On Literature

INTERTEXTUAL IRONY AND LEVELS OF READING

I apologize if in the course of this talk I will have to quote, among my various examples, some that come from my own work as a storyteller as well, but I shall have to dwell on certain characteristics of so-called postmodern narrative, which some literary critics and theoreticians, in particular Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Remo Ceserani,^* have found to be not only present in my fiction but also explicitly theorized in my Reflections on "The Name of the Rose." These features are metanarrative, dialogism (in Bakhtin's sense, in which, as I said in the Reflections, texts talk to one another), "double coding," and intertextual irony.

Although I do not yet know what exactly the postmodern is, nevertheless I have to admit that the above-mentioned characteristics are present in my novels. However, I would want to distinguish between them, because it often happens that these are understood as four aspects of the same textual strategy.

***

Metanarrative, inasmuch as it is a reflection that the text carries out on itself and its own nature, or the intrusion of the authorial voice reflecting on what it is narrating, and perhaps appealing to the reader to share its reflections, is much more ancient than the postmodern. Deep down, metanarrative in this sense is already present in Homer's "Sing, Muse...," and—to come closer to our own time—is evident in Manzoni's reflections, for instance, on the suitability of talking about love in the novel. I admit that in the modern novel metanarrative strategy is present with greater insistence, and it has happened to me that, in order to highlight the reflection the text is carrying out on itself, I have turned to what I would call "artificial dialogism," namely, the fiction of a manuscript on which the narrating voice reflects, and tries to decipher and judge at the very moment when it is narrating (but as is all too clear, this strategy, too, was already present in Manzoni).

Even dialogism, especially in its most obvious form of "citationism," is neither a postmodern vice nor virtue; otherwise Bakhtin would never have been able to discuss it so far ahead of its time. In Purgatorio canto 26 Dante meets a poet who begins "freely to say:"

Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,

qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

leu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan...

(So much does your courteous request please me,

that I cannot and do not want to conceal myself from you.

I am Arnaut, who weeps and goes on his way singing...)

Dante's contemporary reader would have recognized easily that this Arnaut was Arnaut Daniel, but only and precisely because he is brought on stage speaking Provençal (and with lines that, although invented by Dante, are modeled on the troubador tradition). The reader (whether modern or of that time) who is incapable of recognizing this kind of intertextual quotation is excluded from an understanding of the text.

Let us now come to so-called double coding. The man who coined the expression was Charles Jencks, for whom postmodern architecture

speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life.^* The postmodern building or work of art addresses simultaneously a minority, elite public, using "high" codes, and a mass public using popular codes.^†

This idea can be understood in many ways. In architecture we all know examples of so-called postmodernism, which abound in quotations from the Renaissance or baroque, or some other epoch, blending "high" cultural models into an ensemble that nevertheless turns out to be pleasing and imaginative also for the popular user—often to the detriment of functionality and while reinstating the value of decoration and ornamentation. For instance, there are countless allusions to and components of extreme avant-gardism present in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which nevertheless also attracts visitors who have no knowledge of architectural history but who nonetheless say (as the statistics also show) they "like it." In any case, this element was also present in the music of the Beatles, which was also—and not accidentally—arranged in Purcell's style (in an unforgettable disk by Cathy Berberian) precisely because these melodies, so tuneful and pleasant, used cultured phrasing and echoes of other times, which are noticeable to the educated ear.

Examples of double coding can be found today in many advertisements, which are constructed like experimental texts that at one stage would have been understandable to only small groups of cineasts, and which nevertheless attract all types of spectators because of their various "popular" motifs, such as the allusion to erotic situations, the appeal of a well-known face, the rhythm of the editing, the musical accompaniment.

Many works of literature, because of their rediscovery of typical novel plots, have been appreciated even by the wider public, which ought to have been put off by avant-garde stylistic elements, such as the use of interior monologue, metanarrative play, the plurality of voices that are nested inside each other in the course of the narration, the unhinging of temporal sequences, leaps in stylistic register, intermingling of third- and first-person narration, and free indirect speech.

But this seems to mean only that one of the characteristics of so-called postmodernism is to provide stories that are capable of attracting a wide public even though they employ learned allusions and "arty" stylistic devices; in other words (in the most successful cases) if they can blend the two components in a nontraditional way. It is undoubtedly an interesting feature, and it is no accident that it has aroused perplexed attempts at explanations from theoreticians of the so-called quality best seller, a work that pleases even though it contains some artistic virtues and involves the reader in problems and procedures that were once the exclusive prerogative of high literature.

