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Designifiers: Proper and improper names in Italian and French contemporary fiction

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Designifiers: Proper and improper names in Italian and French contemporary fiction

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Content NOTE TO USERS This reproduction is the best copy available. ® UMI R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DESIGNIFIERS: PROPER AND IMPROPER NAMES IN ITALIAN AND FRENCH CONTEMPORARY FICTION by Sabrina Ovan A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2005 Copyright 2005 Sabrina Ovan R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. UMI Number: 3196868 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3196868 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Proper and Improper Names 14 Chapter 2. The Place of Names 52 Chapter 3. Everyday Naming: Georges Perec’s Les Choses 91 Chapter 4. Open names: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler 136 Chapter 5. Nameless History: Luther Blissett’s Q 180 Selected Bibliography 234 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the political and cultural implications of what we may call the de-signification of names and signatures in contemporary literary works, and it investigates the ways in which literature and philosophy have questioned the name-function as individual signifier. It begins with a discussion of the roles that names and the act of naming have taken through the history of philosophy, and it then moves on to examine how these theories interact with works of Italian and French literature from the 1960s to the present. All the fictional works analyzed in this dissertation provide detailed reflections on names, heteronymy and anonymity. Furthermore, these writings are the product of authors who have used multiple and collective names, such as the experimental literary workshop OuLiPo (or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) and the group of Italian writers working under the pseudonym Luther Blissett. My dissertation argues that in the work of writers’ collectives proper names fail to signify, that is to say, they fail to refer to singular individualities and address instead a multiplicity. The first section investigates how the historical transformations of the notion of proper names form a sedimentary bed underlying modem and postmodern texts. The second section is a close analysis of the designification of names and of the socio political concept of anonymity in Georges Perec’s Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties (1965), Italo Calvino’s Oulipian novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Luther Blissett’s historical novel Q (1999). This section provides a close analysis of the ways in which proper names may be used, erased or altered in narrative works, and argues that the novel taken as examples question the institutional, power-related role of names, and turn instead to anonymity and pseudonymity as ways to oppose the restrictive notion of authorship, and take it as a paradigm for the narration of history and modem society. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 Introduction - Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique science where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity o f the body writing. Roland Barthes, “The Death o f the Author. ” - We are accustomed ...to saying that the author is the genial creator o f a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world o f significations. ... The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source o f significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain junctional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses. Michel Foucault, “ What is an Author? ” The main purpose of my dissertation is to analyze the cultural implications of what we may call the de-signification of names and signatures in contemporary literary works. Any contemporary reader of literature, even non professionals or “readers for pleasure,” may be subconsciously aware of the direction that certain recent literary phenomena have taken toward the systematic omission, or more frequently, the alteration, of the authorial signature in narrative works. The tendency to move away from the institution of the signature and privilege anonymity over authorial recognition, or adopt pseudonyms instead of official names is often understood as a way of hiding (for various possible reasons) the real identity of the writer. In many cases, however, anonymity and pseudonymity are instead consciously used as a reflection on the status of authorship, an active gesture that questions official identity-related classifications as well as the definition of the artistic and written work as the expressions of genius. The designification of names may present itself in different forms. Some writers may adopt the omission, the alteration or the multiplication of names within R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 2 the content of their work or choose to operate on the erasure or the modification of their own name. In the examples I offer (texts by Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Luther Blissett) proper names, even when present, are not necessarily defining. Rather one could say that they “become indefinite” or volatile, either in the course of the work or in its reception. The proper name, in other words, seems to abandon the power that was historically and traditionally inherent in it. We could affirm that the reflection on names these texts engage in implies a different paradigm from the traditional linguistic classification that posits the proper name as signifier. In other words, the proper names that appear in these works function as designifiers. My aim, then, is to unravel the formal, social, and political implications of the designification of the name on the form and structure of the work itself. I must underline, however, that this dissertation does not consist of an overview of anonymous or pseudonymous writings throughout the history of literature, but is rather an analysis of the different ways in which the name-function as signifier (and not simply its function as a mark of authorship) has been questioned in literature and philosophy. Although I do indeed begin with the discussion of the concept of authorial name in relation to poststructuralist theories centered on the “death of the author,” I progressively move away from the notion of authorship and concentrate instead on the conceptions and functions of names, and in particular of proper names, per se. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 3 More specifically, in the first part of my work I trace a genealogy of the different forms that the debate surrounding the role of names has taken through the history of philosophy up to contemporary theory. In the second part of my dissertation, I offer, as mentioned, a cluster of examples of a complex and diverse “movements” of de-signification of names. I begin with the reading of two novels: Georges Perec’s Things (1965) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). These texts are paradigmatic not only for the ways in which they play with the function of the proper name, but also because they may be considered as the product of a “multiple name.” Both novels in fact were written at a time in which both Georges Perec and Italo Calvino were members of the literary group Oulipo. Subsequently, in my final chapter, I discuss the more recent anti-authorial literary phenomenon constituted by the collective of writers Luther Blissett/Wu Ming, which began its activity in Bologna around 1994, and I proceed with a close reading of the group’s first novel Q. All the literary texts in my dissertation may be considered experimental works, since they de-emphasize the importance of the name of the author and of the proper name in general. Whether or not signed with the (actual) name of the author, the texts included in this work portray a common attitude towards the treatment of the name as a non-defining category. There are a number of reasons why my discussion starts with a specific reference to the reader of literature as opposed to the writer. First of all, we must admit that inscribed within the role of any literary critic is, primarily, that of a reader. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 4 Secondly, placing the emphasis on the contribution of the reader to the literary work may partially draw the attention away from a hermeneutic attempt that emphasizes the figure of the author. The work of the individual author, in this way, would no longer be the product of individual genius but rather the result of different cultural influences, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, the product of a multiplicity.1 Finally, just like the concept of authorial death, also that of the birth of a new reader who is also an active producer of text is embedded in critical traditions — namely poststructuralism and semiotics — that find their origin in 1960s France and Italy. Although I will not claim that it is solely by means of the intervention of post-structuralism and 1960s literary theory that the role of the reader in the work of art gained a privileged place in the literary debate, we may nonetheless observe that a type of literature characterized by anti-authorial and anti-individualistic stances starts to emerge in the same locations and at the same time as theories surrounding the death of the author, the waning of the subject, the differance of meaning. My analysis, then, revolves around two main considerations. The first is that the attempt at defining the “property” and “propriety” of names (or, in other words, the reason why names came to be considered as proper) dates back at least to the Platonic school of philosophy; the second is that of equally ancient origin is the envisioning of the act of name-giving as an instrument of legal, political, and even divine, power.2 Given the political significance of names and the act of naming, the use of anonymity and pseudonymity is a gesture that potentially contests the rules that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 5 surround the legal, institutional, and conventional power of proper names. Such a gesture may be observed either in writings that are well aware of the cultural and political significance of names, or in what we can call counter-cultural forms of expression (the avant-gardes, activist circles, politically engaged literature). The literary works I analyze belong to both categories. In the case of Calvino and Perec, for instance, they are the product, if not of collective writing, at least of cooperative work. As I briefly mentioned, both writers were members of the literary group Oulipo, which specifically worked on the exploration of linguistic constraint, and on the interconnection between mathematics and language structures. I will argue that through the reflection on proper names in their work, Perec and Calvino add an element of socio-political reflection to the Oulipian corpus, often accused by critics of engaging in simple and meaningless word games. We could claim that the debate surrounding the meaning and function of proper names, signatures, classification, albeit an important matter of discussion over all the history of Western philosophy, has become particularly prominent in Italian and French literary culture during the last forty years, when the accent placed on the notion of collectivity as a political, aesthetic and philosophical principle has overcome the importance of the paradigm of individuality and individualism. Among the reasons for this switch in importance is the great number of written works on the nature of classification, the role of the author and their use as a theoretical basis for collective and ultimately political practices. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 6 All the most representative thinkers of the Italian and French 1960s and 1970s, such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, have produced work on naming, ordering, and classifying, evidencing the epistemological nature of these topics. From Foucault’s and Barthes’ diatribe over the death of the author to Eco’s notion of indeterminacy — and consequent depersonalization — of the art form; from Renato Barilli’s statement that “we can only speak about signifiers” and that “about signifieds, we know nothing,” (Barilli x) to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the signature as a territorial domain, the mystification or manipulation of the primary signifier, the proper name, in all its forms and expressions is, we could say, a starting point for the study of contemporary literary forms and their intertwining with political practices. Numerous recent scholars have pointed out the great influence of the French thought of the late 1960, or as it has been named, 1968 thought on cultural and linguistic practices. In his analysis of literary culture “from mat ’ 68 to the fin-de millenaire,” for instance, critic William Paulson declares that “Poststructuralist thinkers were skeptical of language’s capacity to convey meaning stably or unequivocally, and thus attentive to the multiple possibilities for uncertainty or creative disruption to be found in texts and utterances.” (Paulson 60) To give another example, Kristin Ross points out in her book May ’68 and its Afterlives, that the revolutionary climate of the end of the sixties, which touched politics, culture, and the media influenced the way a generation envisioned not only philosophy or art, but a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 7 way of living altogether. This influence, however, also coincided, according to Kristin Ross, to the waning of the role of the intellectual as a hegemonic political figure (as Sartre was) in favor of the birth of an anti-hegemonic collective culture.3 Ross insists that art started then to “see its purpose as that of keeping apace with events, with achieving a complete contemporaneity with the present and with what is happening around it.” (May 68 15) The Italian 1968, just like the French May, is viewed as an all-encompassing moment of protest.4 In his book A History of Contemporary Italy. Paul Ginsborg states that the Italian 1968 was “an ethical revolt,” or “a notable attempt to turn the tide against the predominant values of the time.” (Ginsborg 301) By the end of the 1960s, students in Italy gave birth to a movement aimed at overthrowing nothing less than “the values that had become predominant in the Italy of the ‘economic miracle,’” (Ginsborg 300) and first of all the value of individualism in favor of collectivity. In his article “Worker Identity in the Factory Desert” Marco Revelli makes similar affirmations, observing that 1968 set up to create “a culture that shared assumptions.” (Revelli 116) As a result of this anti-individualistic current, the culture that arose from the movements of protest was mainly constituted of experiments in cooperative practices of all kind; writing itself becomes a type of collective experience, and group reading of (mainly critical) texts, collective analysis and open interpretations were thought to have the possibility to redefine the political and social role of individual- multiple, or, to use the Marxist term that became popular at the time, of the general R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 8 intellect. The main “assumption” of 1968 Italian culture was then, apparently, that of collective action, in radical opposition to predominant ideals of individualism and the “free development of the personality.”5 The Italian sessantotto, we need to point out, had outcomes possibly more violent and long-lasting than those of the demonstrations of the Parisian May and June.6 As Michael Hardt affirms - quoting Eco— in his book Radical Thought in Italy. “Some like to say that whereas 1968 lasted only a few months in France, in Italy it extended over ten years, right up until the end of the 1970s.” (Hardt and Vimo 3) This time extension is what makes so significant, even for the present, the political and literary theories that sprung from the different phases of the Italian antagonistic movements.7 In this sense it could be useful to take briefly into consideration an unpublished essay by Max Henninger titled “Patchwork 1979: Notes on Blackout by Nanni Balestrini.” Through the reading of a poem by activist-writer-Gruppo 63 member Nanni Balestrini, the article provides an overview of the multiple artistic and political radical movements that promoted, in 1970s Italy, a culture of mass intellectuality. This “new culture” tended to integrate not only high-brow and low-brow expressions, but also the ideas of intellectual and manual labor.8 Often simply referred to as “the Movement,” the different expressions of political antagonism present all over the Italian territory sprung from encounter of the students’ and the workers’ movement; the working class strategies of radical non-collaboration known as operaismo intermingled with the poetic/artistic/political experiments and the theories at the basis R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 9 of the constitution of shared public spaces known as centri sociali. Interestingly, many literary attempts to come out of this movement were reflecting the notions of collectivism and organization of shared space that Henninger defines as the typical features of late 1970s Italy. Henninger talks about Balestrini’s poetry as a “calculated assemblage,” and “not so much the spontaneous expression of a single narrator as a quasi-mathematical process o f‘organizzazione di segni.’” (Henninger 9) Balestrini’s poetry is paradigmatic then of an experimental technique aimed to the creation of texts “that do not so much unfold linear narratives as assemble disjunct semantic elements, between which the reader is invited to make his own connections. Balestrini’s combinatory procedure becomes, as it were, a call to the reader to engage in a process of creative re-combination. Renato Barilli has suggested that, in this sense, Balestrini breaks with the traditional temporal paradigm of narrative, creating a literature that is more properly spatial.” (Henninger 9-10) If we want to trace a line of difference between the two national experiences of the movements in the literature of the time, then, we could say that French theoretical writings display a greater preoccupation with the integration of avant-garde artistic practices into “everyday life,” while for Italian theory the main objects of analysis are the new ideas surrounding of labor that derive from the movimento operaista. New concepts such as ‘immaterial labor,’ ‘mass intellectuality,’ and ‘general intellect,’ which, Hardt states, are the root for today’s attention on “new forms of cooperation and creativity,” (Hardt and Vimo 6) are strictly related to the ideas of cooperativity R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 10 that find their origin in the 1960s and 1970s radical political movements, intermingling with earlier philosophical theories of “openness” and “de individualization.”9 An inquiry over an abstract topic such as the waning of the proper name and the attribution of a diminished importance to the signature is, I claim, a good point of departure for linking together the two traditions. The self-deconstruction of the individual, that considers itself only as a tool for the collective transformation of society is in fact a common aspect either in Italy or in France. Although the national specificity of the two movements has been reiterated at length, all the historical material available today suggests that we cannot clearly separate the experiences of the French and Italian cultural contexts. For these reasons, I will take France and Italy, throughout my dissertation, as an ensemble. The choice of a transnational space of analysis as opposed to a strictly national one will allow me to pin down the common points at the basis the two literary, social and political cultures. Furthermore, a study that touches both the Italian and French tradition under the sign of proper names and anonymity can, in my view, draw together the French theories on the “death of the subject” and the “critique of everyday life” and the Italian studies on the “General Intellect.”1 0 All these concepts are in fact based on the political principles of “collective mind,” or of “mass intellectuality,” which retain a strict link with all the theories on the de-individualization of the author and the de-signification of names by way of anonymity, pseudonymity or heteronimy. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 11 In brief, focusing on the “literary mark” of individuality par excellence, the proper name, and through what we may call a genealogy of names and name giving, I analyze the ways in which this mark has been perceived by a transnational culture of de-individualization. In other words, I intend to point out the historicity of 1968 theories of language, naming and classification, and see how their interrelation with fictional texts is at the basis not only of literary, but also of cultural and political paradigms. To conclude, calling the period roughly from 1965 to the present day the “contemporary” is a highly conventional choice, and by no means an exhaustive one. Once we start discussing the origins and implications names and their erasure carry with them, we will realize that the coordinates we will retrieve might be applied to a far larger number of texts and artistic expressions than those discussed in the present work. The same coordinates might also apply to earlier texts and to linguistic traditions other than the French and the Italian. There is no doubt, nonetheless, that the period from the sixties to the present in European literature was dominated by an epistemic change that has affected social and political life and that has sensibly left its trace in the ways in which literature is now read and understood in the Western world. Notes 1 At the very beginning of one of the most significant works on the multiplicity of the individual subject, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, we read: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 12 habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” (A Thousand Plateaus 3) 2 See Chapter 1 of this dissertation for a more specific definition of the word name. 3 Ross writes: “Intellectuals ... had no specific place in May, no particular role; they were like everyone else, part of the crowd ... Like everyone else, they did not represent a concrete social category, but merely an agent at work with other agents, on the street, inscribed in the same project. In fact, it was their refusal to self-identity as intellectuals that motivated their actions.” (May 68 174) 4 It is very common to think of the sixties (and especially of “1968”) in Europe as a time in which traditional bourgeois values were reversed. Although this affirmation may be discussed at length, we must agree that the revolutionary thought of 1968 in France has assumed, in the written documents, an extremely intellectual dimension. French scholars and university professors who participated into the revolutionary events of 1968 wrote about putting into question the different cores in which the socio political system was structured. In a collection of essays written between august 1968 and 1969 and titled: Reflection on the Revolution in France: 1968. we read: “Adult society, whose first claim had been its ability to take decisions calmly, to override mere differences of opinion with fact and reason underneath its technocratic and liberal window dressing, was found to be hypocritical. Any control of student activity from the banning of political discussion in universities to the segregation of sexes in lodgings was seen as a means to condition the student to hierarchical control. Knowledge in such a society is only the knowledge of techniques and ‘know-how’ and never the knowledge ‘why’ and ‘for what purpose.’ But for the student the list of whys became endless. Why do we study ‘deviants’, they asked, and why not compulsive adjusters like the man who never protests, the banker and the politician? Why study the insane and not the businessman who remains calm in the face of inhuman working conditions and degrading jobs? Why study the habits of the poor and not the practices of the very rich? Why assume a model man and not take people as they are?” (Posner 38-39) 5 Ginsborg writes that the students’ sense of rejection “was able to find fertile support in minority developments in both the dominant ideologies of Italy, Catholicism and Marxism. The pontificate of John XXIII had opened the Italian church to a new ferment of ideas and activities. More than ever before, attention was paid to the need for social justice. In 1967, Don Milani, a dissident Catholic priest, published an extraordinary book called Lettera a Una Professoressa. In it, students from the school of Barbiana, in the village of Vecchio Mugello, north of Florence, documented the class bias of the educational system and the triumph of individualism in the new Italy. The philosophy of Italian education, according to Don Milani’s school students, ran as follows: ‘Woe betide him who touches the Individual. The Free Development of the Personality is your supreme conviction. You care nothing for society or its needs ... you also know less them us about your fellow men. The lift is a machine for avoiding your neighbors, the car for ignoring people who go by tram, the telephone for not talking face face and for not going to other people’s homes.’ The book rapidly became a cult text for the student movement.” (Ginsborg 300) 6 Hardt divides the Italian experience of 1968 in three major phases: “A first long season of political struggles extended from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, in which factory workers constituted the epicenter of the social movements. The attention of revolutionary students and intellectuals was focused on the factories ... The most significant radical political theorizing of this period dealt with the emerging autonomy of the working class with respect to capital, that is, its power to generate and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 13 sustain social forms and structures of value independent of capitalist relation of production, and similarly, the potential autonomy of social forces from the domination of the state ... A second stage of the movements can be defined roughly by the period from 1973 to 1979. In general terms, the focus of radical struggles spread in this period out of the factory and into society, not diluted but intensified. Increasingly, the movements became a form of life. The antagonism between labor and capital that had developed in the closed spaces of the shop floor now invested all forms of social interaction. Students, workers, groups of the unemployed, and other social and cultural forces experimented together in new democratic forms of social organization and political action in horizontal, nonhierarchical networks ... Beginning at the end f the 1970s, the Italian State conducted an enormous wave of repression. The magistrates sought to group together and prosecute the terrorist groups along with the entire range of alternative social movements ... the symbolic defeat took place in 1980 at the Fiat auto plant in Turin.” (Hardt and Vimo 2-3) 7 Hardt claims that “the intense work militancy of the 1960s, the social and cultural experimentations of the 1970s, and the repression of the 1980s ... made Italy exceptional with respect to the other European countries and the United States.” (Hardt and Vimo 4) Although I do not intend to contrast this view and claim that the French and the Italian experiences of 1968 follow the same direction, the similarity of French and Italian thought, at least at an intellectual level, is impossible to overlook. 8 Henninger writes: “With the appearance of the journals Ouademi Rossi and Classe Operaia (in 1961 and 1964, respectively), there emerged in Italy a new current of Marxism known as operaismo. It constituted an attempt to formulate a conceptual apparatus and a practical strategy that would do justice to the transformation of the Italian working class during the period of postwar reconstruction while taking account of the problematic character of Soviet Marxism as highlighted by the tragic outcomes of the Hungarian insurrection of 1956. The distinctive trait of operaismo consisted in its insistence on the autonomy and primacy of working-class struggle with regard to capitalist planning. For the theorists of operaismo, the working class needed to be thought of not as passively responding to the transformations of capitalism as imposed by entrepreneurs, but rather as the driving force behind those transformations.” (Henninger 1-2) 9 See, in particular, Umberto Eco’s The Open Work. 1 0 The author-function, in the words of Michel Foucault is the of the “mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” (“What is an Author?” 148) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 14 Chapter 1. Proper and Improper Names. 1.1. Proper Names, Authors and Signatures. Roland Barthes’ 1972 essay “The Death of the Author” underlines how the name of the author, as the expression of the person that stands at the origin of the work, is a historically determined figure. Barthes writes: The author is a modem figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French Rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.” (“The Death of the Author” 1) English Empiricism, French Rationalism, and even the “personal faith of the Reformation” represent three key moments of crisis in history. They are crucial to the study I will conduct in my dissertation, which is concerned with the analysis of different epistemic breaks when the notion of individual (and individuality itself) undergoes significant changes. These traditions are important not only for the study of the history of the author, as Barthes states, but also in order to generate a hypothesis about the larger cultural stakes of the multiplication, an alteration, or even the omission of proper names (authors, characters, places) in written works. It is interesting, in fact, to note that in the conceptions of French Rationalism of the seventeenth century (Descartes) as well as in the studies on language of the French and the English empiricists of the eighteenth century (Locke, Condillac, Rousseau), the proper name is a particle of written language endowed of great power. The debate R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 15 around the supposed power names contain and generate, though, has a much earlier origin. We could indeed state that names, and the proper name in particular, have been considered as tools or instruments of power since the beginning of writing. And since writing has, from antiquity onward, surged to privileged status over simple speech, the signature, understood here as the writing of the proper name, is the expression in which this power is most clearly manifested. Here of course we will need to make a specification. A signature meant as the written mark of a proper name can be understood in at least two different ways. In general use, the signature is the cursive writing of somebody’s name, which is legally binding precisely because it is handwritten; because, we could say, the writing hand is its only possessor, and the same hand is also a guarantee of its reproducibility. But a signature may also be a printed mark of a name (think, for instance, of the name of the author in the cover of books). In this case, the signature may be reproduced, and, we may say, disseminated by anybody, but it is nonetheless understood as the written mark of an individual that allows this individual to become “public.” The study of cursive signatures can be an interesting topic in itself, but it would direct my research toward questions related to the legal aspect of the signed text and the legal persona of the author (the body of the writing hand, we could say). For these reasons I choose to concentrate on the second meaning of the word, which I will now explain in more detail. The word signature from now on should be understood as the printed mark of any proper name in a written work. I do not make a specific R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 16 distinction here between the name of an author and a name of a character in a written work, since what interests me is the status of the printed name in general and the ways in which it has referred through history to both the name giver and the object named. The meaning and the use of proper names and signatures in narrative works is an important topic for literary criticism, and especially for French and Italian criticism originating in the 1960s. The study of the author-function, for instance, and, implicitly, the name of the author in artistic expressions, is the basis for Barthes’ and Foucault’s respective essays “The Death of the Author” and “What is an Author?” Foucault, in particular, states: “The coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences.” (“What is an Author?” 141) To the notion of author Foucault opposes that of a writing subject who cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the author must assume the role of the “dead man in the game of writing”. In conclusion, Foucault affirms that the name of the author does not really indicate a person, but rather a classifying function. He states: “the author- function is characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” (“What is an Author?” 148) If the author-function is specified by a written name, then, what are the definitions of the name-paradigm and of the signature? Or, how are these categories formed, and what relation do they have with the written word? R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 17 Following the argument Deleuze and Guattari expound in A Thousand Plateaus, the signature, or the expressive form of the name, constitutes a “temporal constancy and a spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark.” (A Thousand Plateaus 315) The signature is then, a written, hence spatial, mark of presence. We may retrieve a similar idea, in relation to the written form of the name, in the early (1967) work by Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology. where he writes: To the extent that the constitution of ideal objectivity must essentially pass through the written signifier, no theory of this constitution has the right to neglect the investment of writing ... Thus the name, and especially the proper name, is always caught in a chain or a system of differences. It becomes appellation only to the extent that it may inscribe itself within a figuration. Whether it be linked by its origin to the representations of things in space or whether it remains caught in a system of phonic differences or social classifications apparently released from ordinary space, the proper-ness of the name does not escape spacing. Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal [propre] meaning does not exist, its ‘appearance is a necessary function - and must be analyzed as such - in the system of differences and metaphors.” (Of Grammatology 88-89) The presence of the signature as a written mark, then, should not make us think of one image, one author or character that is signified by that particular name. Derrida poses this question: Is it not evident that no signifier, whatever its substance and form, has a ‘unique and singular reality’? A signifier is from the very beginning the possibility of its own repetition, of its own image or resemblance. It is the condition of its ideality, what identifies as a signifier, and makes it function as such, relating to a signifier which, for the same reasons, could never be a ‘unique and singular reality.’ From the moment that the sign appears, that is to say from the very beginning, there is no chance of encountering anywhere the purity of ‘reality’, ‘unicity’, ‘singularity.’ fOf Grammatology 911 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 18 The (signed) proper name may at most make us think of a “genre,” a multiplicity of things and ideas that a sign written on a page, and especially a nominal sign, brings to the surface by analogy. In literature, the signature shares a strict relation with the proper name, but the two terms, we need to specify, are not interchangeable. As Peggy Kamuf states in her 1988 book Signature Pieces: “A signature is not a name; at most it is a piece of a name, its citation according to certain rules. But neither it is simply a piece of common language that can be picked up and used by just anyone to any purpose. Like a dash or hyphen — a trait — the signature spaces out, joins, and dissociates.” (Kamuf 11) Kamuf s study, like Deleuze and Guattari’s, underlines that the role of the signature is a spatial one, because it is centered around the determination of a place for the concept signed, the concept that bears the guarantee of the author. In all the theoretical work I have mentioned, the signature is not the mark of a single and unmistakable signified, but rather a trait that “dissociates” as well as “joins,” a mark which is impossible to keep in a single place. Even though this trait is at times associated with death, as in Barthes, this association should not make us think of its disappearance, its inutility, or even less, its fixity. Kamuf reminds us that the brandishing of the phrase death o f the author “as a token in some struggles has not helped to illuminate its possible import because the question of whether one is for or against the ‘death of the author’ obviously makes little sense in itself.” (Kamuf 5) Interestingly, to the rather morbid idea of the dead author, she opposes the notion of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 19 “floating authorship,” an idea that better suits the image of continuous displacement of signatures. We should then discuss whether affirmations of the multiple value of the signature might be applied also to the more general concept of the proper name, and whether or not such affirmations constitute a rupture with the traditional ways names were conceived in the past. 1.2. Cratylus’ view. What stands at the basis of contemporary notions of names? In Western thought, the debate over the formation and the function of names, and names’ relation to objects and persons dates back to the pre-Socratic schools of philosophy.1 As amusingly parodied in Plato’s Cratylus. as early as 400 B.C., both the Heracliteans and the Sophists had very exhaustive (and expensive) views on the matter.2 We read in the Cratylus: S o c r a t e s: S o our next task is to try to discover what this correctness is, if indeed you want to know. H e r m o g en e s: Of course I do. So c r a t e s: Then investigate the matter H e r m o g en e s: H ow am I to do that? So c r a t e s: The most correct way is together with people who already know, but you must pay them well and show gratitude besides-they are the sophists. Your brother Callias got his reputation for wisdom from them in return for a lot of money.” (Cratylus 392c) Plato’s Cratylus is one of the most exhaustive ancient texts to deal with the origins, the significance and the “propemess” of names (onomata). The dialogue is primarily centered on the establishment of the correctness of names, focusing, as Susan S. Levin states, “on the thesis that ovopaxa are assigned correctly if R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 20 etymological analyses of them disclose their referents’ natures.” (Levin 47) As J. L. Ackrill points out, the Cratylus “opens with a confrontation between Hermogenes and Cratylus, who hold opposed views on a linguistic question, whether names are purely conventional or have some natural correctness; and the dialogue mainly consists in an examination of the two rival answers to these questions. But it ends with a confrontation between two ontological theories, the Heraclitean doctrine of flux and the Platonic doctrine of Forms.” (Ackrill 125) The dialogue brings forward two very distinct (and distant) hypotheses of the relation names have with things: the theory of •2 “conventionalism” and that of “naturalism.” In the dialogue, Socrates contrasts the views of Hermogenes who is convinced of the complete arbitrariness of names (conventionalism), and of Cratylus, who thinks all names possess an innate rightness as a given of nature (naturalism).4 Socrates’ own position is located somewhere between the two views. He treats the name as a “tool” for “dividing things according to their natures.” (Cratylus 388a) In line with Cratylus, Socrates asserts that there is an innate correctness of names, but he points out that this correctness is strictly related to the name-giver. As Umberto Eco states in his book The Search for the Perfect Language, “even by these cultures that ignored Cratylus. every discussion on the nature of a perfect language has revolved around the three possibilities first set out in this dialogue.” (Search 10) In the first part of the Cratylus we come across a lengthy etymologic description of the proper names of the gods and goddesses; in the second part, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 21 Socrates analyzes common names such as “aletheia” (truth), “pseudos” (falsehood), “on” (being), and the name itself, “onoma.” The dialogue, however, does not linger on the difference between common and proper names, making names and more general “words” and “actions” apparently coincide.5 The intent of the Cratylus. rather, seems to be directed to conveying a sense of truthfulness, or at least a justification for how names adapt to things. Socrates mostly insists upon the division between names that are “right” or “wrong.” In other words, even though we never clearly see the distinctive characteristics of proper names in the dialogue, we do come across “proper” names, and names that are definitely “improper.” An improper name is a name “wrongly given,” that is to say attributed by an inappropriate name-giver (a common citizen, for instance, or a woman).6 Following this argument, a naming convention can be defined as the practice of using a name in the way inaugurated by a relevant name-giving. More precisely, it is the practice of applying the name to its referent (if it is the name of an individual) or to objects belonging to its referent (in the case of names of kinds). Socrates tells Hermogenes that the action of speaking, like every other action or crafts, requires its proper tools and expertise. By consequence, he states: “it isn’t every man who can give names, Hermogenes, but only a name-maker, and he, it seems, is a rule-setter - the kind of craftsman most rarely found among human beings.” (Cratylus 395a) The name is, Socrates insists, the tool of a ruler, and as such it should be held and given by a rule-setter. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 22 Name-object relation, Rachel Barney explains in her book Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus, “is standardly established by an act of imposition - a namegiving or baptism by an authoritative namegiver.” (Barney 5) Names are, as we have seen, tools that divide things according to their natures, but their correctness is strictly dependent on the person who chooses (or, in Socrates’ words, “produces”) the name. A name, then, represents more than a simple tool or possession: it is an instrument of power, or, in Socrates’ words, “the product of a rule-setter.” (Cratvlus 338a) Since a name is the property of the “wise men,” or legislators, we can see how the propemess of names in the Platonic conception involves the double notion of propriety, or correctness, and of property, or possession. The Cratvlus revolves around two main ideas: one is that names are the basic tools for speaking, the “smallest part of a statement;” the second is that it is necessary to have the skills of a name giver (or legislator) in order to use these tools. The correct ways in which names are chosen, hence what makes names “proper,” depends on the judgment of the name-giver, the one who possesses, and may subsequently give away the property of the name. Considering that names are, in the Platonic conception, something that belongs to someone and that can be “given,” the figure of the name giver must necessarily be a figure of power. The function of the name, then, is literally a political one. Numerous scholars, such as J.V. Luce, Rachel Barney and Susan Levin, have pointed out the political aspect of the set of concerns in the Cratvlus. Luce, for R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 23 instance, states that Plato “was well aware that in the commerce of society name and thing must be properly yoked together if truth is to proceed and be conveyed from mind to mind.” (Luce 232) Barney’s position is even more detailed. She states: The starting point of the Cratylus is the presumption that our naming conventions are legitimately subject to rational scrutiny and critique; and the central project of the Cratylus is thus in a broad sense political. It is parallel to Plato’s explicitly political investigations in other dialogues and involves treating language as a social institution like any other. Like a law, a name may be instituted and applied well or badly, with or without intelligence ... This political bearing is what makes it important to refute Hermogenes’ conventionalism at the outset of the dialogue. (Barney 13) Indeed, “at the outset of the dialogue” the conventionalist Hermogenes is easily convinced with Socrates’ theory, while the Heraclitean Cratylus is doubtful. And to Socrates’ invitation to think about the matter of the correctness of names, he replies: “I’ll do that. But I assure you, Socrates, that I have already investigated them and have taken a lot of trouble over the matter, and things seem to me to be very much more as Heraclitus says they are.” (Cratvlus 440e) And when he is advised to go “off into the country” and think about the discussion on names, he states: “I’ll do that, Socrates, but I hope that you will also continue to think about these matters yourself.” (Cratvlus 440e) This ending has led scholars believe that Plato privileged Cratylus’ position over Hermogenes’, and that the Platonic dialogue intends to leave the question of the correctness of names open.7 We have seen how, in the Platonic dialogue, names are conceived as instruments of power. The power that the name giver holds is one of ordering, of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 24 classification. In her analysis, which touches both the Cratvlus and the later Sophist. Luce remarks that “for the purposes of a particular argument, the general class of names has to be clearly subdivided into the sub-classes of ‘agent-names’ and ‘activity- names.’ The blending of these sub-classes effects one particular type of ‘revelation’ of reality. This is the revelation accomplished by what Aristotle calls the ajrocpavTucoc; Xoyoq, i.e. the assertorial statement.” (Luce 229) Although we do not find, in Aristotle’s work, a description of names as detailed as that offered in the Cratvlus. what Branka Arsic calls, in her recent essay “On Leaving No Address,” the possibility “to articulate and think identities” (Arsic 296) is at the basis of the Organon, the earliest formal study of logic based on the syllogism and the category. 1.3. The Organon. Name-related questions, especially the notion of identity and its division into categories, is foundational in the thought of Aristotle. In the Organon (and especially in the two sections On Interpretation and Posterior Analytics!, subjects and predicates of assertions are usually called “terms” (horos, instead of onomatd). A term can be either individual (“Socrates,” “Plato”) or universal (“human,” “animal”).8 In Aristotle, language represents the world merely by referring to it. Umberto Eco claims that for Aristotle language stands “to the world in the relation of signifier to signified or sign to its referent.” (Search 31) The notions of truth and falsity in Aristotle seem to be displaced from the name itself to the use of the name that the speaker makes in a statement. Critic David Charles states that for Aristotle “names are signs for thoughts R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 25 which are not yet combined with other thoughts that are signs for verbs so as to make affirmations, capable of truth or falsity.” (Charles 81) The Organon makes a further distinction between individual (differentia) or multiple reference {genus) of names {terms or definitions). In the words of Herbert Granger: “In the definition the genus divides the species from the thing in general, and the differentia distinguishes it from the other things falling under its genus.” (Granger 258) Aristotle’s discussion on names in the Organon seems related to the single or multiple referentiality of terms in classifications rather than to the actual description, or definition of what names are.9 We have seen how the Platonic dialogue portrays the name and the act of naming as part of a hierarchic structure, introducing the notion that names are instilled with the values of both property and propriety. Both notions of “rightness of names” presented in the Cratvlus and “genus and difference” of the Organon are at the basis of modem and contemporary theories on naming, definition, and classification. Jacques Derrida talks more specifically about the name and its Platonic conception in his three-essay study Sauf le Nom (On the name in English translation). The first Platonic reference of his study, though, is not from the Cratvlus but instead from the Timaeus. a dialogue on the theory of forms, which intermingles with both the study of the categories in Aristotle’s Organon and the ontological questions of the Metaphysics. In his essay, Derrida explains the function of the name by putting it in relation to the Platonic term khora, (from the Timaeust and the (Aristotelian) logic of non-contradiction. Derrida affirms that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 26 when a name comes, it immediately says more than the name: the other of the name and quite simply the other, whose irruption the name announces. This announcement... still remains alien to the person, only naming imminence, even only an imminence that is alien to the myth, the time, and the history of every possible promise and threat. (On The Name 89) Derrida, then, continues: “if khora indeed presents certain attributes of the word as proper name, isn’t that only via its apparent reference to some uniqueness ... the reference or this referent does not exist. It does not have the characteristics of an existent, by which we mean an existent that would be receivable in the ontologic, that is, those of an intelligible or sensible existent.” (On the Name 97) In the Timaeus the khora is seen in relation to the problem of the logos, and understood both as the question of the origin of the experience of the world and the question of the strategy of reasoning. We read, in the Platonic dialogue: Let us rather declare that the cause and purpose of this supreme good is this: the god invented sight and gave it to us so that we might observe the orbits of intelligence in the heavens and apply them to the revolutions of our new understanding. For there is a kinship between them, even though our revolutions are disturbed, whereas the universal orbits are disturbed ... likewise, the same account goes for sound and hearing - these too are the gods’ gifts, given for the same purpose and intended to achieve the same result. Speech (logos) was designed for this very purpose - it plays the greatest part in this achievement.” (Timaeus 47c-d) The name, which as we have mentioned, is the smallest part of language, is a foundational issue in Derrida (as it was in Plato) because it poses the problem of the relation between the I and language. The essay by Derrida is, Italian critic Gianfranco Dalmasso observes, structured by the political and cosmologic scene setting of the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 27 Timaeus. It moves from the Platonic perspective for which khora is the elusive origin as a problem of the being of language, and, we could say, of names being part of this primordial state of being. The name is an object that is not to be enclosed in a “difference,” not even into sexual difference. No name can indicate an essence of names, and, Dalmasso writes, “the khora is in itself sui generis, a genre of its own, it is the way of naming, which is also, necessarily the origin of naming.” (Dalmasso 10) The question over the origin of something, including names, is at the center of Platonic thought but, it is commonly believed, not of Derridean thought. The last claim is only partially true. Although we can say that the idea of going “beyond” the origin pervades Derrida’s discourse in general, we should not think that poststructuralism and deconstruction, as methods of philosophical inquiry, attempt to discard the notion of origin altogether. What do we mean, then, in poststructuralist terms, by “starting from the beginning”? We can find an explanation of the task Derrida sets out to solve in the following sentences. He writes: Let us go back behind and below the assured discourse of philosophy, which proceeds by oppositions of principle and counts on the origin as on a normal couple. We must go back toward a preorigin which deprives us of this assurance and requires at the same time an impure philosophical discourse, threatened, bastard, hybrid. fOn the Name 126) Reading these words, it seems that the search of what the philosopher calls a “preorigin,” does not preclude the possibility of considering the concept of origin altogether. The “impure philosophical discourse” appears to rest on the notion that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 28 there is no hope to find a universally valid origin for acts, events, or philosophical concepts multiplicity of contextualized “originary moments.” Derrida himself, after all, brings forth history and the question of origin when interpreting text, and Khora is only an example among many. With this idea of (non)origin in mind, we can consider Plato’s Cratvlus and Aristotle’s categories as the originary theories of names, as well as the ideas that shaped modem European conceptions of literature, speech, and writing. These two different theories, the Aristotelian “universality of the logos” and the Platonic “realism,” however are by no means the only theories of names and the act of naming in for the development of Western thought. If, following the Cratvlus. names are the first particle of language, and the name-giver is the figure who decides what names are right in the first instance, then what or who is at the origin of name-giving? In other words, where do names come from? This question carries with it a series of philosophical implications. If the name giver is the figure that conveys correctness to a name, then we are almost forced to think of a primordial name-giver, someone who, by giving the first names to things, also originated language itself. The myth of the Nomothete — the original name-giver - in theories regarding the search for the original Adamic language, has tried to attribute this function to the first man God put on earth. