From the diary of Silas Flannery
In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven.
How many years has it been since I could allow myself some disinterested reading? How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself? I turn and see the desk waiting for me, the typewriter with a sheet of paper rolled into it, the chapter to begin. Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me. What I do has as its aim the spiritual state of this woman in the deck chair framed by the lens of my spyglass, and it is a condition forbidden me.
Every day, before starting work, I look at the woman in the deck chair: I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind
and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable.
At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.
At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.
At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It’s no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.
And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my
shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I am unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes… Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass knows what I should write; or, rather, she does not know it, because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she does not know; but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.
At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of com-
plementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it. I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader. Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light.
Looking at the woman in the deck chair, I felt the need to write “from life,” that is, to write not her but her reading, to write anything at all, but thinking that it must pass through her reading.
Now, looking at the butterfly that lights on my book, I would like to write “from life,” bearing the butterfly in mind. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow “resembles” the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly.
I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.
Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.
One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller—the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take him as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.
The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Hòlderlin (while it is clear that Hòlderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner’s (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn’t be ready before Thursday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes
him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and he is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.
On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass. “How enthralled she is! She’s holding her breath! How feverishly she turns the pages!” the tormented writer thinks. “Certainly she is reading a novel of great effect, like those of the productive writer!” “How enthralled she is! As if transfigured in meditation, as if she saw a mysterious truth being disclosed!” the productive writer thinks. “Surely she is reading a book rich in hidden meanings, like those of the tormented writer!”
The greatest desire of the tormented writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading. He starts writing a novel as he thinks the productive writer would write it. Meanwhile the greatest desire of the productive writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading; he starts writing a novel as he thinks the tormented writer would write it.
The young woman is approached first by one writer, then by the other. Both tell her they would like her to read the novel they have just finished writing.
The young woman receives the two manuscripts. After a few days she invites the authors to her house, together, to their great surprise. “What kind of joke is this?” She says. “You’ve given me two copies of the same novel!”
Or else:
The young woman gets the two manuscripts mixed up.
She returns to the productive writer the tormented writer’s novel in the productive writer’s manner, and to the tormented writer the productive writer’s novel in the tormented writer’s manner. Both, seeing themselves counterfeited, have a violent reaction and rediscover their personal vein.
Or else:
A gust of wind shuffles the two manuscripts. The reader tries to reassemble them. A single novel results, stupendous, which the critics are unable to attribute. It is the novel that both the productive writer and the tormented writer have always dreamed of writing.
Or else:
The young woman had always been a passionate reader of the productive writer and has loathed the tormented writer. Reading the productive writer’s new novel, she finds it phony and realizes that everything he wrote was phony; on the other hand, recalling the tormented writer’s works, she now finds them splendid and can’t wait to read his new novel. But she finds something completely different from what she was expecting, and she sends him to the devil, too.
Or else:
The same, replacing “productive” with “tormented” and “tormented” with “productive.”
Or else:
The young woman was a passionate admirer, et cetera, et cetera, of the productive writer and loathed the tormented one. Reading the productive writer’s new novel she doesn’t notice at all that something has changed; she likes it, without being especially enthusiastic. As for the manuscript of the tormented writer, she finds it insipid like all the rest of this author’s work. She replies to the two writers with a few polite words. Both are convinced that she can’t be a very alert reader and they pay no further attention to her.
Or else:
The same, replacing, et cetera.
I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.” There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.
Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” ‘Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.
And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say, “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”
This is the special bliss that I see appear in the reader’s face, and which is denied me.
On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Every time I sit down here I read, “It was a dark and stormy night. ..” and the impersonality of that incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the
time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to the first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.
Ever since I have had this poster before my eyes, I have no longer been able to end a page. I must take this damned Snoopy down from the wall as quickly as possible, but I can’t bring myself to do it; that childish figure has become for me an emblem of my condition, a warning, a challenge.