It has never been clear whether a quality best seller is to be understood as a popular novel that uses some "cultured" strategies, or as a "cultured" novel that for some mysterious reason becomes popular. In the first case the phenomenon should be explained in terms of a structural analysis of the work, concluding, for example, that its appeal to popular taste is due, say, to the reworking of a "plot," maybe a thriller plot, that hooks the reader and allows him to overcome the stylistic or structural difficulties. In the second case the phenomenon comes under the rubric of reception aesthetics, or, rather, reception sociology. One ought, for instance, to say that a quality best seller depends not on the poetics of the project but on a transformation of the reading public's tendencies, seeing that (i) one cannot underestimate the growth of a category of "popular" readers who, sated with "easy" and instantly consolatory texts, realize the fascination of works that challenge them to a more demanding though somehow more satisfying experience, and agree to reread them several times; and (ii) many readers, whom the publishing industry obstinately still considers "naive," have absorbed many of the techniques of contemporary literature through various channels, and consequently feel less embarrassed when faced with a quality best seller than some sociologists of literature.

In this sense the quality best seller appears to be a phenomenon that is as old as the world. Certainly The Divine Comedy was a quality best seller, if we are to give credence to the legends that say Dante took revenge on the blacksmith who sang his poetry badly (even if he did sing it badly, the fact is he sang it and therefore knew it). Shakespeare was also a quality best seller, judging by the size of the audience that followed him, even though they did not perhaps catch many of his subtleties and recycling of previous texts. Manzoni's The Betrothed was also a best seller, even though, with its at times essaylike qualities, it conceded very little to the tastes of those who had up until then fed themselves on gothic novels and popular romances—and yet it was the victim of countless pirated editions, and Manzoni was persuaded to accommodate popular tastes by personally supervising Gonin's illustrations for the 1840 edition. In fact, when you think carefully about it, the definition of quality best seller applies to all the great works that have come down to us in multiple manuscripts and printed editions on the wave of a success that has affected more than an elite readership, from the Aeneid to Orlando Furioso to Pinocchio. Consequently, this is not a unique phenomenon but a recurrent one in the history of art and literature, even if it must be accounted for in a different way in each individual age.

Now, in order to underline the differences between double coding and intertextual irony, allow me to reflect on my personal experience as a writer. The Name of the Rose begins by telling how the author came across an ancient manuscript. We are in full citationism here, since the topos of the rediscovered manuscript is of venerable antiquity, and as a direct consequence we immediately enter the area of double coding: if the reader wants to get access to the story as it is told, he has to accept some quite learned observations as well as a metanarrative technique raised to the nth degree, because not only is the author inventing out of the blue a text that he can dialogue with, but he is presenting it as a nineteenth-century, neo-Gothic version of the original manuscript, which went back to the end of the fourteenth century. The "popular" reader cannot enjoy the narrative that follows unless he has agreed to this game of Chinese boxes of sources, which confers on the story an aura of ambiguity stemming from the fact that the source is uncertain.

But, if you remember, the title on the page that talks about the manuscript is "Naturally, a Manuscript." That "Naturally" has various resonances, because on the one hand it is intended to stress that we are dealing with a literary topos, and on the other it lays bare an "anxiety of influence," since the reference is intended to be (at least for an Italian reader) to Manzoni, who begins his novel with a seventeenth-century manuscript. How many readers will have grasped or could grasp the various ironic resonances in that "Naturally"? And supposing they have not grasped them, will they still have access to the rest of the story without losing much of its flavor? So we see that that "Naturally" suggests what intertextual irony is.

Let us return to the various characteristics attributed to postmodern fiction. As far as metanarrative is concerned, it is impossible for the reader not to notice metanarrative observations. He might feel disturbed by them, he might ignore (or skip) them, but he notices they are there. The same goes for explicit citationism, as in the Dante example. The reader might not realize that Arnaut Daniel is speaking in his own poetic language, but he will notice that he is speaking in a language that is not that of the Comedy, and that therefore Dante is quoting something else, even if it is only the Provençal way of speaking.

When we come to double coding, we can have (and this tells us how many different profiles this notion can assume): (i) a reader who does not accept the mixture of cultured and popular styles and contents, and who therefore refuses to read it, precisely because he recognizes this mixture; (ii) a reader who feels at home precisely because he enjoys this process of alternating between difficulty and approachability, challenge and encouragement; and lastly (iii) a reader who perceives the entire text as a pleasant invitation and does not in the end realize the extent to which it draws on elite styles (so he enjoys the work, but misses its references).