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 29 1.4. The Nomothete. The notion of Adamic language and the theory of naming that derives from it are not directly related to classic philosophy hut rather to another “original” (and non- Westem) source, the Bible, and more specifically to the passage in Genesis in which Adam utters his first words giving names to the creatures that populated the earth. The Adamic language (or “natural language,” opposed to divine language) is supposedly the language through which God and Adam spoke and understood each other before the fall (was it Hebrew? Greek? Latin?), hence the perfect language. In his article “Languages in Paradise,” Umberto Eco writes that the quest for the perfect language originated in Europe during the fifth and sixth century A.D., when the populations started abandoning Latin as the universal language. Eco writes: “It thus happens that as soon as Europe was bom as a bunch of people speaking different tongues, European culture reacted by feeling such an event not as a beginning but as the end of a lost harmony, a new Babel-like disaster, so that a remedy for linguistic confusion needed to be sought.” (Serendinities 29-30) In his essay, Eco studies the development of the theory of the perfect Adamic language through the connection between the Greek and the Judeo-Christian theories on the origin of naming.1 0 In Genesis, as known, Adam’s first God-given task was to give names to “every beast of the field and every fowl of the land.” (Genesis 2:19) This passage has evidently been subject to numerous interpretations. Although this is not the place to analyze all its implications in philosophical and religious thought (the attempt at the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 30 recuperation of the language of Adam before the fall had purposes of eternal salvation) we can take it as a point of departure for an analysis of the myth of the Nomothete, the original Name-giver. The investigation of man’s natural language starts precisely with the acknowledgement of Adam as Nomothete, and discusses the power that the first man (and subsequently humanity in general) acquires through his name-giving ability. Since name-giving is Adam’s first linguistic action, the studies on Adamic language usually attribute to names a divine quality. Eco writes: “It was said of Adam that he had given ‘proper’ names to things, the names that the things should have as they expressed their nature.” (Serendinities 79) In Serendipities and The Search for the Perfect Language. Eco notices how the myth of the Nomothete in the Christian philosophic tradition intermingles with the discussion of the rule-setter in the Cratvlus. He states: “the ancient Greeks debated a problem that Genesis left unsolved, that is, the problem of the relationship between names and things. Plato in the Cratvlus discusses the problem of whether words have their source in nature, by direct imitation of things, or in law, by convention.” (Serendipities 26-27) In modem language, the word Nomothete specifically means “lawgiver,” taking its meaning from the nomos (the law) instead of onoma (the name). But this lawgiver is also the original denominator, Adam in Genesis or the “craftsman rarely found among human beings” of the Cratylus. In the Bible the action of naming seems to be the gesture that most closely relates man to God. Not only does Adam’s primordial act of naming reproduce God’s R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 31 act of creation: we know that God himself begins his work with an act of nomination, calling “the light Day and the darkness ... Night.” (Genesis 1:5, 8) It is unclear, however, on what basis Adam actually chose the names he gave to the animals. Eco writes: The version in the Vulgate, the source for European culture’s understanding of the passage, does little to resolve this mystery. The Vulgate has Adam call the various animals nominibus suis, which we can translate only as “by their own names.” The King James version does not help us anymore: “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” (Genesis 2:19)... Thus Adam might have called the animals “by their own names” in two senses. Either he gave them the names that, by some extralinguistic right, were already due them, or he gave them those names we still use on the basis of a convention initiated by Adam. In other words, the names Adam gave the animals are either the names that each animal intrinsically ought to have been given or simply the names that the Name Giver arbitrarily and adplacitum decided to give them. (Serendipities 24) Dante’s Paradiso is one of the earliest literary texts to expound a complete thesis on the difference between natural and divine language. In Canto XXVI, when Dante encounters Adam and speaks to him, he gives an account of his own search for the perfect language.1 1 The words the two characters exchange are centered on language and naming; in particular Dante and Adam debate the establishment of the appropriate name for God. Dante thinks that the first sound emitted by Adam could only have been an exclamation of joy that, at the same time, was an act of homage towards his creator. The first word that Adam uttered must therefore have been the name of God, El (the first Hebrew name for God in the Patristic tradition). Once again, the first language act is an act of nomination. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 32 The discussion over the language of Adam starts to gain importance in the Middle Ages, and it expands beyond that period, influencing modem conceptions of 10 language and science. In his book The Language of Adam. Russell Fraser remarks that “in the seventeenth century... men like Bacon and Hobbes, Bishops Wilkins and Sprat, on the continent Descartes and Leibniz, John Amos Comenius see a way to annul the confusion of tongues and restore the primitive concord. The goal to which they are tending is the enfranchisement of man. Put more boldly, is the reversal of the primal fall.” (Fraser 2) Interestingly, this tradition takes the Platonic view on naming in contrast to the Aristotelian logical categories, which were commonly accepted in 1 ^ the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The studies on language of the sixteenth and seventeenth century (the Grammaire de Port Rovale above all), follow the tradition related to Adamic language in the sense that they tend to pose, as did Plato and the Platonists, reality before language itself. The scientific intelligence chooses “not to regard the credit of names but things.”1 4 (Fraser 13) To the dilemma of whether names are attached to things by natural appropriateness or by arbitrium, however, philosophy does not provide a definite answer. Rather it chooses to privilege, alternatively in different periods of time, the Aristotelian or the Platonic, the naturalist or the conventionalist theory. The question of the “correctness of names,” at any rate, is a recurrent theme in the writings of the Greek and Christian tradition, and is treated in very similar terms in the two sources. It is through names, often simply referred to as “words,” that the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 33 theories of natural languages made their way in the European thought of the eighteenth century. French empiricism (largely deriving its theories from Locke) makes the claim that language is the first source in the formation of human ideas. In the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), interestingly published without the signature of the author, Condillac explains that his design is to “reduce everything that pertains to the human mind to a single principle, and that this principle shall be neither an abstract maxim, nor a gratuitous supposition, but a firm fact of experience whose consequences will all be confirmed by new acts of experience.” (Condillac 5) He adds: “Ideas connect with signs and it is only by these means that they connect among themselves.” (Condillac 7) When engaging in the detailed study of how Western (alphabetical) languages are organized, Condillac refers to the name as “the most natural sign of our ideas.” (Condillac 170) The name is also the sign that maintains the primacy in the hierarchy of language because “in every case, except that of substances, the essence of the thing coincides with the notion we have formed, so that consequently, the same name is equally the sign of either.” (Condillac 171) Names are also, for the French philosopher, the elements of language that maintain a certain fixity through time, so, we may imply, they are the most “originary” part of language. The Platonic theory on names of the Cratvlus reappears in another influential text of the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages espouses from its beginning the Platonic notion of propriety, or correctness of names. In regard to whether or not “names are true, on the basis of the supposed immediate reference of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 34 their elementary component names,” (Rousseau 16) Rousseau writes: “Plato’s Cratvlus is not as ridiculous as it appears to be,” (Rousseau 16) since “if it still existed, the first tongue would retain the original characteristics that would distinguish it from all others. Not only would all the forms of this tongue have to be in images, feelings and figures, but even in its mechanical part it would have to correspond to its initial object.” (Rousseau 14-15) Both Rousseau’s and Condillac’s essays place names at the basis of the system of knowledge. Just as in the Platonic dialogue, in the studies origin of languages names retain a clear hegemonic value in the hierarchic structure of language. Even if we, as contemporary readers, distance ourselves from the idea that names have a form of correctness, or “exactness” an idea that has retained little or no value in itself, we nonetheless recognize the foundational importance of the name giver as a figure of power. As Eco makes clear, the Nomothete is still, in our imaginary, a figure that retains a certain fascination. And the power of the Nomothete resides, as in a syncretistic ensemble of the Cratvlus. the Timaeus and the Categories. in the ability of dividing classes, genera, categories. Contemporary western philosophy still considers the act of classifying, or dividing things into categories as the primary human abilities. Foucault, for instance, calls this ability “the bare experience of order.” And although the question of whether names apply to things by nature or by arbitrium is still the main point of discussion in epistemological theories, the figure of the Nomothete, as the original “human being,” “divinity” or simple “act” that creates R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 35 names, and by extension, language has nonetheless retained its ruling position over the centuries.1 5 1.5. Names in the present. In order to study the directions the power of names has taken in contemporary literature, we will need to analyze the name-tool and, possibly, find out how the relation between name and name-giver has developed in Western culture. We have briefly seen what names were in the antiquity and in the eighteenth century, but if we want to advance with our inquiry we should probably ask ourselves what a name is now. The simplest answer to this question is that a name is a particle of language, but we also know that it is not just any particle of language. A name is generally thought of as designating identities, and, at least in the Western imaginary, it is the language unit at the basis of classification. Names are mostly suited to classifying since the name has, unlike other particles of language, a direct relation with the things of the outside world. While a verb may designate a rather abstract concept such as an action; while pronouns and adverbs indicate the relation among language parts, the name designates the “thing that is named.” For this reason all names share a privileged relation with the things of the outside world and with human beings. To say that (both common and proper) names are basic parts of classification is equivalent to saying that names are the ordering parts of language. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 36 If in the Platonic conception names signify some sort of “models” for real objects, modem philosophers of language like, for instance, Brice Parain insist that, as language is an abstraction, denomination cannot be true to the model per se, but changes according to the use the naming human being makes of the name. The relation the name giver has with the name, though, remains crucial. In his book Recherche sur la Nature et les Fonctions du Langage. written in 1945, Parain affirms that “Les philosophes ont bien observe que toute perception se constitue par un jugement. Mais ont-ils suffisament souligne que c’est la denomination qui est le premier jugement, et qu’elle est le moment decisif de la perception?” (Parain 21) Denomination, the attribution of a name to a thing, is for Parain “la premiere attribution, celle sur qui tout raisonnement repose, car avant de dire que Socrate est sage, il faut d’abord qu’il soit que cet homme dont il est question a pour nom Socrate.” (Parain 23) This theory seems interestingly close to Socrates’ views and to the Adamic nomothesis. However, even though Parain observes that a name is “the first attribution” and “the decisive moment of perception,” he regards denomination as arbitrary, and lacking a direct or “natural” counterpart in the objects of the real world. Names designate a “function” or a “place in the chronology,” but they do not represent the actual individual or thing that is named. Parain writes: “si je veux reconnaitre quelqu’un, je lui donne un nom, mais ce nom n’est pas lui ... Autant qu’une deformation, nos paroles sont une formation, autant qu’une negation de quelque chose, elles sont une affirmation d’autre chose, qui est peut-etre le plus important, qui est peut-etre l’essentiel.” (Parain 28) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 37 This conception of names posits denomination as the first classifying use of language, but is ambivalent as to the importance of the function of name-giver -- and even of the name itself — of providing a singular signification for the thing that is named. We could infer from this conception that the power of ordering that the name-giver held in Plato’s dialogue is sensibly diminished. 1.6. Foucault’s Order. To conclude our inquiry about the “evolution” of the concept of naming in our age, we should consider one of the most influential books dealing with the denomination of things. The Order of Things, written in 1966 by Michel Foucault, re opens for the contemporary critic the question of the signification of names and things.1 6 Here Foucault affirms that, in Western history, the classification of things - hence the use of names in their relation with the objects of the outside world - is not “natural” or “arbitrary” per se, but has functioned in different ways through different periods of time. In this way, the different classifying methods have changed the epistemological systems that characterized different ages in the history of Western 17 culture. In his book The death and Return of the Author. Sean Burke affirms: So far from being a paradigm that has been superimposed upon an era, or an analytic reduction of the mass of discourse, the epistemological arrangement is the ground and possibility of thought itself, the potency of which the discourse of the age is an actualization. To this system of relations Foucault gave the name episteme; to the science of its recovery, ‘archeology.’ (Burke 62) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 38 The episteme is then the ground for any inquiry on the relation between names and things through history. Critic Michael Payne affirms, in his essay on The Order of Things, that epistemes both enable and limit the production of knowledge, not simply by external, institutional, or political manipulation but by their own domination of the extent of possible intellectual production. In this sense, they are charged simultaneously by both intellectual and cultural power, although they are not as absolute as Kantian categories nor as institutionally specific as Kuhnian paradigms. (Payne 45) Foucault states that “the order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers... Not that reason made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered.” (The Order of Things xxii) In his book, Burke claims, Foucault “accepts the conventional demarcation of post-Medieval history into the Renaissance, the Classical age, and the modem age. Nor, of itself, is Foucault’s determination of the essential structures of knowledge in these eras particularly radical.” (Burke 63) The law of resemblance regulates the epistemological field of the Renaissance by way of a continuous correlation of similes between writing and things. By resemblance Foucault means an establishment of the identity of things based on the fact that they can resemble, attract, convene, emulate other things. Foucault affirms: At the Renaissance, the organization is ... ternary, since it requires the formal domain of marks, the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to the things designated by them; but since resemblance is the form of the signs as well as their content, the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 39 three distinct elements of this articulation are resolved into a single form. (The Order of Things 42) The episteme that organized knowledge during the Renaissance drastically changes towards the end of the seventeenth Century to be substituted for the law of “representation.” Foucault calls representation a binary order between words and things. He writes: “from the seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified.” (The Order of Things 43) The order of representation has its origin in France, and it is exemplified by the famous Grammaire de Port Rovale. which defines the arrangement of signs as the binary connection between a signified and a signifier. Foucault affirms that behind the epistemological shifts occurring in history, the experience of ordering, of classifying, has always been a fundamental practice of knowledge. In the introduction to his archeology, Foucault writes: The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be at home ... thus, in every culture, between the use of what one migh call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.” (The Order of Things xx-xxit A “pure experience of order,” we could argue, is the element that confers a high value to the tools used to classify. And since the need for classifying things has been felt since the beginning of our culture, we could claim that the tools allowing a practice of ordering (names) are to be considered the most important language tools. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 40 Foucault seems to take this reflection as proof of the importance of the study of names and classification. These studies, he claims should take precedence over the inquiry of man, since he writes that “man - the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates - is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge ... It is contorting ... to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old... and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” (The Order of Things xxiii) To say that man is “nothing more than a recent invention” means that the modem way of thinking has considered man, which was before only a “category” among others, as the first object of any study. As Todd May affirms in his book Between Genealogy and Epistemoloev: “Man cannot be transparent. The reason for this is not that human being are of such depth and complexity that they cannot be understood in any exhaustive sense. Rather, it is he epistemic structure of psychology that bars the psychological project from its realization.” (May 25-26) To say, as humanists in the Renaissance did, that man is “measure of all things” is equivalent to saying that the word “man” is a measure, an “order.” In the shift from the system of resemblance to that of representation, this abstract category has been substituted for the actual object it designates. If the epistemological system of the Renaissance was based on a continuous and open relation between signs and “measures,” our contemporary episteme has translated this R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 41 transitoriness into a closed system of signs that have a direct, binary reference with the things they designate. My work, then, an attempt at determining the concepts that stand behind names and their erasure in written works without for this reason putting them in a submissive relation with the (human) name giver, induces me to consider the role of names in epistemic history, and to take the categories of “name” and “signature” as the basis for the explanation of the reversal of signification of heteronymy, pseudonimty and anonymity. What Foucault calls the “system of resemblance,” the episteme that constituted and ordered knowledge from the beginning of the Renaissance, relies on signatures. These signatures are described as “names” marked on the surface of things. Language, in this scheme, is a phenomenon observed and studied as if it pertained to nature. On the function of the signature, Foucault writes: “A knowledge of similitudes is founded upon the unearthing and deciphering of these signatures ... Resemblance was the invisible form of that which, from the depths of the world, made things visible; but in order that this form may be brought out into the light in its turn there must be a visible figure that will draw it out from its profound invisibility.” (The Order of Things 26) This is precisely why, during the sixteenth century, language is not conceived as an arbitrary system, but “has been set down in the world and forms a part of it, both because things themselves hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 42 because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered.” (The Order of Things 35) Such correspondence of language and things finds its privileged expression in writing. As Foucault claims, the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century, sided by the strengthening of a literary tradition that was no longer oral, consecrated writing as the privileged means of language expression. Just as naming was a prerogative of the wise men for Socrates, writing is, in the Renaissance, the masculine (hence dominant) part of language.1 8 This privilege of writing becomes, from the Renaissance, the “great event of Western culture,” (The Order of Things 38) since the signs that were deciphered in the classic age were “natural” written signs. We may imply, from this last point, that names, classification and power have maintained their position in the hierarchic status at least until modem times, since as studies of language have pointed out, the gendered (male) power of language is what has permitted in history the development Western conception of political power itself.1 9 It follows that a written work that provides a reflection on the omission or alteration of names, though not completely erasing or eliminating that power, acts upon it nonetheless, and in so doing it exemplifies the potentiality that such erasure may hold. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben states, a potentiality is the mode of existence of a privation. In his essay “On Potentiality” he writes that “to have a faculty means to have a privation.” (On Potentiality 179) The erasure of names, in this sense, may be seen as containing both power and potentiality. It has power, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 43 because it represents the modification of a tool that contains power as inherent; it is a potentiality because it is an active privation, an omission of something that is perceived as necessary: it empties or modifies an existing space. The signature, then, understood as the written expression of the name, must be thought of as determining a territory, because the “trait” (its expressive mode) is constituted precisely of a spatial movement. Usually, a signature makes us think of a written sign on a page, and, more specifically, the proper name of a person. This person, though, does not hold a direct relation to the written sign that represents his or her name. More than the individual itself, the signature represents, quite literally, a series of “positions.” These positions can be defined in different ways: they are the profession of the signing person, his or her relation to the written work; the signature even mediates the relation the “author” has with his or her readers. A spatial or “extended” name, the signature is the mark that institutes the territorial power of the name. Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out the importance of this expressive quality of the signature. Like names for Socrates, the written mark of the proper name is always appropriative (it determines a property) and territorialized (it determines a domain that belongs to a subject). We read in A Thousand Plateaus: Expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that the qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 44 constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain. (A Thousand Plateaus 316) We could then say that the signature encloses its field of signification around its possessor. As Deleuze and Guattari state, the signature is a spatial mark, the mark of a territory. This territory is what allows signatures -which in literary works are usually related to the name of the author- to form a closed system, one that relates the proper name to concepts of propriety and property; a system that is reminiscent of the one discussed in the Cratvlus. In literature, the possessive value of the signature is made particularly evident in the relation the author has with his or her work. This relation is constructed in such way that the spatial, economical, and classifying domain of the oeuvre, sealed by the signature (the territorializing trace of the “creator”) becomes the property of a subject. But the name of the author is not the only territorial name/subject relation that is present in literature. Names of characters, for instance, are themselves studied in terms of territorialized units, in the sense that they spring from the creative intellect of the author and are thought to be chosen in relation to his/her experience, or else to have a particular significance in accordance with the space and time of the story. All names present in works of literature, then, are known for having a signifying function. If we rely on a binary system of signification, we should then say that a single proper name makes specific reference to a single individual. Or, paraphrasing the words of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that it marks the (literal and metaphoric) territorial domain R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 45 of that individual. Our study of “multiple names” or “heteronyms,” then, will be determined primarily by the signature, which, in our cases, will be considered as a “failed expression” of individuality. We read at the end of the first chapter of The Order of Things that literature is the only expression that can be linked to a pre-modem “living being of language.” Nothing else in our modem system of knowledge reminds us of the “resemblance” of the classic age. Failing to represent a type of binary knowledge (one signified explaining one signifier), literature, from the nineteenth century, “achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of ‘counter-discourse,’ and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century.” (The Order Of Things 44) We would make a mistake, then, if we considered contemporary literature with the same epistemic paradigms of our age. We should instead rely on an earlier “analogic” — in the sense of “proceeding by analogies”— system in our reading of literary works. As a reminder of a “lost episteme,” literature is what permits the system of resemblances to appear once more on the surface. Literature works for the contemporary reader as the world of signatures for the interpreter of signs in the Classic Age. If the world of analogies, still present in literature -and only there- is a marked world, we should probably ask ourselves what its marks are made of, what do they associate with, and not just, as we often do, what or who they “stand for” or “designate.”2 0 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 46 Concentrating then on the de-signifying “signature” of contemporary literary works may lead us to discover the actual relations this literature may have with an analogic episteme, and to find the implications of their treatment of the written mark of the proper name. In the specific works I analyze, the expression of the proper name does not necessarily characterize an individual but is merely a sign that resembles and refers to “something else.” Following this order of things, we will consider proper names in these contemporary works of literature as “failing to signify,” in the sense that they fail to reinduce their names to a single signified.2 1 The three novels I analyze always contain, within the narrative, multiple reflections and commentaries on the signification of names. One is the work of a collective, of multiples as opposed to individuals. The others are the product of individuals who were also involved in collective and cooperative literary work. In all cases they tend to reduce the importance of the signature as determining individuality, in order to contrast the power that the signature has acquired in a binary system. As I stated in my introduction, all the primary works I will treat in this dissertation appeared at a period of time in which, in Italy and France, debates on the function of language and writing, as well as on the formation of identity, on individuality and cooperation, were dominating the cultural climate. More recent literary experiments that focus on the elimination of signatures, aside from constituting interesting literary cases of anonymity and pseudonymity, can be taken as examples of the aftermath of the ideas generated in the late sixties. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 47 By analyzing one of these cases - the still active collective of writers Luther Blissett/Wu Ming, and more specifically their first novel Q (1999) - the second part of my work will show how writing, still the main form of language expression, changes its “shape” in the contemporary, possibly as a consequence of the theories elaborated towards the end of the twentieth century. As the written page is not the sole, or even the privileged support for words and signatures (written text literally surrounds us, like the “natural” signatures of the Renaissance), our spatial environment surrounds us with “signatures” that we are inevitably called to decipher. Some of the works I analyze in my examples may be read on screen as well as on paper, they may be spread through different and faster channels, may be discussed online with authors and other readers, establishing a multiplicity of outputs for the written text. They represent an “expansion” of literature in which the author, even when named explicitly, is nothing but one of the many, and not always the most relevant, producer of literature. As such, these works of literature, written by collective writers, insist on exposing the unimportance of signature in the written work. They should not be considered as carriers of a new truth or a change in episteme, but only as different attempts at opening a closed system, and reveal its arbitrariness to the readers. Notes 1 The Cratvlus has been analyzed at length, and it has received much attention especially in the contemporary period, when questions of naming, identity and classification have become crucial in literary and critical studies. In a recent book called Idea of Prose. Giorgio Agamben states that the idea R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 48 of the name was very important and delineated from the antiquity. He writes: “Ancient philosophy carefully distinguished the level of the name (onoma) from that of discourse (logos) and considered the discovery of this distinction of such importance as to ascribe the merit to Plato. In truth the discovery was made earlier: it was Antisthenes who first affirmed that for simple and primary substances there could be no logos, but only name. According to this idea, the unsayable is not that which is in no way attested to in language, but that which, in language, can only be named. Whereas the sayable is that about which one can speak in defining discourse, even should it finally lack a name on its own.” (Idea of Prose 105) In this insight, the main question that comes to the surface is whether names are actually parts of discourse, or rather separated from it. It may be inferred that Agamben’s view is close to Cratylus’ idea of the impossibility of naming, or of “uttering” a name as if it were a meaningful item. This impossibility, of course, does not mean that names are inconsistent, or even inexistent as such. Their existence and meaning, though, is in Agamben’s words, unrelated to a “higher” or “detached” figure of Nomothete, detaching the name giver from the logos altogether. The simple reference of names to ineffability, though, clearly places names into a category of their own. The difficulty in categorizing Cratylus’ theory of names into clear patterns may be one of the reasons why Cratylus’ view, which involved, we could say, a theory of multiplicity ante-litteram, was forgotten throughout the centuries. Cratylus’view, however, is important for our study because it reveals that an opposition to the theory of the power of names has been present since the origin of the debate on names. 2 Socrates affirms in the opening phase of the dialogue: “Hermogenes, son of Hipponicus, there is an ancient proverb that ‘fine things are very difficult’ to know about, and it certainly isn’t easy to know about names. To be sure, if I’d attended Prodicus’ fifty-drachma lecture course, which he himself advertises as an exhaustive treatment of the topic, there’d be nothing to prevent you from learning the precise truth about the correctness of names straightaway. But as I’ve heard only the one-drachma course, I don’t know the truth about it.” (Cratylus 384b-384c) 3 Hermogenes states: “But it would be absurd for me to beg for Protagoras’ ‘Truth,’ Socrates, as if I desired the things contained in it and through them worthwhile, when I totally reject them.” (Cratylus 384c) 4 Hermogenes states: “Cratylus says, Socrates, that there is a correctness of name for each thing, one that belongs to it by nature. A thing’s name isn’t whatever people agree to call it -some bit of their native language that applies to it- but there is a natural correctness names, which is the same for everyone, Greek or foreigner.” (Cratylus 383a) 5 As R. Robinson has pointed out in “The Theory of Names in Plato’s Cratylus.” “there lay undistinguished at least five notions that are distinct now: the proper name, the name, the word, the noun, and the subject of predication.” (Robinson 2) Robinson analyzes a possible Greek equivalent for “word” and “language” and concludes that “it is usually better to say that it is about names than to say that it is about language.” (Robinson 3) this is why the word onoma is usually translated as “name.” 6 We read in Cratylus: “S o c r a t e s : If you were asked who gives names more correctly, those who are wiser or those who are more foolish, what would you answer? HERMOGENES: That it is clearly those who are wiser. S o c r a t e s : And which class do you think is wiser on the whole, a city’s women or its men? HERMOGENES: Its men. SOCRATES: “Now you know, don’t you, that Homer tells us that Hector’s son was called ‘Astyanax’ by the men of Troy? But if the men called him ‘Astyanax,’ isn’t it clear that ‘Skamandrios’ must be what the women called him?” (Cratylus 392d) The Socratic argument as it is stated in the Cratylus. however, implies that the name is nonetheless in use, even when improper. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 49 7 In the introduction to the 1998 English translation of the Cratylus. C.D.C. Reeve affirms: “Not much is known about Hermogenes. He was a constant companion of Socrates (Xenophon. Memorabilia 1.2.48, IV.8.4) and was at his deathbed (Phaedo 59b7-8). Diogenes Laertius characterizes him as a Parmenidean (III.6), while the Cratylus itself makes it plain that he has often discussed names with Cratylus in the past (383-384a). His views are sometimes represented as being rather silly.” (Cratylus xi) 8 Following this brief description, a proper name can be defined as an individual term. The Aristotelian discussion on terms, however, intermingles with the study of categories and essences. A definition, or what answers the question “what is so and so?” — in other words, Plato’s onoma — is for Aristotle an account of the essence of something. In this way, the question surrounding definitions is not relegated to the field of logic (that is to say to the predicate or linguistic argument) but is also ontological, because, if the term defines an essence, only what has an essence can be defined, and then the question revolves around what an essence actually is. The ontological aspect of the Aristotelian concept of category moves the study of the name from logic to metaphysics. For Aristotle, individuals do not have an essence, only species do. A species is defined by its genus (the kind) and its differentia (the specific character of that species). Both gem s and differentia can adapt to a definition of proper names. 9 As D. J. Allan states in his book The Philosophy of Aristotle, “there is a very real continuity between Aristotle’s inquiry and that of the mathematical logicians of today. His inquiry was defective, first, because he studied only one type of deduction, and, secondly, because his analysis was not wholly a formal one: he was the first to use abstract symbols to denote the terms which appear in propositions, but it did not occur to him to symbolize the relations between the terms, which he continued to express in ordinary language.” (Allan 100) 1 0 According to Eco, the tracing of search for the perfect language is of crucial importance not only for linguistic studies, but also for the cultural present of Europe since, he writes, it is “one of the key questions confronting those involved in Europe’s making, and at the same time to satisfy the curiosity of the world at large: in short, who are the Europeans? Where have they come from? Whither are they bound?” (Search x) 1 1 Dante’s task, already expounded in the earlier De Vulgari Eloauentia (1304-1307) is to discover one language, more decorous and illustrious than the others, which had to become the language of his own poetry. 1 2 On the topic, see in particular: Massimo Bianchi: Signature Rerum. Segni. Mgia e Conoscenza da Paracelso a Leibniz: Remi Brague: Europe, la Voie Romaine: Dino Buzzetti e Maurizio Ferriani: La Grammatica del Pensiero: Joaquin Carreras v Artau: De Ramon Lull a los Modemos ensavos de formacidn de una Lengua Universal: Maria Corti: Dante a un Nuovo Crocevia: Louis Couturat and Leopold Leau: Histoire de la Langue Universelle. 1 3 This tradition is often referred to as the “legacy of Nimrod,” from the character in Dante’s Inferno who is responsible for the linguistic chaos of the tower of Babel) Fraser writes: “All men are bom either Aristotelian or Platonic. The Platonist knows intuitively that ideas are real and the universe an order or cosmos. The symbolic language he elaborates is the map of this cosmos which, to the Aristotelian, is perhaps only an old chaos of the sun.. .The realists are Platonic and have instructed us sufficiently in what it means to be real. This perception suggests the unwisdom of taking at face value the modem requirement that ‘names be made up of the definitions of things.’” (Fraser 24-25) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 50 1 4 We could also claim, following Fraser’s reasoning, that the “legacy of Nimrod” relies on the ancient motto “Philosophia sunt res, non verba.” This phrase, attributed firstly to Cato, is presented in the 1653’s book by Sir Thomas Urquhart Loeopandecteision (Introduction to Universal language). See Richard Boston: The Admirable Urquhart. 1 5 In Cratylus. this power is evidently hierarchic, anthropomorphic and, as known, gendered. In the Platonic system the “wise men,” those with the power of naming are strictly male. Socrates excludes women’s ability to give the right name for the simple reason that the feminine gender is not possessed of wisdom or of knowledge compared to man. 1 6 Michael Payne writes: “In both its French and English versions The Order of Things is divided into ten chapters, which are grouped in two parts: 1 to 6 and 7 to 10. The first six deal with the historical and social determinations of knowledge, and the last four - while not abandoning those earlier categories - question their adequacy by subjecting them in turn to the kind of critique they themselves make possible... The Order of Tilings is nothing less than a history of systems of knowledge from the Reanissance to the modem age (roughly from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century). Foucault’s concern was not just with what was known during those times, but more specifically with what constituted knowledge during each of the three epochs.” (Payne 44) 1 7 The movement that constitutes in the change of the episteme is always bi-directional in Foucault’s system, hence we could say that the classifying methods have changed and have been changed by the epistemological systems. 1 8 Foucault writes: “Esoterism in the sixteenth century is a phenomenon of the written word, not the spoken word. At all events, the latter is stripped of all its powers; it is merely the female part of language, Vigendre and Duret tell us, just as its intellect is passive; writing, on the other hand, is the active intellect, the ‘male principle’ of languaee.’YThe Order of Things 39) 1 9 Besides Foucault’s The Order of Things, (together with Madness and Civilization and The Archaeology of Knowledge) many philosophical writings of the sixties (and later) express this view. See, among the most influential, Derrida’s Writing and Difference. Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. 2 0 In a recent article, Richard Rorty defined our contemporary culture as a “literary culture.” Contemporary intellectuals of the West, he claims, have witnessed the failure of religion and philosophy in bringing “redemptive truth,” and now rely on literature for the same purpose. Rorty writes: “the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature.” (Rorty 2) Literature, though, may only confer to intellectuals the illusion of truth, since it does not admit the existence of a truth intended as “a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection.” In brief, literature cannot “fulfill the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fix everything -every thing, person, event, idea and poem- into a single context which will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique.” (Rorty 2) Literature does not, as religion and philosophy once did, claim to bring to the final “redemptive truth” Rorty describes, but instead it only affirms the impossibility for this truth to exist. Moving on a different epistemological level, literature has unsurprisingly taken upon itself an ambivalent role. Its external signs would attract readers (or “intellectuals” as Rorty calls them) and induce them to find a higher meaning in them. At the same time, though, this meaning is impossible to be found, and it results in a series of interpretations, none of which is final. Literature works for the contemporary reader as the world of signatures for the interpreter of signs in the Classic Age. If the world of analogies, still present in literature -and only R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 51 there- is a marked world, we should probably ask ourselves what its marks are made of, what do they associate with, and not just, as we often do, what or who they “stand for” or “designate.” 211 will not treat these works as “new,” or as “avant-garde” works per se, but instead connected their use of names to the Foucaultian definition of systems of signification. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 52 Chapter 2. The Place o f Names. 2.1. Designifying maps. A study of how the plurisignification of names works in contemporary literature will render necessary a closer reflection on the status of classification in the contemporary age. Such reflection may help me locate temporally the literary texts I will analyze, and it may also reveal itself as bi-directional, since these texts constitute, by way of alteration of the signifying function of the name, a reflection on our ways of classifying. Although this chapter will not engage with a close reading of the texts, it will nonetheless try to look for the spatial-temporal coordinates that have permitted their appearance. This map, as we may call it, will in the end be a helpful tool for finding out what common aspects the works I consider, which cover an extended period of time, may have. I have stated in the first chapter that my work engages with the analysis of contemporary novels. Such an affirmation, it is evident, is the result of a classification of genre. The ways in which we may classify literary works are many, and some of these ways, such as genre (novels, poetry, short stories), style or period are extremely familiar to the reading public. But literary texts are not just subject to classification. They are also a privileged means - a tool - used by critics to explain how classifications work. All the contemporary novels I will analyze contain, each in a different way, reflections on how classifications work. Works such as Georges Perec’s Things, or Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, for instance, do not only R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 53 concentrate on the idea of “storytelling” as it is traditionally intended, that is, on the development of characters through a narrative plot. These novels privilege the exposition of lists and classifications over the simple recounting of events or description of characters. Besides narrating a story, these novels seem to portray as well how the stories and their characters fit into a “scheme.”1 To speak about the ordering of things through language, in The Order of Things. Michel Foucault takes as example precisely a passage from a work of contemporary literature by Jorge Luis Borges. The text reads: “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et caetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” (The Order of Things xv) This strange taxonomy is clearly an example of impossible classification. The reader who smiles while trying to decipher this strange list does so because, Foucault claims, it is impossible for us to even “think” such order. The taxonomy is called heteroclite - deviating from common rules -- because its terms lack the “common place” that can hold them together.2 Borges’ taxonomy, Foucault claims, represents the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal, etymological sense: in such a state, things are ‘laid,’ ‘placed,’ arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 54 ... the uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is certainly related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed: loss of what is’common’ to place and name. (The Order of Things xvii-xviii) Borges’ text, in other words, does not allow the reader to think in terms of categories, or at least exposes the category to its un-imaginability. The categories described in Borges’ text are unimaginable because they manipulate the space of the description. Name and place lack a connection; the items in the list do not occupy the place that is usually assigned to the objects of a “normal” classification, nor do these item follow any specific order. The “common place” is, in The Order of Things, a spatial ensemble in which names collide forming a meaningful order, or, in Foucault’s words, a “tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of the world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences - the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (The Order of Things xvii) Without the establishment of this space, any nominal order would not be meaningful, at least not in our epistemological schemes. This tabula that helps our thinking operate on the ordered items usually works on correspondences. The objects within the tabula - those taking part in the order - must be similar, or at least comparable to each other. But we should be aware of the fact that this “common place” is never completely stable. As Roland Barthes affirms in his essay “On Common Places,” written for the Enciclopedia Einaudi in 1979: “The ‘common place,’ a double word that should be written as a single word because it is a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 55 rigid syntagm, does not have a stable meaning in history.”3 (“Luogo Comune” 208) The common place, Barthes writes, has been the subject of a notable reversal of values since it was seen as a precious process of persuasion in antiquity, while its vulgar meaning is despised in modem culture. Barthes analyses the origin of this figure which goes back to ancient Latin rhetorics.4 In antiquity, the rhetorical process was composed of three phases - inventio, dispositio and elocutio - and was based on evidence that needed to be found in order to convince an audience. Evidence could be brought forward in many different ways, but the most common was the way of speech, or a particular way of reasoning with the audience. Among the syntagms of rhetorical reasoning was the “popular syllogism,” or entimema. In his analysis of the rhetorical construction, Barthes writes: “rhetorics has established the main possible forms of this reasoning: the certain sign, the less-than-certain (polysemic) sign, the vraisemblance; but how do we find, within these generic forms, sub-forms that are closer to the point we need to discuss? It is here, finally, that we find the common places; the entimemeatic premises can be taken from such places. If we know these places, we can develop a reasoning, we have something to talk about.”5 (“Luogo Comune” 210) Barthes underlines that the common place is the aspect of language that connotes a generally understandable meaning. It is a foundational item, the part of discourse that allows the first level of understanding to take place. The negative idea we have of a commonplace, then, is due only to its repetitive aspect, and to the fact that, for the modem episteme, originality is to be preferred to R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 56 the repetition of already known formulas. But, Barthes writes, “we need to realize that the repetition of language that originates the common place is ambivalent.”6 (“Luogo Comune” 220) On the one hand it can appear as a form of oppression, because, combining the same sentences in different ways, it reduces the freedom to produce something new; on the other hand, just like sign repetition is what stands at the basis of language, so the repetition of senteces (hence common places) is what allows us to hold a conversation. In ancient Latin rhetorics, and certainly up to the period Foucault has named the age classique, repetition indeed possessed a positive value. With his analysis of the common place, Barthes intends to pin down that the celebration of originality and the cult of the new, which have relegated the function of the common place to a minor and devalued rhetorical expedient, is the result of modem epistemological schemes. Interestingly, Barthes and Foucault recognize approximately the same period of time as the moment in which such epistemological change (or epistemological break) takes place. Barthes affirms that it is during the seventeenth century that the art of rhetoric, earlier a complex edifice in which the common place had its proper function, starts being reduced to the study of elocutio. Modem rhetoric has forgotten the other two foundational rhetorical aspects: the inventio and dispositio, and has become, through a process that starts in the seventeenth century, “only a copious theory of figures (of tropes).”7 (“Luogo Comune” 217) It is important then to remark, as Barthes does, that this movement tended towards the abolition of a great part of the old rhetorical figures R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 57 continues up to modem linguistics, where only two tropes, metaphor and metonymy, have been taken into serious consideration.8 Modem linguistics, we could say, has “reduced the space” of ancient rhetoric. Once a consistent edifice with numerous figures and shades of meaning, rhetoric is now nothing more than an erudite topic; with the sensible reduction of its original complexity, rhetoric has almost entirely lost its interest among academics. The story of the development of the common place through time is then a story of displacement: from a precise and extended place in a complex art, this rhetorical figure has been reduced to an unimportant, even banal, trope. The area of study in which the common place has kept an important role is that of taxonomy. If to classify means to determine a common place for names and things, in fact, and if it is also a way to be understood and communicate, then the function of this rhetoric figure is necessarily a crucial one. The ambivalence inherent in the rhetorical figure of the common place, we could say, is reflected precisely in the ambivalence of the signification of names. As we have briefly seen, in contemporary rhetoric the common place does not possess a precise function but it is instead an ambiguous and negatively perceived trope, though remaining a foundational tool of discourse. The name, in the same way, is generally understood as a tool that retains a direct and univocal relation with the object or “thing” it designates. The fact that numerous studies have pointed out that this relation is fictitious, and that the value of names is indeed polysemic, the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 58 conception (the common place, we could say) that sees names as unilateral signifying units has not entirely changed. Literature, for Barthes (as for Foucault), is what allows a redemptive function for the common place. Literature is the means by which common places can be used and at the same time evade from the negative value usually attributed to them. Barthes writes: “The writer has chosen a practice, writing, that because of its status, and because of the ways in which it is enunciated, eludes and overcomes at once the common place and its objection. Why? Because literature has the constant function of changing (instead of repeating) what has already been said, hence at the same time it recognizes and transforms the common place.”9 (“Luogo Comune” 224) In brief, literature can be classified as containing, within itself, both repetition of formulas - common places - and new ways of approaching and modifying these formulas. At the same time, we need to point out, following Foucault’s analysis, that literature is the field in which signatures - hence also proper names - refer back to an epistemological system that is different from all other systems of knowledge in the modem age.1 0 In this sense the connection of the study of names and common places comes to the surface. Names, and especially proper names, are constitutive of common places which make any classification possible and comprehensible. In proceeding with the analysis of our literary texts, then, we should link these ideas on common place to the notions of names and name-giving, and try to establish a place of encounter between signifier and signified. The peculiarity of common places R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 59 in the books I will analyze, as well as the signatures that characterize them, do not designate individuality, category or genre, but insist on the other hand, on the multiplication and indefiniteness of these categories. And if writing is, at least since the Renaissance, the means that allows language to signify, the signature is then what may bring to the surface the signified or the analogies behind the signed name. But we should not forget that the signature, understood as the written mark of the author in a work, is also the basis for the classification of literature itself. We should then concentrate on signatures in the work and o f the work if we want to give a complete range of hypotheses for the designification (and plurisignification) of names. Moving from these premises, we may conclude that our mapping of heteroclites and heteronyms needs to be understood (paradoxically) also as a search for a common place; a place, that is, in which names will have a common signified, and from which we may, or indeed we should start to look for all possible distortion of that significance. This distortion will probably take us back to the analysis of the name itself, and it will show how the classifying particle par excellance is not a fixed unit, as the prescriptive studies of the modem episteme would make us think, but contains, always and necessarily, a series of analogies that send us back to different signifieds. We will then see how this multiplicity of signifieds contained in one signifier (the proper name and the signature, in this case) is conceived in contemporary literature. