So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. (p. 9)
Different readers read the same book differently, and yes, the same reader will read different books differently. Most of us probably seek out the conventions that we have grown fond of in other books, qualities that go by names such as character, plot, tone, and setting. You know the drill. It's how successful authors develop a following, by sticking to the style or structure or formula of their last popular work and departing just enough to keep the familiar reader interested. Or not so much seek and find as wander in the woods, swim in the current, or pick one's way through the puzzle of the narrative, enjoy the layered texture of the metanarrative, or trip out on the nonlinear language of some other text not yet defined as a genre.
But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that books exist that I will still be able to read..." she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?
The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress.
"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belong to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...." (p. 72)
Other times it's just pure admiration for a writer who has articulated a series of thoughts that I've wanted to express but never found the words. An author who has written something I wish I had written. Or better yet, a work that clearly and with a sense of humor sums up something I've been mulling over vaguely for years, then extends the line of thinking and expands it far beyond the range I had stumbled through, but now I can see that it's been there all along, and the possibilities it presents are exciting if a little mind-boggling.
"First of all, ask about If on a winter's night a traveler, make them give us a complete copy, and also a complete copy of Outside the town of Malbork. I mean copies of the novels we began to read, thinking they had that title; and then, if their real titles and authors are different, the publishers must tell us and explain the mystery behind these pages that move from one volume to another."
...
"The novel I would most like to read at this moment," Ludmilla explains, "should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves..."
... (pp. 92-93)
The business end is another thing altogether. It's a little like making laws or making sausage, once you've been around the actual process it's never the same being a consumer of the product. Clearly that has an upside as well as a downside. I know a little something about what ingredients went into that sausage and what gives it its distinctive flavor and texture and sausagey goodness, and I have certainly become more discriminating, selective, and appreciative of the many Varieties of Sausage Experience.
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and start reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on.... (p. 125)
Somewhere in the reading, a time-warped kind of self-reflexive light goes on in the mind of the reader that reveals or at least depicts what has been going on in real life for some time without the reader's knowledge, or alternatively what has not been going on, and only now does the reader grasp some aspect of his own everyday existence that has been staring him in the face, such as the seemingly universal overlapping and interpenetrating relationships between and among ourselves and our consciousness of some account we are telling ourselves, usually in relatively innocent self-delusion for perfectly valid reasons with unpremeditated and unintended consequences.
As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths. (p. 129)
Cutting and pasting words and phrases from one existing source into a second related site is perhaps the most common practice known to literate culture. There are a lot of assets out there to be copied and repurposed. Some of them are tightly guarded and some are fair game, and of course the rules about the boundaries are one of the most contentious issues known to litigious society. Everybody samples content, but some are more careful or judicious or sneaky about it than others. And everybody quotes somebody, usually misquoting and often unattributed or wrongly attributed, rarely in context and usually distorting, with or without malice. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's okay, just send the check by the end of the month with the agreed upon fee for permission to use said material, because no matter what it is, somebody owns it.
The arboreal young man, having hidden the manuscript in his jacket, slipped out of the elevator, slammed the gate in my face, and is now pressing the button to make me disappear downward, after hurling a final threat at me: 'The score with you isn't settle, Agent of Mystification! We still have to liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the counterfeiters!' I laugh as I slowly sink. 'There is no machine, kiddo. It's the Father of Stories who dictates our books!'
He brings the elevator back up. 'Did you say the Father of Stories?' He has turned pale. For years the followers of the sect have been searching for the old blind man, across all the continents, where his legend is handed down in countless local variants. (pp. 130-131)
The book as mystical source of truth, as romantic repository of timeless wonder, as magic theater of the mind. The book as mirror of nature and the soul, as the key to unlocking unlimited knowledge and power, as the secret passage out of your mundane predicament and toward liberation. The book as a copy of a simulation of a description of a retelling of a rumor of a legend of a translation of a hallucination of a recollection of a twice-told tale of a rationalization of a dream of a testimony of a prediction of a fantasy of a justification of an apocryphal of an alibi. The book as an example of what can be done with a stub of a pencil (Ring Lardner). The book as the flesh made word, the somatic experience of the body electric transformed by one dimensional scratching on two-dimensional surfaces of three-dimensional efforts in four-dimensional flow of a time-space-weight continuum in the historical dialectic of analog waves in digital particles, note by rhythmic note.
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on.... (p. 125)
If we are all readers, I guess we are all texts. We read and are read in context. The story, if there is one, has texture, and because it is layered, woven, closely or loosely knitted, the tale is spun into many threads of textile material that is high in fiber. It seems as if Calvino has thought of everything and decided to render it bit by bit in fragmentary, easily digestible pieces of stories larded with the seeds of other stories.
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. (pp. 180-181)
Yet there is a distinct sense in which making a book reveals in the close proximity to the planning, marketing, design, production, packaging, and distribution of the tangible object a widget-like randomness, a wonderfully absurd kind of mundane materiality whereby ink stains on pressed wood pulp are so darn magical.
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." (p. 197)
So why haven't I written anything lately? Or have I, and it just didn't end up here in this sad space? Am I just taking a break, or have I moved on to bigger and better or smaller and more humble things?
"Me? I don't read books!" Irnerio says.
"What do you read, then?"
"Nothing. I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."
Irnerio's eyes have broad, pale, flickering pupils; they seem eyes that miss nothing, like those of a native of the forest, devoted to hunting and gathering." (p. 49)
Maybe the fun begins when the text speaks to the reader in an unprecedented way, like when you meet someone unlike anyone else you've ever met, and you just want to keep that conversation going and see where it leads.
(To begin. You're the one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest - for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both - must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.) (p. 153)
Or, as my friend at work said, it means there is no story. He's the one who told me about this crazy book in the first place, the catalyst in my journey toward and through the mind of Calvino and Ludmilla and the Other Reader, in which there clearly is a story, actually many stories, a proliferation of stories in fact, none existing outside the Reader, which is probably his point - no independent, self-existent, noncontingent story.