The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?
Today I will begin by copying the first sentences of a famous novel, to see if the charge of energy contained in that start is communicated to my hand, which, once it has received the right push, should run on its own.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place
and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.
I will copy out also the second, indispensable paragraph to allow myself to be carried along by the flow of the narration:
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and it was more like a cupboard than a room. And so on until: He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
At this point the next sentence attracts me so much that I can’t refrain from copying it: This was not because he was cowardly and abject: quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. While I’m about it, I could continue for the whole paragraph, or, indeed, for several pages, until the protagonist introduces himself to the old moneylender. “Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
I stop before I succumb to the temptation to copy out all of Crime and Punishment. For an instant I seem to understand the meaning and fascination of a now inconceivable vocation: that of the copyist. The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object.
A man called on me, saying he is my translator, to warn me about an outrageous practice damaging to him and to me: the publication of unauthorized translations of my books. He showed me a volume, which I leafed through without getting much out of it: it was written in Japanese, and the only words in the Latin alphabet were my given name and surname on the title page.
“I can’t even figure out which of my books it is,” I said, handing the volume back to him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know Japanese.”
“Even if you knew the language you wouldn’t recognize the book,” my visitor said to me. “It’s a book you have never written.”
He explained to me that the great skill of the Japanese in manufacturing perfect facsimiles of Western products has spread to literature. A firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of Silas Flannery’s novels, and it manages to produce absolutely new ones, and first-class novels at that, so it can invade the world market. Retranslated into English (or, rather, translated into English, from which they claim to have been translated), they cannot be distinguished, by any critic, from true Flannerys.
The news of this diabolical swindle has profoundly upset me, but it goes beyond my understandable fury at the economic and moral injury: I feel also a timid attraction for these fakes, for this extension of myself that blossoms from the terrain of another civilization. I imagine an old Japanese in his kimono crossing a curved little bridge: he is my Nipponese self imagining one of my stories, and he succeeds in identifying himself with me through a spiritual itinerary that to me is completely alien. Whereby the false Flannerys turned out by the swindling firm in Osaka would be, of course, vulgar imitations; but at the same time they would contain a refined and arcane wisdom that true Flannerys lack completely.
Naturally, in the presence of a stranger, I had to conceal the ambiguity of my reactions, and I acted as if I were interested only in collecting all the data necessary for bringing a lawsuit.
“I will sue the counterfeiters and anyone who cooperates in the dissemination of the faked books!” I said, looking meaningfully into the translator’s eyes, because I suspected this young man was not without a role in the shady business. He said his name is Ermes Marana, a
name I had never heard. His head is oblong horizontally, like a dirigible, and seems to hide many things behind the convexity of its brow.
I asked him where he lives. ‘For the moment, in Japan,” he answered me.
He declares himself outraged that anyone would make improper use of my name, and ready to help me put an end to the fraud, but he adds that in the final analysis there is nothing to be shocked about, since, in his view, literature’s worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared.
He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions. I feel I can share many of his affirmations, but I was careful not to let him know this. He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath. And since for him artifice is the true substance of everything, the author who devised a perfect system of artifices would succeed in identifying himself with the whole.
I must stop thinking of my conversation yesterday with that Marana. I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn; but my aim is to capture in the book the illegible world, without center, without ego, without I.
When you think about it, this total writer could be a very humble person, what in America they call a ghost
writer, a professional of recognized usefulness even if not of great prestige: the anonymous editor who gives book form to what other people have to tell but are unable or lack the time to write; he is the writing hand that gives words to existences too busy existing. Perhaps that was my true vocation and I missed it. I could have multiplied my I’s, assumed other people’s selves, enacted the selves most different from me and from one another.
But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living. Perhaps the true book is this diary, in which I try to note down the image of the woman in the deck chair at the various hours of the day, as I observe her in the changing light.
Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.
If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block
me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.