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 60 2.2. Common Places. The idea of commonplace can help us underline how the relation between sign and meaning delineates itself in works of contemporary literature, and especially in those works that present a reflection on the notion of proper name. Operating an abstraction that at the same time permits and obliges to use the proper name in ways that are usually considered unconventional (omissions, pseudonyms, multiple names), the primary texts I will consider space out the territory of the signature, be it the signature of an author, a character, or a place. This spatial extension of the text must then be understood both metaphorically and literally. Works are wider because their meaning, no longer determined by one preemptive signifier, can open to different interpretations, hence, we could say, the text can become different texts. Strongly influenced by theories that underline the question of the interpretation of the reader and the primacy of such interpretation in the actual production of the work, these texts necessarily “open” to a multitude of possible readings. An important example of these theories that stress the importance of the reader in “making” the text is Umberto Eco’s book The Open Work published in Italy in 1962, only a few years before Foucault wrote his epistemological study on classifications. In this work Eco analyzes literature and literary texts in a way that is very similar to the one proposed by Foucault and Barthes. Concentrating on the question of the signature and the multiplication of the potentialities of the anti- authorial work, Eco writes that every artistic form may be seen as an epistemological R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 61 metaphor, that is to say that “in every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or culture of that time see reality.”1 1 (The Open Work 13) Eco affirms that what characterizes the contemporary tendency of the artwork is a process of “opening” of forms and genres from a closed, binary logic to multiple and indeterminate fields. He writes: The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetic of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer’s freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.1 2 (The Open Work 15) Aware of this discontinuity and indeterminacy, the open work needs then to abandon any definiteness. Among the “predictable outcomes” Eco talks about, stands the obsolete closed relation between author and reader. In the open work, the receiver writes the work as well as the author, who no longer has any value as a single creator. Eco’s views, as well as Barthes’ and Foucault’s reflections on the subject of names in poetics have opened, in contemporary Western theory, a constant debate on the status of significance of names, which continues to this day. When in 1977 Roland Barthes wrote his essay “Death of the Author,” he was simply pointing out the importance of the figure of the reader as an accessory that needs to be considered alongside with the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 62 writer.1 3 Both reader and writer, Eco claims in The Open Work, make the work of art.1 4 But if we can associate the name of an author to a territory, a domain (usually determined, among other things, by national borders) what is, we should ask, the domain of the reader? An attempt to answer this question will show how the space of our texts can be indefinite and indefinable. The reader, as a multiple and indefinable entity, is in fact more difficult to locate within an enclosed space than the writer. At the same time this “a-spatialized” reader is also impossible to name, since its identity can be conceived as a hypothesis, but cannot be clearly defined. The reader, we could say, produces an anonymous text, since it becomes part of the text without leaving a signature. It is by taking into consideration this last point that we will see the (territorial) domain of the text as impossible to inscribe into pre-established national borders. This domain extends along a spatial unit that expands the traditional national coordinates. We may talk about spatial expansion as a result of indefineteness of categorization because, as it is obvious, a multiplicity - of readers, in this case - may exponentially augment the space it occupies rather than reducing it. If names and signatures are altered in the novels of our study, so that they do not stand for a thing in particular, the spatial category of nationality used to define the domain of the author, though maintaining its function as signifier, will de-territorialize its space of signification. Our R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 63 final signature, we could say, will determine a different territory that stands both outside and inside the traditionally conceived borders of “national literatures.”1 5 In the Platonic conception, we have seen, names divide things, and in so doing they reinforce the notions of closed borders. A form of literature in which names fail to signify, or at least where their signification is to be found “elsewhere,” cannot be related to a particular national space. Its limits inevitably blur, its language, the only element that remains clearly recognizable as pertaining to a specific “place,” does not refer to the places we would expect it to. As in Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, for instance, the places names determine are non-existent, they extend on an unrecognizable territory and yet they describe a space that is somewhat familiar. This familiarity is constituted by continuous references to specific national characteristic, or by exotic elements that, nonetheless, make us think of a determined space.1 6 To sum up this idea of border expansion, we may say that when names are not related to singularities they underline the marginal or indefinite positioning in space of both the name giver and the thing named. But since, as we have briefly seen, both ideas of power and potentiality are implicit in the alteration of the function of names, the space such literature will occupy (on shelves, in the “literary world”, etc.) is an ambiguous one; it is sometimes marginal, other times central, but always “open” and always “in movement” nonetheless. The spatial marginality of this “nameless multiple,” we could say, may be an element of literature that triggers a reflection on R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 64 the rules imposed by the institutional “border-determining” power. It is in other words what could allow the appearance of an anti-hegemonic form of literature, a form of literature that openly conflicts with the affirmations of the name-giving legislator.1 7 We could imply, from this reasoning, that the absence of recognition, hence of hegemonic social positioning, of “anonymous,” “pseudonymous” or “heteronymous” forms might be seen as a limitation. But as the limitation of originality that the use of the common place in literature induces is also what allows a text to signify, this marginality is compensated for by the increased capacity that being multiple entails. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reasoning, for instance, an unpredictable movement — in the sense that its direction cannot be calculated — inevitably confers to the absence of signature, intended here as the mark of the name, not just a power that is comparable to that of names, but a precise political value. This value is evident in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of nomadism, for instance, which is defined in their texts as a “displacement of intensities.” In their essay “Pensee Nomade,” we read: L’intensite ne renvoie ni a des signifies qui seraient comme des representations de choses, ni a des signifiants qui seraient comme des representations de mots .. .L’intensite a a voir avec les noms propres, et ceux ci ne sont ni representations de choses ni repesentations de mots ... il y a une espece de nomadisme, de deplacement perpetual des intensites designes par des noms propres, et qui penetrent les unes dans les autres en meme temps qu’elles sont vecues sur un corps plein. L’intensite ne peut etre vecue qu’en rapport avec son inscription mobile sur un corps, et avec l’exteriorite mouvante d’un nom propre, et c’est par la que le nom propre est toujours un masque, masque d’un operateur.1 8 fL’ile deserte 358-359) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 65 To say that a name is a mask of an operator (rather than the operator itself, we may imply) is equivalent to saying that proper names hide and misplace rather than express their meaning. Therefore, pseudonymous, or even anonymous expressions will only render this relation between name and thing evident, allowing the (implicit) nomadic character of the signature to be the pre-eminent signifier. 2.3. The Name-Machine. It is evident that our understanding of literature is founded on proper names. To give an example, we identify the books we read by the name of their authors. Moreover, titles often become, metonymically, proper names for the whole content of the work. In brief, we “territorialize” our reading with names throughout the process: by identifying characters, locations, cities, places of publication, editors, editions, we implicitly divide our texts into categories, that is to say we classify by providing a name for each “thing.”1 9 My analysis of designifiers, we need to keep in mind, will treat name and namelessness, as well as the “possessor” and the “receiver” of the name, not as opposites, or even separated, but as a unit that is extremely difficult to define because it is constituted by a multiplicity. The relation between names and their alterations - be it anonymity or pseudonymity -- is not mutually exclusive, not dychotomic, we could say, but instead bipolar, generating a continuous tension between the two polarities. What constitutes this form of multiplicity, then, is not just a lack, or absence of the name, or a misplacement, or substitution of a name for another, but rather an active antagonistic value, a “generator” of domains that may be R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 66 widened to infinity. Always performing changes and transformations, and expanding its territory over the enclosed “named” space through its continuous alteration of codes, the machine of the name may be placed next to another machine, that of its lack. Any alteration in the use and significance of proper names is not devoid of meaning but rather opens the text to a multiplicity of significations, and this multiplicity directs the system of classification towards one that we may call “anti- 0 1 representational,” or “analogical.” Once we bring to the surface all these aspects surrounding names and classification, we inevitably realize that the choice of contemporary texts that engage with questions of this kind could be virtually unlimited. For these reasons, and in order to show more clearly the movement of this name-machine, I choose to limit my study of the phenomenon of multiple names to a specific generic category: the novel. This choice is dictated by many factors. The first is a widespread opinion among critics that the novel is, especially in Europe, the dominant form that literary writing has assumed in modernity.2 2 Many histories of the novel have underlined the preeminence of this form over other literary expressions, at least starting from the nineteenth century. To give just an example, in his 1959 book The Book to Come, a discussion on the present status and the future expectations of literature, Maurice Blanchot equates with a certain ease the words “book” and “novel.” These two terms, at the end of Blanchot’s research, seem to collide. To give another example, in many of the writings of the Italian avant-garde collective Gruppo 63, the novel is one of the most important R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 67 concerns of contemporary literature because it is the narrative form in which “reality” and especially the social field, is best described. It is not just by chance that Gruppo 63, a “multiple name” in itself, directs the focus of its politically charged literary and social theory on the study of the novel, and especially on the crisis of the novel. This crisis is normally equated with other forms of crisis in society. In an article written with the collective, Umberto Eco states: Indeed, the (real or supposed) neo-avant-gardes constitute only the most evident, usually superfluous aspect of a cultural situation in which not only the traditional notion of art but also the possibility of art itself is undermined. Through this phenomenon, questions of man, rationality, communication, relation between culture and society come to the surface, in a historical moment in which culture subsumes unusual and apparently aberrant forms because the entire social and economic context is changing on a global scale.2 3 (Gruppo 63 290) The connection between characters in novels and their place in modem society has -from the nineteenth century -always been so close as to lead critics to use the genre as a tool for sociological studies. In a short essay that appeared in France Observateur in 1963 (a commentary on Lucien Goldmann’s work on the sociological aspects of the novel), Barthes recognizes “two sociologies of the novel.” 2 4 In the article, Barthes shows appreciation for Goldmann’s new approach, which seems to detach from the general assumptions that make the novel the privileged genre of capitalist society, such as the identification of the work as a way to understand society. He writes that marxist and historical criticism have always posed the medium of “collective consciousness” as the basis for the interpretation of society and narrative works. Goldmann uses this medium order to sketch a internal typology to the “novel” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 68 form. For Goldmann the ethic project of the novelist always comes to term with a (collective) imaginary, which itself requires its own sociology. Two complementary sociologies must then be conceived. One is ideological, and based on the “content” of the novel, one is semiological, and based on its “form.” The novel is the privileged space in which the two sociologies can operate. Barthes never questions the pre-existing generic division of the novel, which is also adopted by Goldmann. Both Goldmann and Barthes, though, are aware of the fact that a criticism of the genre novel is particularly difficult because it also involves an analysis of different types of language: the Marxist, the semiotic and so on. As we may see, in this short passage by Barthes generic categorizations blur, and this con fusion of genres leads the way to the creation of new genres (a “sociology of forms”), giving us the impression that this process of de-categorization and re categorization could carry on endlessly. The novel has been conceived in different ways through time. A famous, fairly recent study concentrating on this genre, Milan Kundera’s The Art o f the Novel (1988), states that the novel is, at least in Europe, the most influential genre since the nineteenth century because it is what “protected the concept o f being” from its multi sided attacks coming from science, technology and philosophy itself. Kundera writes: The rise o f the sciences propelled man into the tunnels o f the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less c le sjy c m d d lK S K e te te w n ld a s a il^ a r U s fflm s e l^ a g d k plunged further in what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, the forgetting o f being. (Kundera 4) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 69 Kundera sees being, or to be more precise, the existential theme, as “unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of (European) novel.” (Kundera 5) It is the novel, under this view, that which protected man from the abovementioned, Heideggerian “forgetting of being.” (Kundera 4) The novels that I will analyze in this part of my dissertation are also engaged, as we will see, in the search for a definition of this “being” that Kundera talks about. The final reason why I choose the form of novel in my analysis of proper names is the fact that many literary experiments and “avant-gardes,” those writings, that is, which represent a clear cut with tradition and propose radicalism in expression, have adopted the novel and novelistic writing as one of the privileged sites for their experiments.2 5 My reflection on the power and potentiality of names in contemporary novels, then, will treat the modification of the signature in its function as a “spatial” marker of the literary work, trying to analyze the signature’s spatial, temporal and political significance in novels. This attempt may add a sociological, or indeed a “doubly sociological” value to the notion of names and signatures, which are usually studied in their linguistic or semiotic value. In the contemporary texts we will consider, the motion of the signature — which is never a fixed entity - is what makes us perceive a glimpse of the potentialities included in its alteration. For if the name “creates a territory,” as in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, its omission or transformation must necessarily de-territorial ize that space to create another. This other space is necessarily larger, because it is made up of all the possible alterations of a signature, and it is R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 70 immaterial or at least unperceivable, because it works through the omission (hence the lack) of the signature. Deleuze and Guattari are the philosophers who theorized this idea of deterritorialization. In their view, the process of deterritorialization starts with the intervention of a machine. The machine released in this process, though, unlike any other machine we may think of, does not need to have a fixed point of control, but it is only an immaterial and unfixable movement. A machine is, for Deleuze and Guattari, “a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it.” (A Thousand Plateaus 333) They affirm: “Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializ.es it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released.” (A Thousand Plateaus 333) In an analogous way, the voluntary modification (or elimination) of the spatial mark of the signature in the literary work is a machine released, one that contains the potentiality of reversing the territorializing power of the fixed name. The lack of signature, erasing an enclosed territory, opens to the possibility of creating other, different spaces. Or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words: “As a general rule, a machine plugs into the territorial assemblage of a species and opens it to other assemblages.” (A Thousand Plateaus 333) However, in my analysis, the overpowering machine constituted by the signature does not have a direct counterpart in anonymous, multiple or “multidirectional” forms. In its multiple logic, the un-signed work may at R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 71 best open the text and disseminate it in different directions. Since the anonymous is necessarily tied in a mutual relation with the name, some of the “machinic statements” that the name implies, such as its predominantly spatial character, are shared by the anonymous form.2 7 In other words, I do not intend to assert that Deleuze and Guattari’s theories on multiplicity and deterritorialization have caused the name, and consequently the authorial form in literature, to disappear. As we know, the vitality of names in literature -and especially of the authorial name - is still evident. Theories on deterritorialization, nonetheless, suggest a reflection on the movement of the name, and propose a subsequent detachment from the uses the rule-setters or name-givers make of it. The avant-garde of the beginning of the century, in this sense, had set a paradigm that could no longer be overlooked as Europe emerged from the Second World War: the constant need for an opposing voice to the dominant analysis of modernity. The avant-garde’s questioning of power sites of society, from the institutions to logics, led the avant-gardists to turn their experiments directly against the institutional forms in literature. To give an example, the automatic novels of the Surrealists, as well as the notion of automatic writing in itself, proposed a non-linear logic, which should be taken as foundational for the movements of the “heteronyms” and “multiple names” of the sixties and seventies. We find remnants of automatic writing in the “liberating constrictions” of the Oulipo, in the “invisible characters” in Perec’s Things, or Calvino’s If On a Winter’s night a Traveler. In all the texts R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 72 mentioned, signatures exist and play an important role. But, we need to point out, their way of signifying does not strictly follow the binary rules of logic. Both the signature and the lack thereof acquire power. Or, to be more specific, signatures stand for their own omission, or lack of signified, or, at times, for plurisignification. This rhizomatic movement that signatures enact is clearly detached from the individuality that is supposedly their “generator.” 2.4. Surrealist Novels. The avant-garde movements of the beginning of the twentieth century then, and Surrealism in particular, may be easily taken as a crucial, albeit unstable, origin of the designifying movement of names.2 8 The Surrealists are among the first to oppose to the idea of authorial genius that had emerged a century earlier, while on the other hand they proposed the notion of automatic writing, an idea, we notice, more directly related to the “machinic” than to the “human.” Although the Surrealists signed most of their works with their actual names, their cooperative effort, their non-singularity, we could say, are what underlies their movement. The avant-gardes, and especially the historical avant-garde are usually renowned for expressing themselves through the writing of manifestos. A manifesto, then, which represents an attempt at self definition, is for the historical avant-garde a new way of conceiving the relation between “names” and “things” (where the thing is, in this case, a multiple self). This is how the manifesto and the avant-garde as a whole become a new “genre” in itself. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 73 After the Surrealists had brought to the surface the problem of classification in the age moderne with the writing of the first Surrealist Manifesto, it appeared evident that the idea of self definition was crucial to their work, and that, in addition, this “self’ that was to be defined could not be the self of an individual. The Surrealist self is a multiple, an ensemble of signatures that figure as a series of proper names. Though some of the names stated are well known, while others are less known to a contemporary audience, we clearly perceive from the reading of the manifesto that these names have little or no importance as individualities. They do not represent what Foucault would later call an author-function. In the manifesto, the only proper name that may work as a “traditional” dividing tool is that of Surrealism. And even this name is a peculiar signifier, one that has no clear or stable relation with a single signified. Surrealism is in turn an “avant-garde,” a “group,” a “genre.” Ibis last connotation of Surrealism as a genre (a definition that may be easily extended to the whole idea of avant-garde) is actually quite widespread, and constitutes the basis for many influential studies of the avant-garde and avant-garde art, such as, among others, Renato Poggioli’s and Peter Burger’s.2 9 The latter in particular, in devising, precisely, in his 1984 book, a theory of the avant-garde, insists on disclosing criteria, elements of classification, common themes that could enclose a sort of attitude of “avant- gardeness” into a scheme. His way of proceeding resembles, in the end, many avant- garde attempts at self-classification, such as manifestos. We could even go so far as to say that Peter Burger’s work (and then, implicitly, any theory of the avant-garde) find R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 74 its origin in the avant-garde itself. This is because even though the avant-gardistes were not the first to write and consciously express their belonging to a group with similar tastes, ideas, characteristics, they nonetheless arrived at a level of self awareness of their role that allows them to classify the genre of the work before the “generic work” actually existed. In other words, the avant gardes are an example of a literary genre that starts with “a framework to fill in” rather than by producing a work that could be enclosed within a framework at a later time. Burger states in the second chapter of his work, dedicated to the historicity of aesthetic categories: It is my thesis that certain general categories of the work of art were first made recognizable in their generality by the avant-garde, that it is consequently from the standpoint of the avant-garde that the preceding phases in the development of art as a phenomenon in bourgeois society can be understood, and that it is an error to proceed inversely, by approaching the avant-garde via the earlier phases of art. This thesis does not mean that it is only in avant-gardist art that all categories of the work of art reach their full elaboration. On the contrary, we will note that certain categories essential to the description of pre-avant- gardist art (such as organicity, subordination of the parts to the whole) are in fact negated in the avant-gardiste work. (Burger 19) The avant-gardist work, in Burger’s words, has a place within an ideal spatio- temporal categorization of art. But it does not, as we may think, proceed in a linear way as a development of the bourgeois notion of art. “One should not assume” Burger states, “that all categories (and what they comprehend) pass through an even development. Such an evolutionist view would eradicate what is contradictory in historical processes and replace it with the idea that development is a linear process.” (Burger 19) The place of the avant-garde is then crucially defined as the divider of an R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 75 epoch, one that sets a clear distinction between the linear “evolutionist” thought constituted as a given in bourgeois society, and the avant-garde, which generated a line of thought that directly opposed to the pre-existing system of logics. In his 1995 book The Rules of Art, literary critic Pierre Bourdieu defines genre as a “position.” He states: “The interplay of homologies between the literary field and the field of power or the social field in its entirety means that most literary strategies are overdetermined and a number o f‘choices’ hit two targets at once, aesthetic and political, internal and external.” (Bourdieu 205) Not only does his definition insist on the spatial character of genre, which appears similar to a grid that can be filled with proper names, but it also relates the notion of genre to the social field. Following this set of ideas, the Surrealist manifesto could be a demonstration of how, as in the definition of both Bourdieu and Burger, the position of genre is to be understood in the strictly spatial meaning of the word. Or, more precisely, in the avant-garde genre is self-positioning, it has a specific place that is self-defined by avant-garde “practices.” At the same time this “avant-garde genre” literally hits two targets at once, the “aesthetic” and the “political,” the “internal” and the “external.” Whether this aim is to be seen as intentional (as it seems to emerge from the reading of Bourdieu) or unintentional (as for Burger), it nonetheless succeeds in changing the rules of art themselves. The passage of the avant-garde, then, consists precisely in this conscious relation with the generic space of action (any type of action, not only writing). This R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 76 consciousness is the element that directs the avant-garde toward the aesthetic break that takes place at the beginning of the century. Previously, according to “the development of art as a phenomenon in bourgeois society,” genre categories were often applied to the professional positions of authors who were “poets,” “novelists,” “dramatists” in the first place, and this necessarily placed the accent on the authors in the first instance. The avant-garde proceeds in the opposite way; to give itself a multiple name (Surrealism, Dada, Futurism) is in the avant-garde work a sort of liberation from the burden of the “heroism” implied in the name of the singular author. Avant-garde praxis, we could affirm, transposes the Foucaultian author-function onto a multiple, since it is clear, reading the works of the French avant-gardes that the artists were not aspiring to an authorial or authoritarian work, but rather to a group effort that was seen preeminently as a reversal of the individualistic notion of the (then ■ JA dominantly bourgeois) art world. As it appears in all Surrealist manifestos, published in 1929,1930,1945, authorial narrative is outside the Surrealist discourse. To give an example, after a long accusation against the status of the novel genre, we read in the first manifesto: “Les heros de Stendhal tombent sous le coup des appreciations de cet auteur, appreciations plus ou moins heureuses, qui n’ajoutent rien a leur gloire. Ou nous les retrouvons vraiment, c’est la ou Stendhal les a perdus.” (Breton 19) If the Surrealist manifestos insist on rather abstract notions (or anti notions, since they are opposed to every pre-existing scheme) of logics and experimentation, it is nonetheless specifically in relation to the novel that the major R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 77 experiments in automatic writing took place. Books such as Le Pavsan de Paris or Nadia, for instance, are often referred to as “surrealist novels” regardless of their ambiguous positioning and the impossibility of placing them in a clear genre category. In conclusion, although the genre position (the category-novel) remained stable because it was, Bourdieu would claim, overdetermined by the interplay between the social and the literary field, Surrealist novels in many ways escaped this clear classification, and they constituted as much a reflection on classification itself - and then, by extension, on naming—as one on the social and political context in which they were embedded. 2.4. Modern M ythologies. The introduction to Aragon’s Le Pavsan de Paris claims to be the introduction to a “modem mythology.” It is a novel, then, specifically placed in time (modernity, and to be precise 1926) and in space (the city of Paris). We read at the beginning of the work: II semble que toute idee ait aujourd’hui depasse sa phase critique. II est commmunement recu qu’un examen general des notions abstraites de l’homme ait epuise insensiblement celles-ci, que la lumiere humaine se soit partout glissee et que rien n’ait ainsi echappe a ce proces universel, susceptible au plus de revision. Nous voyons done tous les philosophes du monde s’obstiner avant de s’attaquer au moindre probleme a l’expose et a la refutation de tout ce qu’ont dit sur lui leur devanciers. (Aragon 9) Modernity is, in Aragon’s words, the continuous negation of old values, and implicitly, what caused the “waning of the light of man.” Although it remains indefinite, modernity is nonetheless a spatial-temporal paradigm that we should try to R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 78 define for the reading of the surrealist text, as well as the texts that we will treat more closely in the following chapters. The notion of modernity is a complex one. The word modernity is in itself, we could say, a polysemic name, since it belongs to disparate times and could be referred to different topics; diverse locations and agencies. The term “modernity” keeps creating for itself new meanings with the passing of time. But if we want to find a “general” meaning and an origin to it, we will possibly make it coincide with the beginning of the twentieth century, and we may identify as its foundational characteristic what Henri Lefebvre has called the “pre-eminence of language in cultural expressions.” (Modernity 174) Lefebvre has retraced this coordinate as constitutive of the modem period in his 1976 book Introduction to Modernity. Here he writes: From the end of the nineteenth century onwards language per se becomes foregrounded in culture, in the name of a poetic or creative intention, a subjective and abstract intention which works on abstraction as though it were concrete (and aware initially of the magical character of the operation, the word as alchemy, then gradually losing sight of the original aim, the wish to create, the paradox and the challenge, until finally the end-product becomes accepted as something sufficient in itself). (Modernity 175) We identify modernity both with the political concept devised by Marx between 1840 and 1845 and with the artistic paradigm pursued by Baudelaire around the same period of time. At the same time, “modem” is an adjective used in the contemporary period mainly in opposition with the term “old-fashioned,” in order to underline the newness of the object it qualifies. The term “old-fashioned,” though, is in a sense inscribed in R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 79 modernity, because as soon as something becomes modem, what was modem once inevitably declines. As “the modem” always changes though, the notion itself of modernity remains stable because, being founded on the myth of the “new,” it never extinguishes itself. Henri Lefebvre affirms: Modem consciousness is made up of equal parts of certainty and uncertainty, seriousness and superficiality. It imagines itself to be the antechamber whence classics emerge. So art and culture blindly come into line with knowledge, and technicity, where the innovative and the controversial either rapidly integrate into existing structures, or simply disappear. Anything which appears to be able to outlast its context of novelty becomes a classic, and more and more rapidly (at least in France, where the fetishizing of classicism is getting more pronounced with the passing years). (Modernity 184) Lefebvre adds that a characteristics of our modernity (the period of the beginning of the 1960s, in which he was writing), is “negation.” (Modernity 184) Novelists as well as figurative artists, musicians, dramatists, all promote their work as anti-something: “antiplays, antiliterature, antinovels and antipoetry. Unaware of what the roles and rules involved really are, they take it upon themselves to bring about the dissolution of a rt... But very soon they become successful, and start growing up. It is time to write real plays, real novels, real poetry. Negativity is vanquished. They have seen the light.” (Modernity 184) In the end, Lefebvre’s analysis of a temporally specific modernism (and this is how the term “modem” will be understood in this text from now on) is the result of a perpetual crisis. He continues: Rather paradoxically- our modernism contains two aspects which at first glance might appear to be incompatible: an overexaggerated cult of the ever-changing here- and -now, and a neoclassicism... .There is perpetually something new- to a greater or lesser degree - in the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 80 different sectors of social practice, knowledge and consciousness. Moreover, to a greater or lesser degree, these sectors are volatile.... In our modernism - and this is what makes it original - one innovation seems as new as another, and while we are preconditioned to give them all the benefit of a favourable reception, they are all governed by a margin of uncertainty and chance. One of the most arrogant features of the new is that on both an emotive and an intellectual level it manages in some obscure way to give the impression of being synonymous with creativity. (Modernity 185) This foundational idea of newness is also what characterizes the thought of the 'XO avant-garde. The new type of literature devised by the avant-garde writers was directly related to the modem times they were witnessing. The approach to modernity that we may find in Surrealist novels resides mainly in the use of language. The “modem mythology” of Le Pavsan de Paris is founded in language. In the novel, the signs that reveal modem Paris are all words, all written signs.3 3 This insistence on language (and especially on written signatures) as signifiers of the modem world goes hand in hand, for the Surrealists, with the malaise for the overwhelming presence of “the modem” around them. This double way of understanding modernity also unveils, in the work of the avant-garde, a “new” awareness of time. The automatic writer is immersed in the modem space and time he belongs to, but he is also detached form it, and always in search of what we may call an avant-garde time, one that is always new, or at least renewable, and in particular, one that goes beyond the idea/ideology of modem. The setting of the paradigm of the new, one of the fundamental points of the avant-garde, then, can only be put in motion through language. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 81 Immersed in their search for a new mythology (which brought them instead to a myth of the new), the automatic writers turned on the over-schematic classifications of genre, and in particular to the old and established form of the realist novel and changed into a multiple, anti-schematic work that posed the accent on the spatiality of language. For the Surrealists, language surrounds us, and it no longer signifies. The realization ante-litteram of the importance of the author-function as an elite figure in the new society that was forming on the ashes of the decadence of the established bourgeois society, as well as the quest for the importance of something “new” to emerge, made the Surrealists follow the signs of modernity through the streets of the modem cities, and found in symbols of technical and cultural innovations. The premise for a new theory of modernity is, in their view, what negated the bourgeois individuality and substituted it for the signs of the “masses.”3 4 Aware of the importance of change, the Surrealists embraced the new anti- individualistic current of society and applied it to literature and to literary genre itself. Both Surrealism and the surrealist novel became a genre. Our proposed trajectory of anonymity, then, will take into consideration the evolution of this genre in a few works of the neo-avant-garde of the sixties in France and Italy, and analyze how, in these works, the influences of automatic novel writing have developed and tended toward an elimination of the importance of the proper name as the determiner of a subject. We may in fact claim with certain accuracy that the avant-garde of the sixties, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 82 in France and Italy, has been the privileged space for the proliferation of the ideas on erasure of name and the “death of subjectivity.”3 5 2.5. The Trajectory of Multiple Names. It is important to underline that our primary texts, just like Aragon’s Surrealist novel, even when not directly engaged with political stances, always represent a reflection and a critical position of the actual social situation.3 6 Given that, as we mentioned, all these texts are embedded in modernity, I will try to analyze this aspect and its interconnection with the treatment of proper names, in order to underline the “political unconscious” of these texts, which have often been criticized for their a- political surface. My work will try to show how, that is, the erasure and alteration of names “works,” a concern which, as Frederic Jameson specifies in his Political Unconscious, is the basic question for any political interpretation of a text.3 8 Jameson affirms that his concern (very much like that of Deleuze and Guattari’s in their writing of Anti-Oedipus) is to “reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective and to the status of psychological projection.” (Political Unconscious 22) This affirmation is based on the assumption that the term “everyday life” has been used in its political sense, and in particular, as a way to side with the “real” people in their daily activities (the dominated) against more “official” and “abstract” institutions (those who dominate). In his introduction to the Everyday Life Reader. Ben Highmore states: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 83 To invoke everyday life can be to invoke precisely those practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites. It becomes shorthand for voices from “below:” women, children, migrants and so on. But while designed to challenge certain conventions, this can still maintain an unproblematic acceptance of everyday life as a transparent realm: now instead of looking at government records, attic rooms are plundered for diaries, letters and such like. (Highmore 1) Thus everyday life could be easily understood as a common place term that signifies a way of conceiving and narrating history that is different from that portrayed in official documents or government records. This view nonetheless, is only partially acceptable, because, as Henri Lefebvre observed in his 1947 Critique of Everyday Life, there is no “truth” or “system” to be found in the elements that form daily life, since elements that are too diverse and difficult to classify. Highmore adds: “Everyday life invites a kind of theorizing that throws our most cherished theoretical values and practices into crisis. For instance, theorists always promote the values of “rigorous” thought, “systematic” elaboration and “structured” argument: but what if rigour, system and structure, were antithetical and deadening to aspects of everyday life?” (Highmore 3) Texts concerned with the politics of everyday life, such as the novels by Georges Perec as well as the theories of Henri Lefebvre, for instance, have a direct parallel with the theories exposed by the Surrealists. Just as the historic avant-garde had done at the beginning of the twentieth century, the critique of classification that has developed in the sixties is directed in particular to those genres that define themselves as ideological. In his book Au Dela du Structuralisme. a collection of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 84 articles published in 1971 as a summa of his theories developed on everyday life, Henry Lefebvre affirm s: Ainsi precede le fetishisme du savoir, baptize ‘epistemologie,’ dont nous verrons qu’il consacre la division du travail sur le plan intellectuel, qu’il protege la parcellarisation de la connaissance sous le manteau d’une encyclopedisme de parade. Le remplissage du centre theorique bloque la pensee, la recherche, l’exploration du reel et du possible ... tel est le cas duformalisme, celui dufonctionalisme, celui du structuralisme, situation qui les reunit dans un conrnnm destin: tentative, success, declin. (Au Dela du Structuralisme 11-12) These words, written more than thirty years ago, are symptomatic in portraying the tendency of society (called - rather derogatorily—“fetishism of knowledge”) towards the over-specialization of every field of knowledge. Starting precisely in the 1960s, this tendency has continued, and in fact augmented through the last thirty years. In order to avoid what Lefebvre calls an “epistemological encyclopedism,” we should then momentarily forget specific ideas of genre as related to a period. We should probably avoid the reclassification of genres proposed by contemporary criticism and categorized under the ultra-specific names of “postmodern genres.” In place of such encyclopedic classification, I try to concentrate instead simply on the category of the novel, the one which, apparently, though undergoing some changes, has indeed remained stable since the nineteenth century.3 9 And although any notion of genre has been, we could say marginalized by contemporary literary criticism, and especially by deconstruction, which sees a lack of rigor in its taxonomy, and, as Frederic Jameson states, “truly discredited by literary theory,” (Political Unconscious R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 85 57) we may nonetheless recuperate its specificity as a “position,” as a spatial entity which can help us place the proper names in the novels we will study. As I stated earlier, my final aim is to consider how the name and its absence are treated in novels written in Italy and France during the 1960s and 1970s. These novels, which will be closely analyzed in the next chapters are Georges Perec’s Things: a Story of the Sixties. Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Luther Blissett’s Q. It is important to remark that these writings are contemporary (and co-spatial) with the theories on the “incorrectness” of names and classification proposed by Michel Foucault, as well as the important theories on multiplicity and its “perpetuous movement of being” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is my claim that in these works of literature the significance that is usually ascribed to the name and the signature, be it identification, tool for dividing, or fixation of identity is at the same time elaborated and transcended. The names in the novels, as well as the names of their authors, are to be treated as signifiers of “multiples” rather than of “individualities.” Another characteristic of these novels (one that by no means characterizes the entire poduction of the authors) is, we could say, the limited size. The short novels analyzed in this work are relevant to a period in which the dominant intellectual discourse insisted on the “crisis” or even the “death” of the novel.4 0 The rapid increase of the production of printed material that was taking place at the beginning of the sixties in Europe created a debate over the possibility of writing “complete” and “linear” novels. The short narrative, then, is embedded in the period of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 86 time analyzed also because of its shortness: a “small book” is a practical item to hold, and it permits a quick and easy reading, one suitable for the increasing “velocity” of a society that starts, in the sixties, to invest a great deal of resources in transportation and communication technology. If these aspects of society are outlined “in” the novels, they are also visible in its “external” form. Even the very long Q, paradoxically, fits into this scheme. The novel is in fact readable in many different formats: it is not only a book but it may be downloaded online for free, since the collective of writers that is behind its creation has substituted the open notion of “copyleft,” (a form of non-lucrative acknowledgement of authorship) for the legally binding idea of copyright. The works, then, are “anonymous” in this sense: they follow the process of technologic growth in which the value of the name is progressively reduced because of its “heaviness,” a characteristic that loses value with the advancements of modernity. Notes 1 In the specific case o f Calvino’s novel, the classificatory function is a central part o f the narration and, we could say, it comes before the plot. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is constructed with a scheme which makes use o f a slightly modified version o f Greimas’ semiotic square o f signification. 2 The word heteroclite, a translation o f the latin heteroclitus, is o f uncertain origin. In Latin heteroclitus refers to a word or piece o f language that deviates from common rules or common forms. It presulably comes from the Greek heteroklitos, a compound o f heter (different) and -possibly—klitos, the verbal form o f klinein, which means to lean, incline, inflect. 3 “II ‘luogo comune’, parola doppia che si dovrebbe scrivere in un solo tratto poichd e un sintagma irrigidito, non ha avuto un significato stabile nel corso della nostra storia; esso e anche stato Poggetto di un rovesciamento di valori piuttosto notevole, passando da un sigjiificato tecnico, presso gli antichi, I quali vi vedevano un prezioso procedimento di persuasione, a un significato volgare, disprezzato nella cultura modema.” (“Luogo Comune”208) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 87 4 The essay was published in Italian. All translations o f the essay are my own. 5 “La retorica ha stabilito le grandi forme possibili di questa premessa: il segno certo, il segno meno certo (polisemico), la verosimiglianza; ma come trovare in tali forme generiche, delle sottoforme piu vicine al punto da discutere? E’ qui infine, che si incontrano i luoghi comuni; le premesse entimematiche possono essere tratte da certi luoghi; conoscendo questi luoghi, posso sviluppare il ragionamento, ho di che parlare.”(“ Luogo Comune” 210) 6 “Bisogna rendersi conto che la ripetizione del linguaggio che da origine al luogo comime e ambivalente: da un lato, essa pud apparire come ima schiavitu, poichd riduce la liberth che permette di produrre qualcosa di nuovo combinando delle frasi sempre in modo differente; dalTaltro, come la ripetizione del segno e ci6 che fonda la lingua, e le permette di funzionare, cosi la ripetizione delle frasi (e ciod i luoghi comuni) 6 cid che permette a molti di tenere un discorso.” (“Luogo Comune” 220) 7 “Solamente una teoria (copiosa) delle figure (dei tropi).” (“Luogo Comune” 217) 8 “Nella linguistica modema sono stati presi in considerazione quasi esclusivamente due tropi: la metafora e la metonimia. In questo caso, i tropi, in numero ridotto avranno lo stesso ruolo angusto dei tre luoghi comuni di Aristotele.” (“Luogo Comune” 217) 9 “Lo scrittore ha scelto una pratica, la scritture, che, per il suo statuto, per il modo in cui essa pone l’enunciazione, elude e supera contemporaneamente il luogo comune e la sua contestazione. Perchd? Perche la letteratura ... ha per lavoro costante non di ripetere cid che e stato detto, ma di variarlo ... e cid b nello stesso tempo riconoscerlo e dialettizzarlo: in breve, non distruggerlo (cosa impossibile) ma esorcizzarlo.” (“Luogo Comune” 224) 1 0 See Michel Foucault, The Order o f Things: 44. 1 1 “In ogni secolo, il modo in cui le forme dell’arte si strutturano riflette - a guisa di similitudine, di metaforizzazione, appunto, risoluzione del concetto in figura - il modo in cui la scienza o comunque la cultura dell’epoca vedono la realta.” (Opera Aperta 50) 1 2 “In un contesto culturale in cui la logica a due valori (Taut-aut classico tra il vero e il falso, tra un dato e il suo contraddittorio) non e piu l’unico strumento possible della conoscenza, ma si fanno strada le logiche a piu valori, che fan posto, ad esempio, alTindeterminato come esito valido dell’operazione conoscitiva, in questo contesto ecco che si presenta una poetica dell’opera d’arte priva di esito necessario e prevedibile, in cui la liberth che la fisica contemporanea ha riconosciuto non piu come motivo di disorientamento ma come aspetto ineliminabile di ogni verifica scientifica.” (Opera Aperta 52) 1 3 In “Death o f the Author,” Barthes affirms: “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any o f them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” (“Death o f the author” 3) 1 4 Barthes w ill later add that both figures determine the interpretations o f the work, which may be different but at the same time valid in themselves. As a consequence, readers’ interpretations multiply, and these may stray - even greatly—from the first supposed interpretation given by the writer. In this way interpretations literally multiply the text. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 88 1 5 See J. L. Nancy, Being Singular Plural: 2-35. 1 6 See Chapter 4 o f this dissertation for an exhaustive reading o f Calvino’s text. 1 7 See the analysis o f Plato’s Cratvlus in Chapter 1 o f this dissertation. 1 8 This quote from Deleuze refers to a reading o f Nietzsche. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche. 1 9 We may imply from Deleuze and Guattari’s words that, in its function as a mark, a name defines a territory. They state: “the territory is first o f all the critical distance between two beings o f the same species: mark your distance. What is mine is first o f all in my distance; I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters o f expression.” (A Thousand Plateaus 319 -320) 2 0 Such an establishment o f bi-polarisms, always interdependent, may indeed posit a problem precisely in our judgment o f the valu e o f proper names. 211 use the terms “analogical” and “representational” following Foucault’s definition o f the two differtn epistemes (that o f the Renaissance and that o f the A g e C lassiqu e) as dominated in turn by “analogy” and “representation.” See Foucault, The Order o f Things: 17-77. 2 2 See, for instance: Winfried Engler, The French Novel: Joann Cannon, Postmodern Italian Fiction: Paul Gifford and Johnnie Gratton, Subject Matters. Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the present: Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. 2 3 “In realta le reali o pretese neo-avanguardie costituiscono solo l’aspetto piu vistoso, non di rado superfluo, di una situazione culturale in cui viene messa in crisi non solo la nozione tradizionale di arte, ma la possibility stessa dell’arte. E attraverso questo fenomeno traspare la messa in questione della stessa nozione di uomo, di razionalM, di comunicazione, di rapporto tra cultura e society in un momento storico in cui la cultura assume forme inedite e apparentemente aberranti per il semplice motivo che l’intiero contesto socio-economico sta profondamente mutando su scala mondiale.”(Gruppo 63 290) 2 4 Towards a sociology o f the novel is the text written by Lucien Goldmann In 1964 and reviewed by Barthes in hi article on France Observateur. Goldmann’s text is a critique o f the previous idea o f “sociology o f the novel proposed by Lucacs, in which “the insurmountable rupture between the hero and the world”, the element that is constitutive o f the novel genre, is founded in the “two degradations (that o f the hero and that o f the world) that must engender both a constitutive opposition, the foundation o f this insurmountable rupture, and an adequate community to make possible the existence o f the epic form.” (Goldmann 2) 2 5 Eco writes his articles with Gruppo 63, about a “culture o f opposition” that is especially present in Italy, and he identifies it with a tradition that, starting with the avant-gardes, has become in contemporary literature a genre in itself. 2 6 See Umberto Eco, The Open Work: 9-38. 2 7 This term is directly taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s work A Thousand Plateaus, in which they state: “What we call machinic statements are machine effects that define consistency or enter matters o f R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 89 expression. Effects o f this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value o f passage or relay.” (A Thousand Plateaus 333) 2 8 The word movement here must be intended in the literal meaning o f motion induced entity. 291 am referring here to Renato Poggioli’s Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia. translated into English as The Theory o f the Avant-garde (1968). 3 0 Burger affirms: “My second thesis is: with the historical avant-garde movements, the social subsystem that is art enters the stage o f self-criticism. Dadaism, the most radical movement within the European avant-garde, no longer criticizes schools that preceded it, but criticizes art as an institution, and the course its development took in bourgeois society. The concept ‘art as an institution’ as used here refers to the productive and distributive apparatus and also to the ideas about art that prevail at a given time and that determine the reception o f works. The avant-garde turns against both - the distribution apparatus on which the work o f art depends, and the status o f art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept o f autonomy.” (Burger 22) 3 1 See Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: 120-152; Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital o f the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: 147-162. 3 2 Burger states in Theory o f the Avant-Garde: “since the historical avant-garde movements cause a break with tradition and a subsequent change in the representational system, the category is not suitable for a description o f how things are. And this is all the less when one considers that the historical avant- garde movements not only intend a break with traditional representational system but the total abolition o f the institution that is art. This is undoubtedly something ‘new’, but the ‘newness’ is qualitatively different from both a change in artistic techniques and a change in the representational system.” (Burger 63) 3 3 Le Pavsan de Paris displays an abundance o f written signs taken from “afifiches et placards,” shop- windows, price-lists, and advertisements, and transposed in the novel as graphic inserts. 3 4 We read in Le Pavsan de Paris: “Maintenanat que nous avons couche h nos pieds 1 ’eclair comme un petit chat, et que sans plus fr6mir que l’aigle nous avons compte sur sa face les taches de rousseur du soleil, a qui porterons-nous le culte de latrie? D ’autres faces aveugles nous sont nees, d’autres craintes majeures, et c’est ainsi que nous nous prostemons devant nos filles, les machines, devant plusieurs idees que nous avons revees sans nto fiance, un matin. Quelques-uns d’entre nous qui prevoyaient cette domination magique, qui sentaient qu’elle ne tirait pas son principe du principe d’utilit6, current reconnaitre ici les bases d’un sentiment esthetique nouveau. Ils confbndaient nai'vement le beau et le divin. Mais voici que les raisons profondes de ce sentiment plastique qui s’est 61eve en Europe au d6but du xxe siecle commencent a apparaitre, et a se demeler. L’homme a delegue son activity aux machines. II s’est ddparti pour elles la faculte de penser.” (Aragon 146) 3 5 See Breton, Manifestos du Surrealisme; Aragon, Le Pavsan de Paris (esp. pp. 139-230); Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Guy Debord, The Society o f the Spectacle. 3 6 Luther Blissett/Wu Ming’s novels are an example o f the importance o f names in connection with political discourse. Not only is the explicitly anti-authorial work on the part o f the collective taken as a political stance, but the story they narrate in their books are usually conscious attempts at rewriting history from the perspective o f the dominated. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 90 3 7 At the time in which these novels were issued, the question o f a political engagement on the part o f writers and artist was indeed crucial. To make an example, the critical articles o f Gruppo 63, were often devoted to an analysis o f the political “usefulness” o f texts and works o f art. 3 8 Deleuze and Guattari write: “the unconscious poses no problem o f meaning, solely problems o f use. The question posed by desire is not “what does it mean?” but rather “How does it work?” (Anti- Oedinus 109) 3 9 Most o f the novels we w ill consider have undergone repeated attempts at categorization, some o f which are even contradictory. They have been defined as “avantgarde works.” “experimental texts,” “postmodern novels.” The last definition is particularly interesting. Although, we would expect, traditional generic division does not apply to postmodern texts, which are generally defined, as Maijorie PerlofF explains in her study on postmodern literature “nonrationalistic and wholesale appropriations o f other genres, both high and popular” (PerlofF viii), some critics have defined this “appropriation” as a “genre” o f its own, as a proof that the need for classification in literature is a crucial one. Among the critics that have adopted the idea o f postmodern genre, Clifford Geertz assumes that blurring or mixing o f genres is indicative o f a “new way o f thinking,” hence a new category in itself. Here is how he describes the notion o f “blurring”: Scientific discussions looking like belles letters morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Bartheleme), histories that consist o f equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada), theoretical treaties set out as travelogues (Lfevi-Strauss) ... Nabokov’s Pale Fire, that impossible object made o f poetry and fiction, footnotes and images from the clinic, seems very much o f the time; one waits only for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra.” (Geertz 165-66) Everything, we can easily see, may be included into the grid o f genres. Even what seems to escape it may in the end be classified as a genre o f its own. What interests us here, is not whether the way o f thinking portrayed by the blurring o f genres is in fact “new,” but rather how o f it reflects and is reflected in the society it portrays (consciously or uncounsciously), and in the “movements” o f the “subjects” within this society. Since the relation o f the novel to the portrayal o f society is undeniable, and it has indeed been studied since the appearance o f the form itself, we w ill take its “genericity” into consideration 4 0 See Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi, Gruppo 63. Critica e Teoria: 105-207. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 91 Chapter 3. Everyday Naming: Georges Perec’s Les Choses. - There is an individual named perhaps approximately. Georges Perec, Which Moped ■with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back o f the Yard? In a short essay titled “Approches de Quoi?,” first published in Cause Commune in 1973, Georges Perec explains his neologism “infra-ordinary.”1 The infra ordinary (as opposed to the extra-ordinary) designates a kind of meticulous attention to “the everyday.” (Highmore 206) The term connotes both a state and a practice, since Perec underlines the social importance of the description of the infra-ordinary. According to author, the obsessive interest for the everyday that the term suggests may create an opposition to what Guy Debord had called, several years earlier, the “spectacle,” or the excessive sensationalism imposed on society by all modem form of media (“news,” “entertainment,” “propaganda”). For Debord the spectacle has become, since the 1950s, the controlling agency of the new mode of production, extending its power to influence social behaviors.2 Perec’s aim, with the infra ordinary, is to oppose the spectacle by bringing to the surface the uneventful, what is left out from the news, what exists outside mediatic attention. He writes: What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front page splash, the banner headline. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the train exists ... in our haste to mesure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coal mines, ‘social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there is a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. (Highmore 206) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 92 But is Perec really proposing a revolutionary social practice simply by coining neologisms such as injra-ordinaire, or endotique (as opposed to exotique), which describe an everyday that is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, neither banal nor exotic? In his article “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra-ordinary,” Gilbert Adair expresses a few doubts on this point. His argument concerns the sensational tone of Perec’s piece itself, the choice of examples almost banally related to a certain type of leftist rhetoric (the coal miners, the train).3 In this sense, Adair sustains, Perec is not suggesting a real opposition to the spectacularization of society, but rather he is complying with that sensationalism by “sporting an earnestly schoolmasterish hat,” and proffering the “pious commonplace” (Adair 99) that social injustice is intolerable. Whether or not we agree with Adair’s comments, we can remark that the infra ordinary is an inherently ambiguous term. While, in its essence, the infra-ordinary is inherently an absence of representation, the very coinage of the word aims to capture the representation of that absence. Although Perec’s oeuvre includes very different types of texts, the attention to the infra-ordinary is indeed a constitution of greater part of his narrative corpus. In the autobiographic Je me souviens. for instance, the writer asserts his willingness to discover the “little fragments of the everyday.” fie me souviens 5) The narrator of his second novel, Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu parisien. observes and jots down “what happens when nothing happens, what passes when nothing passes, except time, people, cars and clouds.” (Tentative 45) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 93 We could claim that, just like the definition of the infra-ordinary, the narration of the everyday retains also an ambiguous value. The careful description of the everyday finds its roots in the proverbially anti-spectacular activity of observing places and people’s habits, an activity very familiar to Perec, who worked for the CNRS, (an important French research institution), almost all his life.4 But this activity, as many have pointed out, also has a function in the spectacle.5 Statistical research has in fact always been the “background work” for social control, as well as the blueprint for the creation of social trends and for advertising. Perec’s first novel, Les Choses: a Story of the Sixties. (1965) revolves entirely around such ambiguities. The novel is centered on the daily habits and desires of a young Parisian couple whose job as psychosociologues (market researchers) consists precisely in collecting and cataloguing the infra-ordinary aspects of people’s lives. The plot extends over a time span of circa six years, and although there is no specific mention of dates, we can infer, from brief references to political events and cultural products in the text (film titles, literature, popular music) that the narrative takes place between 1958 and 1964.6 As critic Yuji Oniki states in his 1995 article “Perec, Marx, and Les Choses.” “plenty is imagined but very little happens in Les Choses.” (Oniki 93) For this reason, the novel may be simply summarized. In the first part, Jerome and Sylvie, the two protagonists, live in Paris, where they both work as interviewers in the new, developing sector of “motivation research.” A third person narrator follows the couple R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 94 through all their daily activities: during their interviews at work, in their free time, with their friends. The narrator always provides lengthy descriptive lists - similar to the lists of questions they ask their interviewees - of Sylvie and Jerome’s shopping sprees, real or imagined. In the second part of the novel, having reached the impasse of a life that does not guarantee stable employment or allow good earnings, the couple moves to Sfax, a small city in the Tunisian desert. There, Sylvie works as a schoolteacher while Jerome is unemployed, and spends his days in idleness. After eight slow and depressive months in Tunisia, the two decide to return to France, accept “real jobs,” and eventually settle down in Bordeaux, to conduct an average - and rather mediocre - existence as cadres in a market research company. As in any good statistical account, Sylvie and Jerome’s family names are never disclosed, while the information on their ages is very precise. Actually, only through this detail do we know the exact duration of the novel. At the beginning, Sylvie is twenty-two and Jerome is twenty-four. At the turning point of the novel, she is twenty- four while he is twenty-six. When the story ends, they are “not yet thirty.” (Les Choses 125! Sylvie and Jerome are virtually the sole human agencies in the plot; the story mentions other characters very vaguely, and only in relation to the couple. Nevertheless, the protagonists are not introduced until the second chapter, after a long description of an object-filled apartment, which reads, as critic Paul Schwartz has noted, “like an advertising prospectus or a Better Home and Gardens article.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 95 (Schwartz 7) First presented in this ad-like context, the couple appears as a single and nameless unit. There is no direct description of their individual personalities, nor any specific insistence on a gender distinction between the two. As critic Kristin Ross remarks, the characters are “united by shopping into an intractable third person n pronoun: ‘they.’” (Ross 58) Furthermore, not a single line of dialogue is ever exchanged throughout the novel. Who are “they,” then? Is the story of Sylvie and Jerome an expression of the infra-ordinary? Most critics have concentrated on the characters’ function as specimen of the average Parisian couple. If Kristin Ross ascribes to the protagonist of Les Choses the function of explaining “everything French” in the late fifties and early sixties, Leroy T. Day, in his 1989 article “Narration and Story in Georges Perec’s Les Choses” affirms that Sylvie and Jerome are “presented more as hypothetical characters than as purely fictional ones.” (Day 250) If we concentrate on this typical aspect of the characters, a reading that is indeed legitimated by the novel’s subtitle “A Story of the Sixties,” we must then reflect on the implications of Perec’s impersonal way of narrating the history of the present.8 Day observes, for instance, that Perec’s impersonal tone is accomplished “by leaving the referent of ‘ils’ vague, and avoiding all proper names.” (Day 250) What, then, does a nameless story of the sixties (if the story really is nameless) tell us about the sixties themselves? Moving from the interpretative premise, proposed by Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981), that the political perspective must not be conceived as a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 96 sort of “supplementary method” or an “option auxiliary” to the interpretation of literary works because it is always the primary hermeneutic, this chapter considers the political meaning of a work that has often been read as a sociological study of 1960s everyday life but only marginally (and very recently) as a politically and historically significant work.9 As Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross affirm in an article on everyday life, “The Political, like the purloined letter, is hidden in the everyday, exactly where it is most obvious: in the contradictions of lived experience, in the most banal and repetitive gestures of everyday life - the commute, the errand, the appointment.” (Kaplan/Ross 3) To this brief list of everyday activities with a political significance, I will add “the act of naming.”101 have already discussed the conception of names as instruments of power in antiquity, and studied the position of power of the Nomothete (the name- giver) in Western philosophy. I have subsequently observed the distinction between “correct” and “incorrect” names, noticing how the substance of these conceptions, despite the radical changes in theories of language, has not drastically changed throughout history. Concentrating on the use of names in Les Choses. I try to understand how the practice of everyday naming works for Perec, and by extension -- since the novel wants to be a “story of the sixties” -- in 1960s French society.1 1 To do so, I rely primarily on two works of criticism which have underlined the importance of the book as a tool for social-political analysis: Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars. Clean Bodies (1998) and Stella Behar’s Georges Perec: Ecrire pour ne pas dire (1996). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 97 The chapter is roughly divided in three sections. In the first I analyze the use - and omission - of names in Les Choses. I study the alternation of common and proper names in the novel, the meaning of the frequent lists Perec makes, and the references to names of advertised products in relation to the infra-ordinary anonymity of the characters as social agents. More specifically, I try to see whether the majority of proper names mentioned - Sylvie and Jerome’s names, as well as the names of things, places, cultural products - can map out a path which relates names and anonymity to the development of 1960’s consumer society. The second part addresses the issue of class and in particular the unnamable status of social classes in the early 1960. Taking into consideration Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, a text strictly linked to Les Choses. I will see how Barthes’ definition of the bourgeoisie as an “anonymous society” adapts to the description of the bourgeois and, most important, of the petty bourgeois and the cadre in Les Choses. The concluding section is devoted to the second part of the Les Choses. set in Tunisia, where, apparently, a reversal of all the paradigms proposed in the first part takes place. Although it is not my intention to dwell on the specifically postcolonial aspect of the narrative, I nonetheless observe how the functions of naming and classification change dramatically in relation to the different spaces of the narration. 3.1. Proper and Common. It is crucial to point out, as a way of beginning, that the story of Jerome and Sylvie is enclosed within two quotations. Les Choses opens with a quote (in English) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 98 from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and ends with one by Karl Marx on the means necessary to achieve truth. The opening quotation reads: Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvelous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remain closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks. (Les Choses 17) While some critics have speculated about Marx’s quotation, generally seen as an indication of Perec’s method, or, in the words of Pierre Burgelin, the implication of “cette mise en jeu personnelle constamment distanciee par la reflexion critique.” (Burgelin 50) not many have commented on this first quotation. Lowry’s passage may be read as an ironically optimistic presentation of the contemporary setting of the novel, where the products of civilization are the carriers of happiness for the protagonists, in sharp contrast with Marx’s closing passage, which is an appropriate • i 'y epitaph for the bitter conclusion of the story. Marx’s quotation reads: “The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true; the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result.” (Les Choses 126) Those who have indeed considered the opening quotation (such as, for instance David Bellos and Yuji Oniki) limit their observations to the author’s peculiar language choice, to the fact that Perec transcribed Lowry’s passage in English, while the original version is actually a literal translation of a Mexican Spanish radio R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. announcement.1 3 For Bellos, both the epigraph by Lowry and the envoi from Marx can be read as linguistic/cultural borders set up to situate the “Frenchness” of Les Choses. Bellos writes: “The first effect of the two foreign bodies around Les Choses is to frame the French text with language-traces of France’s two northern neighbours - as if the language laid out between them were placed by the book’s shape where it lies on the European map, between English and German.” (Bellos 326) It is indeed evident that the two quotations delimitate the borders of book. However, the space they enclose is not only geographical or national. The passages help delineate the context of Things also in a different sense. The two prominent figures - the British writer and the German philosopher - whose names begin and end the story, represent a sharp contrast with the insignificant names of the main characters. Sylvie and Jerome lack, in fact, family names, hence they do not seem to have or belong to any significant tradition, be it of nation or of class. Tucked between the proper names of Lowry and Marx, the names of Sylvie and Jerome thus stand out, even at a first glance, as improper and common. The novel’s treatment of the characters as subjects is, by consequence, rather problematic. Issues of naming and subjectivity are central in Les Choses. Even though Perec did not, as some argue, write his first novel with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1954 short essay Pour un Nouveau Roman in mind, which urges writers to “arrive at a new prose form capable of representing the new, depthless here and now, the era of the masses, which is ‘one of administrative numbers,”’ (Ross 75) the characters in the novel are R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. striking for their impersonality and undifferentiated asubjectivity.1 4 Behar underlines how the main difference between Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec, who “se dit realiste,” (Behar 5) rests mainly in the writers’ conceptions of historical time. While Robbe-Grillet sees a-historic vision as the best way to represent the “crise du sujet,” Perec substitutes “une perspective qui restitue le monde dans sa dimension temporelle et done historique.” (Behar 5) As it is clear from the subtitle of the novel, which warns the reader that the story is temporally situated, historical time is not dissociable from the interpretation of the asubjectivity of the main characters of Les Choses. The initial critical reception of the novel discusses at length its relation to the Nouveau Roman but does not dwell on its historicity. Aside from Les Temps Modemes. the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945, which accuses the author of complicity with the emerging consumer system he pretends to criticize, all the reviews of Les Choses, ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left (that is to say from the monarchic newspaper Aspects de la France to the PCF-affiliated L’Humanite and the leftist Le Nouvel Observateur) reserve words of praise to the novel.1 5 In his sociological study of Perec’s reception Lire la Lecture. Jacques Leenhardt observes that both public and criticism appreciated (as a sign of modesty) the fact that the author chose not to put the word “novel” on the title page of his book at a time in which “la polemique du Nouveau Roman bat son plein,” (Leenhardt 55) and the character of the work, defined as a Flaubertian “education sentimentale sans le R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 101 sentiment.” 1 6 (Leenhardt 56) The real focus of most early criticism, though, was the more fundamental question posed by the work. The main topics covered in the reviews were of a moral character. Assuming that Perec’s narrator was making a mockery of the protagonists, both left and right-wing critics were unanimous in condemining the carence d ’ absolu of the characters. Their criticism extended to a general complaint about modem youth, for whom “things” are a goal in themselves rather than a means to obtain more essential values. In general, two tendencies of the criticism surfaced in early reviews. One side incriminated Sylvie and Jerome’s lack of ideals and their wrongly focalized desires (strictly material ambitions, blind adherence to the rales imposed by the system). The second tendency regretted the desuetude of “virile” values, such as the straggle for life, which are supposed to develop in the individual those virtues of Constance and discipline Jerome and Sylvie so blatantly lack. The values attributed to Les Choses constitute an example of what Pierre Macherey criticizes as the sense of “essential truth” that literature is believed to convey. Macherey writes: “We ... succumb to the illusion of a literature that is full of philosophy in the sense that a form encloses a content which it holds and clothes, and which also gives it its essential truth.” (Macherey 229) The unanimous consensus surrounding the truths expounded in Les Choses eventually rendered the novel a literary and educational institution; at the end of 1965 Perec was awarded the Prix Renaudot, and Les Choses subsequently became part of the literature program in every French high school.1 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 102 An invariable argument, recurrent in all criticism of Les Choses, from early journalistic reviews to more recent academic articles, is the discussion of the loss of individuality of the protagonists, who, “in the struggle to possess all the things, sacrifice their identity.” (Schwartz 6) Sylvie and Jerome, critics claim, are “representatifs d’une societe qui uniformise les fa<?ons de vivre des hommes et des femmes et homogeneise les gouts et les desires,” (Burgelin 43) hence they are “represented only as Other; they are, properly speaking alienated.” (Leak 68) It seems, in other words, that the impersonality of the characters, their indistinctness, their absence of dialogue and, of course, their alienation (a topic that, we cannot forget, was particularly en vogue during the 1960s) are indeed inescapable aspects of Les Choses.1 8 Although Perec declared, in an interview with Bruno Marcenac and Marcel Benabou in 1965, that “people who think I have denounced consumer society have understood absolutely nothing about my book,” (Georges Perec Owns Up 17) many critics have read, and still read Les Choses as “an indictment of Gaullist Consumer Society,” (Times Literary Supplement! or as a text “contre la societe de consommation ... une societe qui, par la publicite, suscite des besoins chez les individus ppur les rendre etrangers a eux-memes, pour les ‘aliener,’ comme aurait dit un intellectuel de l’epoque.” (Segura 50-1) Even taking Perec’s disclaimer into consideration, we nonetheless perceive the dehumanization of the characters in the novel. Certainly the (Flaubertian) ironic tone R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 103 the narrator often uses would have to make us think there is, if not properly an indictment, at least a disapproval of Sylvie and Jerome’s “art of living.”1 9 But looking closely at the accuracy and the affect with which Perec dwells on his description of commodities - “these bright, soft, simple and beautiful things” (Les Choses 25) — market-driven psychological mechanisms, or advertising language, we cannot help but agree with the writer when he affirms that a moral judgment is not necessarily, or at least not always present in the novel. Les Choses does not append moral commentaries to Sylvie and Jerome’s choices, leaving the interpretation of their acts open. If any judgment on the part of the narrator is present, it is simply displaced from the characters to the things themselves, from the subject to the object. Indeed, while the lack of nobility of Sylvie and Jerome, evidenced by their lack of family names, is a frequent topic of criticism, the abundance of proper names of the things that surround the characters often goes unnoticed. And although some, such as for instance Paul Schwartz, recognize the commodities as “the real subject matter of the book.” (Schwartz 6) no one lingers on the “subjectivity of the objects” that is defined by proper names, and that is reminiscent of what Pierre Macherey calls “subjectivity without subjects,” (Macherey 42) a theory of subjectivity detached from the realist principle it entails, “that the subject as such exists.” (Macherey 42) This subjectivity, which comprehends non-subjects, is what puts on the same plane the characters and the things in the novel, and it is clearly set in motion through the use of 90 names, and in particular of proper names. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 104 Discussing the frequency of the long lists of things in Les Choses. Harry Matthews, a good friend of Perec’s and one of the most important critics of his work, talks of the book’s “quasi-obsessive inclination for accumulation.” (Matthews 7) Indeed, the interminable lists are the first evident feature of the novel. The opening scene, for instance, is devoid of human presence but it nonetheless features a long list of proper names. The novel opens with a description of a dreamlike apartment filled with sumptuous objects and rich furniture that is entirely in the present conditional tense. The subject is, interestingly, a disembodied, anonymous eye: The eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respectively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle streamer named Ville-de-Montreau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. There, the carpet would give way to an almost yellow woodblock floor, partly covered by three faded rugs.2 1 (Les Choses 21) It appears as if Les Choses raises from the beginning a question of subjectivity. We cannot help but wonder, in fact, whose seeing eye this is. Who signs, in other words, this opening description?2 2 Yuji Oniki claims that the disembodied eye that starts the narration does not pertain to a particular subject, but is instead the asubjective expression of a “narratology of glimpses,” or a type of narration that is incapable (because of its relation to the commodification of society) of reproducing the fixed gaze representative of realist, Balzacian fiction.2 3 The essence of this type of narration R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 105 lies in its mobility, since “from the very beginning the eye is unable to concentrate on one particular object, gliding instead from object to object.” (Oniki 96) In his 1977 book The Railway Journey, a study of the relations between nineteenth-century industrialization and the new speed of the train, Wolfgang Schivelbusch proposes a more complete explanation of the “synthetic philosophy of the glance.” (Schivelbusch 60) In Schivelbusch’s text, this glance, or “panoramic view” caused by the new means of transportation drastically changes the perception of the nineteenth-century “eye.”2 4 And if it is true, as Ross comments, that “transportation creates commodities,” because “it is precisely the movement between geographical points that makes the object a commodity,” (Ross 39) then the developed commodity culture of the 1960s - with its increased quantity of objects available to the buyer by means of faster transportation - may also induce an increased velocity in the panoramic view. This speed necessarily impedes the visual enjoyment (the fixed gaze) of any object, forcing the eye to move incessantly from one commodity to the next. In the initial description, the objects “becoming subjects” through the imposition of a proper name are not the type of commodities that will subsequently dominate the narrative, but rather their carriers. The eye recognizes a train, a car and boat. These means of transportation, all named (a Stephenson locomotive, a Thunderbird, a paddle-streamer named Ville-de-Montreau), are indeed the first subjects of the novel. In relation to these subjects, the characters, just like the eye that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 106 glides over the ceiling of an imaginary place, are consequently disembodied and dehumanized. To them the full view of the true nature of postwar “commodity culture” is precluded; they may only cast brief, fleeting glances on its consumerist reality. Or in Perec’s words “Jerome and Sylvie had the sensation that something was escaping them” (Les Choses 75) but they never fully realize what it is. The long of lists of objects “evoques avec une precision prolixe,” (Burgelin 42) then, are surrogates of the subjectivity of more traditionally novelistic characters. In more than one instance we read, in Les Choses, that the protagonists are “absolutely anonymous.” (Les Choses 39) Sylvie and Jerome lack the “past and tradition” that (especially in a French context, which owes a great deal to its aristocratic history) are generally symbolized by family names. Stella Behar underlines their impersonality when she asks: “En effet, que nous dit le texte sur les personnages? Si l’on regarde de pres le choix des personnages, on note qu’il sont des echantillons preleves dans une serie de ‘fils de petit-bourgeois sans envergure’ ou ‘d’etudiants amorphes et indifferencies.’” (Behar 22) To this statement Kristin Ross adds that Perec never allows Sylvie or Jerome’s individual identity to emerge. Their description never lingers on their specific personalities, thoughts or physical appearance. The reader only knows that they want to buy the same things. In contrast to these non-individuated, anonymous characters are the great number of things around them which, as we have seen, bear very recognizable names. In his book Georges Perec: Traces of His Passage. Paul Schwartz notices that all the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 107 things in the novel are “humanized, brought to life, by phrases which idealize the setting.” (Schwartz 6) Also Pierre Burgelin follows this note, when he affirms that in the opening scene Perec “cree un decor (lieu de vie autant que paysage mental) aux teintes chaudes et passablement incombre. Tous ces rempart de cloisons, d’etageres et d’objets ... protegent le bien-etre passif, mythiquement foetal, que propose cet antre vouluptueusement clos et tapisse, colore et legerement sombre.” (Burgelin 42-43) The most important aspect to come out from the obsession with listing is that the characters, as opposed to the objects, never really “come to life.” Their actions and their thoughts only appear as sketches cramped among such lists. Their search for self definition (hence for nomination) inevitably passes trough the purchase of things which are “noble,” that is to say, properly classified: “shirts by Doucet... the great staircase of footwear heading from Churches to Westons, from Westons to buntings, and from Buntings to Lobbs.” (Les Choses 39) Or, as Behar notices, “bien que consommateurs inveteres de produits seriels, Jerome et Sylvie essayent de fabriquer, bricoler, un produit sur lequel apposer leur propre signature.” (Behar 23-24) All the long lists of objects and places that fill the novel - furniture, clothes, shoes, magazines, wine, appliances, food, as well as films or neighborhoods of Paris - function as markers for the missing subjects. It seems that proper names in Les Choses always characterize commodities. The names in the book, however, do not only refer to things that can be bought, like brands of shoes and clothing, newspapers and magazines. The novel mentions names R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 108 of places (cities and city-streets, villages, countries), cultural icons, film titles, names of monuments or galleries. All of these names are also commodities, because they are all described in relation to consumption. For example, although the narrator states that Sylvie and Jerome (and their friends) “were cinephiles,” nowhere in the text do we find a clear explanation of this term; the films that the couple watches, likes or dislikes are simply listed as if they were objects to be owned. The same can be said for the streets of Paris. Often the reader comes across detailed accounts of their long walks; however, contrary to the nineteenth-century Baudelairean fldneries, which reinforce the unfamiliarity of the city, or the 1950s Situationist derives, without a specific aim other that that of resisting coercive spatial trajectories, Sylvie and Jerome’s promenades are indeed overdetermined by their newly discovered role as consumers: “Those were the years when they wandered endlessly around Paris. They would stop at any antique dealer’s. They would go into department stores and stay for hours on end;” (Les Choses 42) or else: “They often went out in the evening, sniffing the air, ogling the window displays.” (Les Choses 81) When the narrator affirms that Paris was for them “an eternal temptation,” the transformation of the city-space itself into commodity is indeed complete. As Oniki notices in his article, the problem of the commodity “can hardly be restricted to economics or political science insofar as it is inescapably bound within language. Like commodities, words operate through a system of differentiation as R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 109 opposed to one of similarities.” (Oniki 100) And even more strictly economical analyses of commodities underline the strict relation of the latter with “the semantic O ’! power of natural language.” (Bacharach 346) This differentiation versus similarity system that Oniki ascribes, quite generally, to “language” might be best understood in relation to the notion of “tool for dividing things” that the Platonic text reserved to a particular language unit: the name. Through the objects they continuously look for, then Sylvie and Jerome understand, or at least perceive, their own lack of nomination, and through what the (anonymous) reviewer in Les Temps Modemes called an “excessive compliance to the system,” this lack does indeed bounce back onto the reader. When Leroy T. Day affirms, in his article “Narration and Story in Georges Perec’s Les Choses,” that Sylvie and Jerome “are easily identified with,” (Day 250) he probably means to say that the readers of Les Choses were not to recognize themselves specifically in the characters, but rather in the names of the commercial goods mentioned. Persons and things, in the novel, melt to become an indistinct part of the infra-ordinary, of the “everyday” description of objects and uneventful lives. In a 1965 interview, Perec declared that his novel sets out to represent the ways in which “the language of advertising is reflected in us.” (Perec Interview 5) And it is true that often the lists of objects in Les Choses are constructed as descriptions from pieces of advertising: “whitewashed walls were indispensable, dark brown carpeting a necessity, which could be replaced only by a mosaic of antiquated floor tiles of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 110 different kinds; exposed beams were obligatory, and little internal staircases, real fireplaces with a fire burning, rustic (or even better) Provenfal furniture were highly recommended.” (Les Choses 48) Although this is not the place to attempt a discussion of the language of advertising, a topic that has generated vast amount of writing in sociology, semiotics, media and cultural studies, we may nonetheless make reference to the paradigmatic work by Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), which many have likened to Things.2 8 The book puts the stress on the basic relation between advertising and objects in consumer society, affirming that advertising is based on the continuous creation of needs for new objects, and the subsequent instillation in the recipient of a sense of lack. Baudrillard writes: “Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption, but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed.” (Baudrillard 164) “The lack of proportion,” Baudrillard continues, “is the ‘functional’ apotheosis of the system.” (Baudrillard 164) Perec refers to this disproportion in simple terms, when he states that in advertisement “everything’s promised” (Perec Owns Up 5) but nothing is delivered. As almost all criticism of the novel has noticed (from early reviews to subsequent monographic studies) and by Perec’s own admission, Les Choses. is, just like advertisements, constructed around different expressions of lack. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. I ll The sense of absence and lack that pervades the novel has been interpreted in different ways. Some critics put the stress on the characters’ lack of material wealth and the psychological and social mechanisms that advertising sets in motion given their relatively unprivileged social condition. Mauricio Segura, for instance, claims that the main point of the novel rests in the characters’ lack of human relations, and he identifies this lack as a result to the continuous mediation of the things surrounding them. Others (Ross and Behar above all) make insightful comments on the lack of specificity of the characters. Moving from a strictly Marxist frame of interpretation, secondary bibliography also discusses the issue of the absence of a precise social class to which the two protagonists belong. What is mostly evident in the novel, however, is that the characteristics of lack are always ascribed to the characters, while the objects that fill the space surrounding the characters convey instead a sense of abundance. The objects’ relation to the protagonists, in other words, underline how the specific moment of French history Sylvie and Jerome are living in is defined primarily by the names of things. Or, as Behar states, objects in Les Choses are invested with a “surplus de sens culturel et historique.” (Behar 24) If things are what define 1960s French society, the human being is reduced to the a-subjective, statistical role of “consumer.” Characters in the novel like Sylvie and Jerome, we realize, can only decide whether to be annexed within this system or completely cast out. It is in this reflection on different types of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 112 “subjects” - and not simply through the moral interpretation of the novel - that we may start to grasp the political significance of Les Choses. 3.2. Desire for Definition. In her study on Georges Perec, Stella Behar notices that the writer’s concern, in Les Choses. rests principally with the topic of the “transformation des rapports humains dans un systeme economique et social en mutation.” (Behar 5) The critic evidences how Perec’s interest for the social context of the early 1960s informs his descriptions, making the idea of “transformation” more important than that of “rapports humains” themselves. As a way of confirmation of this statement, Perec affirms in an interview: “Toute une sociologie americaine et francaise a commence d’evoquer les problemes de l’homme solitaire dans le monde de production. Mais cela n’avait pas encore ete un theme litteraire. II n’y a pas eu de roman, de recit qui presente des personnages vivant a l’interieur de cette societe, soumis a la pression du marche.” (Georges Perec Owns Up 32) What this declaration also implies is that within a monde de production that succeeds in turning men and women into anti social, solitary and yet non-individual beings, the provision of a definition for everything new - including a new type of novel that narrates this world - was felt as a 29 necessity. The subtitle of Kristin Ross’s book is “Decolonization and the reordering of French culture.” This subtitle clearly evidences post-war France’s need for a new order to substitute for the old colonial system. Such a new order implies the creation R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 113 of new types of classifications and naming. Ross states that in many instances the dominant intellectual current of the time, that of structuralism, was mostly concerned with the “ordering of objects” rather than with the “criticism of their functions,” (Ross 177) and Perec’s first novel, in many ways a “narrative structuralist” work, at the same 'J A time evidences and frustrates this desire for social ordering. Paul Schwartz underlines this aspect in his study of Les Choses. He affirms that Sylvie and Jerome’s main goal consists in the “arrangement of an ideal universe,” and that “their desire to fill the space with meaningful, coherent structures inspires this grandiose image of a mythical, harmonious garden of urban beauty and pleasure.” (Schwartz 8) Sylvie and Jerome are part of a new society yet to be defined, where, to use Ross’s words “objects were more important than people” and they “determine the way people live.” (Ross 177) We have seen how the characters are individually undefinable. But are the protagonists of Les Choses defined, or named, socially? In general, and especially within the tradition of the French novel, social definition coincides with class definition. Since the nineteenth century, classifications such as the “novel of society” or “ roman bourgeois” insist on bringing forth the idea of a narrative in which the individual is viewed in the position he occupies in the social structure. This position is generally limited to the three major pre-revolutionary categories, or to a few additional sub-categories: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie (divided into grande and petite bourgeoisie), and the lower classes (the pre revolutionary “third estate,” or the Marxist “proletariat”).3 1 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 114 To which class, then, do Sylvie and Jerome belong? This question, we could say, hovers over the whole narration of Les Choses. The scanty references to the couple’s background often make use of the words “petty bourgeois,” or “lower middle class.” Perec states: “Almost all of them came from the lower middle classes, whose values, they felt, were for them no longer adequate.” (Les Choses 50) Despite this inadequacy, the couple’s aspirations are also indefinite and ambiguous. Although it is evident that they aim towards a vague bourgeois ideal — “they cast their eyes, enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and perfection of the upper middle classes.” (Les Choses 50) -- Sylvie and Jerome namely resist any association with the term bourgeoisie. Their refusal has, obviously, historical significance. Growing up between the modernization of postwar France and the ideological resistance of the Marxist and antifascist left (Perec, we should not forget, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who fell victim to the war and the Holocaust), the “new generation” of Sylvies and Jeromes were taught to despise the ideals of the grands bourgeois, which they associated with right-wing conservatism and labor- • y 'j exploitation. For this reason they look for their own identity outside the old class divisions. Ironically, they find it in the modernized version of the same bourgeois, in the “new man” and the “new woman” (or, as Ross points out, in the “new couple”) that the new magazines like L ’ Express were offering to the public.3 3 Ross writes: “Magazine reading in Les Choses ... emerges as the chief contributing factor to the ‘derealization,’ the sentiment of reproducibility or cloning ... Thus in Les Choses. for R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 115 example, it is the chapter that treats Jerome and Sylvie’s relation to their friends that includes a lengthy discussion of L ’ Express', gradually we realize that it is by way of the shared habit of reading specifically that magazine that the ‘they’ of Jerome and Sylvie is able to extend out beyond the couple-dyad to encompass a whole ‘horizontal comradeship’ - the phrase is Benedict Anderson’s - of like-minded companions.” (Ross 142) Even with their superficial acts of rejection, such as a pamphlet anti- L ’ Express in which they state that “though it was not obvious that L ’ Express was a left-wing paper, it was clear as daylight that it was a sinister one,” (Ross 47) Sylvie, Jerome and their group nonetheless “allowed L ’ Express to take them under its wings.” (Les Choses 47) The magazine, which, according to its editor Franfoise Giroud was “the story of a group of people who fervently hoped to see France take off’ (Giroud 151) is the primary source of identification of the new class of people the protagonists of the novel constitute. These images of a “new France” in which Sylvie and Jerome recognize themselves are the same images Roland Barthes catalogues as petty bourgeois “mythologies” in a series of short essays written between 1954 and 1956, and published as a single volume, with the title Mythologies, in 1957. Andrew Leak has defined the essays in Barthes’ Mythologies as “a kind of mythical corpus of the consumer society.” (Leak 58) This corpus is composed of an extremely varied subject matter: newspaper and magazine articles, photography and films, social rituals and cultural events, advertisements and electronic posters. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 116 In the concluding, summarizing essay of Mythologies. “The Myth Today,” Barthes gives an interesting definition of the bourgeoisie. He sees this dominant class as a societe anonyme, or “the social class which does not want to be named.” 3 4 (Mythologies 139) The bourgeoisie’s lack of name is not only seen in opposition to the aristocracy, which was precisely defined by proper names, but also as the conveyor of “‘normalized’ forms [that] attract little attention, by the very fact of their extension, in which their origin is easily lost.” (Mythologies 140) Hiding behind the things they own and their non-recognizable names, the bourgeois are no longer, in the twentieth century, a “social class” in the original Marxist sense (that is as the owners of the means of production); they become indeed a cultural product (a commodity) in itself. Barthes writes: This anonymity of the bourgeoisie ... becomes even more marked when one passes from bourgeois culture proper to its derived, vulgarized and applied forms, to what one could call public philosophy, that which sustains everyday life, civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short the unwritten norms of interrelationships in a bourgeois society.. .by spreading its representations over a whole catalogue of collective images for petit-bourgeois use, the bourgeoisie countenances the illusory lack of differentiation of the social classes: it is as from the moment when a typist earning twenty pounds a month recognizes herself in the big wedding of the bourgeoisie that bourgeois ex- nominatioh achieves its full effect. (Mythologies 140-141) The term bourgeoisie, then, (which connotes a class that, however anonymous, is extensively named in Barthes’ essays) must be understood as the series of unwritten norms that dictate collective behaviors and images; consequently, the extension of all things bourgeois rests mainly in the reproducibility of these norms. The paradox of the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 117 bourgeois, in other words, as well as its appeal, is that it reproduces its codes as if it were a model class, and a non-class at the same time. Les Choses has often been conceived as a new episode or a final chapter in Barthes’ reflections on the modem forms of myth.3 5 Perec himself has defined his novel as an exercise on Barthes’ Mythologies, and the strict relation between the two works is a constant topic of discussion among Perec’s critics since the first appearance of the book. Andrew Leak has noted how Perec considered the reading of Barthes’ essays as a sort of “mouthwash.” Perec did in fact state: “I wrote Things with a pile of Madame Express beside me, and, to wash my mouth out after having read rather too much Madame Express. I would read some Barthes.” (Leak 64) Leak comments on Perec’s affirmation by saying that “the problems of Jerome and Sylvie stem from having read too much Madame Express and not enough Barthes,” (Leak 64) and that “Perec’s reading of Mythologies provided him with more than just a ‘corpus’ of material: it also suggested a ‘way of seeing,’ an angle of approach.” (Leak 58) This angle, we may imply, is located somewhere between the denunciation of consumer society and the attraction towards consumerism. In terms of class-representation, in Les Choses. the angle is placed in the double repulsion and attraction that the myth of the bourgeoisie instills in Sylvie and Jerome. As we have seen, the narrator of Les Choses affirms in more than one instance that the main characters do not subscribe to the ideals proposed by magazines like L’Express. that they did not especially like to be drawn to desire commodities, that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 118 “they wanted to fight, and to win.” (Les Choses 77) But in these notes of undirected rage, the overwhelming anonymity of the bourgeoisie comes to the surface: “But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness.” (Les Choses 77) The names of the objects that Sylvie and Jerome buy or, more often, wish they had bought, the films they watch, the places to which they go, the newspapers and magazines and books they read, assume a crucial importance in this process of accumulation which contributes to the formation of the characters’ dilemma that pushes them back and forth “between the desire and the refusal of a world imposed on them.” (Matthews 129) In many instances Sylvie and Jerome evaluate their future prospects. They inevitably feel trapped between indefinable and undesirable (social) positions to which they cannot give a name. In this sense, then, the continuous and unsolvable quest for happiness, which, in consumer society becomes necessarily a quest for things, pushes Sylvie and Jerome all around Paris, to the countryside, to Tunisia, and even, through their imagination, to London and Scotland. This search, unstoppable like the gliding eye that opens the narration, represents also the characters’ search for a class: a position in a classification, and, by extension, a name. As Barthes suggests, however, this class cannot be named or recognized. The characters’ archetypal status thus contrasts with the impossibility of their classification, be it individual or social. They do not belong R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 119 to the “proletariat,” they are no longer definable as “petty bourgeois,” nor as “bourgeois” tout court, principally because they do not identify with the values of either class, but also because they are unable to recognize these classes, hidden under their anonymity. Political and class-related issues are prominently discussed in Barthes’ Mythologies.3 6 And yet the essayist states, at the end of his analysis, that the myth as a category is necessarily non-political, or better, “depoliticized speech.” (Mythologies 142) He writes: “just as bourgeois ideology is defined by the abandonment of the name bourgeois, myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things .. .The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.” (Mythologies 142-143) This perceptible absence, linked to the perceptible lack that Jerome and Sylvie feel all along their quest, mimics their lack of social belonging. As if to compensate for this lack, then, together with advertising, myths and things, also a new label comes to Sylvie and Jerome’s aid. One passage in the novel, in fact, mentions their status as jeunes cadres, or technocrates. Perec writes: “They were the ‘new generation,’ young executives [femes cadres] who had not yet cut all their teeth, technocrats on the way, but only halfway, to success.” (Les Choses 42) The cadre is one of the most discussed and controversial positions in the social scale in the post-war period. In his article “The Transformation of Society,” (2002) John Home notes how the name underwent great transformations: defining at first the self R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 120 organized professional body of engineers during the Poupular Front in the Vichy years, “in the 1950s it designated the engineers and managers who revolutionized business organizations.” (Home 145) Ross notes that the creation (or, more accurately, the importation from the United States) of the position of cadre was “the transitory expression of a French society in transition.” 3 7 (Ross 166) It should not surprise us, then, to find cadres in the main roles of a novel that, as Behar has underlined, is above all a representation of change and transition. The position of cadre responds in fact, as a new, untraslatable and inherently mobile category to the desire for new classifications (hence new name-giving) in late 1950s and early 1960s society. And yet the “new class” does not hold a stable position in the social hierarchy. The very signifier for their category is unstable, often interchangeable with technocrate, ingenieur economiste, dirigeant. At times it is altogether replaced by its English counterparts: manager, executive. The position itself, albeit responding to a widespread desire for classification, displays inherent characteristics of indefiniteness and transition. Evidence of this apparent contradiction is provided by the great number of works in cultural theory and sociology that question at length the definition of this rather new term and the technical-scientific terminology associated with it. The class to which the figure of the cadre belongs is indeed recent. As sociologist Luc Boltanski remarks, the actual term does not exist before the 1930s. He writes: “In novels, plays, and other works prior to the 1930s cadres are never mentioned. They go unrepresented. Nor do they appear in census statistics until after R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 121 the war.” (Boltanski 37) But, the sociologist adds, it is only during the years 1945-55, with the introduction in France of American-style “human engineering” and “management practices” that the word cadre assumed its modem significance. The representation of cadres in Perec does not rely on any history of the class, which for Boltanski is strictly connected to Italian Fascist “corporatist organization of society,” (Boltanski 38) but rather relies on its modem aspect, the “versatile new manager” whose figure came into being after the war and which takes its model from the newly adopted standards of productivity coming from the United States rather than from the social structure of 1930s Europe. Boltanski stresses the American inheritance of the French cadre when he states that, no matter which position on the Americanization of France one may take, “one cannot hope to understand the changes in the social representation of cadre in the postwar period without understanding what those changes owed to the importation of value systems, social technologies, and standards of excellence from the United States.” (Boltanski 97) These American standards of excellence, just like everything else in Les Choses. take the form of proper names. Sylvie and Jerome often refer to the names of American sociologists, and in particular “the names of C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, or - even better - Lazarsfeld, Cantril or Herbert Hyman, of whose works they had read not three pages.”4 0 (Les Choses 37) The description of cadres in Les Choses coincides with that of the interests and daily activities of Sylvie and Jerome’s circle of friends, and underscores the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 122 similarities within the group. Perec writes: “There was a whole crowd of them, they made a fine bunch. They knew each other well; taking a lot from each other, they had common habits, common tastes and shared memories. They had their own vocabulary, their own marks, their special ideas. Too sophisticated to be perfectly similar to each other, but probably not sophisticated enough to avoid imitating each other more or less consciously, they spent a large part of their lives swapping things.” (Les Choses 44) This “fine bunch,” formed by symbiotic couples astonishingly similar each other, engage by all means in the same daily activities, at work and in their free time. The group’s cohesiveness, however, cannot be regarded as a real mark of class formation. If we understand the term “class”, with Jon Elster, as “a group of people who by virtue of what they possess are compelled to engage in the same activities if they want to make the best use of their endowments,” (Elster 331) then we can see that cadres, simply united by daily habits and, as Boltanski underlines, “the use of social space,” (Boltanski 100) are not really definable in terms of class. Class-consciousness does not touch cadres, who are supposed, according to a sociological study by Jacques Leenhardt, to stay away from political matters and show “proof of good will and devotion.” (Leenhardt 165) In the description of the characters, the narrator underlines that their status is, like the status of all other names in the novel, a designifier, it is the proper label of an improper class. Cadres, in other words are caught between two statuses and in permanent balance between them. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 123 Class, then, in Perec’s first novel, resists a specific definition. For the majority of critics, though such as Pierre Burgelin, Kristin Ross, and Leroy T. Day, the lack of specificity coincides with the indefinite character of the emerging commodity culture. Day and Ross in particular talk about cadres and technocrates as the new figures of power emerging in consumer society, as the element informing its desire for commodities. They underline, however, the absence of the term’s concrete referentiality, especially in terms of specific positions of power and prestige. The condition of anonymity, what Sylvie and Jerome are unable to grasp completely, is given by their desire for the anonymous society, the will to belong to something that does not want to name itself. What strikes us, then, in the French couple that leads the action of Les Choses. is the lack of individual and of social signification. Claude Burgelin affirms that the heroes of Les Choses — not only Sylvie and Jerome, but also their group of friends - “sont les produits d’une classe moins que moyenne, urbaine, socialement sans contexte.” (Burgelin 40) “They,” Burgelin adds, “signify nothing,” or, in Perec’s words: “they had no past, no tradition.” (Les Choses 55) Sylvie and Jerome’s literal lack of reference not only de-signifies all individuals in favor of things, it also marks the impossibility of classification of their social position. As we can see then in Les Choses, both practices of everyday naming and social ordering result in lack of name and lack of order. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 124 3.3. Sfax. Whether Les Choses is an attempt, as some have claimed, to give a final explanation of the myth of modernity for the new generation of young French professionals, or a stem critique of consumer society that concentrates on the infra ordinary aspects of the life of a couple of jeunes cadres, what we realize after a careful reading is that all the categories Les Choses sets out to represent obtain their position in Perec’s infra-ordinary scheme by way of lack rather than of presence. The description of the ideal Parisian apartment that opens the narration is only a dream. The real apartment in which the protagonists live lacks the space that would make it a suitable abode. The couple, as seen, lacks specificity, linked through the narration by the third person pronoun “they.” Most importantly, all the human beings portrayed in the novel lacks a proper name, that is, a signifier that individuates them as subjects. What abounds, on the other hand, are the objects and the commodities, which literally encumber the narration, disallowing space for anything else. The infra-ordinary, in the story of Sylvie and Jerome is the domain of the objects rather than that of relations. The second part of the novel, however, offers an interesting reversal of all the paradigms proposed in the first. After a few years spent working as market researchers, Sylvie and Jerome feel unhappy about their precarious position in Paris and they are unable to see any improvement in their status. They subsequently - and quite hastily - decide to move to Tunisia, replying to an advertisement that offers teaching posts in the ex-colony. Sylvie and Jerome are sent to Sfax, a small city in the middle of the Tunisian desert. There, Sylvie is employed as a teacher of French R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 125 literature at the Technical College while Jerome remains unemployed. Although Mauricio Segura talks about this section of the novel as a “recit de liberation” following a “recit d’alienation,” (Segura 50) the change of scenery does not seem to bring any freedom to the characters, but only a greater feeling of alienation. The exotic image of Tunisia that the couple had dreamt about when they were in need of a change from their Parisian lives is yet another delusion. Things, in Sfax, are dull and unstimulating. This short section of the novel almost demands a reading based on the neat opposition of two modes of production. On the one hand, we witness the speeding modernization of western capitalism; on the other, a representation of the “older,” desert environment of the ex-colony, a place whose inhabitants, Ross explains, are “in possession of their own means of production and tied to a seasonal, cyclical temporality.” (Ross 145) Contrary to what one may think, in Les Choses it is the endotic (Paris), that is assigned qualifications of marvel and wonder, while the elements that form the exotic (Tunisia) are usually preceded by unsettling adjectivization. In Sfax things are “bare,” “empty,” “sickly,” “distant.”4 1 Critics, in general, tend to avoid the discussion of the second part of Les Choses. and many barely mention it. This is the case, for instance, of Pierre Burgelin, who in place of an interpretation of the Tunisian adventure of Sylvie and Jerome offers to the reader a picture of Georges and Paulette Perec in Sfax. Others decide to reserve the focus, rather than on the changed environment, on the characters’ decision R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 126 to “flee,” to “escape the temptations of wealth” (Day 257) or to “flee from themselves” (Schwartz 13) altogether. All, however, agree on one point. As Schwartz affirms, “The second part of the novel is as different from the first as Sfax, Tunisia, is from Paris. In a novelistic universe obsessed with space, the transfer of the action from one place to another is dramatic.” (Schwartz 13) Part of the transformation could be seen as a sort of wish-fulfillment for the characters. Their Tunisian apartment has indeed all the space that their first apartment lacked: “it consisted of three huge rooms with high ceilings.. .a long passageway led to a small square room from which five doors opened, three of them to the bedrooms, one to a bathroom, one to a vast kitchen.” (Les Choses 103) Furthermore, the two can live with only one salary, and Sylvie’s job allows a decent amount of free time. Actually, for the first time in the novel, the couple is no longer a single unit, but each of them acquires individuality, they divide into two different beings. What operates this division is the difference in their occupations: “Sylvie’s job timetabled their lives.” (Les Choses 108) However, nowhere in this section does the narrator allow a positive regard, or even a glimpse of happiness for the protagonists. Opposed to the fast-moving pace of the first part, where the abundance of objects imposes a hectic, “panoramic view,” here the “eye” has the time to linger on every detail of the surroundings, only to find them empty, “inscrutable,” “a vacuum,” “a blank zone,” “a tabula rasa:” “their life was like an unrelinquished habit, an almost unruffled tedium: a life sans everything.” (Les R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 127 Choses 113) Contrary to their lives in Paris, often tense but filled with activities, the pastimes Sfax offers to the protagonists are empty and repetitive. As the narrator concludes: “Their lives were dripping away.” (Les Choses 109) Their apartment, though very spacious as opposed to the small and cramped Parisian flat is empty and gloomy. Yuji Oniki underlines how the few unremarkable objects that Sylvie and Jerome use to decorate their new home prove to be not only unattractive but altogether hostile to the protagonists: “the amicable, encouraging resonance of adjectives employed to designate English clothes is supplanted here by the conspirational nature of indecipherable things outside of commodity culture.” (Oniki 111) This hostile character is rendered, first and foremost by the sudden lack of signature of objects and surroundings. Everything changes for Sylvie and Jerome in Sfax. Consequently, also the way things are named or classified follows the dramatic mutation relative to the different spaces of the narration. Tunisia is literally a designifier, its desert space is vague unmarked, just like its shape, very different from the clear-cut borders of hexagonal France. The town Sylvie and Jerome inhabit is not appealing. This ville-phantome contrasts with the fullness of Paris primarily through its absence of names. All the signs are lacking that would make it a modem space (in the Surrealist sense). The abundance of names of the Parisian streets, squares, boulevards, monuments, compared to the bareness of Tunisia, completes the image of the Parisian milieu as “even more impervious to that which is unlike itself.” (Ross 146) As opposed to the garden in Rue de Quatrefages, the space in Tunisia is made of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 128 “streets upon streets set at right angles to each other, metal rollerblinds, high wooden fences, a world of squares that were not squares, of non-streets, of phantom avenues.” (Les Choses 104) The protagonists often entered the Arab quarter, made it almost the only goal of all their walks ... they did not understand its basic mechanisms, all they could see was a labyrinth of alleys. Raising their eyes, they might admire a wrought-iron balcony, a painted beam-end, the pure ogive arch of a window, the subtle play of light and shade, an extremely narrow staircase - but their walks have no aim.” (Les Choses 106) This scene is in sharp opposition to the descriptions of their joyful, commodity-driven flaneries, where they “would cross all of Paris to see an armchair they’d been told was just perfect.” (Les Choses 31) Instead of the epitome of their supposed escape from the world of things, the aimlessness of Sylvie and Jerome’s walks around Sfax conveys a sort of nostalgia for the clearly recognizable (and signed) expressions of wealth. Unlike the goods on display in the expensive shops in Paris, things in Tunisia do not stir up any excitement in the characters: Or, as Ross states: “Shopping in Tunisia ... Sylvie and Jerome are distressed to find out that the objects in the bazaar there ‘don’t speak to them,’ don’t beckon, call out to them to be purchased like the objects in Parisian shop windows.” (Les Choses 146) If the objects do not “call” the protagonists, though, also Sylvie and Jerome do not call the object with their appropriate names. Perec refers to the characters as anonymous. In Tunisia this anonymity is express not simply by lack of name but more importantly by lack of mutual recognition between characters and things. Where in Paris this lack was R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 129 ascribed only to the characters, in Tunisia it reveals the things for what they are: undesirable objects without names. As opposed to the “shirts by Doucet,” Jerome and Sylvie see plain “evening dress, ladies’ shoes;” in place to the dreamlike Chesterfield settee, they “bought long planks of barely planed wood and twelve-hole bricks, and they covered two-thirds of the walls with bookshelves.” (Les Choses 104) There are no lists of names in Tunisia because names are what make the complexity (and consequently allow the enjoyment) of the modem world. As Perec affirms: “There’s a necessary connection, to my mind, between modem things and happiness. The prosperity of our society makes one kind of happiness possible - you could call it Orly-joy, the joy of deep-pile fitted carpets; there is a current form of happiness that means, I think, that you have to be absolutely modem to achieve happiness.” (Perec Owns Up 17) In this sense, the voyage to Tunisia is, as Ross notes, “less spatial than temporal.” (Ross 145) Its function is to show all the previously indexed characteristics of modernity with a clearer eye. The Tunisian episode in Les Choses acquires political significance only as a reversal of the view of modernization imposed in the first part of the novel, or as a realization that “the unmodem remains unassimilated, nonintegratable, incompatible with the modernized, technocrat milieu.” (Ross 146) In other words, the view of the exotic functions to offer more clues about the endotic, and for this reason it is an expression of the infra-ordinary; it is comparable to what Perec has called “pit explosion” that reveals the scandal of “working in coal mines.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 130 However, even though the journey to Tunisia allows Sylvie and Jerome to discover the “infra-ordinary,” this awareness does not enable them to enact a transformation of the everyday. Through the realization of their anonymity, the couple also discovers that their condition, historically given by the modernization of society, is unchangeable. For Stella Behar, “L’episode Tunisien revele a Jerome et Sylvie leur neant.” (Behar 34) This pessimistic view concludes the novel. Behar continues: “L’absence d’un triangle du desir les empeche de fonctionner. Ils decident done de retoumer dans cette societe dont ils comprennent les referents, celle de leur culture, leur generation, leur epoque. L’episode tunisien devient le catalyseur d’un mouvement vers une totale adaptation au systeme propose par Tepoque.” (Behar 34) The final acknowledgement of this order takes place, ironically, on a train that transports the now-commodified Sylvie and Jerome to a new destination. The infra-ordinary, at this point no longer a “practice,” is limited to a “panoramic view” of descriptive images that are the reproduction of the world they have chosen: glassworks, new factories, holiday camps, small houses all alone in clearings. Who inhabits those houses is, after all, unimportant. Notes 1 The piece was subsequently published after George Perec’s death in a small volume titled L’lnffa- Ordinaire. (1991) a collection of short sketches which follows a line very common for him, that of the creation of neologisms. 2 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord writes: “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world - not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its specific manifestations - news or propaganda, advertising or the actual R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 131 consumption of entertainment - the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself.” (Debord 13) 3 See Gilbert Adair, “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra Ordinary.” 4 See David Bellos, Georges Perec, a Life in Words. 5 See in particular Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (1947): Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1983): Kristin Ross, Fast Cars. Clean Bodies (1998); Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern age. (1992); Situationist International Anthology (1999). The event that the media creates is generally presented in opposition to the non-eventuality of the daily. Sadie Plant observes: everyday life “is devoid of its glamour representation, experience becomes almost embarrassing, something of which one feels ashamed, an event without a camera.” (Plant 67) However, no later than 1961 Debord claims that everyday life is “colonized” that it undoubtedly presents a character of alienation but that this alienation is imposed from above. 6 In the text, there is mention of the Algerian war (1954 -62) and of its ending: “The Algerian war had begun with them and was being pursued before their eyes.” (Les Choses 71) “The events of 1961 and 1962 - from the Algerian generals’ putsch to the massacre at Charonne metro station - which heralded the end of the war enabled them, temporarily but with uncommon effectiveness, to forget, or rather, to suspend their habitual concerns.” (Les Choses 72) Also, there are multiple references Gaullism (De Gaulle was elected Prime Minister in 1958): “It happened to be the case, furthermore, that Gaullism was an adequate response, an infinitely more dynamic response than people had at first declared far and wide that it would be, and that its danger lay always in some other place than the one where people thought they had found it.” (Les Choses 71) 7 The first time the characters are mentioned, still in the imaginary realm, reads: “They would open the mail, they would open the newspapers. They would light their first cigarette. They would go out.” (Les Choses 25) 8 Indeed some critics (such as the biographer David Bellos and Paul Burgelin) dismiss the claim of impersonality, stressing out instead the autobiographical aspects of Les Choses: Perec wrote about market researchers because he himself worked for the CNRS; die couple lives in a small apartment in Rue de Quatrefages in Paris, Perec’s exact same address; he and his wife Paulette really did move to Sfax for a year. The novel is consequently a slightly detached narration of the author’s life. 9 See Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: 20- 21. 1 0 Apparently, if we follow Lefebvre’s writing, the “discovery of everyday life” started with an act of naming. That is to say when Henri Lefebvre “one of the first social theorists to pay attention to the details of everyday life outside of macro-social structures, such as kinship patterns, employment and status,” (Shields 65) heard his wife name and praise a particular brand of dishwasher soap. The importance of naming, in all advertising practices, is also underlined by the taboo status it has acquired. Although it is possible, outside advertising contexts, to make reference to a specific product, it is usually forbidden to actually name the product itself. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 132 1 1 As is often remarked in Bellos’ biography Perec: A Life in Words, as well as in other works on Perec, the activity of writing was for him an everyday practice just like shopping or commuting. See in particular Bellos: 40-121. 1 2 Bellos writes: “The quotation itself is from Marx’s first published article, ‘Uber die neuste preufiische Zensurinstuktiori (1842), but Perec had come across it neither in Marx nor in German. He knew the passage because it is quoted at the end of an essay on film montage by Sergei Eisenstein, in a volume Pierre Getzler had once lent him ... but the motto is nonetheless one to which Perec remained ever faithful.” (Bellos 354) 1 3 See Bellos; Yuji Oniki, “Perec, Marx and Les Choses.” 1 4 See Mauricio Segura, “Societe de Consommation: phantasmes et sueurs froides chez LeClezio, Perec et Robbe-Grillet.” 1 5 See Jacques Leenhardt and Pierre J6zsa, Lire la Lecture: 53-59; Bellos: 299-318. 1 6 See Leenhardt: 55 (footnote). 1 7 See the large number of volumes “Profil d’une Oeuvre” available. 1 8 Mauricio Segura, for example, affirms that “dans les annees 1960, le terme ‘alienation’ a le sens du vocable allemand Entfremdung (que l’on attribue d’ordinaire h Hegel et qui sera repris par Marx) qui signifie “l’dtat de l’individu qui, par suite des conditions sociales (economiques, politiques, religieuses), est prive de son humanity et asservi.” Par ailleurs, il est significatif que le terme alienation, provenant de la psychiatrie fran^aise du XIXe sidcle (‘alienation mentale’), conserve sa connotation renvoyant h la folie.” (Segura 50) 1 9 See Franco Moretti “The comfort of Civilization,” in Representations no. 12, Fall 1985: 115-139. Moretti defines the “art of living” as an aesthetic harmony between the individual and society. He writes: “That aesthetic organicity, and the happiness that comes with it, belong not only to a past that precedes capitalist production and the “mechanical” state, but endure in modem times as well. But now they are shifted “to the side of,” so to speak, the new collective institutions, which they engage in a silent and unending border war. Following the lead of various recent studies, I will call this ‘parallel world’ the sphere of ‘everyday life.’” (Moretti 120) 2 0 See Pierre Macherey, “A Production of Subjectivity.” 2 1 Sylvie and Jerome’s desire for objects often reflects a desire for escape and exoticism. This is underlined by the fact that their peregrinations, real or imagined, often bring them outside of France, and towards England, North America Italy, or other imaginary places. For instance, When they discover thrift shops and flea market, for instance, we read: “They went every fortnight, on Saturday mornings, for a year or more, to rummage through tea-chests, display stalls, stacks, boxes, upturned umbrellas ... and wandered in a state of mild bewilderment around the Malik market, pondering on the strange fate of things, laid out alongside used nails, second-hand mattresses, machines of which only the casing remained, and spare parts, things which were but the slightly imperfect surplus stock of America’s most celebrated shirtmakers.” (Les Choses 55) Their exoticism, though, is clearly mediated, just like their desire for objects, by the images offered of such places by all the media of consumer society: cinema, advertising. The real encounter with the exotic, which coincides with their trip to Tunisia, will reveal the inconsistency of all their speculations. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 133 2 2 Oniki states: “Following the first sentence, the eye disappears without being mentioned again in the novel. Are we to consider this eye as the general, non-descript reader’s objective lens, or are we to imaine it a the mental eye of Sylvie and Jerome? ... Regardless of what this eye specifically represents, we cannot ignore the fact that this object, an eye, is placed between the looking subject and its object.” (Oniki 96) 2 3 The reference and opposition to Balzacian fiction is paradigmatic in this period. Also Robbe Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman proposes the dismantling of the figure of the “rounded, individual character” associated with the figure of Balzac. 2 4 Schivelbusch writes: “the motion of the train shrank space, and thus displayed in immediate succession objects and pieces of scenery that in their original spatiality belonged to separate realms. The traveler who gazed through the compartment window at such successive scenes, acquired a novel ability that Gastineau calls ‘la philosophie synthetique du coup d’oeil’ (the synthetic philosophy of the glance). It was the ability to perceive the discrete, as it rolls past the window, indiscriminately. The scenery that the railroad presents in rapid motion appeared in Gastineau’s text as a panorama.” (Schivelbusch 60-61) 2 5 The theme of lack is constant in Perec, and has been repeatedly linked to his biography. In the novel La Disparition. this lack refers to the letter “E” which is completely absent from the text. However, most critics link the “disappearance” to a more tragic circumstance: the actual disappearance of Perec’s mother, who was deported in 1943 by the German authorities and probably killed at Auschwitz. The photograph of the certification of disappearance of Eva Perec is a constant presence in many studies that deal with the work of the French author. See David Bellos, Warren F. Motte, Pierre Burgelin, Jean- Claude Bertharion. 2 6 Benjamin’s description of the flaneur, in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth century” contains a foreshadowing of the role that is destined to the future generations of Sylvies and Jeromes, or In Benjamin’s words, die department store as “the flaneur’s last practical joke.” (Benjamin 156) Benjamin continues: “In the flaneur the intellighentsia pays a visit to the marketplace, ostensibly to look around, yet in reality to find a buyer. In this intermediate phase, in which it still has patrons but is already beginning to familiarize itself with the market, it appears as bohemianism. The uncertainty of its political function corresponds to the uncertainty of its economic position.” (Benjamin 156) 2 7 See Michael Bacharach, “Commodities, Language, and Desire,” in The Journal of Philosophy 1990. pp. 346-368. “I take commodities to be goods in the trading of which language enters in a certain way. The critical condition for there to be such trading is, I shall say, the semantic power of natural language. The gains from trade in commodities are therefore not to be attributed to the actions of autarchic individuals as liberal individualism maintains. They rest upon traders’ use of resources that cannot but be held in common.” (Bacharach 346) 2 8 See for instance Fanny Acolet: Georges Perec et Richard Brautienan au pays des Obiets. 2 9 On this topic, see for instance Robert Goldman’s article “We Make Weekends. Leisure and the Commodity Form:” 84-103. 3 0 Following Perec’s self-definition of the novel as an exercise on Barthes’ Mythologies. I use this term to underline the writer’s debt to structuralism. We must keep in mind, though, that for its attention to practices of everyday life, the work also contains an inherent anti-structuralist stance. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 134 3 1 See Winfried Engler, The French Novel: Pierre, Laforgue Romantisme et Histoire: Warren F. Motte, Fables of the Novel: Marilyn Severson, Masterpieces of French Literature: Dominique Viart, Le Roman Francais Auiourd’hui: Transformations. Perceptions. Mythologies: Isabelle Daunais, Fronti&res du Roman. 3 2 Perec talks about Sylvie and Jerome’s leftist political background in chapter VII. “Their political consciousness, insfar as they had any such thing as structured and considered set of thoughts rather than an inchoate eruption of more or less consistently angled opinions, was, they thought, already beyond or above the Algerian issue, engaged with alternatives that were more utopian than real, with general questions which, they conceded with some regret, had little chance of producing any kind of practical result.” (Les Choses 74) 3 3 Ross affirms that the characters of Les Choses “provide the purest laboratory for analysis of the [new modem household] phenomenon: childless and possessing no visible parents or extended family, the characters Sylvie and Jerome are reduced to their pure function of embodying the desires of a new, streamlined, middle class couple, a couple disencumbered of both the anxieties and the privileges of lineage, inheritance, and transmission characteristic o f an older, nineteenth century bourgeoisie.” (Ross 126) 3 4 See Roland Barthes Mythologies: 137-156. Here the term societe anonyme is interestingly translated in English as “joint-stock company” therefore implying the double notion of the word societe as “society” and as “commercial enterprise.” 3 5 Fueling this view is also the reference to the friendly relation between the two writers in the sixties: in 1956 Perec had attended Barthes’s seminar on Sarrazine at the Ecole d ’ Hautes Etudes, and Barthes himself was among the first to read the manuscript of Les Choses in 1962, and to give words of encouragement to the then-unknown young novelist. 3 6 In almost every description of modem myth does Barthes include the word bourgeoisie in all its variation (petite-bourgeoisie, bourgeois culture, grands bourgeois). 3 7 Ross underlines the twofold meaning of the term cadre in the 1950s. If my work only deals with the meaning of cadre as technocrat, it is important to acknowledge the existence o f the revolutionary counterpart of the cadre, theorized by Franz Fanon. Ross writes: “Fanon’s revolutionary cadre was the aspiration to a future; he was both present - an activit, a subjectivity, a force - and the wish for a different word. His being, in Fanonian rhetoric, is intimately tied to the being and future of the nationalistic movement.” (Ross 65) 3 8 See for instance: S.R.S. Szreter, “The official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, France;” Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Loic J.D. Wacquant, “Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu.” 3 9 “The debate over Americanization in France has always been highly political and filled with acrid polemic. This was particularly true in the mid-1960s, when France quit the NATO alliance and DeGaulle opposed the purchase of certain French firms by American corporations, and later, during the events of May ’68 and the Vietnam War. Attitudes toward America are like a social Rorschach test. Each social group takes its own partial view (in both senses of the word “partial”), defining the United States in terms of the group’s own interests and position in French society. In these confused debates, the period from the Liberation up to 1960 seems to have been forgotten or repressed” (Boltanski 97). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 135 4 0 These names, belonging to authors of 1940s-1950s works of market sociology and statistics, such as “The Organization Man,” or “Audience Effects,” underline the importance of techniques of American market research. By consequence these are the names that made possible the very thought of the new social order in which the name cadre can find its proper place. 4 1 It may be argued that this type of narrative resembles many descriptions of exotic landscapes, and especially of Africa. In this sense the exotic imagery really does follow the lines of a literary tradition, and Perec’s move is not particularly original. We must note, however, that the peculiarity of Les Choses rests in its confusion between the element o f the exotic and the endotic, both in the description of the familiar (Paris) and of the unfamiliar (Sfax). Although very different tones are used to describe the two spaces, none of them is completely understandable to the protagonists, who are literally alienated from the space around them. It is interesting to note, however that critics have not taken into consideration the level of exoticism of the Tunisian episode, concentrating instead on the exoticism of Paris. i R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 136 Chapter 4. Open names: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. - World conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts andforms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was pullulating with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark It was a period when the will and determination to exist, to leave a trace ... was not wholly used up. Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knieht. If Georges Perec reserves, in Les Choses. a specific attention to designifiers, as we have observed in the previous chapter, the questioning of the proper name as a plausible unit of signification underlies all of Italo Calvino’s work. Throughout his narratives, Calvino often dwells on considerations of what may happen to a text when the first element of what composes it, the name, ceases to signify, or, in the writer’s words, ceases to become a “distinguishing mark.” This preoccupation on the part of the writer is particularly evident, and accurately theorized in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, where proper names (and first of all the name of the author) are systematically used as multi-referential items or, we could say, are “opened.” The gesture of opening names, however, should not only be understood as an application of Eco’s idea of open work or the paradigm of openness to a theory on names, but as a literal “breaking open” of the proper name that reveals its inner lack of unitary signification. This operation in Calvino can be seen as an attempt to dismantle and put back together what the writer calls the “complex and unpredictable machine” of language. My study of Calvino’s proper names and it extends from the names included in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to a reflection on the multiple name that revolves around its construction, the Oulipo.1 Putting the accent on combinatory structures, on R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 137 the virtually unlimited possibilities that language and narrative allow for, on concepts such as the “open” meaning of proper names and definitions, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler contributes with a new chapter to the debate on the role of the novel, the author and the reader in modem (and postmodern) society. In analyzing the multiplicity, the absence, and the significance of names in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the combinatory hypemovel that Calvino wrote in 1979,1 wish to underline Calvino’s role as a connector between Italian and French theories of poetics, or between the Barthesian concepts of “death of the author” and of “text-producing reader,” and the notion of the indeterminacy of contemporary art forms developed in Italy since the publication of Umberto Eco’s The Open Work in 1962. This analysis will lead me to show how Calvino’s hyper novel draws together in its structure the Italian and French intellectual debate on the new forms of the Work of art. This debate is not only relevant in aesthetic terms, but also as a discussion of the potentialities of the writer, the reader and the written work to influence the vision of the world. Calvino’s interest in how names and signatures are used as designifiers, then, will be a point of departure for the discussion of the concepts of indefiniteness, 'y multiplicity and ultimately of postmodernism in the writer’s work. Calvino’s literary career is usually divided into two distinct phases.3 In the first phase, roughly going from the late 1940s to 1965, the writer tried to come to terms with the moral imperative of writing as a form of letteratura d ’ impegno, or politically engaged literature. Bom in 1923, Calvino reached his twenties in the middle of World R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 138 War II and was directly involved in the Resistance.4 His first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1946), narrates the tragedy of the war and the experience of the armed partisan groups from the point of view of a young boy.5 The novel is unfailingly considered as neorealist, anti-Fascist fiction, in the sense that it explores the possibilities of man’s meaningful participation in the process of history through the photographic depiction of social portraits linked to real historical events. Progressively, however, Calvino detaches himself from neorealism, or at least he masks the elements of social denunciation in his writing through the adoption of highly imaginative, fairytale-like narrations. Books such as The Seasons in the City, or the chivalric epic trilogy Our Ancestors are still pervaded of a moral sense that presupposes an involvement in social themes such as the alienation in big modem cities, the necessity for rebellion, the absurdity of institutions and bureaucracy, but the ways in which these issues are addressed has very little in common with the canon of realist or neorealist narration. The second phase in Calvino’s writing, which goes from 1965 (the year in which the writer moved permanently to Paris) to his death in 1984, has often been referred to as the “French Connection,” since the writer maintained continuous contacts with the latest innovative French literary trends, ranging from the antinovel or “nouveau roman,” to structuralism, semiotics, and the sensational Parisian literary workshop Oulipo.6 As a consequence of oulipian influence, this phase in Calvino’s writing is characterized by more abstract narratives and literary games which tend to R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 139 interrogate the act of writing and textuality in itself. Drawn to these “provocative, diverse, but rarefied experimental movements and ideas,” (Weiss 88) and at the same time stimulated by a lifelong interest in genetic, astronomic, and cosmologic theories, Calvino was inspired to create a new genre of narratives that encompass semiotic theories, linguistic experiments, structures informed by mathematics and philosophical reflections on the possibilities that new technologies (especially the computer, then a relatively new tool) were offering to literature. All these theoretical and practical elements converge in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and are expressed through the rigor of its structure which contrasts with the fantastic development of the multiple plots. The continuous changes of direction in the subject matters treated in the novel allow the writer to obtain a lack of authorial distinctiveness, which he aimed to by his own admission.7 And indeed, critics have often underlined the difference of the two periods in Calvino’s writing as if they constituted the work of two distinct authors altogether. To make an example, in a review of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that appeared on Time Magazine in 1981, Melvin Maddocks writes that “anything seems possible except that Calvino, 57, now an editor of the Turin house Giulio Einaudi Editore, was once a Marxist, a veteran of World War II Resistance, who believed, in his youth, that literature should be dedicated to ‘political engagement,’ to ‘social battle.’”8 (Time May 25 1981) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in other words is quite literally the work of an author that questions the role and functions of authorship. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 140 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler may be considered the epitome of the second phase in Calvino’s production; it addresses abstract philosophical questions such as the relations of the writer (and of the reader) with the text, the importance of authorship, the question of genre, and it is specifically centered around the discussion on the significance, or, more appropriately, the de-significance of proper names in novels.9 All these theoretical insights the novel brings forth by making use of the structures and the constraint proposed by the Oulipo. 4.1. The Oulipo. The Oulipo is an experimental literary group founded in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francis Le Lyonnais; it counted Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud among its most productive members. The Oulipo is particularly interesting among the rest of neo-avantgarde literary movements because, unlike all other groups, it is still active and productive to this day. Its name is the abbreviation of Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature).1 0 The group chooses the name Ouvroir in order to underline the unprecedented connection between literature and manual labor, between art and work. The Oulipien writer - be it a poet or a novelist - is then not considered as an artist or a genius, but as a worker. Or, given the insistence of the group in the collective effort that gives shape to the space-ouvroir, s/he is a multitude of workers.1 1 We can start to appreciate, from this brief description, the importance that the Oulipo attributes to names, and in particular to its own name. In the foreword to one of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 141 the few English texts on the theories of this rather a-generic French group, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Noel Amaud writes: “The future of Oulipo is inscribed in its name. More precisely, its name imposes a form on the group, its only manner of being (and of acting).” (Motte xi) These words are striking for their insistence on the role of the name as an ontological constituent: in the case of the Oulipo, the name gives form, and, more than this, life. Because, Amaud continues, “If the Oulipo abandoned this form involuntarily, it would die; voluntary abandon would be suicide: the group would scuttle itself.” (Motte ix) The name Oulipo reveals an undefined area “in between” the clear taxonomic distinction among genres, and even among disciplines. We read in the introduction to the English edition of the works of the group: An ouvroir -a word that has fallen into disuse- once denoted a shop and, as late as the eighteenth century, a light and mobile shop made of wood, in which the master cobblers of Paris displayed their wares and pursued their trade. The word could also denote that part of the textile factory where the looms are placed; or, in an arsenal, the place where a team of workers performs a given task; or a long room where the young women in a community work on projects appropriate to their sex.... Later, and for a short time only, ouvroir denoted a group of well-to-do women seeking to assuage their consciences in needlework for the poor and in the confection of sumptuous ecclesiastical ornaments. Curiously enough, it was this last notion, the ‘sewing circle,’ that prevailed in the minds of the Oulipians. (Motte xii) In his 1960 article “La Litterature Potentielle,” Raymond Queneau affirms that The Oulipo’s aim is to propose “new structures of a mathematical nature, or to invent new artificial and mechanical procedures that contribute to literary activity.” (Queneau 321) The works signed by the Oulipo, in other words, are organized like a poetic form R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 142 of mathematics, as a set of economic choices that fit precisely within a pre-defined structure through mathematical constraints self-imposed by the writer.1 2 This exceptionally diverse group “of writers, mathematicians, university professors, and pataphysicians,” (Motte 1) is interested in the form of writing “as practice, as work, as play.” (Motte 1) These forms are seen in opposition to what Georges Perec calls literature’s “great capitals (Work, Style, Inspiration, World-Vision, Fundamental Options, Genius, Creation, etc).” (Motte 5) The best explanation of how an Oulipian constraint works is possibly Queneau’s structure of his “One Hundred Trillion Poems.” In an explanation of his poetic endeavor, Queneau writes: These poems obey formal laws far more vast and rigorous than those of the traditional sonnet. In fact, they constitute a combinatory ensemble: each line of each poem may replace (or be replaced by) its homologue in the nine other poems. Thus, to each of the ten first lines, the reader can add any often different second lines; there exist therefore 102 , or one hundred possible combinations for the first two lines. Given that the sonnet has fourteen lines, the possibilities offered by the collection as a whole are of the order of 101 4 , or one hundred trillion sonnets. (Motte 3) As we may observe from this brief description, the Oulipians promoted the use of complex mathematical structures in their works, as well as the maximum possible hybridization and contamination of literary genres. In their views, contamination has the possibility, just like a recursive structure, to multiply the potentiality of literature. For these reasons, we may not enclose the Oulipian work within the traditional generic frame of authorial oeuvre, but we should rather take it as de-territorialized work, or as a work that detaches itself from the specific cultural place assigned to it. Within this R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 143 type of work, we could say, names do not function as tools to define a thing, or even a field, but rather open towards multiple fields. Texts become “light” because they do not possess the weight usually ascribed to the subject or the responsibility given by the authorial name, as it is implied in the definition of the name Oulipo in itself. Calvino had maintained a strict contact with Queneau and the Oulipiens since 1965, and officially became a member of the group in 1973. Calvino writes If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler following the Oulipian rules of literary/mathematical constraint, and for this reason he considers the Traveler (as he liked to call it) first and foremost as an Oulipian novel. In 1980, with an article included in the “Bibliotheque Oulipienne,” and titled “Comment J’ai ecrit un des mes livres” (a parody of Raymond Roussel’s Comment i’ai ecrit certains des mes livres) Calvino explains the complex set of constraints that lie behind the construction of his hypemovel. He writes, for instance, that in the Traveler “the structures chosen by the author are relatively few in number, but the possible realizations are combinatorily exponential.” (“Comment j ’ai ecrit” 143) More specifically, Calvino defines the Traveler as an “anticombinatory” experiment, calling anticombinatorics the multiplication of literary possibilities given by a set number of choices. Starting with a limited number of entries (a series of hypotetical actions and relations among a limited number of characters and locations), Calvino notices that the number of possible stories to be developed is uncountable for the human mind.1 3 Transposed to the Traveler, the practice of anticombinatorics is R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 144 applied to reveal a vision of a forma mundi that operates through language. But how is this world of language portrayed in the book? If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler narrates, we could say, a story about the “pleasure of the text.”1 4 It is a book about the writing (and the reading) of books, or, as critic Teresa De Lauretis’ states in her article on the postmodern value of Calvino’s novel “Reading the (Post)Modem text: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” it is “a novel about novels, a story about storytelling whose characters are only readers and writers.”1 5 (De Lauretis 135) The main plot (or frame) is the story of an unnamed male Reader (Lettore) addressed by an extradiegetic narrator through the second person pronoun “You” (tu). This is a relatively new technique that Calvino derives from the French experiments and the Nouveau Roman, and more specifically from Perec’s A Man Asleep and Michel Butor’s La Modification. The adventure of the Reader (“Your” adventure) begins with the reading of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The narrator provides a lengthy (and highly eroticized) description of the pleasures that the new book promises to the Reader: “You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal... Of course, this circling of the book, this reading around before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.” (Traveler 9) But after you, the Reader, finally get “inside” the novel and are captured by the plot, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 145 You are forced to interrupt the reading because of a binding mistake in the copy.1 6 The erotic/sexual charge of the act of reading (and the frustration that derives from its interruption) is here rendered with great force of details. After You find out about the mistake, Your reaction is to “fling the book to the floor, you would hurl it out of the window ... you would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the common market, beyond western culture... Merely what it deserves, neither more nor less.” (Traveler 26) Rushing to the bookstore to return the defective copy, You find out that the book you were reading was not really the new Calvino. The wrong pages, the bookseller tells you, were bound between the wrong covers. What You started (and now want to finish) was a book by an unknown (and Active) Polish author, Tazio Bazakbal. In the bookstore You also meet a female reader named Ludmilla (Lettrice, or the Other Reader in William Weaver’s translation) who apparently came across the same problem with her copy of the book. You and the Other Reader, immediately attracted to each other by your common passion for novels, decide to abandon the Calvino in favor of the Bazakbal, hoping to continue the reading at the point where it was interrupted. Bazakbal’s novel, completely different from Calvino’s, is nonetheless engaging. However, when the plot starts to engross the Reader, another printing mistake occurs, and the reading is once again interrupted. This time, too, the mistake R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 146 in printing suggests that the novel is not really by Polish author Bazakbal; it is instead a translation from an unknown Cimmerian author called Ukko Ahti. From this moment on, the twelve chapters that form the novel’s “frame” or “macrotext” sequentially recount the complicated adventures of the Reader (You) in his search for the different novels’ ending, and his (more successful) attempts to seduce the Other Reader.1 7 Within this frame are inserted ten novel fragments, all of which are left unfinished. Every time the novels are interrupted for different and more imaginative reasons: besides the errors in binding and printing, we read about a mix-up of different texts, an incomplete text from a nonexistent country, a fake translation, a grotesque arrest and book confiscation in a fictive Latin American dictatorship. All ten novel incipits are exercises in different genres and constitute the pretext for the continuous quest of the Reader. All along the quest You the Reader are introduced to a number of highly stereotyped characters, all of whom are in some way related to textuality, reading or writing. Besides the Other Reader Ludmilla, You come across the Non Reader Imerio, the publisher Cavedagna, the shady translator Ernies Marana, the author of best-selling novels Silas Flannery, and what De Lauretis calls “the criticai- feminist reader:” (De Lauretis 138) Ludmilla’s “evil sister” Lotaria.1 8 The structure is further complicated by the fact that the title of “the book within the book” coincides with the title of the book itself, and it appears at the beginning and at the very end, when Reader and Other Reader, married at last, enjoy an evening at home, reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 147 The structure of the novel is striking for its geometrical precision, which seems in contrast with the imaginative situations that constitute the plot. The main frame, Calvino affirms, develops from basic strategies derived from Greimas’ “semiotic square,” a structuralist explanation of meaning construction in narrative. Schematically speaking, the square suggests that a narrative will be organized around a pair of terms whose relation is oppositional or negational, or, as Greimas writes, as “a binary semic category, of the type white vs. black; the relation of the terms of this category is that of mutual contraries, each one being at the same time capable of projecting a new term which would be its contradictory.. .The subsequent assumption is that this elementary structure of signification furnishes a semiotic model adequate to account for initial articulations of meaning within a semantic micro-universe.” (Greimas 25) Constructed as a semiconductor-shaped recursive structure (a series of switches, to be clearer), the main frame of If On a Winter’s night a Traveler literally divides the narration into ten opposite set of choices. In this sense, the adventures of the Reader are determined by the type of novel-fragment that he reads and vice- versa.1 9 In his (rather cryptic) scheme of chapter one, for instance, Calvino explains the set of choices as follows: “The reader reads the book/the book narrates the story of the reader in the book/ The reader in the book cannot read the book within the book/ the book within the book does not tell the story of the reader / the reader in the book pretends to be the reader of the book/ the book pretends to be the book within the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 148 book.” ('“Comment i’ai ecrit” 154) As we may see, the constraint that underlies the narrative is based on a series of variations on the themes of reading and writing. Some of the ideas proposed by the Oulipo, and used in Calvino’s novel, such as the exploration of the liberating constraint of language are reminiscent of the postructuralist approach (see Barthes and Derrida for instance) that sees language as a meaning-differing machine that must be continuously reworked and that can eventually offer a form of jouissance. Others, such as the discussion of the name- function and the stress on the non-originality of the artistic product, reflect the ideas proposed in the politically informed philosophical studies such as Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Umberto Eco’s The Open Work that had an enormous influence on the intellectual world of contemporary France and Italy. In other words, although the idea of Oulipian constraint seems to work best on abstract concepts, such as repetition, formulas, multiplicity, and the work of the Oulipo rarely addresses the affairs of the world in a direct manner, the point of departure for its philosophical conceptions are strictly grounded in their own time. Writing about the Italian influence of the Oulipo, the French avant-garde and poststructural theory, Paolo Albani states that Calvino’s Oulipian writings are “on the one hand an analysis of the narrative possibilities of combinatory games taken from the school of Russian formalists, of Roland Barthes and the fictional writing of Tel Quel and, on the other hand, an approach to the tendency of contemporary culture that sees the world as discrete - in the mathematical sense of the word, as in “composed of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 149 separate parts” - rather than continuous.” (Albani 125) In the Oulipian writings, in other words, the concepts of fragmentation (or discreteness) of the subject, the reader, the narrative, always function as points of departure for the development of narratives and poetry. In making a parody of the types of reader (the average, the ideal, the academic, the non-reader) and of writers (the productive writer/the tormented writer and so on) If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler does not simply deal with structural constraints and wordplay, but with a complete theory on the status of contemporary literature, positioning itself within this theory. Despite its apparent distance from any form of letteratura d ’ impegno, then, Calvino’s novel retains all the main paradigms that best define the highly engaged 1960s and 1970s Italian and French culture, language and society. 4.2. Gruppo 63. It is inevitable to detect, in the description of the constraints and structures that reveal the potential of literature - and especially in the explanation of the name Oulipo - a conception of poetics that is in many ways similar to what Renato Barilli, a writer in the innovative literary-political journal “il Verri” and the founder with Umberto Eco and angelo Guglielmi of the Italian neo-avantgarde group Gruppo 63, calls the “relationality of all fields of action.” (Barilli 293) Similarly to the French Oulipian writers, a group of Italian intellectuals, poets, writers, artists and performers joined their forces at the beginning of the 1960 to give life to a “collective” that proposed new ways of conceiving contemporary poetics through collaborative effort. The R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 150 collective took its name, Gruppo 63, from the year in which their first convention took place (1963).2 0 The most important intellectual figures of Gruppo 63 were the already mentioned Renato Barilli, Umberto Eco, and Angelo Guglielmi. The theories proposed by the group, which largely influenced all forms of literary criticism in the following years, revolved around the search for the definition of a new concept of impegno in literature, the creation of an “open” work of art, and the discussion around the theme of the “crisis of the novel” in contemporary society. The collective also promoted a number of new writers who are now internationally known (Edoardo Sanguined, Nanni Balestrini, Gianni Celati) and has been considered, by Italian readership and criticism, a cradle of innovative philosophical thought and a laboratory for future experiments in the arts. Their views, it has been remarked, were the foreground for numerous artistic and literary movements of the late 1960 and 1970s, and they also had a direct influence over the formation of the 1968 student movement.2 1 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler may be easily situated at the center of the debate on the new forms of art and literature initiated by Gruppo 63 .Although Calvino had not directly contributed to the production of the collective, his work was oftentimes taken into consideration by the group as an example of literature that contains the potential for overcoming the old format of the neorealist novel. Barilli was an admirer (with some reservations) of Calvino’s work. In a 1989 article emblematically titled “My Long ‘Infidelity’ towards Calvino,” the philosopher states R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 151 that the writer’s late “theoretical” production conforms with the new concept of impegno (socio-political engagement) in philosophy and poetics the group proposed. During the 1960s, Barilli wrote a series of important articles tended to define a new conception of impegno in literature, one that rejects the old opposition (originally proposed by Benedetto Croce) between the “autonomy of the arts” from the political realm on the one hand, and the “ostentatious display of political choices” (Barilli 285) on the other. Barilli clearly states that this dual opposition is no longer valid for contemporary art forms, and that although artists and writers should not forget the importance of a political engagement, they should instead find new forms of expression that position themselves outside the old dualism. For instance, he states, the new avant garde in the arts should be “reconfigured as a passage from a monadic autonomy, inclusive and without relations, to a relational autonomy, which is integrative and must be integrated; or as a transition from aesthetic choice to autonomous integration of the aesthetic.” (Barilli 284) In other words, the artist should not think of the role of the art as “autonomous” and detached from the mundane, but s/he should also avoid a complete reliance on a “ragion pratica” (practical reason), or on “macro-operative choices, and the tendency to attribute to them a primacy, a guiding role in a cultural program.” (Barilli 289) For Barilli, then, a contemporary artistic avant-garde must not display forms of a-critical refusal and irrational subversion, and at the same time it should not rely on the notions of creation or illumination. An avant-garde is effective when it can operate on a “orderly R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 152 programming of disorder” (Barilli 300) and it is instead unconceivable outside “a richly articulate and clearly organized culture because such culture constitutes its main structure ... what characterizes the avant-garde today is the awareness of a methodology of relations that operates within a horizon of mundane truth and thus has the possibility to integrate the aesthetic sector within the other sectors o life and thought.” (Barilli 300) Barilli sees in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler an Italian version of the French “narrative of absence” (comparable to the work of Jarry, Queneau, Robbe-Grillet), since, he claims, Calvino reproduces in his characters the impossibility “to confess their inner selves and allow the reader to enter their private worlds through stream of consciousness narration or monologue exterieur (a more proper description of the French technique).” (Barilli 14) Characters in Calvino, Barilli claims, are instead “constantly being subverted by a distanced narrator who delighted in continuously unsettling and thwarting the reader’s expectations.” (Barilli 14) This affirmation, which unmistakingly situates Calvino as a “transnational” intellectual/literary figure, also offers a clear description of the de-personalization and indefinite role of the characters in the novel. On a slightly different note, Calvino’s Oulipian structure is clearly reminiscent of the theory of “indeterminacy in contemporary poetics” expounded in The Open Work. Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking collection of essays on poetics that was becoming a slogan precisely in the years in which the project of the Oulipo started.2 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 153 In his book, first issued in 1962, Eco observes a tendency in contemporary works of art to escape closed classification into disciplines, as well as the closed roles of artist and interpreter. The contemporary poetic form opens instead to multiple readings and multiple fields, producing in the artist and in the interpreter “acts of conscious ffeedom.”(Eco 53) Eco talks about the tendency towards the open work as a “positive direction” of contemporary art, one suggesting the image of an ambiguous world full of possibilities rather than one made of closed and impermeable categories. In The Open Work contemporary works of art, literature, architecture, music all display a “philosophical tendency towards interdisciplinarity,” (Open Work 54) a tendency that is rooted in the avant-garde tradition of the early twentieth century. What makes literature and art specifically contemporary, Eco sustains, is their ability to work as “epistemological metaphors” to indicate, that is, a new way of seeing, understanding and accepting a world in which traditional values have dissolved and in which the possibilities for different types of relations are opening. By giving up schemes that our “psychological habit” has deemed almost as “natural” (such as, he states, the binary logical system) and by revising all the impositions from logical thought to science of an older and closed system (without completely refusing them) art is adapting to a “new culture” of open works, which as the subtitle of Eco’s book suggests, starts with a celebration of indeterminacy. In proposing the visionary idea of a new, emerging culture that touches all strata of society and connects all previously separated fields of knowledge (art, science R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 154 philosophy, even technology) the theme of the open work gained immediate popularity as well as numerous vulgarizations; apparently, after 1965, every artist, writer or even scientist in Italy was trying to make open projects. Many were even sending their notes to Eco asking him whether their work could be enclosed within the “open” canon. The expression “open work” was ultimately taken as a social paradigm. “Open” was synonymous with innovative and modem. Fear of conservative “closure” was everywhere. Strangely enough, If On a Winter’s night a Traveler (a bestseller in Italy right after it was published) did not receive the expected response from the critics close to Gruppo 63. Angelo Guglielmi, for instance, strongly criticized the book for its closure. For Guglielmi, the happy ending of the Traveler, the marriage of Lettore and Lettrice, does not allow an open reading of the novel, and - what is worse - it represents a too optimistic, hence hypocrite, look at reality. Apparently, by 1979, the idea of open work had become both a formal and an ideological paradigm forjudging any literary work. Calvino responds to Guglielmi’s criticism with a famous letter published in the literary journal Alfabeta. in which he states: Among the literary forms that characterize our age there also exists the “closed” and “calculated” work. In it, closure and calculation are paradoxes that indicate the opposite truth to the reassuring one that the form itself seems to signify. In a word, the closure communicates the sense of a provisional world, a world on the edge, in pieces. But if you would admit this, you should recognize that the book of the Traveler all together fits in some ways in this model... a closed and calculated ending is for you only an easy choice, but it could be seen instead as an acrobatic exercise to defy - and point to - the void under us.2 3 (“Risposta a Guglielmi” 59) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 155 Indeed, if we look closely at Calvino’s hyper novel, we will realize that it can constitute a very good example of how the categories of openness work. We have already analyzed the structure of the novel as an open, anticombinatory experiment. But to provide an even better example of openness and indeterminacy we must necessarily look at the series of novel fragments contained in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the novels that the Reader protagonist unsuccessfully tries to finish (hence, literally to “close”) If for Calvino the “acrobatic exercise” of the ending suggets the unfinishedness of the novel as “pointing to the void under us,” the series of ten “genre novels” that attract the attention of the Reader are all actually unfinished.2 4 These novel fragments are open to the reader’s interpretation and (almost literal) rewriting (in their potential completion). Furthermore, as Salman Rushdie states in his 1981 review of the book, all of the fragments are “wonderfully readable, and somehow don’t seem fragmentary at all.” (Rushdie 16) Indeed, the fragments can be easily seen as following a specific spatial trajectory, or, as critic Beno Weiss states, “each of the ten narratives has its own style and takes place in a different country, ranging from Italy, to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and South America; there are some imaginary countries. All in all, the narratives represent a parody of contemporary fiction.” (Weiss 172) This “quest for the novel” that pushes the Reader around the world, is then also a journey around the literary world for the actual readers of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler who are thus faced with an overview of different international literary genres. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 156 Concentrating on this novelistic trajectory, critics have seen the novel incipits of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler as following a path and suddenly disappear, as if this non-linear narration was constitutive of a new way of conceiving literature. In her article “Prinicipio Senza Fine,” for instance, Assumpta Camps affirms that Calvino’s narration “proceeds through bifurcations and minimal and circumscribed alternatives, with the final aim of suggesting the potentiality of living multiple lives at the same time.” (Camps 312) In the fragments, we read about the possibility to “turn the clocks backwards,” (Traveler 34) of the vertigo that “a crowd falling” provokes, of the search of an effective alteration of the laws of linear consequentiality through the erasure of people, places and reality: “Walking along the great Prospect of our city, I mentally erase the elements I have decided not to take into consideration. I pass a ministry building ... and I feel the need to reduce it to a smooth, vertical surface ... Similarly, I erase five more ministries, three banks, and a couple of skyscraper headquarters of big companies.” (Traveler 244) In this type of experimental (and, we could say, literally potential) writing, the narration follows a specific path that is made of hypotheses and verifications, and offering “the maximum degree of potentiality of the real.”2 5 (Camps 313) Through a discontinuity and an openness that include an endless and multiple succession of potential solutions to a given problem. This element is noticeable, for instance in the fragment named “In a Network of Lines that Enlace” in which the main character predicts all the possibilities of a phone that rings, or in the novel “Without R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 157 Fear of Wind or Vertigo” discussing in the different cases of censorship, or else in the fragment in which in infinite images refract in a multitudes of mirrors. The importance of the “hypothetical period” is underlined even at a grammatical level, through all the fragments. As many critics remind us, the title of the novel, If On a Winter’s Night a traveler, includes within itself the hypothesis of a new novel made up of all the different fragments assembled together; in a surreal finale the Reader is faced with the list of the titles of all the novel fragments, and he realizes that they form a new fragment on their own: “If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from a steep slope without fear of wind and vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave - What story down there awaits its end? He asks, anxious to hear the story.” (Traveler 258) This form of continuous project, which also lies at the basis of the conception of open work, is only apparently resolved at the end of the book, where the marriage of the Reader and the Other Reader suggests the “closure” of Calvino’s novel. The final part of the Traveler’s structure, in fact, concludes with the ironically all-inclusive possibility: “The world continues.” This final/non final item in the list reveals an openness that is not simply an abstract category, but a real openness to the world. In this sense the structure of the Traveler contains indeed an enigmatic reflection on reality: if the last novel fragment, titled “What story down there awaits its end?” represents the apocalyptic end of the world in a cold and hypertechnologic R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 158 atmosphere, then how does the world continue? In the list of possible finales, we have, of course, the two opposite possibilities (again, a switch): the end of the world, versus the resolutive wedding. But in line with The Open Work’s claim that contemporary literature does not follow an old binary scheme of logic, we also perceive a third possibility beyond these oppositions. This possibility is given by the potential endlessness of the recursive structure of the novel, by the fact that the series of switches may be reproduced ad infinitum', and in particular by the fact that this possibility, may or may not be developed; in brief, it is potential literature. In a famous 1979 review titled “If on a Winter’s Night a Writer dreamed about a ten-color Aleph” (“Se una notte d’invemo uno scrittore sognasse un Aleph a dieci colori”) Cesare Segre notes that Calvino treats as a narrative the crucial topics that contemporary literary criticism was struggling with after the definition of open work, such as “the protagonist role of the reader, the frame and structure, the fragmentation of the subject, or the role of the author.” (Segre 42) If we relate Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to the Italian studies in epistemology and literary theory that became paradigmatic in the end of the sixties, we will inevitably notice how this apparent style exercise is indeed a reflection on the ways contemporary society “thinks” and, consequently, uses language. For this reason the lack of political directness of the book may not be “showing involvement” as did the highly realistic content of the first phase in Calvino’s career, but can indeed be taken as a point of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 159 departure for understanding the philosophical issues that were forming the intellectual climate of the time. Indeed, in a number of writings Calvino expresses his interest in summarizing contemporary literature and culture through a series of notions or keywords. The concept of multiplicity (which is strictly related to openness), for instance, is a recurrent theme in the writer’s oeuvre. In this regard, Calvino defines the contemporary novel as encyclopedia, or as a ‘“system of systems’ Where every system conditions the others and is conditioned by them.” (Six Memos 105-106) Furthermore, the ability of literature to represent “the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality” (Six Memos 114) is one of the author’s main objects of inquiry since his first writings. The Six Memos for the Next Millennium (in Italian Lezioni Americane), a series of notes (unfinished and published posthumously) for six lectures that were to be held at Harvard University in 1986, presents a list of the most important themes that literature should address in the approaching millennium. The list is formed of six abstract concepts: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Interestingly, all of these six themes deal with a discussion of how things are “marked,” “indicated,” or “distinguished” in the field of literature, science or philosophy. When the discussion revolves around the notion multiplicity, Calvino provides an interesting overview of the work of authors (Gadda, Proust, Goethe, Borges, Flaubert) who, in different phases of history, have tried to establish R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 160 relationships between discourse, methods, and levels of meaning. Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that binds together the major works both of what is called modernism and what goes by the name of postmodern ... What tends to emerge from the great novels of the twentieth century is the idea of an open encyclopedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun encyclopedia, Which etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle. But today we can no longer think in terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold2 6 (Six Memos 113) This view of multiplicity is the thread that joins together a large number of Calvino’s stories. Critics have indeed noticed how this idea of multiplicity and of encyclopedic construction of contemporary poetics derives from the notion of multiple potentiality of narration. In her article “Principio senza Fine: L’iper-romanzo di Italo Calvino,” for instance, Assumpta Camps explains how “the experimental work carried on by Calvino during the mid sixties in the fields of narration and on literature as a tool for the representation of reality will bring the author ... to evidence the artificial character of the narrative machine.”2 7 (Camps 310) In other words, the theorization of multiplicity in Calvino is a direct consequence of his taking part in his experiments in multiplicity with the Oulipo, his exploration of language as a machine and ultimately the possibility of actual machines (like computers for instance) to work through language. Within this context, then, the opening of the form of the novel through its constraint, its unfinishedness and its indeterminacy are shown in its plot, its language, its structure, and reflect what Barilli calls a visione del mondo (“vision of the world” or Weltauunshaung). This opening, we need to keep in mind coincides with an R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 161 observation of the indeterminate and infinite possibilities of language, or the reduction of signs to pure signifiers, their abstraction from the signified that lives within them, or as critic ... the substitution of the signified with an alien referent, one that cannot be expressed. This operation starts with the opening of the first particle of language, the name, and of its ability to define the things in the world. 4.3. Invisible Names. One of the most interesting features of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the one which has mainly attracted the attention of the critics, is the technique of second person narration.2 9 The use of the second person pronoun, A.H. Carter states, is an attempt at “a narrative challenge of the old cliche that ‘there is first-person fiction and third-person fiction, but never second-person fiction.”’ (Carter 125) Addressing the character -- and especially a character called “Reader” -- through the second person pronoun “you,” immediately creates a multiple web of potential interpretations. The novel’s incipit, for instance, is made up of a series of instructions that could be directed at the same time to the Reader in the book (the character) and the readers of the book (ourselves). The novel starts: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room.” (Traveler 3) These initial instructions are so general that they could possibly address some kind of collective, or “universal” readership. The ambiguity of the second person address rules over the narration. The undefined You/Reader of If R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 162 On aWinter’s Night a Traveler is there to confuse rather than reassure the “real” reader, the real “you.” In her review of the book, for instance, critic Inge Fink states: “Whereas on the opening pages we had the “I” of the author talking to some unsufficiently defined “you,” we have now the “I” of the character-narrator, talking about “him,” the author, to (presumably the same) “you;” a jungle of pronouns almost too thick to penetrate.” (Fink 96) All along the novel the narrator insists on the point that the Reader is undefined by any proper name or classification besides his condition as a reader of books. We read, for instance: “Who you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to ask. It’s your business, you’re on your own. What counts here is the state of your spirit now, in the privacy of your home, as you try to re-establish perfect calm in order to sink again into your book; you stretch your legs, you draw them back, you stretch them again.” (Traveler 32) By addressing the character of the story as a tu, Calvino obviously plays with the roles of the reader in the book and the reader of the book, but, what is even more important, he avoids the burden of the attribution of a name to the character, and simply classifies him by its function as a reader. The protagonist of this fragmented story thus remains, through the second person pronoun, in the realm of the indeterminate, precisely because of his lack of name.3 0 The non-name Reader, then, we could say, is a good example of an open, multi referential name, or better, designifier. The you/Reader, we could say, defers the attainment of a stable definition, just like the character/Reader defers, through his continuous quest, the completion of the books he is reading. This R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 163 deferral of definition (or, to use Derrida’s words, differ ance) of the name of the main character has induced critics to consider the novel as a story on anonymity, on •j -I depersonalization and, ultimately, on the impersonality of the author. In his article, Cesare Segre constructs the discussion of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler around the alternation of significant names (such as Ermes Marana or Silas Flannery) and the anonymity of the second person. He states that Calvino’s aim in the Traveler is “to avoid any predisposition for an illusory reading ... and first and foremost to avoid autobiographical or personal implications on the part of the author.” (Segre 192) Calvino, Segre continues, “in line with most contemporary literature, .. .rejects expression in favor of communication ... and valorizes an anonymous ‘I’ in order to establish absolute impersonality.” (Segre 192) Segre mentions anonymity as a feature with at least two different purposes. One is the affirmation of the “impersonality of the author” that is necessarily reflected in the namelessness of the you-character and in the multiple voices that compose the novel fragments; the other is the notion of “reduction of subjectivity” which Segre situates within the current debate on contemporary poetics. He states: “Well informed on the results of criticism a la page, I think he [Calvino] considered the repertory of the methods that [semiotic] criticism has brought forward as a Christmas toy-box; he started playing, he enjoyed himself.” (Segre 177) this view, we immediately notice, is also close to the notion of literature expounded by Queneau and the members of the Oulipo. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 164 Most critics agree with Segre and reserve the focus of their analyses to second- person anonymity, understood as the affirmation of the reader’s “autonomy from the writer’s authority,” (Fink 194) or as a form of “radical depersonalization.” (Olds 121) We need to underline, however, that If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler literally abounds with proper names. To make an example among many, the female protagonist - the Other Reader - though addressed as a reader like the main character, defined by a name, Ludmilla. Some (as, for instance Teresa De Lauretis) claim that Ludmilla’s specificity, opposed to the indefiniteness of the male reader, is to be attributed primarily to her gender. Teresa De Lauretis claims that Ludmilla’s role as a Woman Reader (a role that, unlike that of the male reader cannot lead to a-gendered identification) is simply to be “desired and pursued by Reader and Writer alike.” (De Lauretis 139) This interpretation, however, seems very limited. The name Ludmilla, as Calvino cares to underline, is not a real mark of distinction, but simply “the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel.” (Traveler 141) The indeterminateness of the female Reader (which mimics that of the male Reader) is indeed evident in her continuous transformations, her becoming every female character in each novel fragment, indeed in her being every single woman in the book. We read: “Holding your breath, you have followed from letter to letter the transformations of the woman reader, as if it were always the same person. But even if they were many persons, to all of them you attribute the appearance of Ludmilla.” (Traveler 128) The Other Reader may very well be an object of desire (just like literature, which in Italian, we R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 165 need to remark, is a feminine noun), but as an ideal reader of text, she is also, literally, a multiple character. Other proper names (and possibly all proper names in the novel) follow this pattern of de-signification. They all tend to refer to a multiple, or, following Aristotelian logic, to “universals” rather than “individuals.” Even Ludmilla’s sister Lotaria, a monolithic and un-faceted individual (almost a cliche), undergoes multiple transformations in the only episode of the novel that sees her as protagonist. In the space of a few pages Lotaria changes into book-trafficker, revolutionary/counter revolutionary spy, disguised police officer, computer-programmer. As predictable, through all these sudden transformations, Lotaria changes her name and becomes Corinna, Gertrude, Ingrid, Alfonsina, Sheila, Alexandra. Ludmilla and Lotaria have been considered as two opposite versions of femininity, the attractive and the castrating woman, the good reader who simply reads for pleasure and the bad reader who “cannot help analyzing and debating novels.” (De Lauretis 137) Indeed, Calvino does not discard this interpretation, by referring to Lotaria as Ludmilla’s “diametric mirror-image.” (Traveler 215) This distinction between the two women, however, is not as clear-cut as it seems. Just as their names do not refer to a single, individual character but are used to multiply their referents, Lotaria and Ludmilla have multiple characteristics that exude from their prescribed and monolithic roles. Lotaria’s analysis of books through computer word-scanning in chapter nine, may be controversial and unsettling — “what is the reading of a text,” she R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 166 states, “except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meaning?” (Traveler 186) — but is mostly accurate, and is a technique that Calvino himself was researching at the time he wrote the novel. Indeed, the structure that makes up the book is directly reminiscent of the smallest constituent part of the computer, the semiconductor (or switch).3 3 Lotaria, then, cannot simply be considered as a bad reader as De Lauretis has hinted.3 4 We may observe, instead, that the dualisms on which the whole story seems to be constructed (reader/writer male/female reader, good/bad reader) reveal themselves, just like the proper names that define the characters, unreliable signifiers. It seems appropriate, in other words, to suggest that we should neither privilege nor condemn categorically any one reader’s methodology, any one reader’s practice of reading, but rather see them as the configuration of the game that is the structuring principle of the novel itself. In this way each reading can reflect and shed light on other readings, including, and especially, our own. Following this reasoning, then, the good reader Ludmilla cannot be considered only as a “reader for pleasure.” Unlike the male reader, she actively participates in the texts she reads: she is the agency that literally “produces” texts simply through her desire for reading. The novel fragments that the Reader starts and interrupt each time are all experiments in “genre novels,” and they appear to the Reader following Ludmilla’s specific desire. For instance, when the Other Reader states: “I prefer novels ... that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific,” (Traveler 30) the novel fragment that follows is a sort of “kitchen R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 167 realism,” a realistic narration taking place in a remote eastern European village. The novel describes a crowded kitchen abounding with details on food preparation, tools, and people’s physical characteristics. This technique is repeated in every chapter. Whenever Ludmilla “desires” a kind of novel, the novel automatically materializes in front of the Reader’s (and all readers) eyes. Ludmilla is thus not only a reader and an object of male desire, but also a producer of text through her desire.3 5 The (apparent) dualism that divides the “good” and the “bad” woman reader, also applies to a pair of male characters in the novel: the bestseller writer Silas Flannery, who “produces books as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins,” (Traveler 189) and the evil figure of the translator Ernies Marana, who turns false “whatever he touches, even if it isn’t false already.” (Traveler 152) Calvino’s play with the role of the two characters (and especially with the notion of traduttore/traditore) is here rooted in their proper names which, unsurprisingly, have attracted the attention of many critics. Silas Flannery’ has been seen as Calvino’s “double,” and the origin of his name is controversial. It either suggests “Ian Fleming grafted onto Sean Connery” (De Lauretis 135) or a combination of Silas Mamer and Flannery O’Connor. In both cases, the earnest, productive writer who appears to be a positive figure is not at all the “author” that we would expect to encounter. He is instead, or at least tries to be, a de personalized writer, someone who can capture the desire of all his readers and write in conformity to it. In a passage that we can consider as the epitome of de-personalized R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 168 thought, he claims: “there is thought in the universe - this is the constant from which we set out every time. Will I ever be able to say ‘Today it writes.’ Just like ‘Today it rains,’ ‘Today it is windy?”’ (Traveler 176) Silas Flannery, however, does not resolve the question of how to proceed in writing his impersonal work. As critic Marshall C. Olds affirms in his article “Another Book, another Author,” “Much of his time is spent brooding on the multitude of ways the author can be expunged from his works.. .he becomes sidetracked, and often quite comically, as he contemplates one form after another of depersonalization.” (Olds 122) In Flannery’s world nothing really happens, and his role in the novel, which leads him to write a personal journal as an attempt to cope with a “dry period” has often been compared to Calvino’s recent lack of productivity. We must underline, though, that the author-Flannery cannot be easily identified with the author-Calvino. Calvino’s role as an author may retain some of the bestseller-writer characteristics, but has probably more in common with Flannery’s alter-ego Ernies Marana. The translator/counterfeiter is in this novel a more interesting character than the old and quiet writer. Marana always travels the world in disguise, and his adventures -real or invented - are immensely more engaging than Flannery’s theoretical torments. The Reader’s first encounter with Marana is through the letters he writes to his editor: In writing to Cavedagna, Marana always has some practical reason: to justify his delay in the delivery of the translations, to press for payment of the advances, to point out new foreign publications they shouldn’t let slip through their fingers. But among these normal subjects of business R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 169 correspondence appear hints of intrigues, plots, mysteries ... The letters are addressed from places scattered over five continents, although they never seem to have been entrusted to the normal post, but, rather, to random messengers who mail them elsewhere, so the stamps on the envelopes do not correspond to the countries of provenance. (Traveler 116) Marana, seemingly the opposite of Flannery, is instead strictly connected to the writer. Their only difference rests on the fact that Marana considers literature as a mystification and dealing in literature as dealing in falsehood. The shady translator, whom Beno Weiss calls “Calvino’s incarnation of Deconstruction,” (Weiss 176) derives his second name from a distortion of the Spanish word Marana, which means “scam” or “deception,” and his first name from the Greek divinity Hermes, which means “interpreter” or “mediator.” As Weiss reminds us, Hermes’ task “was to conduct the souls of the dead to Hades, for the ancients he also epitomized the power of the spoken word and was regarded as a most sinister thief.” (Weiss 174) Indeed, when we read about Marana, we do get the impression of confronting the god of (literary) thieves. Ernies’s occupations correspond to those of Hermes as described in Plato’s Cratvlus. When Socrates explains the significance of the name Hermes to Cratylus, he states ‘I would imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter (Heremeneus), or messenger to thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language. (Cratvlus 329b) Ermes Marana dreams of an endlessly multipliable literature made entirely of false attributions, of counterfeits and pastiches.3 6 The multiplicity included in his name, then, reflects the multiplicity that is inherent in his character as the best representation R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 170 of the “genius of simulation, in Baudrillard’s terms, the postmodern artist in the age of media implosion, the age of the infinite multiplication of discourses; the writer poised on the rim of the black hole of meaning.” (De Lauretis 136) Marana, then, may be Calvino’s incarnation of both deconstruction and postmodemity; in any case the most “contemporary” character, and for this reason his name is the one that most suggest a multiplicity of references. Calvino is principally known outside of Italy as the major representative of Italian postmodernism.3 7 In her article on the postmodern aspects of Calvino’s novel, for instance, Teresa de Lauretis suggests that Calvino’s book is “a novel that obstreperously proclaims its participation in the postmodern aesthetics of simulation, textual spectacle, masquerade and self-reflexive excess.” (De Lauretis 131) Reasserting De Lauretis’ view, Constance Markey adds that Calvino’s entire career could be traced as a trajectory towards postmodernism. In her definition of Calvino’s journey, Markey states that Calvino and Postmodernism had a worldview and a birthday in common. She writes: “If postmodernism was bom out of the tragedy of World War II, so too was Calvino the writer; if its fiction expresses a loss of faith in mainstream literary forms and heralds a search for more relevant means of expression, so too does Calvino’s. Furthermore, just as postmodern philosophy sets out to explore life’s tenuous journey, so does Calvino.” (Markey 86) Although these two definition of postmodernism (and of Calvino) seem almost contradictory, the first resting on the superficial characters of postmodern aesthetic, the second on its gloomy “end of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 171 history” aspect, taken together they indeed point to all the main issues of the debate around the definition of postmodernism, and they do so taking Calvino’s work as paradigmatic. The definition of postmodernism is indeed foggy and unstable just like the characters in the Traveler. Many see it as a break with the aesthetic field of modernism; others define it as a politics of interpretation. For some, De Lauretis insists, “it means ‘the end of ideology,’ while others see it as an epistemological shift in social consciousness. Others still think of i t ... less as a work in modernist terms - unique, symbolic, visionary - than as a text in a postmodernist sense - already written, allegorical contingent... Similarly, the practice of literary criticism has become a kind o f‘paraliterary’ writing ... and vice-versa, literary writing has become a ‘paracritical’ practice.”3 8 (De Lauretis 133-134) Although this is not the place to debate in details a concept as controversial as that of postmodernism, the idea of a ‘paracritical’ literature adapts particularly well to the analysis of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which entirely revolves around the potential forms that the novel may assume.3 9 Markey and De Lauretis compare Calvino’s work to a journey, a search that arrives, by way of constant interrogation of structures of language, narration and the dynamics of identity-formation, to a form of celebration of the lack of unity, of identity, of definition, all characteristic of the widely debated concept of postmodernism.4 0 To classify, with the majority of critics, this novel within the postmodern canon, then, is R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 172 equivalent to underlining the specifically temporal significance of Calvino’s reflection on literature. Having mentioned the closeness of Calvino’s thought with postmodern and poststructuralist theories, we need to specify that the proper names in If On a Winter’s night a Traveler (a novel that, we have seen, consciously makes a literary practice of such theories) may never be seen as Platonic “dividing tools,” but at best as traces. The term trace must be understood here in its Derridean sense, that is to say as the content that every linguistic sign has in relation to other signs. According to Derrida, a trace is then an element that is potentially inherent in the sign but is nonetheless absent. It follows that a sign is not only a mark of presence but it also includes an absence within itself.4 1 In Calvino’s writings, proper names are often chosen in order to reveal the trace of what they lack. They are the first elements to allow the reader (and the writer) to acknowledge and reveal this trace. A trace in Calvino’s work is not just a potentially inherent element, but rather a material absence. In other words, instead of hiding under a veil of signification, proper names in Calvino’s fiction present, quite literally, their “impropemess.” But how does a proper name become improper? Calvino revels in attempts to answer this question, either by exposing names’ inability to define what exists (as in Lotaria’s multiple names which reveal only a series of masks) or in their multiple referentiality (as in the non-name of the Reader, which can be applied to a multiplicity) To make a final (and possibly the most significant) example, we may R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 173 observe the signature of Calvino-the-author in If On a Winter’s night a Traveler. As briefly mentioned, the story includes the name of the author at the beginning and at the end. We know, though, that Calvino’s name must be understood in its relation to all the other Active writers of novel fragment. The name Italo Calvino, then is no different from Tazio Bazakbal, Ukko Ahti, Bertrand Vandervelde, Silas Flannery, Takakumi Ikoka, Calixto Bandera: fictive and irrelevant. The reflection on the role of names in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, then, can be extended to more general considerations on what names stand for. The novel, we have mentioned, displays a large number of theoretical digressions on the role of the author, that of the reader and the book itself. The search for the definition of the self, the subject, and, consequentially, the object-novel, however is not revelatory of the presence of these elements, but rather of their absence. In an article titled “Italo Calvino: the Last Two Decades,” Joan Cannon states that “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler ... lays bare the dual potential of literature: poised between two voids, the absence of the subject and the absence of the object, literary discourse may be only a series of veils mistaking a blank page or it may be an effective cognitive activity unmasking the inexhaustible depths of reality.” (Cannon 59) As we may observe, the core of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler consists necessarily in its ability to define an absence of definition, and to address the multiplicity included in names and their referents. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 174 Notes 1 See Beno Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino. Weiss talks about the structure of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler as an attempt to “dismantle and put back together what Calvino considers ‘the most complex and unpredicatble’ of all machines: ‘language.’” (Weiss 132) 2 In the introduction of Eco’s Opera Aperta (1995 reissue) we read: “dobbiamo riconoscere che ...O.A. si e imposto come l’inizio di un dibattito che avrebbe investito la society culturale italiana degli anni Sessanta e avrebbe poi trovato I suoi momenti piu caldi con l’uscita del Menabd 5 e la prime sortite del Gruppo 63.” In an intervention on Cratilo. 2, 1963, Gianni Scalia adds: “L’Opera Aperta ha messo alle corde, da una parte quelli per cui l’opera letteraria e prius, originalM originaria, oggettivit£ e soggettivM sublimi; e dall’altra parte quelli... per cui l’opera 6 posterius, derivazione seconda, sovrastruttura dialettica. Ha portato all estreme conseguenze un discorso che, nelle condizioni della cultura italiana, sembra oppresso da una serie di ‘complessi’ mentali ed interessi costituiti, accademici, partitici, aziendali ...Si conclude forse in questasumma, il periodo dell’ossessione dei corti circuiti scrittore-realth, letteratura-societa, letteratura-cultura. Si apre ...ilperiodo delle opere ‘aperte’ in cui reaM, societa, cultura, ecc., non sono distinti, e opposti, di un circolo dialettico bensi’ componenti, strati, patterns dell’opera stessa; la quale non nega alcun rapporto con l’altro perche 6 essa stessa, perpetuamente,l’altro.” (Opera Aperta ix) 3 The majority of critics usually agree upon this distinction. See for instance Joan Cannon, Teresa De Lauretis, Constance Markey, Francesco Ricci, Beno Weiss, Martin McLaughlin. 4 In 1943 Calvino was called up to serve in the Italian army under Mussolini’s Said’s government. Markey states: “By this time (1943), having been influenced by leftist friends, Calvino was a clandestine Communist opposed to fighting for the Fascist cause. With their parents’ support, young Italo and Floriano resisted the draft and went briefly into hiding. Soon after, they joined die Italian Resistance where, as freedom fighters or garibaldini, they saw active combat against the detested nazi army occupying Italy... When the war ended in 1945 and Italy had been liberated, Calvino resumed his normal life, but with a new maturity ... He maintained his ties with the Communist Party that had championed the Resistance and, with social reform in mind, began to work for the communist paper L’Unith, first as a journalist and later as an editor.” (Markey 6) 5 For a complete criticism of the Path to the Spider’s Nest see in particular: Lucia Re, Calvino and the Fable of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement: Annalisa Ponti, Come Leggere il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno di Italo Calvino: Giorgio Baroni, Italo Calvino. 6 See Beno Weiss: 88-98. 7 In Markey’s book we read: “The author was influenced by Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist movement and its skeptical critique of language as the bearer of ultimate truth. A1 of these fresh literary endeavors Calvino saw as a means to enliven fiction, to escape the monotony of traditional historical narrative, and thereby elude (at least on paper) the natural limitations of the human world. Little by little, via these eclectic postmodern inquiries, the social writer Calvino inevitably gave way to the restless intellectual within.” Also, p. 88: “In all Calvino’s postmodern works there is an impatient striving on the author’s part to liberate himself from the shackles of time and place.” (Markey 19) 8 Many, especially in Italy, have strongly criticized Calvino’s detachment from realism, and his predilection for a “dry” and highly theoretical approach. After the publication of If On a Winter’s Night R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 175 a Traveler, for instance, many reviewers denounced Calvino’s excessive attention to the narrative technique. Cesare Garboli, for instance, writing in Paraeone Letteratura in 1979, sees Calvino’s new direction as a sign o f malaise, a degeneration of the writer’s love for literary play. He states: “What is surprising, in the latest Calvino, is not the formal artifice, the organization of the game - these are superficial features. If there is something that is surprising in Calvino today, is his obstinate staging of mediations and dialectics while he sits at a table that no longer interests him, while playing at another table that he’ll never like... Technicism is not, as some claim, Calvino’s value ... lire novelty ... is not in the game, but rather in the dysfunction, the disproportion that makes the game so inferior to the malaise that has inspired it.” (Garboli 69-70) 9 If on a Winter’s night a Traveler is not the only book in which Calvino engages with these topics. Another, possibly more famous endeavor of this kind is the 1972 book of short narrative sketches Invisible Cities. 1 0 On the discussion of the work of Oulipo, see Warren Motte, Oulipo. A Primer of Potential Literature: Jacques Bens, Oulipo 1960- 1963: Peter Consenstein, Literary Memory. Consciousness and the Group Oulipo. 1 1 The oulipiens were: noel Amaud, Marcel Benabou, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, Andre Blavier, Paul Braffort, Italo Calvino, Francois Caradec, Bernard Cerquiglini, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Duchateau, Luc Etienne, Paul Foumel, Michelle grangaud, Jacques Jouet, Latis, Francois le Lionnais, Herve le Tellier, Jean Lescure, Harry Mathews, MichMe Metail, Oskar Pastior, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval Pierre Rosenstiel, Jacques Roubaud, Albert- Marie Schmidt.” (Motte ix) 1 2 In his theory of the “One Hundred Trillion Poems,” Francois Le Lionnais affirmed: “the Oulipo’s goal is to discover new structures and to furnish for each structure a small example.” (Motte 10) In order to explain its parameters more precisely, one may briefly consider Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes. the actual realization of the One Hundred Trillion Poems. This work is so defined: “At first glance, it looks like nothing more than a collection of ten sonnets, but these poems obey formal laws far more vast and rigorous than those of the traditional sonnet. In fact, they constitute a combinatory ensemble: each line of each poem may replace (or be replaced by) its homologue in the nine other poems. Thus, to each of the ten first lines, the reader can add any often different second lines; there exist therefore 102 , or one hundred possible combinations for the first two lines. Given that the sonnet has fourteen lines, the possibilities offered by the collection as a whole are of the order of 1014, or one hundred trillion sonnets.” (Motte 3) 1 3 This game of anticombinatorics is intended as a reflection on how the “open” paradigm may be found through “closure” or through a limited set of possibilities. 1 4 See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte. Here Barthes discusses the concepts of readerly and writerly texts. The writerly text, he claims offers two kinds of enjoyment: pleasure (plaisir) and bliss (jouissance). Jouissartce has a connotation of ecstasy and sexual delight. Pleasure comes through straightforward processes of reading, while jouissance derives from a sense of interruption, a “breakdown” or gap, where something unexpected occurs. 1 5 De Lauretis’ article, included in the collection of critical essays Calvino Revisited (ed. Francesco Ricci), is a study of the novel that takes into consideration the category of postmodern in its generic quality. The article also dwells on a (less interesting) discussion of gender roles in Calvino. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 176 1 6 This interruption also has a functional aspect: it offers an opportunity to Calvino to go on in details about the techniques of book-printing and binding. We read: “The mistake occurred as they were binding the volume: a book is made up of sixteen-page signatures; each signature is a large sheet on which sixteen pages are printed, and which is then folded over eight times; when all the signatures are bound together, it can happen that two identical signatures end up in the same copy; it’s the sort of accident that occurs every now and then.” (Traveler 25) 171 borrow here the terms “macrotext” and “frame” from Mariolina Salvatori’s article “Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: Writer’s Authority, Reader’s Autonomy”: 186. 1 8 De Lauretis insists: “Lotaria, the bad sister and mirror image of Ludmilla, is the negative image of Woman, the unheimlich double of a female Dorian Gray. She is the woman reader we shouldn’t be. Or so the text tries to convince us. For, whether it is due to male narcissism, blinding homophobia, or to a rather shocking cultural naivete in a writer so sophisticated otherwise, Calvino seems unaware that there are women readers - let alone the amazon of old - who simply have no interest in men or men’s desire.” (De Lauretis 139) I quote this passage by De Lauretis not because it is particularly relevant to my analysis of If On a Winter’s night a Traveler, but because it summarizes the positions of a number of feminist readings of the novel. 1 9 For instance, when at the beginning the Reader is looking for his full reading satisfaction, the structure predicts that this satisfaction may come from two sources: from “sensations” and from the “Ego.” Immediately following we will start reading the second novel fragment, named the “novel of corporal experience,” which is all about the description of full material sensations, and suggests the choice of the first choice over the second. The second choice, at this point, is not forgotten but only delayed and it will be the source for the next novel and so on. 2 0 The first convention of Gruppo 63 took place in Palermo in 1963. 2 1 See Eco’s Introduction to Opera Aperta. Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, L’Qrda d’Oro: Patrick McCarthy, Italy snce 1945: Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. 2 2 Interestingly, Eco never mentions the Oulipo in his book. His examples of open works, though, often seem to adapt perfectly to the combinatory structures of the Oulipians. In particular, Eco’s description of the “moving work” and the moving building has many points in common with Amaud’s description of the space-ouvroir. We read in The Open Work: “In the present cultural context, the phenomenon of the “works in movement” is certainly not limited to music. There are, for example, artistic products which display an interesting mobility, a kaleidoscopic capacity to suggest themselves in constantly renewed aspects to the consumer. A simple example is provided by Calder’s mobiles or by mobile compositions by other artists: elementary structures which can move in the air and assume different spatial dispositions. They continuously create their own space and the shapes to fill it.” (Open Work 12) Strangely enough, the translator to this edition of The Open Work has omitted the discussion of the mobile constructions that compose the building of the architecture department of the University of Caracas, and that can be rearranged every day in order to create different working spaces. 2 3 Calvino writes: “tra le forme letterarie che caratterizzano la nostra epoca c’e’ anche l’opera chiusa e calcolata, in cui chiusura e calcolo sono scommesse paradossali che non fanno che indicare la verity opposta a quella rassicurante (di completezza e di tenuta) che la propria forma sembra significare, cio6 comunicano il senso d’un mondo precario, in bilico, in frantumi. Ma se tu ammetti questo, dovresti riconoscere che il libro del Viaggiatore tutt’intero risponde in qualche modo a questo modello ... il “far R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 177 tomare I conti” per te e soltanto una soluzione di comodo, mentre pud ben essere vista come un esercizio acrobatico per sfidare - e indicare - il vuoto sottostante.” (“Risposta a Guglielmi” 59) 2 4 Calvino provides a list of the genres that will be included in the structure: we come across the novel of “the fog,” the novel of corporal experience, the symbolic-interpretative novel, the political-existential novel, the novel of anguish, the geometrical-logical novel, the novel of perversion, the telluric- primordial novel, the apocalyptic novel. 2 5 In Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino. we read: “Invisible Cities is one of the texts of which Calvino was most satisfied, for in it he had managed to say the maximum number of things with the smallest number of words.” (McLaughlin 101) 2 6 “Le relazioni tra i discorsi e i metodi e i livelli. La conoscenza come molteplicita b il filo che lega le opere maggiori, tanto di quello cha viene chiamato il modemismo quanto di quello che che viene chiamato il postmodern ... quella che prende forma nei grandi romanzi del xx secolo b l’idea di una encyclopedia aperta, aggettivo che certamente contraddice il sostentivo encyclopedia, nato etimologicamente dalla pretesa di esaurire la conoscenza del mondo rinchiudendola in un circolo. Oggi non e’ piu’ pensabile una totality che non sia potenziale, congetturale, plurima.” (Lezioni Amerieane 113) 2 7 “La sperimentazione svolta da Calvino dalla meta degli anni Sessanta nel campo del narrare e sulla letterature come strumento di rappresentazione del reale porterd l’autore - in contatto diretto con l’avanguadia ffancese e come parte integrante dell’Oudi.po dopo il 1973 - ad evidenziare il carattere certamente artificiale della macchina narrative.” (Camps 310) 2 8 The idea of literature as encyclopedia is an interesting concept, and although it may give the impression of a closed work with the aim of delimit knowledge within strict boundaries, we may start to notice from Calvino’s interpretation the actual open character of the encyclopedic work. An encyclopedia in fact proceeds through an organized scheme of definitions and categories, but each definition may be considered as a clue to expand and enlarge the topic through a virtually infinite set of new definition. In this sense, the Traveler has many points in common with the structure of an encyclopedia. Strictly related to the idea of open encyclopedia, then, is the work on the possible encounter between narrative and technologies. We could actually claim that Calvino’s theorizations, as well as a number of analogous writing of the time about the same topic, opened the way for the interconnection between language, encyclopedic knowledge and contemporary technologies that are today epitomized by the diffusion of the Internet. 2 9 See for instance Salman Rushdie, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: A. H. Carter, Joann Cannon, Francesco Guardiani, Teresa De Lauretis, Mariolina Salvatori. 3 0 Segre’s position is not in line with this criticism. He states: “the relevance given to the reader seems to be the main characteristic of this book.. .this characteristics is only apparent, not real. Only in the first chapter is the reader potentially addressed by this book.. .From chapter 2, the Reader is no longer the reader of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler... but a Active character.” (Segre 177) 3 1 There can also be a different interpretation. The second person narration reprises the dialogic form (see Plato for instance), which is a form that allows for a development of multiple knowledges. In Platonic dialogues, Socrates would address his pupils directly, and often calling them by (proper) name, but his address was evidently not the only possible one. His discourse, though specifically directed, could then be multiplied to different referents. The dialogic form allows an easier communication and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 178 the dissemination of difficult concepts (see Campanella and Galileo). In this sense, it could be interesting to relate the second person (dialogic) narration of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to the complete absence of dialogue in Perec’s Les Choses. 3 2 “Lo scopo e’ naturalmente di bloccare qualunque predisposizione a una lettura illusa, sentimentalmente partecipe; e prima ancora, di evitare implicazioni autobiografiche o personalistiche da parte dell’autore stesso. Cio che Calvino - d’accordo con molta letteratura contemporanea - dichiara altrove come ripudio dell’espressione a vantaggio della comunicazione ... o come valorizzazione di un io anonimo per l’insediamento di un’impersonalita assoluta.” (Segre 192) 3 3 In his article “Prose and Anticombinatorics” in Motte ed., p. 143, Calvino writes about a story which include “the use of the computer as an aid to literary creation in the following situations: The structures chosen by the author are relatively few in number, but the possible realizations are combinatorily exponential. Only the computer takes on an anticombinatory character when, among a large number of possibilities, the computer select those few realizations compatible with certain constraints.” As a confirmation of Lotaria’s accuracy, Segre writes: “the reader can easily satisfy his curiosity about the books that Lotaria, Ludmilla’s sister, roughly analyzes: they are Calvino’s The oath to the Sniders’ Nests. Cassola’s Ferrovia Locale. Moravia’s The Woman of Rome.” (Segre 180) 3 4 In her article “Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: Writer’ Authority, Reader’s Autonomy,” Mariolina Salvatori admits that to consider Lotaria as simply a bad reader “could prevent us from acknowledging her incisive characterization of Ludmilla as an escapist and regressive reader who reads ‘a novel after another, but... never clarifies the problems.’” (Salvatori 199) 3 5 See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Also, in Constance Markey’s Italo Calvino: a Journey Towards Postmodernism, we read: “Going a step beyond Csmicomics’ whimsy, Calvino tries his hand here at what Barthes calls a “writerly” work, or a psychological narrative of social and historical disengagement. In these texts the reader, deprived of fictional trademarks like plot and characterization, is challenged to participate actively in the story’s making by adding his own suppositions.” (Markey 96) 3 6 See Wiley Feinstein, “The Doctrinal Core of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” 148-149. 3 7 There is one substantial difference between Calvino’s reception in Italy and in the United states. Italian critics tend to focus mostly on the early production of the writer, and especially on his neorealist phase, with the exception of the work of a few critics (Segre, Guglielmi) who have concentrated on the semiotic aspect of the writer’s work. American criticism on the other hand, seems to take into particular consideration the postmodern aspect of the writer, which emerged later in his career. For this reason, this chapter’s sources are for the most part in English. 