SOURCE: Tani, Stefano. “The Metafictional Anti-Detective Novel.” In The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction, pp. 113-47. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Tani provides an overview of the metafictional anti-detective novel and reviews the major works of the sub-genre.]

Metafictional anti-detective novels belong only in a general way to anti-detective fiction. In innovative anti-detective fiction the stress was on social criticism and on a solution without justice; in the deconstructive category I emphasized the nonsolution, the ambiguous perception of reality from the point of view of the detective, the sense of conspiracy and satanism. The characteristics of the second kind are, in comparison with the first, more subjective, bordering on the irrational. The anti-detective game gets more sophisticated and less preoccupied with reality (justice, social criticism) and objectivity (solution) as we proceed from one category to the next. Thus, when we get to metafictional anti-detective novels, the conventional elements of detective fiction (the detective, the criminal, the corpse) are hardly there. By now the detective is the reader who has to make sense out of an unfinished fiction that has been distorted or cut short by a playful and perverse “criminal,” the writer. Thus detective, criminal, and detection are no longer within the fiction, but outside it. The detective is no longer a character but a function assigned to the reader as the criminal is no longer a murderer but the writer himself who “kills” (distorts and cuts) the text and thus compels the reader to become a “detective.” The fiction becomes an excuse for a “literary detection,” and if there is a killer in the fiction, he is a “literary killer,” a killer of texts (Kinbote, the commentator in Pale Fire, distorts the meaning of the poem “Pale Fire”; Marana, the translator in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, cuts and forges the texts of the novels in the novel), not of human beings, and this killer represents within the fiction the operation that the writer (Nabokov, Calvino) performed on it.

Some of the elements in metafictional anti-detective fiction, however, are similar to those in innovative and deconstructive anti-detective novels. Hence we find games of doubles, conspiracy, unfulfilled suspense, and unfinished novels in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and a conspiracy, an unfinished poem, a murder, and a disappointing “legacy” in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. But if some of the previous elements remain, what is different is the atmosphere and the relationship between reader and writer. In metafictional anti-detective fiction the writer is no longer an “absent” third-person narrator but part of his text, which he enters and leaves continuously (Calvino in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) or playfully and misleadingly “explains” through a fictional persona (Kinbote in Pale Fire). He keeps reminding us that what we are reading is only fiction and that he is the conjuror in this magic game, which has no reality but its own.

ITALO CALVINO'S SE UNA NOTTE D'INVERNO UN VIAGGIATORE

Italo Calvino's most recent novel, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979), is about writing and, more than that, about the act of reading. It is actually questionable whether we should term Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore a single novel. Rather, it is an assemblage of beginnings of novels which, for some reason (wrongly bound, wrongly printed, forged, censored, etc.) cannot be finished, and leave the reader—both the fictional one in the novel and the real reader—tantalized and frustrated at the same time. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is composed of the first chapters of ten “interrupted” novels,¹ each preceded by an “introduction” concerning a He-Reader and a She-Reader (il lettore and la lettrice in Italian)² who get to know each other because of the mystery of the unfinished books.

The He-Reader is presented as an Everyman who considers reading one of the most enjoyable activities in life. As he finds out that the copy of the book he bought (which is, of course, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) has been badly bound and that the novel is an assemblage of the same first chapter, he is outraged and hurls the book on the floor:

The thing that most exasperates you [the He-Reader] is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random. … In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects … to re-establish the normal course of events. You can't wait to get your hands on a nondefective copy of the book you've begun. You would rush to the bookshop at once if shops were not closed at this hour. You have to wait until tomorrow.³

The He-Reader is a man who looks in books for an order he cannot find any more in life. He is a disillusioned, disappointed person who knows that “the best [one] can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs.”⁴ Books are the only exception to this conclusion:

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.⁵

The He-Reader is the perfect reader of novels in general, and of detective novels in particular. In fact he projects himself mentally, almost physically, into the world of books and finds in reading a vicarious and appealing alternative life in which he can release those anxieties and expectations that are much harder to get rid of in the real world. We know by now that a detective novel's reader is mainly a reader who has expectations for order, who looks forward to a neat, well-made solution, just like the He-Reader in Calvino's book.