It is only this third case that introduces us to the strategy of intertextual irony. Faced with that "Naturally," whoever appreciates its wink establishes a privileged relationship with the text (or the narrating voice); whoever does not continues to read all the same—and will be faced with two choices: either he will understand through his own capacities that the manuscript business must be a literary artifice (he manages to appreciate the game for the first time, thus "growing" as a competent reader), or, as many have done, he will write to the author asking whether that intriguing manuscript really does exist. But one thing should be made clear: in cases, for example, of double coding in architecture, the visitor might not notice that a colonnade with a tympanum is quoting from Greek architecture, but he nevertheless enjoys the harmony and ordered multiplicity of that construction. On the other hand, the reader who does not grasp my "Naturally" knows only that he is reading about a manuscript, but misses the reference and its playful irony.

A work can abound in quotations from other texts without necessarily being an instance of intertextual irony. Just to take one example, The Waste Land requires pages and pages of notes to identify its references not only to the world of literature but also to history and cultural anthropology, but Eliot deliberately provides the notes because he cannot imagine a naive reader who could miss every single reference and yet enjoy his text in a satisfactory manner. I would say that his notes are an integral part of the text. Of course, uncultured readers could limit their appreciation of the text to its rhythm, its sound, to the hint of ghostliness that appears on the level of content, with a vague knowledge that there is something else there, and enjoying the text like someone eavesdropping at a half-open door, glimpsing only hints of a promising epiphany. But for Eliot (I believe) these would be readers who have not yet grown up, not the Model Readers that he aimed at and wanted to form.

But cases of intertextual irony are different, and precisely because of this they characterize literary forms that, however erudite, can also enjoy popular success: the text can be read in a naive way, without appreciating the intertextual references, or it can be read in the full awareness of them, or at least with the conviction that one has to go looking for them. For an extreme example, let us imagine we had to read the Don Quixote that was rewritten by Borges's Pierre Menard (and that Menard's text can be interpreted differently from Cervantes's text, at least to the extent that Borges claimed). Whoever has not heard of Cervantes would enjoy a fascinating story, a series of mock-heroic adventures whose flavor comes across despite the not very modern Castilian in which they are written. But those who catch the constant reference to Cervantes's text will be able to appreciate not only the correspondences between the original and Menard's text but also the constant and inevitable irony of the latter.

Unlike more general cases of double coding, intertextual irony, by bringing into play the possibility of a double reading, does not invite all readers to the same party. It selects them, and privileges the more intertextually aware readers, but it does not exclude the less aware. If an author happens to introduce a character saying "Paris à nous deux" the naive reader does not identify the allusion to Balzac and yet can become passionately interested all the same in a character who is keen on challenges and boldness. The informed reader, on the other hand, "gets" the reference and savors its irony—not only the author's cultured wink, but also the effects of lowering the tone or changing the meaning (when the quotation is inserted into a context that is totally different from that of the source), the general allusion to the endless dialogue that goes on between texts.

If we had to explain the phenomenon of intertextual irony to a first-year university student, or at any rate to someone who is not in the know, we would perhaps have to tell him that, thanks to this citation strategy, a text presents two levels of reading. But if, instead of someone not in the know, we found ourselves facing someone who was a habitué of literary theory, we could be put on the spot by two possible questions.

First question: so then does "intertextual irony" not perhaps have something to do with the fact that a text can have not just two but four different levels of reading, namely, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels, as is taught in Bible hermeneutics and as Dante claims for his own poem in the Letter to Cangrande?

Second question: but does "intertextual irony" not perhaps have something to do with the two model readers that textual semi-otics, and in particular Eco, talk about, the first one known as the semantic reader and the second as the critical or aesthetic reader?

I will try to demonstrate that we are dealing with three quite distinct phenomena. But replying to these two apparently naive questions is not a poindess exercise, because as we shall see, we are facing a cluster of relationships that are not easy to disentangle.

Let us move to the first question, namely, to the theory of the multiple senses of a text. We do not need to think of the four senses of scripture; we just have to think of the moral meaning of fables: of course, a naive reader can interpret the fable of the wolf and the lamb as a quarrel among animals, but even if the author was not keen to tell us "de te fabula narratur" (the story is about you), it would be very difficult not to glimpse some parable in it, a universal moral lesson, just as happens with the parables in the Gospels themselves.

This joint presence of a literal and a moral sense informs all fiction, even fiction that is least concerned with educating its readers, as might be the case with a cheap police thriller: even from this kind of story the clever and sensitive reader could draw a series of moral teachings, such as that crime doesn't pay, that your deeds will find you out, that law and order are bound to triumph in the end, that human reason can succeed in unraveling the most complex mysteries.