The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once—the biographers of the Prophet tell us— while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith.
He was wrong. The organization of the sentence, finally, was a responsibility that lay with him; he was the one who had to deal with the internal coherence of the written language, with grammar and syntax, to channel into it the fluidity of a thought that expands outside all language before it becomes word, and of a word particularly fluid like that of a prophet. The scribe’s collaboration was necessary to Allah, once he had decided to express himself in a written text. Mohammed knew this and allowed the scribe the privilege of concluding sentences; but Abdullah was unaware of the powers vested in him. He lost his faith in Allah because he lacked faith in writing, and in himself as an agent of writing.
If an infidel were allowed to excogitate variants on the legends of the Prophet, I would venture this one: Abdullah loses his faith because in writing under dictation he makes a mistake and Mohammed, though he notices it, decides not to correct it, finding the mistaken form preferable. In this case, too, Abdullah would be wrong to be scandalized. It is on the page, not before, that the word,
even that of the prophetic raptus, becomes definitive, that is to say, becomes writing. It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible, that is, through the uncertainties of spelling, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen. Otherwise what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its messages by other paths. There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader’s book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.
Strange people circulate in this valley: literary agents awaiting my new novel, for which they have already collected advances from publishers all over the world; advertising agents who want my characters to wear certain articles of clothing and drink certain fruit juices; electronic technicians who insist on finishing my unfinished novels with a computer. I try to go out as little as possible; I avoid the village; if I want to take a walk, I choose the mountain trails.
Today I ran into a party of boys who looked like scouts, excited and yet meticulous, arranging some pieces of canvas on a meadow to form geometric patterns.
“Signals for planes?” I asked.
“For flying saucers,” they answered. “We’re UFO observers. This is a place of transit, a kind of aerial track that has seen a lot of activity lately. They think it’s because a writer is living somewhere around here, and the inhabitants of the other planets want to use him for communication.”
“What makes you believe that?” I asked.
“The fact is that for some time this writer has been undergoing a crisis and can’t write any more. The newspapers are wondering what the reason can be. According to our calculations, it could be the inhabitants of other
worlds keeping him inactive, so that he will be drained of terrestrial conditionings and become receptive.”
“But why him, particularly?”
“The extraterrestrials can’t say things directly. They have to express themselves in an indirect way, a figurative way—for example, through stories that arouse unusual emotions. This writer apparently has a good technique and a certain elasticity of ideas.”
“But have you read his books?”
“What he has written so far is of no interest. The book he will write when he emerges from the crisis is the one that could contain the cosmic communications.”
‘Transmitted to him how?”
“Mentally. He shouldn’t even be aware of it. He would believe he is writing as he likes; instead, the message coming from space on waves picked up by his brain would infiltrate what he is writing.”
“And would you succeed in decoding the message?”
They did not answer me.
When I think that the interplanetary expectation of these young people will be disappointed, I feel a certain sorrow. After all, I could easily slip into my next book something that might seem to them the revelation of a cosmic truth. For the present I have no idea of what I might invent, but if I start writing, an idea will come to me.
What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?
It is no use my awaiting a revelation from the sidereal spaces: my novel is not progressing. If I were suddenly to begin filling page after page once more, it would be a sign that the galaxy is aiming its messages at me.
But the only thing I succeed in writing is this diary, the
contemplation of a young woman reading a book, and I do not know what book it is. Is the extraterrestrial message contained in my diary? Or in her book?
A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact— for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes prove unrecognizable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.
I tried to say this to her. She retorted, a bit irritated: “Why? Would you want me to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?”
I answered her: “That isn’t it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know.”
(Luckily I can watch with my spyglass that other woman reading and convince myself that not all readers are like this Lotaria. )
“What you want would be a passive way of reading, escapist and regressive,” Lotaria said. “That’s how my sister reads. It was watching her devour the novels of Silas Flannery one after the other without considering any problems that gave me the idea of using those books as the subject of my thesis. This is why I read your works, Mr. Flannery, if you want to know: to show my sister, Ludmilla, how to read an author. Even Silas Flannery.”
