“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation; of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology… has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”
--J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play…”
Probably it would not be too much to say
that Calvino’s text can be seen as the literary summa of 20th
century ideas about interpretation in the same way people consider the Commedia
of Dante Alighieri (another Italian) as the literary summa of the Medieval Ages.
(Some eminent predecessors: Ovid, Arabian Nights, Boccaccio, Margueritte
de Navarre, Corneille, Chaucer. As for narrative embedding itself prior to
self-reflexivity, we can go as far back as Homer.) And we must hear Nietzsche’s
name here, too, as that text that opened the world up to interpretation (as
Derrida himself indicates in the sentence after the one quoted above). For what
Calvino’s text enacts is that semiotic play that repositions the origin
and the end of interpretation as both textual simulacra and readerly anxiety.
In this textual allegory of Reading (if allegory is not exactly that
instance where the Other speaks), the major protagonist or figure/focalizer is
a Reader (or the Reader, if that would make his identity more definite).
By making its own functional presence
obvious at the incipit by addressing the Reader in the second person, the
(intrusive) narrator provides a space for the intersection of the fictive
Reader with all potential actual readers, implicating the act of reading
the Calvino text with the allegoric narrative of reading of the Calvino text.
The act of reading coincides with the narrative of reading. Hence, here
we could see an additional complication of the game: the narrative of reading
mirrors the “real time” act of reading, or vice versa. And this is not enough.
Within—and we should put quote marks around these words—the fictive world of
the text, we, the readers, discover that, apart from the spiraling
multiplication of non-climaxing counterfeited novels, this double situation is
replicated in Silas Flannery’s projection of a novel where a Reader searches
for the complete text of what he was reading, only to get caught in the spiraling
multiplication of non-climaxing counterfeited novels. Diagrammatically, we could
envision the situation as follows:
Actual
Reader
↓
Calvino
Text m
↓
(Reader-Protagonist
↓
Calvino
Text n
↓
{Ermes-Flannery>>>Calvino
Text p
↓
[Calvino Text m,n]})
This dictates at least two points de
départ for discussion:
1) The allegoric
narrative of reading: a Reader reads the text, finds it incomplete, searches
for completion, materially and aesthetically, discovers multiple forgeries,
meets Ermes and Silas as perpetrators of the design to make a novel about a
Reader who, finding the text incomplete, searches for completion materially and
aesthetically…. The Calvino text transforms into non-Calvino texts, the Reader
hunts down the rest, demands for climax, but a series of incomplete texts
suspends the climax: anticlimactic. Two
types of readers: one who wants climax, another who wants perpetual suspense.
Deferral of the end, which is the deferral of the origin. The Reader is
literally in suspense. His mode of existence, as the allegorical desire for the
Other, is suspension. The title itself of Calvino’s novel leaves us
hanging. It is a fragment. This entails a relation of non-possession of the
Other (text or the other Reader), or a mode of possession that is always
anticlimactic, plural, incomplete, counterfeit, forged. The denouement is a
return to an origin that is constituted as a forgery or translation: at any
rate, a fake text, whose fakeness derives from the assumption of a “real” text?
What is a genuine text in the first place?
2) The coincidence
of the enactment of reading and the allegoric narrative of reading.
Self-reflexivity. What’s the point for this mise en abyme? First, it
poses that the referent of reading is reading itself. Or, the end point of
reading is the beginning of reading; or, vice versa. Secondly, the mise en
abyme device prevents the recuperation of a binary polar narrative economy (as
in realism, Novel/Reality). This is accomplished by replacing a linear temporal
and causal logic with cyclical,
repetitive, acausal, nonbinary parcours that distribute open-ended
multiplicities and non-identities. Does this mean that all readings or
interpretations are valid? A classical question that has plagued debates in
epistemology and hermeneutics. Does the text pose an answer to this question?
Or does the text demand that this question be asked? (We should read closer
then.) Or perhaps the question should be rephrased to: Is it important to ask
what is valid or not? Is it not that what is important is the way all these
multiple repetitions of non-identities (the definition of counterfeits, right?)
interact and make possible the nostalgia for coincidence or convergence with
the other? That the other of reading is what allows reading to happen? Or
perhaps, the truth of reading is in the suspension or in the plural it maintains.
The multiple points of view regarding
reading that can be found scattered in the text and in the last section suspend
the closure of the question of reading. How could have the Calvino text managed
to appropriate the bursting seams of the plural? Perhaps by being plural
as well and by always returning to the plural. Since reading is a discrete
temporal movement, requiring pauses and gaps (the reader gets tired, the text
is made of discontinuous elements: words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters,
etc.), the resumption of reading always conceives a different text. The coming
and going of the Reader is effectuated by the periodic intervention of Sender
and Receiver functions. (Following Greimas, the Subject function of the
narrative is centrally played by the Reader, the Object function the novel
itself, the Helper and Opponent functions variously played by the Other
Reader--a double herself, the Non-Reader, or Ermes Marana. It must be noted
that Ermes both prevents the Reader from attaining a totalizing and final
comprehension of the textual play and aids the Reader in the play by making
possible the existence of the Object of reading itself, however multiple it may
be. Ermes Marana is therefore the symbolic agent of textual play and exchanges,
the “middle man” between readers, texts and writers, texts and readers, texts
and world, and authors and readers.)
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