It could even be said that in certain works the moral sense is so identical with the literal one as to constitute the only meaning. But even in so obviously moralizing a novel as The Betrothed, the risk of the reader getting only the story and missing the ethical lesson forces Manzoni to insert proverbial observations here and there, precisely in order that those who devour neo-Gothic plots of garish hue are not satisfied with the kidnaping of Lucia or the death of Don Rodrigo, and thereby risk the possibility of neglecting the message about Providence.

What is the real autonomy of these levels, when there is more than one of them? Can one read The Divine Comedy without grasping its anagogic message? I would say that that is what so much Romantic criticism did. Can one read the procession at the end of Purgatorio without apprehending its allegorical dimension? A good surrealist reading of it could do so. And as for Paradiso, Beatrice smiles and radiates so much that she would enchant any reader who ignores the upper levels of meaning, and some critics, inspired by criteria of pure lyricity, told us that we had to ignore these disturbing overlays of meaning in the poem as though they were totally unconnected and had to be removed.^*

One could then say that those levels of reading that depend on overlays of sense can either be activated or not, depending on the historical epoch in question, and sometimes they become totally unfathomable, as can happen not only with texts from very ancient civilizations but, for instance, with many paintings of not so long ago, where—apart from those who are iconographers or iconologists—visitors to museums (and even critics who rely solely on the visual) enjoy Giorgione or Poussin without knowing what obscure mythologies their images refer to (though we are convinced that Panofksy enjoyed them even more, since he was able to read them at both levels, at the level of form and at the level of iconographical reference).

The answer to the second question is quite different. I have repeatedly built theories around the fact that a text (and particularly a text with an aesthetic aim, and in the present case a narrative text) tends to construct two Model Readers. It addresses in the first place a Model Reader of the first level, whom we will call the semantic reader, the reader who wants to know (and rightly so) how the story will end (whether Ahab will capture the whale, whether Leopold Bloom will meet Stephen Dedalus, after having accidentally crossed his path on a number of occasions in the course of 16 June 1904, whether Pinocchio will become a real flesh-and-blood boy, or whether Proust's Narrator will manage to settle his accounts with Lost Time). But the text also addresses a Model Reader of the second level, whom we will call the semiotic or aesthetic reader, who asks himself what kind of reader that particular story was asking him to become, and wants to know how the Model Author who is instructing him step by step will proceed. To put it bluntly, the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated. To find out how the story will end one usually just has to read the text once. To become a second-level model reader one has to read it several times, and some stories have to be read countless times.

There is no such thing as an exclusively second-level model reader; on the contrary, in order to become one, you have to have been a good first-level reader. Whoever has read The Betrothed and has not felt even the slightest shudder when Lucia sees L'Innominato appear in front of her cannot appreciate the way Manzoni's novel has been constructed. But it is certainly the case that you can be a first-level reader without ever reaching the second level, as happens with those who are equally enthused by The Betrothed and. Gargantua without realizing that the latter is much richer in lexical terms than the former; or as happens with those who, not unreasonably, get bored reading Hypnerotomachia Poliphili because amid all those made-up words it is impossible to understand how things will turn out.

On close examination it is in the play between these two levels of reading that we can observe the two ways of understanding catharsis in Aristotle's Poetics, and in aesthetics in general: for we know that there is either a homeopathic or an allopathic interpretation of catharsis. In the first case catharsis stems from the fact that the spectator of a tragedy is genuinely seized by pity and terror, even to the point of paroxysm, so much so that in suffering these two passions he is purged of them, and emerges liberated by the tragic experience; in the second case the tragic text places us at a distance from the passion that is represented in it, through an almost Brechtian kind of estrangement, and we are liberated from passion not by experiencing it but by appreciating the way it is represented. You can easily see that for a homeopathic catharsis a first-level reader is sufficient (this is, after all, the kind of reader that cries when the cavalry arrives in a Western), whereas for an allopathic catharsis one needs a second-level reader—and this is what, perhaps erroneously, makes people attribute a greater degree of philosophical dignity, a more purified and purifying vision of art, to allopathic catharsis, whereas the homeopathic theory becomes linked to the celebration of Corybantism and the Eleusinian mysteries with their perfumes and drugs, or to the celebration of Saturday-night fever.