“Thank you for that ‘even.’ But why didn’t you bring your sister with you?”
“Ludmilla insists it’s better not to know authors person-
ally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”
I would say that she could be my ideal reader, this Ludmilla.
Yesterday evening, on entering my study, I saw the shadow of a stranger escaping through the window. I tried to pursue him, but I found no trace of him. Often I seem to hear people hidden in the bushes around the house, especially at night.
Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.
I asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her. She said no, because here she doesn’t have a computer at her disposal.
She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. ‘That way I can have an already completed reading at hand,” Lotaria says, “with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don’t pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book.”
Lotaria brought me some novels electronically transcribed, in the form of words listed in the order of their frequency. “In a novel of fifty to a hundred thousand words,” she said to me, “I advise you to observe immediately the words that are repeated about twenty times. Look here. Words that appear nineteen times:
blood, cartridge belt, commander, do, have, immediately, it, life, seen, sentry, shots, spider, teeth, together, your… “Words that appear eighteen times:
boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until… “Don’t you already have a clear idea what it’s about?” Lotaria says. “There’s no question: it’s a war novel, all action, brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence. The narration is entirely on the surface, I would say; but to make sure, it’s always a good idea to take a look at the list of words used only once, though no less important for that. Take this sequence, for example:
underarm, underbrush, undercover, underdog, underfed, underfoot, undergo, undergraduate, underground, undergrowth, underhand, underprivileged, undershirt, underwear, underweight… “No, the book isn’t completely superficial, as it seemed. There must be something hidden; I can direct my research along these lines.”
Lotaria shows me another series of lists. “This is an entirely different novel. It’s immediately obvious. Look at the words that recur about fifty times:
had, his, husband, little, Riccardo (51) answered, been, before, has, station, what (48) all, barely, bedroom, Mario, some, times (47) morning, seemed, went, whom (46) should (45) hand, listen, until, were (43) Cecilia, Delia, evening, girl, hands, six, who, years (42) almost, alone,
could, man, returned, window (41) me, wanted (40) life (39)
“What do you think of that? An intimatist narration, subtle feelings, understated, a humble setting, everyday life in the provinces … As a confirmation, we’ll take a sample of words used a single time:
chilled, deceived, downward, engineer, enlargement, fattening, ingenious, ingenuous, injustice, jealous, kneeling, swallow, swallowed, swallowing… “So we already have an idea of the atmosphere, the moods, the social background… . We can go on to a third book:
according, account, body, especially, God, hair, money, times, went (29) evening, flour, food, rain, reason, somebody, stay, Vincenzo, wine (38) death, eggs, green, hers, legs, sweet, therefore (36) black, bosom, children, day, even, ha, head, machine, make, remained, stays, stuffs, white, would (35) “Here I would say we’re dealing with a full-blooded story, violent, everything concrete, a bit brusque, with a direct sensuality, no refinement, popular eroticism. But here again, let’s go on to the list of words with a frequency of one. Look, for example:
ashamed, shame, shamed, shameful, shameless, shames, shaming, vegetables, verify, vermouth, virgins… “You see? A guilt complex, pure and simple! A valuable indication: the critical inquiry can start with that, establish some working hypotheses… What did I tell you? Isn’t this a quick, effective system?”
The idea that Lotaria reads my books in this way creates some problems for me. Now, every time I write a word, I see it spun around by the electronic brain, ranked
according to its frequency, next to other words whose identity I cannot know, and so I wonder how many times I have used it, I feel the whole responsibility of writing weigh on those isolated syllables, I try to imagine what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that I have used this word once or fifty times. Maybe it would be better for me to erase it… But whatever other word I try to use seems unable to withstand the test… Perhaps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alphabetical order, an avalanche of isolated words which expresses that truth I still do not know, and from which the computer, reversing its program, could construct the book, my book.