The He-Reader meets the She-Reader in the bookstore where he goes to return the defective copy. There the clerk tells him that the book, besides being badly bound, also has the wrong cover; what he has been reading was not by Calvino but a novel by a Polish author, Tazio Bazakbal's Fuori dell'abitato di Malbork (Outside the town of Malbork). Now the compulsive He-Reader (perhaps also out of unconscious retaliation) wants to go on with that novel and exchanges the “false” Calvino's with a mint copy of Bazakbal's book, just as the She-Reader had done a minute before. Coincidence makes them meet and, as they talk, we learn that the She-Reader's tastes are similar to the ones of the He-Reader:

I prefer novels … that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in a certain fashion and not otherwise.⁶

Again, reading means entering a well-ordered alternative world that gives satisfactions which the real one gives no longer. The encounter with the She-Reader means to the He-Reader the possibility of romance, the intrusion of the “fortuitous” into the order he is striving to achieve at least in reading. But this is a pleasant “fortuitous,” and “the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived. … Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers.”⁷

In the novel, the act of reading is continuously described as a mental but at the same time physical experience (think of Roland Barthes' Le plaisir du texte). The book-object is viewed almost as a “woman-object”; the expectation and the pleasure derived from cutting open the new pages and from being almost physically absorbed into the plot is a metaphor for lovemaking. Calvino, quite ironically, proposes an eroticism of reading that goes hand in hand with the actual romance developing between the He-Reader and the She-Reader.

While we never know the name of the He-Reader, we finally find out the She-Reader's: Ludmilla Vipiteno. She is the ideal “she-reader” and has been loved by two men of letters (a translator and a thriller-writer) just for this reason.

The translator, Ermes Marana, is directly or indirectly responsible for all the problems and book-hunts the He-Reader and Ludmilla go through. He used to be in love with Ludmilla; he was fascinated and obsessed by the way she could abandon herself to the act of reading, by her almost physical and sensual involvement with it. Eventually Marana saw in the books a rival to which Ludmilla gave much more attention than to him and, as his affair with her was dying, plotted a complex, gigantic revenge against her and the books. Its purpose was to deprive Ludmilla of the pleasure of reading by translating novels and then by interpolating or counterfeiting different texts and authors:

Always, since his taste and talent impelled him in that direction, but more than ever since his relationship with Ludmilla became critical, Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. … [If he had succeeded, he] would no longer have felt himself abandoned by Ludmilla absorbed in her reading: between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.⁸

Eventually Marana loses control of his organization, the OAP (Organization of Apocryphal Power), which splits into two factions: the Wing of Light and the Wing of Shadow. The followers of the Wing of Light try to find among the flood of trash-books produced daily in our society the few books containing some essential and transcendental truth. The followers of the Wing of Shadow believe that only a further mystification of a novel, which is per se a mystifying representation of reality, can lead to an absolute truth intended as the mystification of the mystification; just as a negative number (a “lie”), once squared, gives a positive one (the “truth”). Marana offers his services to the censors of Latin American dictatorships and cooperates in cutting, disfiguring and falsifying as many books as he can and all the books we run into in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Thus the He-Reader soon discovers that even Fuori dell'abitato di Malbork, supposedly by the Polish author Tazio Bazakbal, is actually the victim of a false attribution, Marana's translation into Italian of someone else's novel, and, besides, after the first chapter, the pages are blank.