We should beware of understanding this distinction of levels as though on one side there were an easily satisfied reader, only interested in the story, and on the other a reader with an extremely refined palate, concerned above all with language. If that were so, we would have to read The Count of Monte Cristo on the first level, becoming totally enthralled by it, and maybe even shedding hot tears at every turn, and then on the second level we would have to realize, as is only right, that from a stylistic point of view it is very badly written, and to conclude therefore that it is a terrible novel. Instead, the miracle of works like The Count of Monte Cristo is that, while being very badly written, they are still masterpieces of fiction. Consequently the second-level reader is not only he who recognizes that the novel is badly written but also the one who is aware that, despite this, its narrative structure is perfect, the archetypes are all in the right place, the coups-de-scène judged. to perfection, its breadth (though at times stretched to breaking point) almost Homeric in scope—so much so that to criticize The Count of Monte Cristo because of its language would be like criticizing Verdi's operas because his librettists, Francesco Maria Piave and Salvatore Cammarano, were not poets like Leo-pardi. The second-level reader is then also the person who realizes how the work manages to function brilliantly at the first level.

However, it is certainly at this second level of critical reading that one is able to decide whether the text has two or more levels of meaning, whether it is worthwhile looking for an allegorical sense, or whether the tale is also saying something about the reader—and whether these different senses blend together in a solid, harmonious form or whether they can float about independently of one another. It is the second-level reader who will decide that it is difficult to decouple the literal from the moral sense in the fable of the wolf and the lamb (as though it were pointless without the moral sense to tell the story of that diatribe between animals). On the other hand, one can read with enjoyment and reverence the psalm "In exitu Israel de Aegypto / domus Iacob depopulo barbaro /facta est Iudaea sanctificatio eius, / Israel potestas eius" (When Israel went forth from Egypt, / the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, / Judah became his sanctuary, / Israel his dominion), even without knowing that in anagogic terms the verses mean, among other things, that the sanctified soul will emerge from the enslavement of earthly corruption toward the freedom of eternal glory—and then the second-level reader will go and find out if the psalmist's text really did mean this as well.

There are certainly many analogies between the aesthetically and critically aware second-level reader and the reader who, faced with examples of intertextual irony, catches the references to the universe of literature. But the two positions cannot be identical. Let us take some examples.

In the fable about the wolf and the lamb there are two senses (one literal, one moral), and certainly two readers: the first-level reader who understands not just the story (the literal sense) but also the moral, and the reader who recognizes the stylistic and narrative merits of Phaedrus as teller of fables. But there is no intertextual irony because Phaedrus is not quoting anyone—or if he does cite a previous fabulist, he simply copies him. Homer's Ulysses kills the suitors: just one meaning, but two readers—one who enjoys Ulysses' revenge and one who enjoys Homers art—but no intertextual irony. In Joyce's Ulysses there are two meanings in the biblical-Dantesque mode (Bloom's story as an allegory of Ulysses' story), but it is very difficult not to notice that the story retraces the steps of Ulysses' wanderings, and if someone did not notice this, the tide would offer him a clue. The two levels of reading still remain open, since one could read Ulysses just to know how the story ends—even though such a limited and limiting form of reading is highly improbable (in fact, it is exaggeratedly wasteful), and it would be advisable to stop the experiment after the first chapter and turn to more instantly rewarding stories. It is impossible to read Finnegans Wake except as a huge intertextual laboratory—unless you want to read it out loud to enjoy it as pure music. There are more than the four meanings of Holy Scripture here: they are infinite, or at least indefinite. The first-level reader follows the one or two possible readings of each single pun, then breathlessly comes to a halt, gets lost, moves to the second level to admire the cleverness of an unexpected and insoluble combination of etymologies and possible readings, gets lost again, and so on. Finnegans Wake does not help us to understand the distinctions we are talking about but, rather, puts them all into question, and confuses our ideas. But it does so without deceiving the naive reader by allowing him to proceed without noticing the game he is caught up in. Instead it grabs him by the throat and kicks him out the back door.

In attempting these definitions, one notices, I think, that the plurality of meanings is a phenomenon that is set up in a text even if the author was not thinking about it at all and has done nothing to encourage a reading on a multiplicity of levels. The worst hack telling stories of blood, horror, or death, or of sex and violence, cannot avoid leaving a moral sense fluctuating in the text, even if it is none other than the celebration of indifference toward evil, or of sex and violence as the only values worth pursuing.

The same can be said of the two levels of reading, the semantic and the aesthetic. In the end this possibility exists even for railway timetables. Two different timetables give me the same information on a semantic level, but I might value the first as better organized and easier to consult than the second, thus moving on to a judgment about their organization and functionality that looks more at the how than the what.