I have encountered the sister of that Lotaria who is writing a thesis on me. She came unannounced, as if she were passing the house by chance. She said, “I am Ludmilla. I have read all your novels.”
Aware that she didn’t want to know authors personally, I was surprised to see her. She said her sister always had a partial view of things; for this reason, too, after Lotaria had spoken to her of our meetings, she wanted to check in person, as if to confirm my existence, since I correspond to her ideal model of writer.
This ideal model—to say it in her words—is the author who produces books “as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins.” She also used other metaphors of natural processes that follow their course unperturbed—the wind that shapes the mountain, the wrack of the tides, the annual circles in the bole of trees—but these were metaphors of literary creation in general, whereas the image of the pumpkin referred directly to me.
“Are you angry with your sister?” I asked her, feeling in her words a polemical tone, as of someone accustomed to sustaining her own opinions in argument with others.
“No, with somebody else whom you also know,” she said.
Without too much effort I was able to elicit the story behind her visit. Ludmilla is the friend, or the ex-friend, of that translator Marana, for whom literature is more worthwhile the more it consists of elaborate devices, a complex of cogs, tricks, traps.
“And, in your opinion, what I do is different?”
“I’ve always thought that you write the way some animals dig holes or build anthills or make beehives.”
“I’m not sure what you say is very flattering for me,” I replied. “In any case, here, now that you see me, I hope you haven’t been disappointed. Do I correspond to the image you had formed of Silas Flannery?”
“I’m not disappointed. On the contrary. But not because you correspond to an image: because you are an absolutely ordinary person, as I was expecting, in fact.”
“My novels give you the idea of an ordinary person?”
“No, you see … The novels of Silas Flannery are something so well characterized … it seems they were already there before, before you wrote them, in all their details… It’s as if they passed through you, using you because you know how to write, since, after all, there has to be somebody to write them… I wish I could watch you while you’re writing, to see if it really is like that…”
I feel a stab of pain. For this girl I am nothing but an impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world that exists independently of me. God help me if she knew that I no longer have anything of what she imagines: neither expressive energy nor something to express.
“What do you think you would be able to see? I can’t write if somebody is watching me …” I reply.
She explains that she believes she has understood this: the truth of literature consists only in the physicality of the act of writing.
“The physicality of the act…” These words start whirling in my mind, become associated with images I try in
vain to dispel. “The physicality of existing,” I stammer. “There, you see, I am here, I am a man who exists, facing you, your physical presence…” And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller.
“Communication can be established at various levels,” I start explaining; I approach her with movements surely a bit hasty, but the visual and tactile images whirling in my mind urge me to eliminate all separation and all delay.
Ludmilla struggles, frees herself. “Why, what are you doing, Mr. Flannery? That isn’t the point! You’re mistaken!”
True, I could have made my passes with a bit more style, but at this point it’s too late for amends: it’s all or nothing now. I continue chasing her around the desk, uttering sentences whose complete foolishness I recognize, such as, “Perhaps you think I’m too old, but on the contrary …”
“It’s all a misunderstanding, Mr. Flannery,” Ludmilla says, and stops, placing between us the bulk of Webster’s International Dictionary. “I could easily make love with you; you’re a nice, pleasant-looking gentleman. But this would have no relevance to the problem we were discussing… It would have nothing to do with the author Silas Flannery whose novels I read… As I was explaining to you, you are two separate persons, whose relationships cannot interact… I have no doubt that you are concretely this person and not another, though I do find you very similar to many men I have known, but the one who interested me was the other, the Silas Flannery who
exists in the works of Silas Flannery, independently of you, here…”
I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I sit down. Something in me has gone: perhaps the ego, perhaps the content of the ego. But wasn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t depersonalization what I was trying to achieve?