3 8 See for instance: Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperrealitv: Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essavs in Postmodern Theory and Culture: Remo Ceserani, Raccontare il Postmodemo: Bran Nicol, Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: a Reader: Stephen Baker, The Fiction of Postmodemitv: Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism: Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: Majjorie Perloff, Postmodern Genres. 3 9 One of the themes that dominated the critical debate from In Italy starting from the 1960s is the discussion of the “crisis of the novel,” that is to say the crisis of neorealism (Moravia, Cassola) as a universally valid “genre” for writing fiction. The Italian neo-avantgarde, observing the great changes in the economic and social structures in Italy and the rest of the world, promote a cohesion of literature R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 179 with the new “industrialization process.” The writer, in other words, is aware of the fact that the book is a commodity, an object of exchange, and sees in its multi-leveled diffusion - rather than in its “content” - the primary aim of writing. 4 0 Calvino’s novel displays what Fredric Jameson would call a “collective unconscious.” ('Postmodernism 296) “Perhaps,” Jameson writes, “what follows upon a strongly generational self- consciousness, such as the ‘people of the sixties’ felt, is often a peculiar aimlessness. What if the crucial identifying feature of the next ‘decade’ is, for example, a lack of just such strong self-consciousness, which is to say a constitutive lack of identity in the first place? This is what many of us felt about the seventies, whose specificity seemed most of the time to consist in having no specificity, particularly after the uniqueness of the preceding period.” (Postmodernism 296) Given the vagueness of the concepts such as “identity” or “definition” in this passage, a reader could argue at length about the value of period-division that Jameson proposes. If we associate his idea of lack of definition and identity with the periodization that we have proposed for Calvino’s writing, however, we will realize that they match not only for the “themes” proposed (definition/lack of definition and identity), but also for the suggested Zeitgeist of the different “decades” (Which Jameson interestingly puts in quotation marks). 4 1 See Jacques Derrida, Positions: Writing and Difference. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 180 Chapter 5. Nameless History: Luther Blissett’s Q. - “The painter is standing a little back from his canvas. ” Michel Foucault, The Order ofThines. - “In the fresco I ’ m one o f the figures in the background. ” Luther Blissett, Q. Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things begins with the close examination of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the 1656 painting portraying the Royal family of Spain. Foucault’s opening chapter, though, is by no means a traditional art critic look at the painting, but rather the narration of an epistemological break through an image. In the same fashion, Q (1999), the novel written by the Italian collective of writers Luther Blissett Project, takes a fictionalized visual representation as a point of departure for narrating a tale of historical and epistemological transformation. Q opens with the description of an imaginary fresco that depicts, we could say, the Reformation. The fresco portrays all the main figures that contributed to an important chapter of European history. These figures are also actors within the complex novel. They include the Pope (Leo X), the Emperor, the cardinals and the European princes and, in the margins, the “agents, discreet and invisible, peeping out from behind the crowns and tiaras, but in fact supporting the whole geometry of the painting, filling up its space and, without making themselves conspicuous, keeping those powerful heads at the center of the composition.” (Q 481) The writer of these lines, the “figure in the background” Q, insists that his notes are compiled “with this image in mind.”1 (Q 481) And it is always from within this “apparition” or mental image that Q writes his text. Q and The Order of Things begin, then, with an attempt at ekphrasis, a discursive R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 181 representation of a visual work, even though a fundamental difference underlies the two texts: Foucault is dealing with a real work that he even could look at as visual evidence, whereas Luther Blissett describe a work as they also “paint” it.2 In both texts, however, the ekphrastic narration is used as a means to visualize what we could call a crisis within a crisis, or a historical period of great transformation (the passage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century) from the viewpoint of another moment of epistemic break (the end of the twentieth century).3 Analyzing Foucault’s and Luther Blissett’s narratives, we are forced to notice that the two images chosen as paradigmatic are essentially different. Las Meninas is an oil painting, while Q’s image, which belongs necessarily to an earlier time, is a fresco. This distinction is indeed crucial. Frescos, in fact, can be defined as a form of collective work, one that requires a craftsman-like preparation of the wall/surface to be painted, and the cooperation of a number of different hands for its completion. The making of a fresco involves a series of techniques such as the transferring of the drawing onto a moist lime plaster, and its subsequent painting with special, water- based pigments. It may be interesting to remark that after the end of the fifteenth century, frescos were prepared by means of a subdivision of the surface to be painted into different sections coinciding with the number of expected working days. This method clearly emphasizes that what we now consider an artwork was related, in the fifteenth century, to a more general (and lower) notion of labor.4 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 182 On the contrary, the oil painting is a technique that started to gain currency during the sixteenth century, and may be considered as the epitome of authorial artwork since it is usually completed by a single person in a limited number of sessions.5 Indeed, from the sixteenth century onwards, oil paintings are complicit in the formation of our contemporary notion of the role of the painter as master, rather than simple craftsman. In the case of Las Meninas. in particular, the self-portrait of the master within the oil painting also functions as a self-affirmation as a figure of power close to the sovereign; as Svetlana Alpers states in her 1983 article “Interpretation Without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas.” the painting functions as “a visual statement of the social rank desired by the painter.” (Alpers 33) Las Meninas. one of the most discussed images in art history, has become a cultural icon and it has been interpreted and revisited (visually and narratively) in a great number of ways.6 In his article “Velazquez’ Las Meninas.” originally written in 1965 but published in 1981 with a foreword that makes explicit reference to Foucault’s text, Leo Steinberg has argued that the painting is “concerned with nothing less than the role vision plays in human self-definition.” (Steinberg 52) Following this idea, I want to show how the use of visual tropes to create meaning and definition -- in a word, to name - is inherent to the narration of the passage from the Renaissance to the age classique. As Foucault sustains, this passage is dominated by a sudden change of episteme, and knowledge in the age classique follows the laws of representation. More specifically, I want to analyze how this epistemic change, that Velazquez depicts R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 183 as if it were completed, is still indeterminate and “in the making” during the age immediately preceding, the age narrated in Q. In other words, if Foucault’s Las Meninas examines the closure of the episteme, the collective novel Q (in a more open fashion, we could say) concentrates on the actual passage from an age to another. Las Meninas has often been interpreted as a suspended narrative. In her article, Alpers remarks how many critics and art historians have tried to “supply the plot... of which the picture is a scene.” (Alpers 33) Through the description of the actions of the painter, “glancing at his model; perhaps ... considering whether to add some finishing touch,” (Foucault 3) Foucault’s essay does not move away from this narrative scheme of interpretation. The scene of the painting is first introduced, then the characters are presented through their proper names; an indication of who these figures are in the scale of power follows. In this story, then, the master/painter -Velazquez himself - assumes the over-controlling position of author and narrator. He stands, in his self assigned position, “a little back from the canvas,” (Foucault 3) in the foreground of the uncommonly large picture, directing, and at times deceiving the gaze of the onlooker.7 The characters that compose Q’s fresco, on the other hand, narrate their stories from multiple perspectives; the novel does not describe the composition of the fresco, nor is it unambiguous about the social position of the main characters, which is left for the reader to disclose. The character called Q -one of the narrators - for instance, is not an outstanding figure but part of the collectivity, or, as his initial Q - taken from the biblical Qohelet - suggests, he is merely “the man in the community.” In this R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 184 sense, the figure of Q mimics the multiplicity of points of view that constitute the novel - the narrators and the collective of authors - and thus must be read as an attempt to keep free from the controlling role of the single author/narrator. This attempt is in sharp contrast with the overwhelmingly present figure of the author of (and in) Las Meninas. This does not mean that the construction of Q does not take into consideration the question of time-specific power relations or the position of each character in the political order. In choosing what we could call a background narrative, though, the Luther Blissett Project relativizes the establishment of clear definitions of class and power by mixing registers, names and assigned places in the novel. The continuous movement of the characters, their name changes, their mutating roles, render the assignment of “master” and “subject,” of single and multiple very problematic. In Q the figure of the “master” — the author(s) and narrator(s) - is at the same time in full light and in the background; its multiple faces, points of view, and, first and foremost, its multiple names do not allow easy recognition. All the while, the “sovereigns,” the well known historical figures of power that populate the novel, such as the Pope, the Emperor, the Archbishop Carafa, the Fugger family, are often represented obliquely, as distant figures in the landscape, as signatures in official (and unofficial) documents, or as mere topics of discussion. The reader always learns about them from the point of view of other, minor characters. For example, Martin Luther is an “old enemy” whose death can be celebrated with a toast in a Venetian brothel, the Pope is “an old man, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 185 shrewd in his dealings and inclined to nepotism,” (Q 529) and the Emperor simply someone a friend “has done deals with.”8 (Q 534) The characters that Q depicts in full light are the peasants, the heretics, the servants and the outlaws. But even the choice of concentrating on marginal figures is not always a conspicuous rule. At times the aristocracy mingles with the lowest of the rogues; the schemes of the Bishops and Cardinals often lead them to disguise and assume deceptive identities in order to gather information. The outlaw, heretical protagonist, for instance, accidentally meets with the Pope in a way station, “an isolated farmhouse in the middle of flat, even land,” (Q 632) and the two spend some time together, pleasantly talking about doctrinal and political matters.9 As in a prelude to the age classique, which defines a world where the legible does not directly match the visible (think of Velazquez’s play with light, gaze, perception), the roles of the figures in Q’s fresco are deceiving, and, through what Foucault would call a “series of feints,” narrate a moment in history in which a sudden change in (visual and linguistic) representation upset the order of things in Europe. But if we can visualize the Reformation as a fresco and the epoch immediately following (the seventeenth century) as an oil painting, then we need to ask ourselves what how in narrative, visual, epistemological elements have permitted the passage from collective to authorial representation. A first clue to answer this question could be provided by the observation of the framing of the two images proposed in Q and in The Order of Things. While the painting that fixes the episteme of the modem age, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 186 though being, as we have seen, a suspended scene, displays an abundance of frames (the actual canvas, the hidden painting that is being completed, the power gaze mirror in the background, the numerous paintings hanging on the walls, the open door), the fresco’s lack of specific boundaries suggests that it is impossible to concentrate all the characters and events of Q’s complex story within a strictly defined enclosure; in this sense the fresco best represents openness. Furthermore, a close comparison between the contemporary narratives that accompany the two images (even though Velazquez’s painitng has a material life while Q’s fresco is imaginary) clearly traces, we could say, a historical pattern. In investigating this pattern I want to posit the two ages - the sixteenth and the seventeenth century - as a useful heuristic for thinking. A period of (literal and metaphorical) reformation, in which the positions of masters and multitudes were shaken to the point of rupture and power was found in ambiguous places, is followed by a period in which the European subject (intended as the subject- individual and the subject to the power) needs to put everything back into its (proper) place, back into order. This order, though, is only apparent, as the deceptive frames of Las Meninas suggest. The age classique takes within itself all the conflicts that characterized the Reformation and reframes them into a new episteme altogether. The story of Q takes place between the opening - the Reformation, or, as it has been called, the “great prologue of modernity” (Iannucci 12) - and the closure of the episteme (Las Meninas and the seventeenth century). In its description of the revolutionary movements of the sixteenth century, the novel shows the impact of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 187 heretical ideas on the masses of peasants, city-dwellers and on the emerging middle classes of Europe, an impact that permitted the formation of a collective rebellion against the political authority of the Church of Rome. These movements (starting with Luther’s Reform and spreading in numerous forms all over Europe) emphasized the importance of the role of the collectivity as opposed to the authority of the individual. The story of Q, we must note, ends with the (inevitable) repressive reaction from the Church, which marks the beginning of the Counter Reformation, the institution of the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition and the regression to a type of doctrinal politics in the seventeenth century. The violent reaction of the Catholic Church, however, was unable to erase the change started by the heretical movements of the Reformation; and the seventeenth century, Q implies, opens with an altogether new conception of political, representational and cultural schemes. In this sense, Q’s historical representation appears concordant with the essential archeological principle brought forward in The Order of Things, that is to say with the attempt to bring to light “the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its condition of possibility ... Such enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology.’” (Foucault xxii) Q, then, should not be considered (as the majority of critics have done) simply as a historical novel, but rather as a contemporary R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 188 archeological work. But since The Order of Things is, as many have pointed out, a book on how things are named, and Q is a novel about anonymity and multiple names, then why do they both start with the description of an image? In other words, how can the crisis that Q expounds be expressed in relation to nominal signification?1 0 The ekphrastic narrations that begin the two archaeologies, though very different, follow a specific line that clearly relates them to the broader lines of philosophical inquiry into nomination that I have been tracing throughout. These lines are mainly constituted by the search for the common place between language and image, two systems of signs that are linked together in an “infinite relation.”1 1 (Foucault 9) Before introducing the characters that appear in Velazquez’s painting, Foucault states: “it is time to give a name at last to that image.” (Foucault 9) From then on, the description of Las Meninas is a constellation of proper names; some of them well known, like the King of Spain Felipe IV, his wife Mariana and their daughter, the Infanta Margarita, others less important, like the servants and entertainers who surround the child: Dona Maria Augustina Sarmiente, the “Italian jester” Nicolaso Pertusato. Distinctions of rank, in this representation, do not follow immediately perceivable codes. In fact, the characters of highest rank (the king and queen) are almost invisible, merely a glimpse in a mirror, while the ugly dwarf and the clown stand out on the right side of the painting. The real marks of the character’s hierarchy are, then, their proper names, which appear to be the “real” signifiers that may explain the whole setting. We need to underline, in fact, that almost all the characters in the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 189 painting, with the exception of one, are clearly identifiable. Revealing the names of the figures in the painting constitutes, in other words, a good reference point, since these names “would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him.” (Foucault 9) But, Foucault insists, “the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents.” (Foucault 9) Names, Foucault insists, are deceptive just like the other elements of the painting such as the mirror, the gaze of all the actors, the lighting and the size of the figures in the picture. The (imagined) fresco in Q’s incipit has a similar way of treating proper names. The names mentioned at the beginning are offered to the reader in a list that sounds like an onomastic summary of the events immediately preceding the date of October 31 1517, when Martin Luther openly contrasted the power of the Catholic Church with the exposure of the theses against the commerce of indulgences in Wittenberg. The Reformation, the crucial period that saw the birth of the protestant opposition to the Catholic Church, officially started on that date. The first name of the list is then, obviously, that of Martin Luther, followed by the Pope, Leo X, the Emperor and Albert of Hoellenzorlen, archbishop of Magdeburg and of Halberstat, owner of “a third of the whole German territory.” (Q viii) We have then the Fugger R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 190 family, personal financiers of the Church and the Emperor and first bankers in history, and more names: Johann Tetzel, “the most expert preacher around;” (Q viii) Giovanni Pietro Carafa, future Pope Charles IV and mastermind behind the institution of the Holy Inquisition. However, similarly to the blurred faces of the king and queen in Velazquez’s painting, these names that contribute to form the image of Q’s fresco are perceived like mere glimpses. The proper names that are listed at the very beginning of Q, we could say, refer to the immobile entities in the book, those who retain a unilateral and immutable place. The characters that constitute the real focus of the story, instead, remain nameless, or rather change their names continuously. For this reason their names are not proper in the usual meaning of the word, but rather common, and certainly disposable. The main characters’ lack of a specified position, both in terms of precise rank and of precise identity is what allows their rapid transformations, movements, and multiple adventures. Each in a different way, all the characters assume numerous names throughout their journey, and every one of them coincides with a new episode, not only in their personal narrative, but also in the construction of the story. Being a choral narrative, Q displays a great number of characters; being extremely lengthy (more than six hundred pages) it covers a fifty-year time span and it narrates an extended number of historical and anecdotic events in a succession that, like a thriller story, maintains an extremely fast pace.1 2 The figures Q portrays, be they R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 191 real actors of history or fictional characters, almost never hold a fixed position but are represented at times centrally, at times marginally. Q offers to the reader a panorama of Europe at the time of the Reformation. Various events are seen through the eyes of two “opposite” characters involved in a game of cat and mouse that lasts almost forty years. The story begins in Northern Germany in 1519 and ends in Istanbul in 1555. One of the two main characters is a nameless student of theology in Wittenberg who becomes a heretic and is subsequently forced to live his life as a fugitive, taking a different name for every place he reaches and every new community he encounters; the other, simply called “Q i s a spy of the Church of Rome whose task is to identify and report all heretical activity in Northern Europe. He obeys the orders of the Archbishop Gianpietro Carafa, soon to become Pope Charles IV. The action sees the two protagonists perpetually following each other’s traces, without ever meeting until the end. The choice of setting is dictated by the fact that Northern Europe is the region that witnessed the most intense proliferation of heretic movements, and consequently the strongest form of repression from the Catholic Church.1 3 In their journey, the characters witness the economic, political and religious changes that marked the cultural restlessness of the Reformation, the period that saw the irreversible transformation of Europe from a medieval into a modem society. This transformation is narrated by emphasizing social elements such as the heretical ferment of the cities of Northern Europe; the attempts at throwing off the political and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 192 economic yoke imposed by the Church of Rome; the web of printing and distribution of books that had its centers in Venice and Basel; the increase of commercial routes with the New World starting from Antwerp and the British Isles; the new economic power of bankers such as the Fugger family, personal financiers of the Emperor and the Pope. More importantly, the two protagonists directly participate in some of the major historical events of the sixteenth century. One above all is the Anabaptists’ seizure of the city of Munster, which took place in 1534 and lasted almost a year. This episode constitutes the epicenter of Q.1 4 In many instances, the novel underlines that the story narrated is that of the background figures, those without a name who continuously live their lives in movement. Aside from their numerous name changes, then, the characters are also hidden behind different formal strategies. The narration is not linear, but fragmented, and it consists of an ensemble of documents. Epistles, diaries, oral tales, songs, testimonies concur in designing the whole fresco of the novel.1 5 The book starts, for instance, as an epistolary narrative, with a series of letters addressed to the influential bishop Giovanni Pietro Carafa, who in 1518 was a member of the Consulta of Pope Leo X. The letters reveal a conspiracy aimed at the extirpation of the heresies (and the extermination of the heretics) that were gaining currency in Northern Europe after Luther’s exposition of his theses in Wittenberg. As I have noted above, the writer of these letters, Q, is an agent of Carafa. Q is characterized as the perfect spy; he is meticulous, intuitive, efficient, and silent. All R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 193 the events that unravel around the numerous characters in the novel fit within the scheme that Q and his superior have devised. Q is not the only name the spy adopts in the story, nor is it his real one.1 6 The name Q is taken from the book of Qohelet — or the Ecclesiastes — in the Bible. This section of the Old Testament is mainly concerned with the analysis of the “vanity” of all experience of life, and emphasizes the pointlessness of every role in society because, we read “one fate befalls the wise man 1 7 and the fool alike.” (Qohelet 12:14) The name Q, in this sense, confers an aura of apocalyptic mystery to the character’s actions. When Q’s direct opponent discovers his name, he states: “The man in the crowd. Hidden within the community. One of ours. ‘For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil’ ... It’s the conclusion of Qohelet’s book, E cclesiastes(Q 430) In this regard, a French reviewer of the novel, Philippe-Jean Cantichi, has noticed that the end of the book of Qohelet assumes a tone that reminds us of Big Brother’s universal investigation, embodied by cardinal Carafa’s control plan. Carafa’s most zealous spy has adopted the initial of the book of the Ecclesiastes, which explains his purpose. In the struggle that opposes - in more than seven hundred pages - an outlaw with innumerable borrowed identities and a nameless cop - a less allegorical version of the struggle between the angels and demons - what is at stake is the end of the world.”1 8 (Cantichi 10) The initial Q could also be interpreted as the (beginning of a) quaestio, the Latin term that in the Scholastic tradition refers to the dialogue between a Magister and his students. In her 1996 book Picturing Silence, which explores the uses of language in the emblems of Counter Reformation Europe, Karen Pinkus affirms: “In R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 194 the sixteenth century, the term quaestio connoted an exercise rather than a tract or logicodeductive study, and, although it eventually yields a conclusion unlike other forms of dialogue, emphasis lies in the process of (self-)discovery ... Inherent in the quaestio, whether the subject of debate is language, politics, or even theology, is a quality of pacification produced in the interlocutors.” (Pinkus 32) The letter Q, then, used to define and at the same time un-define the character, addresses the necessity for a continuous exercise that would lead to a (self-)definition (or self-discovery, in Pinkus’ words). And it is indeed this mystery, the discovery of Q’s identity what constitutes the quaestio, or, as we read in the Latin dictionary, the “inquiry, investigation, interrogation, question, examination” of the whole novel. From the very beginning, the novel spurs the readers’ curiosity about Q’s identity, but never completely satisfies it. The discrete agent is never directly presented to the reader, his features may only be grasped through the official and pompous letters he sends to Carafa, or through the mysterious, almost mythical narration that other characters make of him. It is from one of these partial identikits, for instance, that we find out that he is German: “Germans, you say? They’re his favourites, people you can trust, the krauts ... He said, Carafa did, that the Germans make notes of everything, they’re very precise, not like us scruffs who can’t stop chattering.” (Q 547) Another character describes him as “a cleric. Wrapped in a dark habit, with a hood covering his eyes and half his face.” (Q 427) Even when we actually see him, hiding under a different name, the landscape surrounding him is dark R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 195 and foggy: “Outside the night is icy, there’s no light. I shiver in my cloak as I look for the way to the market square ... Barely a shadow, a hint of a presence ... A face emerges from the darkness.” (Q 291) The feeling of fear and of discomfort, as we see even from these few passages, is the dominant impression that the character leaves, together with the omnipresent mark of the letter Q. The only real clues that may help the reader in the reconstruction of Q’s identity are his writing. But his detailed letters to Carafa, and the deceiving ones he sends to his enemies, are rather functional to the organization of the historical frame of the novel. Q’s letters offer to the reader a vision of the fresco, and at the same time hide the protagonist of the story. Q’s direct opponent is, we could claim, a more traditional character. He narrates the story of his adventurous life in the first person, and his strength, courage and moral firmness make him the “super hero” that the reader will inevitably identify with. He is a nameless German, and his story, always parallel to that of Q, begins as a student of Martin Luther in Wittenberg. The year is 1519, and the character is eighteen years old. Throughout the novel, which reaches a closure in 1555, his dedication to the cause of the heretics and the oppressed of all kinds puts him in a perpetual position as fugitive. His names multiply as his story evolves, as he gets involved in the most important events that characterize the history of the sixteenth century heresies: the movement of Thomas Muntzer, the Anabaptist seizure of the city of MUnster, the diffusion of the scandalous book The Benefit of Christ, the routes and commerce of the exiled Jews in the Republic of Venice. If Q’s epistles constitute the “official” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 196 historical frame of the novel, Q’s opponent is intent in writing a sort of counter-history of the Reformation. As we already mentioned, the character starts his adventure nameless. His first appearance is in medias res, when he is taking part in one of the bloodiest battles of the time, in the plain of Frankenhausen, Turing, in 1525. The battle saw the opposition of the army of the Church and the Emperor against the insurrected peasants led by the dissident heresiarch Thomas Muntzer. The clash concluded with the massacre of the peasants and the heretical leaders. After the young man is miraculously spared, he escapes towards Nuremberg, where for the first time he realizes the advantages of a non-identity. He kills a soldier and steals his uniform in a camp, commenting: “I ride, bearing the device of wickedness. It’s the device that will protect me now. Perhaps it’s a shrewd move, I’ve got to get used to it, perhaps.” (Q 21) The transformation, literal and metaphoric, of the young student into a soldier marks the beginning of the character’s adventure. Throughout the novel, he will change habits, language, thoughts, and most of all names. Right after Frankenhausen he finds temporary asylum in Eltersdorf; there he is Gustav Metzger, shepherd’s helper. He states: “By now I automatically turn round when people call me Gustav, I’ve become accustomed to a name no less strange to me than any other.” (Q 24) When he hits Strasbourg in 1528 he is Lienhard Jost, merchant and apparent husband of the beautiful and melancholic Ursula Jost. He is Gert “From the Well” during his participation in the events of Munster in 1534, then Lot during his period of stay at the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 197 congregation of the Free Spirit led by Lodewijck Pruystinck in 1538. He will bear the name of Lodewick Pruystinck himself when the latter is condemned and burned for heresy. In Venice, he is “Messer Ludovico.” He is Titian the Baptist in 1548, when he organizes a stratagem in order to finally meet with the man who always gave him and his people away to the authorities, Q. The epilogue of the book, then, sees the character “outside Europe” (as prophetically announced with the title of the first chapter), at the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul, surrounded by the other fugitives with innumerable names who accompanied him. His Arab name is Ishmael- who-traveled-the world. Although at first the two characters may appear as opposites, a closer observation would suggest that they really are each other’s alter-egos. Q’s opponent, the nameless “super hero,” is evidently a more positive figure, his moral unidimensionality makes him the privileged figure for the reflection on names, subjectivity, and identity. Towards the end of the story, however, Q’s position reverses; he adopts the first person and starts writing his journal. At this point Q turns and becomes indeed a visible figure, and a multi-dimensional character. His journal reveals the secret paths of his thoughts; his worries and regrets mix with the revelations of the plots of the Catholics, the names of the masterminds behind the repression of the heretics in Germany and the Netherlands, the intrigues of the Church with the Emperor and the Fugger family. The sudden change in the character’s views R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 198 is indeed a moment of class-consciousness, where Q realizes his own status and his position in the fresco. He writes: My days are over. Thirty years of secrets are frightening to anyone preparing to begin a new chapter in the struggle for absolute power in Rome.... The thought has been with me for some time now, but I didn’t think it would happen so quickly, or with this feeling of banality in my heart. This isn’t the way to prepare for it. I’d like to leave these pages to someone, the testimony of all that has happened. But to what end? For whom? We plough our way through the twists and turns of history. We are shadow unmentioned in the chronicles. We don’t exist. (Q 658) As Stewart Home has noticed in his review of the English translation of the novel, “it is the role of the cop rather than its (fictional) human manifestation in the form of the Papal agent Q which is to be despised; indeed, it is the very burden of this role that results in Q the (fictional) man loosing the qualities of a subject and taking on the appearance of an object.” (Home 2) Speaking in first person without ever naming himself, the character Q is indeed subject and object; he is the principal narrator of the choral image and the background figure, he is the painter who depicts sixteenth- century Europe and the blurred face in the crowd. Even when he is not present in the scene, his figure is always determinant for the resolution of the action. Both his absence and his presence, just like the absence and the presence of his name, then, have a function. Q is literally the common place of the many historical sketches that make up the narration of the novel. For all these reasons, he must not be seen only as a character - and even his definition as an object, that Home proposed, is somewhat incomplete - but rather as a relation with multiple functions and meanings. Q reflects R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 199 the image of the painter, who through his slight and momentary detachment can see the whole picture with greater clarity, and reserves the space he decides for each and every character. In an affirmation that is clearly reminiscent of the foucaultian narration of Las Meninas. we read: “In the Roman palazzi nothing is as it seems. No one can grasp the whole picture all at once, see both the figure and the background, the final objective. No one but those who hold the threads of these conspiracies.” (Q 482) We could indeed state, in order to conclude the picture, that Q is the Nomothete - understood as the power-invested name giver - of the story.1 9 Q, in fact, names all the protagonists of history that we find in the novel and is, within its geometry, the figure of most power. And yet his position is one of the most complexly defined, and at times appears also the most powerless. He is not nameless nor is he the bearer of a clearly recognizable name. His function is mainly one of ordering, and it is by no means an authorial, or even a creative one. In this sense Q, in addition to being the counterpart of his nameless opponent, is also the alter-ego of the Luther Blissett Project. Just like the collective, in fact, he “does not exist” as an author, and is simply a figure in the background, a storyteller that chooses to narrate something that naturally retains no value as a property. For, as strange as it may seem, Q is the one who literally enacts the heretical slogan omnia sunt communia, the banner of Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptist protagonist. He gloomily states in his journal: “Throughout my life I have never written one word for myself: there isn’t a page from the past that could compromise the present; there is no R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 200 trace of my passage. Not a name, not a word. Only memories that no one would believe, since they are the memories of a ghost.” (Q 481) Everything Q has is inherently held in common, because his individuality, just like his name, does not exist. A double argument is at stake here: the fresco in Q reminds us of the fallacious function of the positions of the figures depicted and on their proper names, and, consequentially, the stress on this fallacy influences our vision of history. To “give the name,” hence to assign a unilateral, recognizable referent to a proper name, belonging uniquely to a proper individual - or to a single image - may result, Luther Blissett and Foucault remind us, only in a partial vision, which in its turn will influence the way we look at a character, a historical figure or an individual, but also the ways in which we perceive language and narration. In Q, as in Las Meninas. words - and names as the first category among them - reveal themselves as deceiving and unreliable signifiers; proper names, for instance, do not reveal congruency with the things they designate, but hide instead their incongruency. Consequently, through the de signification of names and by means of the (generic) tools of the historical novel, Q reveals the unreliability of a historical discourse that is based only, we could say, on a Hegelian notion of history, understood as the history that proceeds to continuous progress through the thought and action of great men (or, we could say, of great names).2 0 This concept is reiterated innumerable times in the novel and becomes the link that holds together the main issues of the book: since it is an assumption that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 201 those without a name must necessarily hold a marginal position, must have lived many adventures and “many stories,” the absence of names is always strictly related to storytelling, and by consequence to history. This vision of history as storytelling (or, as we will see a little further, as mythopoiesis), we need to underline, does not diminish in any way the role and importance of historical discourse in Q. On the contrary, it is what permits one to rewrite the story by placing the emphasis on the multiplicity of views that come together in making history’s picture, be it a fresco or an oil painting. For this reason Q is more concerned with recounting of dispersed looks, images and gestures, so to speak, than with the factual and faithful reconstruction of historical episodes. In Q the absence of names is also what allows the characters to overcome the limitations of social class and rank. Throughout the book, the adventures of the nameless characters are often sided by numerous annotations about the ways in which a changing identity is synonymous with life, and with freedom. As a character states: “Anyone without a name must have had at least a hundred of them ... And a story worth listening to.” (Q 148) Multiplicity of names, finally, is what makes the main characters the ideal narrators: they can depict different lives, in a linear or non-linear way, because they have lived all of them, each with a different name. If the story of the multiple characters in Q may partially answer the question of what lies in between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century that contributes to the break and subsequent formation of a new episteme, the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 202 way in which the novel is constructed and narrated opens to a new inquiry altogether. It suggests, that is, the transposition of an old episteme into contemporary historical patterns. In this sense, we should probably take a further look forward to the period in which the two narratives (Luther Blissett’s and Foucault’s) were written and see whether the paradigms they propose for the past can be applied to a more contemporary historical systems. In this way Q, just like Foucault’s essay on Las Meninas. is not only the narration of an epistemological break, but becomes also an allegory of contemporary history.2 1 5.1. Historical Allegories. What are the contemporary implications of the story narrated in Q? In other words, what is the political unconscious that underlies the narration of one of the most important periods of crisis of early modernity from the viewpoint of the “postmodern period,” which many have understood as another form of epistemological break?2 2 The search for an answer to these questions requires an examination of the peculiar ways in which historical allegories are constructed in the novel; more specifically, it requires a close analysis of the two main concepts that underlie Q’s narration: the method of synaesthetic translation and the novel’s mythopoietic character. Numerous reviewers have noticed and underlined the similarities that Q’s depiction of the Reformation bears with the present history of Europe. This critical approach is also shared by the majority of readers who have made comments on the novel in the Luther Blissett’s newsletter. All these interpretations are of a different nature from R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 203 critical/philosophical inquiries into literary texts. Since no scholarly material is yet available on this novel (nor on the collective that authors it, as a matter of fact) I will take these multiform contributions as a point of departure for a definition of the allegory of contemporary history that underlies Q. Mimicking the multiplicity inherent in the novel, the multifaceted registers of these materials approaches are useful to prepare the ground of my analysis of the ways in which this allegory is expressed in the novel. In an early (1999) review of the book Franco Berardi (Bifo), Italian activist, writer and performer, states that Q is the first Italian (and maybe the first European) novel to deal with the experience of libertarian and autonomous movements. In Q, Bifo states, a form of “communitarian mythology arises from the ashes of oral culture and overlaps with the critique of the power, turning the critique into a new dogmatism and revolt into totalitarian power. This overlap is the origin of all the delusions that have tormented the proletarian community for almost five centuries.” (Bifo 65) Although Bifo’s affirmation is clearly an overstatement - there are many Italian works of the post-war period that engage with the narration of the experience of antagonistic movements - it underlines the relevance of the political-allegorical structure that constitutes the “whole geometry” of the novel and that goes well beyond the narration of the Reformation, becoming a mirror of the history of present struggles. The innovative quality of Q, Bifo continues, lies in the juxtaposition of the Reformation and the “history of our sixties and seventies, the exciting attempts to create R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 204 communities through dialogue, cooperation, sharing, pleasure of bodies and minds, followed by the tragic epilogue of armed struggle, fanatic violence in name of ideals, and police repression.”2 3 (Bifo 65) To cite a few other examples, Fiorella Iannucci of II Messaggero (Rome daily newspaper) remarks how, in Q “the sixteenth century resembles the year 2000,” (Iannucci 12) since “this European Union is like the boundless Empire ruled by Charles IV, financed by the great German banks, and covered by millions of independent currents ... And remarkably similar to the telematic revolution is Gutenberg’s revolution, when ideas were printed in books, and knowledge overturned hierarchies and social classes.”2 4 (Iannucci 12) In La Stampa. Carlo Lucarelli writes that the stories Q narrates represent “an important moment for reflecting on power, history, and on the future, especially in a period of transition such as ours, between modem and hypermodem worlds.” (Lucarelli 17) Furthermore, in Alias, the cultural insert of the daily II Manifesto. Paolo Cassetta refers to the novel’s protagonists as “wandering Anabaptist hackers.” (Cassetta 23) Q, which, in Cassetta’s words, marks the return of the historical novel, also coincides with the narration of the “universal slaugherhouse of the Weltgeschichte and the disenchanted consciousness of contemporary subversion.” (Cassetta 23) In its narration of the history of the struggles that characterized the Reformation and the Counter-reformation, Q privileges specific aspects such as the establishment of the financial power of the banks, the history of heretic rebellion R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 205 against the oppressive Catholic power, the conflicts between the aristocracy and the peasants in the German cities, and the different forms of rebellion of the “autonomous” protagonist. It should not surprise us then to find out that almost all reviewers of Q have noticed that the structure of the plot can be easily read as an allegory not only of contemporary history, but of any history of subversive movements that took place (especially in Italy) in the last forty years. For example, a letter to the authors published in Gian! (2003) retraces the story of Q’s main characters putting them in relation with the paths of the antagonistic movements in post-war Italy.2 5 Here is a fragment from the beginning of the letter: While I was reading the book, I started to realize that Q was not really a historical novel, but your (an my) autobiography. Bom during the “baby-boom”, we reach our twenties during the anni di piombo; we find out that we have sympathy for the oppressed/exploited (depending on the background) and go to Wittenberg with great expectations. There our paths divide. Yours follows ideas of revolt more directly, ic oncordance with your earnest need for justice, while I unconsciously follow the traces of white Leninism. You give your availability and your low self-esteem to the cause. This goes on until the final battle between sincere spontaneity and the evil oppressors. A battle (Frankenhausen), like a strike or an occupation, is always rooted in the motto omnia sunt communia. (Gian! 1611 The authors’ answer to this letter is basically an explanation of how the reader missed their point; Q is not an autobiography, nor it could be, since all the writers and the authors are much too young to even remember the anni di piombo in Italy.2 6 They admit, at any rate, that the letter offers an interesting exegesis of the novel. The value of the interpretation, they insist, does not necessarily rest on the experience of the authors but only on the novel itself, and especially in the fact that Q is a novel of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 206 genre. The authors state: “We work with archetypal figures, in which everyone can see their own ghosts, and then project them onto the author (the authors).” (Giap! 166) The generic quality of the novel has indeed been one of the main criteria of analysis for all the reviewers. An Italian reviewer for II Manifesto, for instance, has noticed how Q’s main attempt is to oppose itself “to the widespread psychological minimalism ... through genre contamination.” (Cassetta 23) A more accurate definition of Q’s historicity, then, may spring from a reflection on the way the novel depicts social (rather than individual) life of the past, and primarily from its treatment of characters as social pawns within a larger fresco. In other words, it is crucial for the understanding of Q’s historicity to pin down the political-allegorical value of the novel. If it is indeed true that Q describes the socio political system that characterized the passage from the period of revolt of the Reformation to the repression of the Counter Reformation as “the origin of all delusions,” (Bifo 65) we must not think that the novel portrays the sixteenth century as the system’s originary moment. Rather, Q attempts to describe a repetitive historical pattern without a specific spatio-temporal point of departure. In this sense the vision of history provided in Q is located somewhere between the Hegelian and the Marxist historical methods, as a dialectic process made of cycles that rely on the synthetic resolution of struggles. However, the Hegelian insistence on the inevitable progress as the synthesis of these struggles seems to be completely absent in the work of Luther Blissett. For this reason, it is tempting to catalogue Q as a historical novel in the traditional, Marxist/Lukacsian sense, or as a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 207 type of fiction that derives “the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.” (Lukacs 19) This is in fact how the majority of Italian reviewers have approached the novel. Reviewers talk in turn about Q as “a historical Fresco,” (Iannucci 12) or of the return of “the Great and Terrible history in contemporary novels.” (Cassetta 23) A closer look at the structure of the novel, though, will allow us to emphasize its difficult generic classification. If we consider the historical novel simply as a type of fiction which mainly focuses on the events of the past, then Q doubtlessly belongs to this category.2 8 We must remark, however, that the generic quality of Q relies on an open multiplicity of definition rather than on the enclosure within a specific genre (or, like in the case of the initial fresco, on a framing). In this sense, the Luther Blissett Project itself has interestingly defined its type of narrative as a “novel of genres,” where different types of generic narratives intersect. In one of the first interviews that appeared in the Italian press, the authors state that Q is “a thriller, a noir, a spy-story, an adventure novel, and a historical novel. We have constructed a choral narrative, in which subtexts and sub-stories continuously intersect.” (www.wumingfoundation.com) The multiplicity of genres included in Q confers to the narration a dynamic quality; the novel thus becomes a story about a passage in history. The dynamism of the novel is rooted in the multiplicity of its characters who lead double lives, hide under different names, and change their identities, professions and creeds with a certain ease, in the aimless itineraries that lead the characters all R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 208 over Europe and, in the epilogue, even outside its borders. Besides the two main characters, then, the real protagonists of Q are the cities of Northern Europe, the Inquisition in Rome, the subterfuges of the Pope, the Princes, and Luther, the conflicts and alliances between the Catholics, the Lutherans, the heretics, the Jews. The action unwinds, as predictable, in the capitals of early modernity: Rome, Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Antwerp, Basel, Venice and finally Istanbul. In Q, we could say, it is not a Lukacsian individuality that functions as main actor, but rather a concept closer to what recent political theorists like Hardt and Negri have called the multitude, or “an active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities share in common ... an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference) but on what it has in common.” (Multitude 100) We may apply this notion of multitude to Q and affirm that it is specifically the communal or, as philosopher Paolo Vimo would call it, the transindividual character of the novel that constitutes its narrative motor.2 9 The narration of a passage of history does not specifically rely on particular individualities and it cannot be described through the biographic features of exceptional characters transposed in a fanciful and unrealistic past but instead on a form of translation that takes into account not only the life of the individuals but also what Marx would define a general intellect.3 0 The historical translation becomes, in this sense, a translation of social space and of the ways in which such space is lived. The Luther Blissett collective attempts to achieve this result through a sort of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 209 synaesthetic translation, that is to say through a mixture of sensorial elements that eventually come together in offering the sense (the episteme) of an age.3 1 For example, in response to a critique of the American edition of Q, the collective wrote (In English): Q was written as if we were translating from an inexistent original manuscript, so we always tried to ‘render’ ... Our choice was aimed at rendering the canyon-like gap between the roughness of spoken languages and the pompousness of writing styles (Latin, most of the times). One thing is certain. Until not a long time ago, common people used to - literally - live in excrements ... They would never take baths. They all stank and had very bad breath. Still in the eighteenth century aristocrats took baths twice a year. It is absolutely normal that the language of those times reflected the universal, unavoidable presence of the results of bodily functions. We needed to render this universe of dirt and scatology with a material and base language. Perhaps the critics’ expectations of how ‘period’ language should sound depend too much on either hi-brow bourgeois literature or Hollywood cloak-and- dagger flicks, or even both things ... We are not interested in that kind of edulcoration. (“Forgive Me” 25) The translation of Q, then, is based on an “original manuscript” reminiscent of Manzoni’s causal incipit of I Promessi Sposi. but also on an imaginary sixteenth century fresco, and displays, we need to point out, a meticulous attention for the indications of setting. Every chapter and sub-chapter is introduced through the exact date and geographic location of the action, as happens, of instance, in Foscolo’s historical-autobiographic epistolary work Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis. Just like these Romantic writers, the Luther Blissett Project is interested in the artistic transposition of an historical age. However, the determination of the choice of base and material language marks a great difference with the form of narration advocated by the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 210 initiators of the historical novel.3 2 Through the conspicuous use of scatological imagery, Q’s language succeeds in representing all aspects of the lives of the protagonists, defining, quite literally, their place ill society. The attention reserved for all the aspects of everyday life (including the most mundane) and all types of sensorial experience (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch) may also be interpreted as a way of joining together the Italian and French literary and critical traditions. If the techniques used, we have seen, are symptomatic of an approach that is well aware of the Italian lineage of historical narrative, the accent placed on a type of sensorial realism is reminiscent of the Proustian narrative method, and shares some similarities also with the French tradition of the realist novel (and especially with Balzac and Hugo). The insistence on the complete vision of society that may be derived from the attention to the details of everyday life, finally unfailingly makes us think of the 1950s and 1960s critical tradition that, as we have seen in previous chapters, has its point of origin in France and is also relevant in Italy, especially in counter-cultural expressions such as the Situationist-inspired avant- gardes. If the mundane realism of history ultimately defines the Luther Blissett Project a history of struggles, the translation of the episteme relies also on the concept of mythopoiesis, that is to say on the creation of foundational myths to explain the history of the multitude, and opposed to the official history of power. And this is probably the mechanism that spurs the adaptation of novelistic genres to the reconstruction of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 211 history. The “narrative praxis” of mythopoiesis, the collective affirms, is the basis for a possible counter-history, or the narration that constitutes the necessary inspiration for the “struggle against the present state of things.”3 4 (Gian! 32) In an explanation of the purpose of mythopoietic narration we read: In the last decades many rebels were drawn to an alienating form of ‘iconophilia’ (see for instance the Christ-like cult of Che Guevara) or, alternatively, to an iconoclastic attitude that prevented them from understanding the real nature of the issues at hand. Many anarchists, for instance, were imbued with the superficial post-Situationist idea that any concrete advancement in the field of democracy, or any concession to popular culture has as a result the reinforcement of the so-called spectacle.3 5 (Giap! 32) As an alternative to the blinding dualism iconophilia/iconoclasm, Luther Blissett proposes (in a 1995 pamphlet called Mind Invaders) a declaration of mythopoiesis in literary expression. The collective states: “we offers stories, mythologies, narrations and symbols that clash with the ideology of neoliberism,” (Giap! 25) an ensemble of images that “can legitimately compete with dominant representations ... We believe that the multitudes need new foundational myths ... For a new world to be possible, it is necessary to imagine it, and make it imaginable for many.” (Giap! 25) Mythopoiesis is, then, also the basis of Q’s structure. A good definition of the poietic direction in contemporary novels that narrate historical events is given in the book History Made. History Imagined, written by David W. Price in 1999 (interestingly the same year in which Q was published). Price defines novels that direct the reader to the understanding of what occurred in the past as “poietic histories.” He states: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 212 Rather than have an outside observer, the proverbial objective historian, describe events and explain why they occurred, novels of poietic history allow us as reader to experience the struggle to create values in one of several ways. Novels of poietic history can, among other things, place us in the mind of a character, present the fictionalized description of a historical situation, or pose a series of questions about values and choice of action either directly, through narrators or characters, or implicitly, through narrative structure. (Price 2-3) Interestingly, Price’s definition implies that poietic history display a “focus on figurative language, with a special emphasis on the mythic underpinning of all history.” (Price 4) In other words, Price reaffirms the need for poietic history to use language that allows the modem reader to sense the past, a process which entails a participation on the part of the reader “in the processes whereby individuals, peoples, and entire cultures and societies figured their future through imaginative projections of their wills.” (Price 3) This operation, which is inherently collective, hence related to the very formation of the Luther Blissett Project, inevitably takes us back to the notion of construction of myth; it also links this notion to the (originally Surrealist) idea of the search for a modem mythology. If we can define mythology (and also mythography, since we are talking about figurative and sensorial language) as a collection of beliefs about history, we may start to understand the inherent historical importance of Q’s operation. As Price affirms, “the mythic structures, tropes, and varying narrative strategies” (Price 5) are the means by which writers of poietic history “allow us to experience the past in the present with an eye towards the future.” (Price 5) In other words, even though, as we have seen, the connection between images and language is an “infinite relation,” this relation is precisely what can give R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 213 shape to a myth.3 6 For the Luther Blissett Project, it is essential that a mytholgy appeal to a collective consciousness (or general intellect) by concentrating on the history of power and class relations. It is in this sense that Q’s mythopoiesis acquires political value. One of the most exhaustive reviews of the book, written by Stewart Home, states: “Luther Blissett uses numerous tricks to avoid endlessly reproducing the narrative of closure ... Anyone looking for the platitudinous revelation with which conventional mysteries conclude will be savagely disappointed. When Q’s identity is finally revealed it transpires that, rather than being some fantastic villain who incarnates ‘evil’, he is actually human all too human.” (Home 2) In the impossibility of finding an appropriate generic space in which to locate Q, then, we should probably look at the element that best resumes the ideas behind the creation of the novel as well as those behind the formation of the collective Luther Blissett Project, that is to say, the reflection on proper names. 