This does not happen with intertextual irony. Unless one goes looking for plagiarism or unconscious intertextual echoes, usually reading as a form of hunt-the-quotation exists in the form of a challenge between the reader and a text (leaving aside the author's intentions): the text somehow solicits the discovery of its secret dialogue with other texts.

As an author of novels that play very much on intertextual quotation, I am always happy for the reader to catch the reference, the wink; but, without calling the empirical author into question, whoever has recognized, let's say, in The Island of the Day Before nods in the direction of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (for instance, the opening question about whether it was an island or a continent) must want other readers also to notice this allusion in the text.

Of course, if there is intertextual irony, it is because one must admit as legitimate even the reading of those who only want to follow the plot about a shipwreck and who do not know whether he has landed on an island or a continent. The duty of the aesthetic reader is to decide that even that first kind of reading is independent and legitimate, and that the text allows it. If in the same novel I introduce a double, I admit that there is a reader who will be amazed and excited by this situation, but I obviously am aspiring to a reader who realizes that the presence of a double is almost obligatory in a baroque novel.

When in Foucault's Pendulum the protagonist, Casaubon, spends his last night in Paris at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, he sees, from below, this construction as a monstrous being and becomes almost hypnotized by it. To write that passage I did two things: On the one hand, I spent some nights underneath the tower, trying to put myself at the center of its "paws" and to look at it from all possible angles, but always from the bottom upward. On the other hand, I looked up all the literary passages that had been written about the tower, especially while it was being built; these were mostly indignant, violent attacks on it, and what my protagonist sees and feels is a highly worked collage of a whole range of texts in both prose and verse. I was not anticipating that my reader could find all these quotations (and I myself am now unable to identify them and distinguish between them), but I certainly wanted the more subtle readers to sense the shadow of something déjà vu. At the same time I allowed the naive reader to live through the same sensations I had experienced at the foot of the tower, even though he did not know that they were bolstered with so much previous literature.

It is pointless concealing the fact that it is not the author but the text that privileges the intertextual reader over the naive one. Intertextual irony is a "classist" selector. You can have a snobbish reading of the Bible that is satisfied only by its literal sense, or at most appreciates the rhythmic beauty of the Hebrew text or of the Latin Vulgate (thus certainly bringing into play the aesthetic reader), but there cannot be a snobbish reading of an intertextually ironic text that ignores its dialogical element. Intertextual irony calls together the happy few—except that the more there are of these happy few, the happier they will be.

However, when a text unleashes the mechanism of intertextual irony, it has to expect that it will not produce just the allusions intended by the author, since the possibility of having a double reading depends on the breadth of the readers own textual ency clopedia, and this encyclopedia varies from reader to reader. In a conference held in Louvain in 1999, Inge Lanslots made a number of very acute observations on the many allusions to Verne that run throughout The Island of the Day Before, and she was certainly right in this. In the course of her oral presentation she found references to another novel by Verne (that I was frankly unaware of) where many mechanical clocks are described, as in my novel. I did not mean to use the intentions of the empirical author as a parameter for validating interpretations of the text, but I had to reply that the reader ought to recognize the many quotations from baroque literature that are scattered throughout that text. Now the topos of mechanical clocks is typically baroque (just think of Lubrano's poems). It is difficult to ask a foreign critic who is not a specialist in Italian baroque literature to recognize one of its minor poets, and I admitted that her approach was not, so to speak, prohibited. If one goes hunting subterranean allusions, it is difficult to say whether the person that is right is the author who was unaware of them or the reader who has found them. However, I pointed out that recognizing an allusion to baroque literature went with the grain of the general characteristics of the text, whereas identifying an allusion to Verne, at that point, did not lead anywhere.

In any case, the discussion clearly convinced the speaker, because I cannot find any trace of her observation in the proceedings of that conference.^*

There are other cases where it is much more difficult to keep a check on the reader's encyclopedia. In Foucault's Pendulum I named the hero Casaubon, and I was thinking of Isaac Casaubon, the man who stripped the Corpus Hermeticum of its mythical status with impeccable critical arguments. My ideal second-level reader, who has access to intertextual irony, could identify a certain analogy between what the great philologist understood and what my character understands at the end of the novel. I was conscious of the fact that few readers would be able to recognize the allusion, and I believed that this was not essential in terms of textual strategy (in other words, one can read my novel and understand my Casaubon even without knowing about the historical Casaubon).