Perhaps Marana and Ludmilla came to tell me the same thing, but I do not know whether it is a liberation or a condemnation. Why have they come to see me particularly, at the moment when I feel most chained to myself, as in a prison?
The moment Ludmilla left I rushed to the spyglass to find solace in the sight of the woman in the deck chair. But she was not there. I began to wonder: what if she were the same one who came to see me? Perhaps it is always and only she who is at the source of all my problems. Perhaps there is a plot to keep me from writing, in which Ludmilla and her sister and the translator are all involved.
“The novels that attract me most,” Ludmilla said, “are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.”
I do not understand whether she has said this to explain what attracts her in my novels, or whether it is what she would like to find in my novels and does not.
The quality of perennial dissatisfaction seems to me characteristic of Ludmilla: it seems to me that her preferences change overnight and today reflect only her restlessness (but in coming back to see me, she seems to have forgotten everything that happened yesterday).
“With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley,” I told her. “I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting.”
“How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?”
“Calm.”
“Then she reads upsetting books.”
I told Ludmilla the strange ideas that come to me about my manuscripts: how they disappear, return, are no longer what they were before. She told me to be very careful: there is a plot of the apocryphers which has its ramifications everywhere. I asked her if the leader of the plot was her ex-friend.
“Conspiracies always escape from the hands of their leaders,” she answered, evasively.
Apocrypha (from the Greek apokryphos, hidden, secret): (1) originally referring to the “secret books” of religious sects; later to texts not recognized as canonical in those religions which have established a canon of revealed writings; (2) referring to texts falsely attributed to a period or to an author.
Thus the dictionaries. Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.
I would like to find Ermes Marana again to propose we go into partnership and flood the world with apocrypha. But where is Marana now? Has he gone back to Japan? I try to make Ludmilla talk about him, hoping she will say something specific. According to her, for his activity the counterfeiter needs to hide in territories where novelists are numerous and productive, so he can camouflage his falsifications, mixing them with a flourishing production of genuine raw materials.
“So he’s gone back to Japan, then?” But Ludmilla seems
unaware of any connection between Japan and that man. She places the secret base of the treacherous translator’s machinations in quite a different part of the globe. According to his latest messages, Ermes has covered his tracks somewhere near the Cordillera of the Andes. Ludmilla, in any case, is interested in only one thing: that he remain far away. She had taken refuge in these mountains to elude him; now that she is sure of not encountering him, she can go home.
“You mean you’re about to leave?” I ask her.
“Tomorrow morning,” she tells me.
The news gives me a great sadness. Suddenly I feel alone.
I have spoken again with the flying-saucer observers. This time it was they who came to see me, to check whether by chance I had written the book dictated by the extraterrestrials.
“No, but I know where this book can be found,” I said, approaching the spyglass. For some time I have had the idea that the interplanetary book could be the one the girl in the deck chair is reading.
On the familiar terrace the girl was not to be seen. Disappointed, I was shifting the spyglass around the valley when I saw, seated on a rocky ledge, a man in city clothes, intent on reading a book. The coincidence was so timely that it was not unwarranted to think of an extraterrestrial intervention.
“There’s the book you’re after,” I said to those youngsters, handing them the spyglass trained on the stranger.
One by one they put an eye to the lens, then exchanged some looks, thanked me, and went out.
I have received a visit from a Reader, who came to submit to me a problem that upsets him: he has found two copies of my book In a network of lines that et cetera,
identical on the outside, but containing two different novels. One is the story of a professor who cannot bear to hear the telephone ring, the other is the story of a billionaire who collects kaleidoscopes. Unfortunately, he was unable to tell me much more, and he was unable to show me the volumes, because before he could finish them, both were stolen, the second less than a kilometer from here.
