrage—namely, where the logical and temporal consequences of traditional action were omitted and the public's expectations might have seemed violently frustrated. Avant-garde was becoming tradition: what had been dissonance a few years before was turning into a balm for the ears (or for the eyes). And from this observation only one conclusion could be drawn: unacceptability of the message was no longer the prime criterion for an experimental fiction (or any other art), since unacceptability had now been codified as entertaining. And I remarked that whereas at the time of the futurists' programs it had been indispensable for the audience to boo, “sterile, today, and foolish is the polemic of those who consider an experiment a failure because of the fact that it is accepted as normal: this means going backward to the worn-out Utopia of the early avant-garde. We insist that the unacceptability of the message on the part of the recipient was a guarantee of value only in a specific historic moment. . . . I suspect that we will perhaps have to give up that
arrière-pensée,
which constantly dominates our discussions, whereby any external scandal caused by a work can be considered a guarantee of its worth. The very dichotomy between order and disorder, between a work for popular consumption and a work for provocation, though it remains valid, should perhaps be re-examined from another point of view. In other words, I believe it will be possible to find elements of revolution and contestation in works that apparently lend themselves to facile consumption, and it will also be possible to realize, on the contrary, that certain works, which seem provocative and still enrage the public, do not really contest anything. . . . Just recently I met someone who, because he had liked a certain product
too much,
had relegated it to a zone of suspicion. . . .” And so on.

Nineteen sixty-five. That was the time when Pop Art was beginning, and the traditional distinctions between experimental, nonfigurative art and mass art, narrative and figurative, were vanishing. This was when Pousseur, referring to the Beatles, said to me, “They are working for us”—not realizing, however, that he was also working for them (and it took the initiative of Cathy Berberian to show us that the Beatles, linked with Purcell, as was only right, could also be performed in recital with Monteverdi and Satie).

 

Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable

 

Between 1965 and today, two ideas have been definitively clarified: that plot could be found also in the form of quotation of other plots, and that the quotation could be less escapist than the plot quoted. In 1972 I edited the
Almanacco Bompiani,
celebrating “The Return to the Plot,” though this return was via an ironic re-examination (not without admiration) of Ponson du Terrail and Eugène Sue, and admiration (with very little irony) of some of the great pages of Dumas. The real problem at stake then was, could there be a novel that was not escapist and, nevertheless, still enjoyable?

This link, and the rediscovery not only of plot but also of enjoyability, was to be realized by the American theorists of postmodernism.

Unfortunately, “postmodern” is a term
bon à tout faire.
I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it increasingly retroactive: first it was apparently applied to certain writers or artists active in the last twenty years, then gradually it reached the beginning of the century, then still further back. And this reverse procedure continues; soon the postmodern category will include Homer.

Actually, I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category—or, better still, a
Kunstwollen,
a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as metahistorical category). I believe that in every period there are moments of crisis like those described by Nietzsche in his
Thoughts Out of Season,
in which he wrote about the harm done by historical studies. The past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us. The historic avant-garde (but here I would also consider avant-garde a metahistorical category) tries to settle scores with the past. “Down with moonlight”—a futurist slogan—is a platform typical of every avant-garde; you have only to replace “moonlight” with whatever noun is suitable. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past:
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
is a typical avant-garde act. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. In architecture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence (in this sense, the early Cage is modern).

But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony. . . . But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.

Irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared. Thus, with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously. I think that the collages of Picasso, Juan Gris, and Braque were modern: this is why normal people would not accept them. On the other hand, the collages of Max Ernst, who pasted together bits of nineteenth-century engravings, were postmodern: they can be read as fantastic stories, as the telling of dreams, without any awareness that they amount to a discussion of the nature of engraving, and perhaps even of collage. If “postmodern” means this, it is clear why Sterne and Rabelais were postmodern, why Borges surely is, and why in the same artist the modern moment and the postmodern moment can coexist, or alternate, or follow each other closely. Look at Joyce. The
Portrait
is the story of an attempt at the modern.
Dubliners,
even if it comes before, is more modern than
Portrait. Ulysses
is on the borderline.
Finnegans Wake
is already postmodern, or at least it initiates the postmodern discourse: it demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking.

On the subject of the postmodern nearly everything has been said, from the very beginning (namely, in essays like “The Literature of Exhaustion” by John Barth, which dates from 1967). Not that I am entirely in agreement with the grades that the theoreticians of postmodernism (Barth included) give to writers and artists, establishing who is postmodern and who has not yet made it. But I am interested in the theorem that the trend's theoreticians derive from their premises: “My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. . . . He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace—not to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterates. But he
should
hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art. . . . The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,' pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. . . . My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: one finds much on successive listenings or close examination of the score that one didn't catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay.”

This is what Barth wrote in 1980, resuming the discussion, but this time under the title “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.”
⁹
Naturally, the subject can be discussed further, with a greater taste for paradox; and this is what Leslie Fiedler does. In 1980
Salmagundi
(no. 50–51) published a debate between Fiedler and other American authors. Fiedler, obviously, is out to provoke. He praises
The Last of the Mohicans,
adventure stories, Gothic novels, junk scorned by critics that was nevertheless able to create myths and capture the imagination of more than one generation. He wonders if something like
Uncle Tom's Cabin
will ever appear again, a book that can be read with equal passion in the kitchen, the living room, and the nursery. He includes Shakespeare among those who knew how to amuse, along with
Gone with the Wind.
We all know he is too keen a critic to believe these things. He simply wants to break down the barrier that has been erected between art and enjoyability. He feels that today reaching a vast public and capturing its dreams perhaps means acting as the avant-garde, and he still leaves us free to say that capturing readers' dreams does not necessarily mean encouraging escape: it can also mean haunting them.