Before finishing my novel, I discovered by chance that Casaubon was also a character in Middlemarch; I had read this novel some time before, but that detail of nomenclature had left no trace in my memory. In certain cases the Model Author wants to ration interpretations that seem pointless to him, and I made an effort to eliminate a possible reference to George Eliot. Thus on [>] there is the following dialogue between Belbo and Casaubon:

"By the way, what's your name?"

"Casaubon."

"Casaubon. Wasn't he a character in Middlemarch?"

"I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we are not related."

However, along came a clever reader, David Robey, who pointed out that, clearly not by chance, Eliot's Casaubon was writing a Key to All Mythologies, and I have to admit this does seem to fit my character. Later Linda Hutcheon devoted even more attention to this connection, and found other affinities between the Casaubons, which apparently increased the ironic-intertextual temperature of my novel.^* As the empirical author I can say that this analogy had never even crossed my mind, but if the format of the encyclopedia of Hutcheon the reader is such as to allow her to see this intertextual relationship, and my text encourages it, then it must be said that the operation is objectively (in the sense of culturally and socially) possible.

An analogous case is that of Foucault. My novel is entitled Foucault's Pendulum because the pendulum I talk about was invented by Léon Foucault. Had it been invented by Franklin, the title would have been Franklin's Pendulum. This time I was conscious right from the start that someone could sniff an allusion to Michel Foucault: my characters are obsessed by analogies and Foucault wrote about the four paradigms of similitude. As the empirical author, I was not very happy with this possible link because it seemed rather superficial. But the pendulum invented by Léon was the protagonist of my story, and I could not change the title, so I hoped that my Model Reader would not attempt a link with Michel. I was wrong: many readers did just that. Linda Hutcheon more than anyone else, and she actually identified precise correspondences between elements of the novel and the four figures of similitude listed by Michel Foucault in the chapter in his The Order of Things entitled "The Prose of the World." Needless to say, I had read The Order of Things when it came out in 1966, almost twenty years before starting to write my novel, and in the meantime I had come across the ghosts of analogy in the tradition of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Hermeticism, so that when I was writing I was thinking about these direct sources, or the deranged use of such sources in current texts on commercial occultism. Probably if the novel had been entitled Franklin's Pendulum, no one would have felt authorized to link the references to the theory of library classification to Michel Foucault; it would have been easier to think of Paracelsus. But I admit that the title of the book, or at any rate the name of the inventor of the eponymous pendulum, constituted too attractive a trail for a hunter of intertextual traces, and Linda Hutcheon was perfectly within her rights to find all she did find. And who knows whether, at least on the level of a psychoanalysis of the author, she is not in fact right, and that my interests in certain aspects of Hermeticism were stimulated by my early reading of Foucault (Michel).

Nevertheless, it would be interesting to establish whether my appeal to Foucault was a case of intertextual irony or simply one of unwitting influence. Up until now I have perhaps allowed people to think that intertextual irony depends on the author's intention, but I have theorized too much on the prevalence of intentio operis over intentio auctoris to allow myself to indulge in such naivete. If a possible quotation appears in the text, and this quotation seems to go with the grain of the rest of the text (and other citations from it), the intentions of the empirical author count for little. The critic (or reader) is right, then, to talk of "citationism," and of the "textual echo" (I am using another of Linda Hutcheon's terms and am not playing on my own name) that the work encourages.

The fact is that once you start playing with intertextual irony it is difficult to resist the appeal of such echoes, even though some might be totally fortuitous, like the reference to Jules Verne's clocks. Linda Hutcheon, again, cites from page 378 of the American edition of Foucault's Pendulum, "The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect," and finds an intertextual echo of E. M. Forster's "Connect, only connect." Acute critic that she is, she has the prudence to say that this "ironic play" exists in the English: for the Italian text (and it is not clear whether she had this to hand when she was writing) does not contain this intertextual reference since it says, "sospettare, sospettare sempre." The reference, which was certainly conscious, was inserted by the translator, Bill Weaver. We have to be honest, the English text does contain this echo, which means that translation can not only alter the play of intertextual irony, it can also enrich it.

In other instances you can come across the possibility of choosing between a reading that is squared and one that is cubed. In one passage from chapter 30 of the Pendulum, where the protagonists imagine that even the entire story told by the Gospels is an effect of an invention like that of the Plan they are hatching, Casaubon comments: " Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère." I do not recall what I was thinking about when I wrote this, but I probably would have been happy with the intertextual allusion to Baudelaire, which was already enriched by the allusion to the apocryphal Gospels. Linda Hutcheon, however, defines the phrase as "a parody of Baudelaire by Eliot" (in fact, if you remember, Eliot quotes this line from Baudelaire in The Waste Land), and certainly if this is so, it all becomes even richer. What are we to do? Divide readers into those who get as far as Baudelaire and those who come all the way up to Eliot? And what if there was a reader who found the "hypocrite lecteur" in Eliot, and remembered it, but did not know that Eliot was quoting Baudelaire?