He was still distraught over this strange episode; he told me that before presenting himself at my home he wanted to make sure I was in, and at the same time he wanted to continue reading the book, in order to discuss it with me with complete self-confidence; so with the book in his hand he had sat down on a rocky ledge from which he could keep an eye on my chalet. At a certain point he found himself surrounded by a troop of lunatics who flung themselves on the book. Around this book his insane captors improvised a kind of ritual, one of them holding it up and the others contemplating it with profound devotion. Heedless of his protests, they then ran off into the wood, taking the volume with them.
“These valleys teem with odd characters,” I said to him, to calm him. “Don’t give that book any more thought, sir; you haven’t lost anything important: it was a fake, produced in Japan. To exploit illegally the success that my novels enjoy in the world, an unscrupulous Japanese firm disseminates books with my name on the cover which, however, are really plagiarisms from little-known Japanese authors of novels that, having had no success, were sent to be pulped. After much investigation, I have managed to unmask this fraud of which both I and the plagiarized authors are the victims.”
“Actually, I rather liked that novel I was reading,” the Reader confesses, “and I regret not having been able to follow the story to the end.”
“If that’s your only problem, I can tell you the source:
it is a Japanese novel, summarily adapted, with Western names given to true characters and places. The original is On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka, an author, for that matter, who is more than worthy. I can give you an English translation, to compensate you for your loss.”
I picked up the volume, which was on my desk, and gave it to him, after sealing it in an envelope, so he would not be tempted to leaf through it and thus would not immediately realize it had nothing in common with In a network of lines that intersect or with any other novel of mine, apocryphal or genuine.
“I knew there were false Flannerys around,” the Reader said, “and I was already convinced that at least one of those two was a fake. But what can you tell me about the other?”
Perhaps it was unwise for me to go on informing this man of my problems. I tried to save the situation with a witticism: “The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.”
The Reader confined himself to a polite little smile, then turned grave again and said, “Mr. Flannery, I know who’s behind this business: it’s not the Japanese, it’s a certain Ermes Marana, who has started the whole thing from jealousy over a young woman whom you know, Ludmilla Vipiteno.”
“Why have you come to see me, then?” I replied. “Go to that gentleman and ask him how things stand.” I began to suspect that between the Reader and Ludmilla there was a bond, and this was enough to make my voice take on a hostile tone.
“I have no choice,” the Reader agreed. “I have, in fact, the opportunity to make a business trip to the area where he is, in South America, and I will take advantage of it to look for him.”
I was not interested in informing him that, to my
knowledge, Ermes Marana works for the Japanese and the headquarters of his apocrypha is in Japan. For me the important thing was for this nuisance to go as far away as possible from Ludmilla: so I encouraged him to make his trip and to undertake the most careful search until he found the ghost translator.
The Reader is beset by mysterious coincidences. He told me that, for some time, and for the most disparate reasons, he has had to interrupt his reading of novels after a few pages.
“Perhaps they bore you,” I said, with my usual tendency toward pessimism.
“On the contrary, I am forced to stop reading just when they become most gripping. I can’t wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me…”
“Which instead is terribly boring,” I suggest.
“No, even more gripping. But I can’t manage to finish this one, either. And so on.”
“Your case gives me new hope,” I said to him. “With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.”
I have pondered my last conversation with that Reader. Perhaps his reading is so intense that it consumes all the substance of the novel at the start, so nothing remains for the rest. This happens to me in writing: for some time now, every novel I begin writing is exhausted shortly after the beginning, as if I had already said everything I have to say.
I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he
can’t go beyond the beginning… He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged…
I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader … I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary…
But I wouldn’t want the young lady Reader, in escaping the Counterfeiter, to end up in the arms of the Reader. I will see to it that the Reader sets out on the trail of the Counterfeiter, hiding in some very distant country, so the Writer can remain alone with the young lady, the Other Reader.
To be sure, without a female character, the Reader’s journey would lose liveliness: he must encounter some other woman on his way. Perhaps the Other Reader could have a sister…
Actually, it seems the Reader really is about to leave. He will take with him On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka, to read on his journey.