5.2. The Luther Blissett Project. The temptation of placing the experiments in collective writing and collective names of the Luther Blissett Project as a conclusive chapter in a genealogy of signification and de-signification of names is indeed great. Proceeding in this direction would lead us to affirm that the ideas behind the conception of the multiple name spring from reflections on anti-individualism and on the opposition to the “rise of bourgeois subject” (to use Stewart Home’s words) that the traditionally-authored R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 214 novel is tied to. Thus, collective names could be conceived as a form of completion of the artistic avant-garde experiments. Moreover, since they have the intent of shifting the attention from the individual, and place it instead on the “collective mind,” or a general intellect, the possible classification of multiple names as a point of arrival for a teleological work is all the more intriguing. Considering the great importance that the concept of general intellect has assumed in contemporary radical political thought, and especially in the work of Italian philosophers such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Vimo and Christian Marazzi, the Luther Blissett Project can be easily defined as a new chapter in 37 literary experimentation, following the lines of the emerging political currents. To make the picture even more complete, we could also direct our attention on the continued interest the Luther Blissett Project has in the connection between art, literature and new technologies, and especially in the Internet, often seen as the appropriate means to allow the spreading of ideas regardless of the source, the pursuing of anonymity and the freedom from the constraint of commercial publishing. However, this dissertation does not desire to bring forward such a theory. The experiments of the Luther Blissett/Wu Ming Project do not represent the telos of a straight evolutionary line in the genealogy of names. First of all, the transformations in the meaning, function, and signification of proper name and name-giving do not follow a linear and chronological development. As we have briefly seen, an opposing view to the institution of the name as an instrument of power has been present since the Cratvlus. Secondly, there is an inherent ambivalence in the treatment of names and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 215 the conception of authorship as brought forward by the Luther Blissett collective, and especially by the “new name” the collective has chosen for itself, Wu Ming (“no name” in Chinese). Unlike Luther Blissett, a multiple signature that could be used by anyone, Wu Ming is more similar to a traditional signature, except for the fact that it applies to five persons instead of a single individual. As an alternative to the proposed interpretation, we could inscribe the work of the Luther Blissett Project within a line that directly follows from the European avant- garde. And indeed, this is what Stewart Home does, in his reading of Q. He writes: “Both the European avant-garde and the workers’ movements are ongoing points of reference for Luther Blissett, as they were to the Situationists. Q itself is one vast detoumement, a calculated and provocative reuse of the artistic heritage of humanity for partisan propaganda purposes; and it was bricolage of precisely this type that formed the main plank of the anti-cultural programme advocated by the lettrists and situationists.” (Home 3) In determining lines of influence that would help us define the multiple name we need to keep in mind, though, that Luther Blissett’s expressions essentially differ from the avant-garde in their rejection of the paradigm of novelty as an aesthetic, and mostly, as an ethical value. Just as the multiform material signed Luther Blissett that is available on the Internet, the multiple name’s first aim is to absorb previous and innovative knowledge in random order; they adopt strategies such as collages, cut-and-paste, juxtapositions in order to re-elaborate old and new categories of knowledge. For this reason then, it is very difficult to come forward with R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 216 a non-contradictory definition of this collective. As we read in a publication of a number of Luther Blissett manifestos, issued under the name of Toto, Peppino e la Guerra Psichica: “All Luther Blissett declarations are equally valid and reliable, even when they appear in open contradiction to one another.” (Toto. Peppino 75) The recuperation of “open contradictions” is also what underlies the storyline, the ideas, and the treatment of names in Q. The stress of the novel on multiple names switches back and forth between the individual and the general intellect. Both elements can in turn be seen as the motors of the narration and the real protagonists of history. For this reason it is interesting to note a peculiar difference in the reception of the novel. If Italian reviewers, probably more acquainted with the writings and the actions of the multiple name, are most of all concerned with the historical representation and the political allegory that rests behind the writing of Q, the appearance of the English version of the book (Q was issued in the United Kingdom in 2003 and in the United States in 2004) saw the critics concentrating their efforts on the discovery of the identity of its author(s).3 8 The most frequent question that English- speaking critics ask, in other words, is not “who is Q?” but rather “who is Luther Blissett?” Technically, Luther Blissett is the name of a Jamaican soccer star. Originally an excellent striker, he was sold from Watford FC (UK) to Milan AC in 1983, only to return to England after a brief and disappointing season. He has, obviously, nothing to do with the collective of writers, activists and performers that compose the Luther R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 217 Blissett Project. The appropriation of his name, and its subsequent eradication from its originary context, is used to exemplify the importance the group attributes to the disruption of the idea of name as signifier. This choice of pseudonym, though, was not received equally by the Italian and English-speaking public. While in Italy the multiple name Luther Blissett was known since the early nineties as the “author” of political pamphlets, Internet manifestos and essentially ludicrous pranks against the institutional media, in the United States, and especially in England, the name was identified with the soccer player alone, it was, in other words, a traditional signifier. It is not surprising, then, to notice that almost all reviews of the English translation of Q begin with an analysis of the reasons why a collective should take such name, and often indulge in long comparisons between the style of Q’s writers and the kicks of the footballer. Here are a few examples. The title of an article written by Donald Morrison that appeared in Time Magazine, reads: “Penned it Like Blissett. How a gang of Italian cyberanarchists stole a British footballer’s name - and wrote a bestseller.” The piece, then, starts: Football fans may remember the name Luther Blissett. He was the high-scoring striker for England’s Watford who was traded to AC Milan for $1 million in 1983 ... Now Luther Blissett is back in the headlines as the author of Q ... But Luther Blissett the Footballer didn’t write a word of Q. his name was hijacked in the mid-1990s by a band of libertarian-left cyberactivists in Bologna. They called themselves Luther Blissett because, as they wrote in one of their many manifestos, Blissett is ‘the ineffable alias that means both everybody and nobody.’ (Morrison 40) Nicholas Blincoe, reviewer from the Daily Telegraph, states in turn: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 218 Luther Blissett, the ex-Watford FC player turned coach, is not the first name one would associate with historical fiction. Yet there have been a number of football players with literary talents, including Terry Venables, who co-wrote three detective novels in the mid-1970s. And it is conceivable that Blissett’s time at AC Milan in the 1980s gave him some kind of insight into the workings of modem Europe. So it is something of a disappointment to open this novel and find a short disclaimer stating that Luther Blissett had nothing to do with its writing. (Blincoe 14) Other reviews, still concentrated on authorship, apparently leave the question more open: “Was this the Luther Blissett, the former Watford striker who infamously lost his goalscoring touch while enduring terrace racism during one season for AC Milan in 1982?” (MacLean 36) asks Craig MacLean, reviewer for Word Magazine. This rhetorical question is followed by a tentative explanation for Luther’s name- appropriation: ‘“We needed the name of a person who’d been stupidly underestimated and misunderstood,’ says one of the original gang of four (maintaining their anonymity, he refers to himself only as Wu Ming 1).” (MacLean 36) Interestingly, even when the quest for Luther Blissett’s stolen identity is only a pretext to get to the analysis of the novel and the description of the collective name, these reviewers seem to find it necessary to offer to the reader an exhaustive explanation of the motives behind the appropriation of the soccer player’s proper name. Did the collective choose Luther Blissett because he was black? Was the choice dictated by his unreliable soccer skills? Does this inevitably underline the cultural importance of soccer for Italian authors? R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 219 None of these questions can be answered in a univocal way. Actually, it is somewhat hard to believe that any affirmation by any writer of the collective regarding the selection of the name as that of a “person who’d been stupidly misunderstood” can be taken seriously, or even half-seriously.3 9 Those who actually have the patience to look for and read all Luther Blissett Manifestos published on the Internet or on paper from the mid nineties until now will notice that explanations of the aims of the Luther Blissett Project abound, and sometimes follows very different lines of thinking. Consequently, just as there is not one unique Luther Blissett, there might not be a single explanation of the reason behind the appropriation of the name of the soccer player.4 0 What we know for sure is that the pranks signed Luther Blissett had toured Europe much earlier than Q’s characters. The Daily Telegraph’s Nicholas Blincoe notes: “Blissett is said to have been surprised to discover that he has become figurehead of European anarchism, apparently his name was adopted by teenage fare- evaders when they were questioned by ticket inspectors.” (Blincoe 14) Rather than discovering who really is the author behind Q it should crucial, in order to provide a complete reading of the novel, to analyze how its story reflects the story of its absent authors, or how multiplicity becomes a historical archetypal figure. So far, only a few critical texts directly address the ideas and writings of the Luther Blissett Project, if we exclude Luther Blissett’s texts themselves.4 1 Luther Blissett has been conceived as a collective of writers, activists and performers, and started its activity in Italy — and more specifically in Bologna — around 1994-5. It is a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 220 network of writers and readers: the name Luther Blissett as well as all Luther Blissett’s material, is not just a possession of the group, but may be freely appropriated by anyone, anywhere, then transformed in order to create other texts in different forms (articles, books, websites, music, films, actions). This uncontrolled appropriation has the ultimate aim of determining a multiple and networked dissemination of the unauthored written work. For these reason it is extremely difficult to trace a precise history of the Project. The group started to become known for actions of sabotage of information, media detournement, or, to use one of their favorite terms, guerrilla-communication 4 2 The name “appears” for the first time in early 1995, when the Italian media talked about the disappearance of an artist called Harry Kipper. Kipper had been cycling around the north of England and his route traced out the word ART. After the artist had been reported missing, weekly TV show Chi I ’ ha visto? (based on the U.S. program “America’s Most Wanted”) set out to follow Kipper’s case. Craig Mac Lean writes: “On the eve of broadcast, the programme-makers found they had been duped - but not before newspapers had been alerted of the hoax. Kipper was the creation of anonymous, Bologna-based art-anarchists who explained their motivation thus: “Chi I ’ ha visto? Is a Nazi-pop expression of the need for control.” the statement was signed Luther Blissett.” (MacLean 36) On March 2, 1997, a similar case bore the signature of the multiple name. In order to undermine journalists’ exploitation of stories on pedophilia and Satanism, Luther Blissett sent to the newspaper II Resto del Carlino R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 221 (Bologna daily) a series of fake confessions of Satanists, together with what looked like human remains. The joke was, at first, taken seriously. When, a few weeks later, the daily television news publicly declared the fakeness of the material, the whole inquiry on pedophilia (that had already sent two innocent people in jail) fell and revealed itself as without any foundation. Luther Blissett published the reconstruction of this last episode in a 1998 book titled Lasciate che i bimbi ...(Let the Children...). The multiple name explains its actions in these terms: “The classic strategies of counter-information are obsolete: we must deal with the diffusion of myths that spread like an oil-stain in the field of “moral panic.” We cannot be under the illusion that it is sufficient to tell the truth. We need, instead, to stay one step ahead of what is false, in order to screw with the traditional media. Our method is plagiarism: we bundle up material, cut up pre-existent texts, make collages of phrases, a cut’n’mix of detournements, quotations, rewritings.” (Lasciate 14) As we may notice, the political stakes of the Luther Blissett pranks display what media art critic Craig Saper calls “an inherently militant attitude toward mercantile constraints of publication.” (Saper 23) Through collective actions, the group encourages anonymity as a way to escape market, and most importantly, social constrictions. Luther Blissett promotes plagiarism of all texts as a valid method of expression, since, they claim, a progressive abandoning of the authorial name goes hand in hand with the abandoning of the value of originality of the literary work, and would so enable a type of literary free exchange that can spread through the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 222 anonymous internet as well as through the traditional editorial channels. In a sense, the Luther Blissett Project intend to see the pre-existent literary forms disintegrate and recompose, all the while occupying different spaces.4 3 If the multiple name is an example of how multiplicity is an active element in the elimination of the boundaries ascribed to authorship, also more literally spatial boundaries are the target of the collective: those of language, community, nationality. From the beginning of its activity in Italy in the early ’90s, Luther Blissett has produced and disseminated throughout Europe a large number of texts in diverse forms. There are Luther Blissetts in Germany, England, France, Spain. The Wu Ming websites and newsletters, originally in Italian, are now available in several different languages. The Italian newspaper II Tempo has defined the group as an “artistic-cultural avant-garde” and as “followers of the chaos of the media.”4 4 II Messaggero. similarly calls the collective “Great Damager” and defines it as the multiple name and a “telematic pirate” who, in the last few years, “persecuted press and police stations all over Europe.” (Iannucci 12) Almost all newspaper and magazine articles on Luther Blissett notice how the collective’s radical expressions do not line up with any ideology, be it left wing or right wing. In their newsletter, for instance, the critique of the political movements of 1968 for their failure in the construction of an egalitarian society is very frequent. The press usually associates the project with new cultural tendencies such as the Anti-globalization movement, the political activists known as R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 223 the Tute Bianche (White Overalls) and to the (principally Italian and European) phenomenon of the centri sociali.4 5 In the book Net, generation (1996), signed Luther Blissett and containing a collection of articles, short stories, manifestos of the early days of the collective, we come across a short self-presentation that, just like the beginning of Les Choses and of Calvino’s Traveller, start in the second person singular: As you can notice from a quick glance at the cover of this book, my name is Luther Blissett. Although you might think I am an American expert in new technologies, I am not really Luther Blissett. Luther Blissett is what the netgeneration calls a collective name. It is a name that everyone may use, widening their desires, erasing their identity and showing the baseness and meanness of the most conventional convention existing: the proper name. My name is Luther, but am I a man or a woman? Am I Italian, Jamaican, or French? Young or old? ... many have been Luther Blissett before me, and many will be after me.4 6 (Net. gener@tion 20) The earliest expressions of Luther Blissett, as we may see, had all the characteristics of avant-garde manifestos: high-sounding language, the accent on novelty and on self-expression, even when the self was not attributable to an individual but to a multiple. The emphasis of Luther Blissett writings from 1996 to 1999 (if we take the publication of Q as a paradigmatic turn) is mostly concentrated on the workings of the multiple name and on its political end, and pervaded with a triumphalist tone that stresses with enthusiasm the potentialities of new technological means (the Internet in Italy was in 1996, still a new form of technology). Net.gener@tion is a fragmentary - and rather uninteresting - collection of manifestos, fiction, political affirmations that express the need of the new generation for the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 224 abandoning of subjectivity in artistic expression. What is most important in this work, and in all Luther Blissett expressions before Q, is that the identity of their authors is indeed unknown. These first experiments were probably successful, in this sense, for their purpose of affirming the obsoleteness of the proper name as a tool of power. The names and identities of the people who wrote Q on the other hand, are now very well known to the public. Q’s writers are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo. As we can read in the foreword to all the material published with the name Wu Ming, “their private data, though not secret, retain no importance whatsoever.” (www.wumingfoundation.coml They live in Bologna, and do nothing to avoid being recognized. They interact with their readers on a regular basis, not only through their web newsletter Giap!. but also in person, at book presentations and informal conferences. The “gang of four” that authored in 1999 the best selling novel Q - and that has, in the meantime, become a “gang of five” - is only a small fraction of the Luther Blissett Project, which has hundreds of expressions precisely because it has been conceived to have its own life.4 7 Differently from the more literally active political and mediatic pranks signed Luther Blissett, Wu Ming seems now to be focused solely on artistic projects (narrative, film, music). As a general description of the newly changed name, retrievable on their website, the authors write: “Wu Ming is a laboratory of literary design ... The new project, reprises and suitably modifies many of the characteristics that made The Luther Blissett Project great: radicalism of proposals and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 225 contents, identity drifts, heteronomies, and tactics of guerrilla-commmication. All of these characteristics are then applied to literature, and more generally aimed at telling stories. Just like in the month that followed the publication of Q, our line of conduct will be to be present but not to appear, to be transparent towards the readers, and opaque towards the press.” fwww.wumingfoundation.com) Literally “without a name,” Wu Ming no longer engages in the writing of self-explaining manifestos, nor exhorts anyone to adopt the multiple name. Still a collective name, and promoting multiple authorship, they are, at this point, like a “rock band.” Answering a few questions from their readers, they write: “Wu Ming is the name of a five-people band, like The Rolling Stones, or I Giganti, or Premiata Forneria Marconi. A1 this is indeed normal and we don’t see why people do not get it. To us, the answer is: because in literature individualistic prejudices are stronger than in other arts.” (Giap! 273) This change has created disappointment among the Luther Blissett community of readers. Those who saw the ideas of the multiple name Luther Blissett as innovative and groundbreaking for its potentially endless dissemination, tend to see a renewed conservative attitude in the group’s closure to a narrative enterprise. It is necessary to remark, as a disclaimer, that the collective novels signed Wu Ming (54. Havana Glam. Asce di Guerra) are among the most interesting works of Italian literature that have appeared in the last few years. The multiple name might have reduced its scope of political action, but in opposing to the “star system” surrounding the name of the author, they still demonstrate that cooperative work in literature is indeed possible and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 226 effective. In this sense they are still “multiple.” At a recent book presentation, one of the five Wu Ming authors stated: “We still like pranks ... Now we insert them into our novels.” (Giap! 273) Strangely enough (or maybe not strangely at all) the actual name Wu Ming does not receive the same attention that Luther Blissett did. This is possibly because of the former’s relation to soccer, opposed to the latter’s reminiscence of more “serious” issues like the association with China and possible (future) questions of Chinese economic dominance, as well as other politically related connections: Maoism (and consequently 1968) but also the multitudes, and, quite literally, the nameless.4 8 The multitudes and the multiple names, however, continue to be the absolute protagonists of the new frescos signed by Wu Ming. Their latest novel, 54, features an intricate historical plot that is reminiscent of Q, except for the fact that its setting moves beyond Europe and well beyond the sixteenth century. The novel is set in 1954, and features among its characters Josep Broz “Tito,” ex Yugoslavian leader; Lucky Luciano, internationally known mafia gangster; and Cary Grant, the Hollywood actor who, like Q’s characters, had multiple names and multiple identities (not only as an actor, but also in his real life). The book insists on Tito’s similarity with the actor, and in many instances provides a detailed description of Grant’s Palm Springs residence, which, just as the opening image in Q, becomes one of 54’s main visual representations. The images that make up the story of 1954, however, are very different from the oil painting or the frescos of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 227 The stories told in the novel, all surprisingly connected as if to form an invisible network, are intended to join together places as diverse as Southern California and Southern Italy, the Yugoslavian coast and the French Riviera, Marseilles, Bristol and Bologna. All these places are not described as exceptional, but filled with everyday details: Cary Grant picking up the newspaper, a group of men talking about the weather at a bar in Bologna (reminiscent of Calvino’s first novel fragment of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler!. Tito looking at himself in the mirror. The emphasis, in 54, is no longer placed on the epistemic rupture that the multiplicity can provide, but instead on the reconstruction, of what we could call the common places that spring from this multiplicity. Notes 1 The passage in which Q describes the fresco appears twice in the novel. The actual incipit shows the main character reading Q’s journal, where the opening line makes reference to the image and the figure in the background. Towards the end of the novel, though, Q is shown in the action of writing, hence the same passage recurs, assuming a completely different significance. 2 For a complete explanation of ekphrasis, see for instance, J. A. W. Heffeman: “Ekphrasis and Representation,” where the technique is defined as “the verbal representation of graphic representation.” (Heffeman 297) Murray Krieger’s 1967 essay “Ekphrasis and the still movement of poetry; or Laokoon revisited” investigates the “generic spatiality of literary form” transforming ekphrasis in “a general priniciple of poetics.” (Krieger 22) This view, though close to other influential critics’ who interrogate the relation of language and images (see for instance J.W.T. Mitchell), is contrasted by contemporary theorists such as Michael Davidson, who talk about ekphrastic works as a particular type of “painterly poems,” claiming that “a poem about a painting is not the same as what I call a painterly poem, which activates strategies of composition equivalent but not dependent on the painting. Instead of pausing at a reflective distance from the work of art, the poet reads the painting as a text, rather than as a static object, or else reads the larger painterly aesthetic generated by the painting.” (Davidson 72) 3 During a conversation I recently had with one of Q’s authors, I asked what painting the collective had in mind when wrote about Q’s fresco. The answer was “Velazquez’ Las Meninas.” 4 For the discussion around the fresco technique in the middle ages and the fifteenth century, see Teofilo Monaco’s De Diversis Artibus (thirteenth century, trans. Adriano Caffaro Le Varie Arti. 2000); R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 228 Cenxiino Cennini Libro dell’Arte, (end of fourteenth century, trans. Daniel V Thompson Jr. The Craftman’s Handbook. 1933); Giorgio Vasari, Introduzione alle Tre Arti (1568, trans. Louisa Maclehose Vasari On Technique. 1960). For a contemporary commentary of these texts, see for instance Pierluigi De Vecchi/Elda Cerchiari: Arte Nel Tempo: Dalla Preistoria alia tarda Antichita (1994). 5 See David Anfam, ed. Techniques of the Great Masters of Art (1987). Also, in his Introduzione alle Tre Arti. Vasari affirms that the secret of this technique was discovered by the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck and diffused in Italy by Antonello da Messina, but such anecdote has no historical foundation, since the technique was well known from antiquity. 6 Among the large number of artistic works that have taken Las Meninas as a source of inspiration, we must remember Goya: Etching after Velazquez’s Las Meninas: Pablo Picasso: Las Meninas after Velazquez (Oil on Canvas, 1957); Salvador Dali: Velazquez Painting the Infanta Margarita With the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (Oil on Canvas, 1958); Jorge de Oteiza: Las Meninas (Lo convexo v lo concavo. el Perro v el EspeioJ (Sculpture, Stone, 1958); Equip Cronica (Manolo Valdes, Rafael Solbes): El Recinte (Oil on Canvas, 1971); Giulio Paolini: Contemnlator Enim VI (Litographic Print, 1991); Philippe Comar: Les Menines (Wood Construction, 1978); Joel-Peter Witkin: Las Meninas. New Mexico (Toned gelatine silver print on paper, 1987). 7 Foucault writes: “The arm holding the brush is bent to the left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints. The skilled hand is suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter’s gaze. And the gaze in return, waits upon the arrested gesture. Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume. But not without a series of feints. By standing back a little, the painter has placed himself to one side of the painting on which he is working. That is, for the spectator at present observing him he is to the right of the canvas, while the latter, the canvas, takes up the whole of the extreme left.” (Foucault 3) 8 The main character states, after he learns form a friend of Luther’s death: “Really, you know, sir, today an old enemy has finally decided to accept his eternal reward. I’m tempted to drink to that happy event.” (Q 514) 9 At the end of the conversation between the two characters, we read: “‘Your Eminence, such magnanimity as you have shown is a rare thing these days. There aren’t many holy men of the Church who would agree to talk to a stranger in the depths of the night, let alone grant him his wishes. My name is... ’ ‘No. come tomorrow, the Bishop of Palestrina won’t be able to afford to make the confidences he has made tonight. As far as I’m concerned you will simply be the erudite insomniac who happened to keep me company.’” (Q 639) 1 0 In her article on Las Meninas, “Representing Representation” art critic Estrella de Diego makes extensive reference to Foucault’s essays, claiming: “In his book, the French philosopher was attempting to conform what he called an Archeology of knowledge, a discontinuous space... Foucault appeared, therefore, to be interested in discontinuity as opposed to progression, in the articulation of the Same - Order - and the Other - Disorder - and in the manner in which both terms are defined and redefined in language. Foucault was, without a doubt, exploring linguistic relationships: the world is perceived by the way it is named.” (De Diego 150) 1 1 The novel introduces each of its locations through a visual image. To give an example among many, in his description of the city of Mttlhausen the narrator mentions Durer’s drawings (another visual technique) as if they were part of the surroundings, as an architectonic element: “Now, from my hidden R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 229 comer, Mulhausen seems like a dream town, a spectre that visits you at night and tells you its story, but as though you had never seen it, a pen-and-ink drawing, that’s how I remember it, like something by our brilliant painter, Herr Albrecht Diirer.” (Q 78) In this passage, it appears as if the preeminent signifiers of the sixteenth century are its figurative works. Q’s images, then, to begin with the opening fresco, function indeed as the initial markers of the changing episteme. In his article on religious representation in the Renaissance, “Visualization and Social Reproduction,” sociologist Bruno Latour states “In the seventy years on both sides of 1500 a new quarrel of images takes place that has given its present shape to our vision of science and of religion.” (Latour 19) If Mulhausen, Nuremberg and the German cities live through Durer’s paintings, the port in Antwerp suggests the work of Brueghel, and Venice is unfailingly associated with Titian. But the repeated visual metaphors are not simply there to help the reader locate the novel spatially and temporally; they also constitute a form of sociological reflection. As Gordon Fyfe and John Law affirm in the introduction to their book Picturing Power: “depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them. The point is not that social life is guaranteed by some shared visual culture, neither is it that visual ideologies are imposed on individuals. Rather, it is that social change is at once a change in the regime of re-presentation.” (Fyfe and Law 2) 1 2 Q’s choral organization is clearly reminiscent of ancient epic narratives, which normally involve the narration of a long historical period and display a large number of fundamental and marginal characters. 1 3 See: Fiorella Iannucci, “II Cinquecento Sembra il 2000.” 1 4 See: Gian!: 222. 1 5 Although there is no bibliography, the appendix of the book underlines the research work that has been necessary to write it. Among the sources cited, we need to mention Carlo Ginzburg: II formaggio e i vermi (1976) and Raoul Vanaigem: The Movement of the Free Spirit: General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concetming Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and. Incidentally. Our Own Time (1994). 1 6 Q takes up two names in the novel: the letter Q (Qohelet) and Heinrich Gresbeck. 1 7 See Charles F. Whitley: Koheleth - His Language and Thought (1978); J.A. Loader: Polar Structures in the Book of Qohelet (1979); E. J. Bikerman: Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel. Koheleth. Esther (1968). 1 8 “La fin du livre de Qohelet prend des allures de prefiguration de l’universelle investigation de Big Brother, incamee par le projet de controle du cardinal Carafa dont l’espion le plus zeH a adopts l’initiale du livre de l’Ecclesiaste qui resume son propos. Dans la lutte qui oppose sin plus de sept cent pages un hors-la-loi insaisissable aux innombrables identities d’emprunt et un limier sans nom - version moins alldgorique de l’affrontement de l’ange et du demon, reduit k un duel d’ombres — , c’est la fin d’un monde que se joue.” (Cantichi 10) 1 9 See chapter 1 of this dissertation, pp. 22-28. The figure of the Nomothete, the name-giver, is invested of great importance because it coincides with the function of the creator of language, and is a myth common to different mythologies and religions. In the tradition of Christian philosophy, the myth of Adamic language derives precisely from the idea of the Nomothete, and the importance this figure has assumed through history is also to be put in relation to the importance attributed to the use of names and languages in the Bible. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 230 2 0 See Hegel: The Philosophy o f History (Trans. J. Sibree, 1956). Hegel affirms that the aim of world’s history is the attainment of the spirit’s knowledge of itself. This spirit Hegel talks about is the spirit of the world (Weltaunshauung), is embodied in the spirit of the peoples. The means (or tools) of history are individuals and their passions. The spirit of the world externally expresses (in the world) what is implicit in the passions and will of the individual. But since the Weltauunshaung is always the spirit of a specific people, the actions of the individuals are significant only when they conform to the spirit of the people of the individual. In this sense, Hegel sees in tradition all the necessary force of an absolute reality. But tradition is not only conservation in Hegel. Progress also derives form tradition, and it finds its instruments in the heroes or the individuals of world’s history (Hegel cites as examples Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, Napoleon). These are the visionary men who know the truth of their people and of their time. 2 1 Although the motor that shapes the structure of the novel is certainly the issue of class - which rises to a symbolic level in the conflict between the two opposite forces of power and rebellion — the main focus of the novel seems to rest on the ways in which people’s understanding changes from a “medieval” to a “modem” way of thinking and living. 2 2 See Frederic Jameson Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitaliasm (1991). Postmodernism, in Jameson’s words, is “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but in which ‘culture’ has inevitably become ‘second nature.’” (Postmodernism ix) This change is related to the “shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and in the way they change.” ('Postmodernism ix) 2 3 Bifo writes: “Attraverso questa storia possiamo intravedere la storia dei nostri anni Sessanta e Settanta, il susseguirsi esaltante e poi tragico di creazione di comunM per forza di discorso, di condivisione, di piacere della came e delle menti, e poi dello scontro armato, della violenza fanatica in nome degli ideali, e della repressione poliziesca.” (Bifo 65) 2 4 lannucci writes: “Come somiglia questa Europa unita a quello sterminato impero di Carlo V, foraggiato dalle grandi banche tedesche, percorso da mille indipendentismi. Come somiglia alia rivoluzione telematica quella di Gutenberg, idee stampate su libri, un sapere che travolge gerarchie e classi sociali.” (lannucci 12) 2 5 Giap! is a selection of contributions to the Wu Ming newsletter. 2 6 A number of works is available on the multiform terrorist (left-wing and right-wing) movements in Italy during the seventies. See for instance, on the Red Brigades, Vittorfranco Pisano, The Red Brigades, a Challenge to Italian Democracy: Richard Drake, The Aldo Moro Murder Case. Leonardo Sciascia, The Moro Affair. Pisano affirms that the aim of the Red Brigades was “to mobilize, to extend, and to deepen the armed initiative against the political, economic, and military centers of the imperialist state of the multinationals.” (Pisano 108) It is important to remark that most material available in English concentrates on the so-called “attack on democracy” of left wing groups like (or close to) the Red Brigades, almost forgetting the influence of right wing groups. For a more exhaustive ensemble on “terrorism” and the anni di piombo in 1970s Italy see Aurelio Lepre, Storia della Prima Repubblica: BalestriniyMoroni, L’orda d’Oro 1968-1977. cap. 8 “Lotta Armata e Autonomia Operaia.” 2 7 It is nonetheless tempting, if not inevitable, to classify the book as a historical novel. This is, at least, what the vast majority of Italian critics and reviewers have done until now. But if we decide to follow the definition of historical novel given by Georg Lukacs in his 1937 landmark work The Historical Novel, that is to say then Q escapes this classification. Lukacs’ work, we must remark, does not only R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 231 attempt to classify a genre in itself, but also proposes a history of the genre. And since his generic formulation of historical novel goes back in time to works of the seventeenth century, many critics have noticed the inherent difficulty in applying Lukacs’ classification to contemporary fiction. For this reason, keeping Lukacs’ work as reference, critics have engaged at times in the creation of a number of sub-genres for historical fiction, at times in the inclusion of all fiction as historical, or else in the refusal of the classification of the genre altogether. In his book History and the Contemporary Novel. David Cowart devises four “final” categories under which all contemporary historical fiction could fell. He writes: “With an eye to the mythic quatemities of Blake, Jung, and Northrop Frye, one can at once improve on Feuchtwanger’s distant mirror thesis and avoid the multiple categories of a pluralistic aesthetic by organizing a discussion of historical fiction under four rubrics: “The Way it Was - fictions whose authors aspire purely or largely to historical verisimilitude; The Way it Will Be - fictions whose authors reverse history to contemplate the future; The Turning Point - fictions whose authors seek to pinpoint the precise historical moment when the modem age or some prominent features of it came into existence; The Distant Mirror - fictions whose authors project the present into the past.” (Cowart 8-9) Any reader of Q would immediately realize that it is difficult to choose one of these classifications for the work. If we were to follow this scheme, we could place the novel somewhere between “turning point” and the “Distant mirror” fiction, but we realize that such operation would be limiting, as it would leave out a number of cmcial aspects, such as the mythopoietic element that underlies the novel. 2 8 Among other works that analyze contemporary historical fiction, see: Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History; Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desires: Harry B. Henderson, Versions of the Past: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. 2 9 See Paolo Vimo, Ouando il Verbo si fa Came. Linguaggio e Natura Umana (2003): 111-139. Vimo talks about “transindividuality” and about “transindividual objects, words, and thought” as the elements that best explain Marx’s reference to the “social individual” and, by consequence, the general intellect. He explains: “The process of individuation, which renders the human animal an unrepeatable, discrete unit [unita discreta\, is always partial and circumscribed; it is by definition inconclusive. The “subject” overcomes the limits of the individual, since it includes, as its identifiable component, a ratio of pre individual reality, which is still indeterminate, unstable and full of potentials. Such reality durably coexists with the singular I, although it does not assimilate with it. It has, then, its autonomous expressions. Collective experience springs from pre-individual reality.” (Vimo 121) 3 0 In the Grundrisse. Marx uses the English expression general intellect in order to define a form of social knowledge that has become a “direct force of production,” one that conditions “the process of social life itself.” (Marx 706) The notion of General Intellect has been the center of attention of most contemporary Marxist philosophers, especially in Italy, where the movimento operaista has tried to take the notion as the point of departure for the development of new conceptions of work, technologic development and the potentiality of subversion of the capitalistic system. Marx, however, does not offer an explicit definition of the term, which appears, rather enigmatically, at the end of the famous “fragment on machinery” in the second volume of the Grundrisse. 3 1 The phenomenon o f synesthesia as an “intersensorial” form o f knowledge has been studied in different fields such as medicine/psychology, anthropology, literature and philosophy. It is now the basis for a number of multi media studies that apply the concept of intersensoriality also to “intermediality” (see Leonardo Vol. 34 n. 1, 2001. The issue is entirely dedicated to a discussion of Intersenses/lntermedia). For an anthropological and philosophical study on how different senses constitute a form of knowledge see Constance Classen: World of Senses. Richard E. Cytowic, Synesthesia: a Union of the Senses. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 232 3 2 See Alessandro Manzoni: On the Hisotrical Novel (Trans. Sandra Bermann, 1984). 3 3 For the themes brought forward by French philosophy concerned with everyday life and its criticism, see chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation. The impact of theories of everyday life in Italian culture is indeed not developed. Although the main philosophic and literary Italian currents of the 1960s and 1970s seem mainly concerned with abstract concepts (aside from a niche in history that is largely influenced by the annals school) we could say that a form of situationist-inspired counter culture does indeed penetrate the Italian soil giving origin to radical and innovative experiments in “alternative lifestyles” the “refusal of work” and the cooperative of self-organized labor; as well in and “space production” such as the centri sociali. 3 4 Tommaso de Lorenzis writes: “Si danno storie, mitologie, narrazioni e simboli in collisione con il cemento ideologico del neoliberismo, e quest’insieme di immagini e racconti pud leggittimamente competere con le rappresentazioni dominanti.” (Giap! v) 3 5 On the revolutionary potential of myth creation see for Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence (Trans. T.E. Hume, 1961) and The Illusion of Progress (Trans. John and Charlotte Stanley, 1964). 3 6 In his analysis of poietic history, Price interestingly opposes to two important views of the novel: the Lukacsian definition (and the Marxist tradition thereby following) of historical novel, and the definition (based first and foremost on Linda Hutcheon’s work) of postmodern novel and postmodern poetics. Both these definitions are incomplete from the point of view of poietic narrative. The historical novel, in fact, would be a limiting term that closes a genre, while the definitions (Linda Hutcheon, but also others) of postmodernism tend to offer a too enthusiastic (and possibly dated?) perspective in the subversive and anti-totalizing potential of genre-blurring, one that would “lose much of their persuasive power when we consider the totalizing effect of market forces that do much to commodify every postmodern work of art.” (Price 12) In Postmodernism. Jameson has already criticized this attitude, and his work will remain the basis for any critique of postmodernism. In this sense, Price claims, it is useful to go back to the tradition of history as proposed by Vico and Nietzsche (and reprised by modem philosophers concerned with the role o f history as narration, such as Michel Foucault and Hayden White). 3 7 See Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Negri and Hardt, Empire and Multitude: Paolo Vimo, II Ricordo del Presente and Ouando il Verbo si fa Came: Christian Marazzi, II Posto dei Caizini. 3 8 The collective Luther Blissett (now Wu Ming) has defined itself “the name of the multiple” since the beginning of its activity. 3 9 See: www.wumingfoundation.com:www.luther-blissett.net 4 0 Luther Blissett the soccer player, by the way, was almost never contacted by the press before the publication of Q in English. 4 1 Books by Luther Blissett: Net.gener@tion. Tot6. Penpino e la Guerra Psichica. Nemici dello Stato. Mind Invaders. Lasciate che I Bimbi... 4 2 Communication-Guerrilla is the title of a book co-authored by Luther Blissett and the German collective Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe, and Sonja Brunzels. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 233 4 3 This idea of an anonymous, ever expanding network that shapes daily life in the “second media age” is not new. In his book defining a new technologic and philosophical phase of western history, Mark Poster writes: “this postmodern daily life is not one o f discrete individuals, hidden behind shields of anonymity in market interactions with strangers; nor is it a return to a village of familiar faces. Instead it combines features of both without the advantages of either ... urban life now consists of face-to-face interactions with strangers coupled by electronically mediated interactions with machines “familiar” with us.” (Poster 64) The Luther Blissett project’s aim is precisely to play with these types of estrangement and familiarity, in order to show their power mechanisms to the ever expanding and nameless crowd. To do so they use a mix of the “first” and “second media” (print as well as electronic, screen-based material) as well as institutional and non-institutional channels. 4 4 This information is taken from Wu Ming’s website. 4 5 The centri sociali (Social centers), in Italy, are usually formerly abandoned locales, taken up (legally or illegally) by groups of people who transform them into habitations and places of congregation. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude: 264-268. 4 6 “Come sapete da un solo sguardo alia copertina di questo libro, il mio nome e Luther Blissett. Nonostante possiate immaginare che io sia un americano esperto in nuove tecnologie, io in reaM non sono Luther Blissett. Luther Blissett b infatti quello che che la netgeneration chiama nome collettivo. E’ in pratica, un nome che chiunque pub usare, allargando I propri desideri, annullando la propria identita e mostrando la cattiveria e la piccineria della convenzione piu convenzionale che esista al mondo: quella del nome proprio.Io mi chiamo Luther.. .eppure sono un uomo o una donna? Sono italiano, giamaicano o francese? Sono giovane o vecchio? ... Ecco il motivo per cui esisto e non sono: prima di me molti sono stati Luther Blissett, e dopo di me molti lo saranno.” fNet.gener@.tion 20) 4 7 The authors of Q are also among the founders of the Luther Blissett Project, and, supposedly, the actors behind many of the pranks and political actions of 1995-1996. 4 8 As Ross affirms in her article “Establishing Consensus,” 1968 is “a spirit, like some nebulous but necessary magma expanding from the 1960s to the 1980s, uniting the two eras into one continuous narrative of progress in the long march of democratic individualism.” (Ross 652) The haunting of this spirit, it seems, has stretched well beyond the 1980s into the years 2000, when “democratic individualism” still does not let Mao be buried in laughter. In her article, Ross refers more specifically to May 1968, because she analyzes the epoch from a French perspective. From an Italian point of view, it is impossible to limit the experience of 1968 to “the month of May.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 234 Selected Bibliography Primary Texts: Aragon, Louis. Le Pavsan de Paris. Paris: Folio Gallimard, 1926. Calvino, Italo. Se una notte d’invemo un viaggiatore. Milano: Mondadori, 1994. . If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1994. Luther Blissett. Q. Torino: Einaudi, 1999. Luther Blissett. Q. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. Perec, Georges. Les Choses. Une Histoire des annees soixante. Paris: Rene Juillard, 1965. . Les Choses. A Story of the Sixties. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990. Plato. Cratvlus. Translated, with Introduction and Notes by C.D.C Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988. Secondary Texts: Ackrill, J.L. “Language and Reality in Plato’s Cratylus.” Fine 125-142. Acolet, Fanny. Georges Perec et Richard Brautignan au pays des obiets. Lille: A.N.R.T., 1999. Adair, Gilbert. “The Eleventh Day. Perec and the Infra-ordinary.” Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 13 no. 3 (19931: 99-107. Agamben, Giorgio. Idea Of Prose. Translated by Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. . Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1999. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 235 Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso. Trans. Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders. Brisbane, CA: Trillium Press, 2005. . De Vuleari Eloauentia. Trans. Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Allan, D.J. The Philosophy of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. 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Milano: Feltrinelli, 1988. Barilli, Renato. A Course on Aesthetics. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. . Tra presenza e assenza: due modelli culturali in conflitto. Milano: Bompiani, 1974. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 236 . Voyage to the End of the Word. Trans. Teresa Fiore and Harry Polkinhom. San Diego: San Diego University Press, 1997. . “My Long ‘Infidelity’ towards Calvino.” Ricci 13-17. Barilli, Renato and Angelo Guglielmi, ed. Gruppo 63. Critica e Teoria. Torino: Testo&Immagine, 2003. Baroni, Giorgio. Italo Calvino. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1988. Barney, Rachel. Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratvlus. New York: Routledge, 2001. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Stephen Heath Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. . S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. 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William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. . The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. . The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998. . “Risposta a Angelo Guglielmi.” Alfabeta 9 (December 1979): 58-62. Camps, Assumpta. “Principio senza fine: l’iper-romanzo di Italo Calvino.” In Annali dTtalianistica 18 (2000): 308-326. Cannon, Joann. Postmodern Italian Fiction. London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1989. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 239 Cantichi, Philippe-Jean. “Le Premier reve de Big Brother.” Le Monde des Livres 19 Apr. 2001: 18. Carter, Albert Howard. Italo Calvino. Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Cassetta, Paolo. “Randagi hackers anabattisti.” Alias 24 April 1999: 23. Cennini, Cennino. The Craftsman Handbook. Trans. Daniel V. Thompson, jr. 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Creator Ovan, Sabrina (author)

Core Title Designifiers: Proper and improper names in Italian and French contemporary fiction

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,literature, romance,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

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Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-451446

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