Everyone noticed that The Name of the Rose begins with a quote from the Gospel according to Saint John ("In the beginning was the Word," etc.). But how many noticed that this can also be seen as a quote from the beginning of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, which opens with a (very respectful) imitation of Saint John: "In principio era il verbo appresso a Dio / ed era Iddio il verbo e il verbo lui. / Quest'era nel principio alparer mio / e nulla si pub far senza costui" (In the beginning the word was with God / and God was the Word and the Word was God. / This was in the beginning, it seems to me, / and we cannot do anything without Him)?

However, when you really think about it, how many readers did notice that my novel begins with a quotation from Saint John? I have found Japanese readers (and perhaps I did not need to go that far) who attributed those very virtuous thoughts to good old Adso, and yet despite this they did not miss the religious afflatus that animates the words of the young monk.

In fact, to be precise, intertextual irony is not, strictly speaking, a form of irony. Irony consists in saying not the opposite of the truth but the opposite of what one presumes the interlocutor thinks is true. It is ironic to define a stupid person as very intelligent, but only if the addressee knows that the person is stupid. If he does not know, then the irony is missed, and what one has is only false information. Thus irony becomes simply a lie when the addressee is not aware of the game.

On the other hand, in terms of intertextual irony, I can tell the story of a double without the addressee sensing the reference to the baroque topos, yet despite this the addressee will not have enjoyed any less this very respectable, literal story about a double. In The Island of the Day Before there are some coups-de-scène that are clearly modeled on Dumas, and my quotation of them is sometimes literal, but the reader who does not get the reference can still enjoy the coups-de-scène, even though in a naive fashion. Thus if I said previously that the game of intertextual irony is snobbish and aristocratic, I should correct myself, because it does not set up a "conventio ad excludendum" as regards the naive reader. It is like a banquet where the remains of the dinner served on the upper floor are distributed on the lower floor, but not the remains from the dinner table, rather the remains in the pot, and these are also set out nicely, and, since the naive reader thinks the feast is happening on only one floor, he will enjoy these for what they are worth (and, when all's said and done, they will be tasty and plentiful) without supposing that anyone has enjoyed more.

This is exactly what happens to the naive reader of Dante's sonnet" Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" who does not know how much its language has changed from Dante's time to ours, and what were the philosophical postulates of Dante's poetry. He will enjoy an elegant declaration of love, and will derive great gain from it just the same, both emotional and intellectual gain. This shows that my culinary analogy was perhaps provocative, but it was not intended to place art and gastronomy on the same level.

And lastly, not even the most naive of readers can pass through the meshes of the text without entertaining the suspicion that sometimes (or often) it refers to something beyond itself. Here one sees then that intertextual irony not only is not a "conventio ad excludendum," but a provocation and invitation to include, such that it can gradually transform the naive reader into a reader who begins to sense the perfume of so many other texts that have preceded the one he is reading.

Links between intertextual irony and biblical or Dantesque allegory? Some. Intertextual irony provides an intertextual second sense for readers who have been secularized and who no longer have any spiritual senses to look for in the text. The biblical and poetic second senses stemming from the theory of the four meanings allowed the text to flower vertically, each sense allowing us to approach ever closer to some Afterlife. The intertextual second sense is horizontal, labyrinthine, convoluted, and infinite, running from text to text—with no other promise than the continual murmuring of intertextuality. Intertextual irony presupposes an absolute immanentism. It provides revelations to those who have lost the sense of transcendence.

However, I would not take too seriously anyone who started to moralize about this or drew the conclusion that intertextual irony is the aesthetics of the godless. It is a technique that can be activated even by a work that then aims at inspiring spiritual second senses, or one that presents itself as a high moral lesson, or is capable of talking about death and the infinite. Remo Ceserani has kindly pointed out that my presumed postmodernism is not without a sense of melancholy and pessimism.^* This is a sign that intertextual irony does not presuppose at every turn a carefree carnival of dialogism. But it is certainly true that the text, to the extent that it is tormented, asks its reader to be aware of the rumble of intertextuality that has preceded our torments, and that author and reader also know how to unite in the mystic body of worldly Scriptures.

Revised version of a lecture given in Forli, Italy, in February 1999.