Silas Flannery,⁹ an Irish thriller-writer whom Ludmilla considers the perfect, elemental author (he writes books as “a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins”¹⁰) becomes of course one of Marana's favorite victims. His books are counterfeited by the forger just as he is going through a writing crisis and is no longer able to produce books like “a pumpkin vine.” After having written so much commercial trash (thrillers!), Flannery wants to write a “true book” and is thus spied upon by both the Wing of Light (which expects that the repentance of one of the greatest writers of lies should give birth to the perfect truth) and the Wing of Shadow (which expects that a liar like Flannery, just by trying to write the truth, will end up writing the ultimate lie) and of course by Marana himself. As Silas Flannery tries in vain to write the “true book” in his residence in Switzerland, he happens to observe with his binoculars a young woman on the other side of the valley sitting in a deck chair and reading a book which, he painfully feels, is not one of his own. He sees her as the ideal “she-reader,” someone who can still read naturally, while he, on the other hand, has lost the taste for that pleasure because of the nausea of hack-writing. The woman is Ludmilla, the “She-Reader” for whom every writer wishes he would or could write.

Since I [Silas Flannery] 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. … 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 …

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.¹¹

Thus the She-Reader becomes a “passion terminal”; her sensual abandonment to reading is viewed and “translated” in different ways by the translator (jealousy and conspiracy), the writer (quest for artistic truth), and the He-Reader (the possibility for order and love).

In contrast, her sister Lotaria proposes a hyperintellectual and dehumanized form of reading, overburdened by all the possible fad forms of interpretation (Freudian interpretation, feminist interpretation, Marxist interpretation) and claims that the “reading” by computer, which deconstructs the text into a list of word-frequencies, is the best (and certainly the quickest) possible.

Doctor Cavedagna, the sad factotum of the publishing house where the He-Reader goes to complain about the interrupted books, still believes in a natural way of reading. Such a belief, however, implies ignorance of the commercial side of book making, an “original innocence” he lost by working in a publishing house. Thus he loves and idealizes the books of his youth, the ones he read before the sin of knowledge, his present work.

Irnerio, a conceptual artist and a friend (what kind of a friend? broods the jealous He-Reader) of Ludmilla, maintains a nonchalantly and almost surrealistically iconoclastic attitude toward books. He does not read books, but uses them as objects to make his paintings and sculptures.

Opposite attitudes toward reading are finally reconciled by Arkadian Porphyritch, Director General of the State Police Archives in a fictional Latin American country named Ircania. In fact he leads a schizophrenic double life: during the day, with the merciless efficiency required by his position, he censors the books that may harm the regime; at night he lies in the comfortable couch of his office to become again only a reader, and treats himself with the unabridged versions of the very same works he expurgated during the day.

Ultimately, I could say that the real protagonist of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is neither the He-Reader nor Ludmilla, but the act and process of reading, around which the actions and thoughts of all the main characters obsessively revolve. Calvino's microcosm deals with a wide spectrum of attitudes toward reading and is eventually split among the persons who still read (the He-Reader, Ludmilla, the “night-side” of Porphyritch) and the ones who do not read anymore (Marana, Irnerio), or cannot read anymore (Dr. Cavedagna, Silas Flannery), or read in a dehumanized way (Lotaria, the “day-side” of Porphyritch).

Readers and the act of reading actually have quite a lot to do with detectives and detection. In fact a good reader is always a “detective,” since he consciously or unconsciously strives for “what is next” as well as for what is left unsaid and ultimately for the end (the denouement, the “composition” of the plot) when he reads a fiction, no matter whether it is a detective novel or not. The reader's often compulsive “detection” is proportional to his involvement with plot and characters, to the fascination that the text exercises on him through the act of reading. The fascination of reading has at least two variables outside the text: the personality of the reader and the contingent situation in which the reading is done. These are variables valid for any of us “outside readers.” Concerning the readers inside the fiction, the He-Reader is annoyed by the interruption in the first book, but gets more and more involved in his quest for an entire, complete novel because he is going through this quest with Ludmilla. Thanks to the sensual abandon she experiences and “radiates” in her way of reading, the He-Reader feels he has at least a “mental love affair” with her, as he is reading the same interrupted books she is reading and goes through the same quest for a complete one. Arkadian Porphyritch's “night side” reacts in a similar way; he candidly confesses to the jealous He-Reader:

“[A]s long as I know there is a woman [Ludmilla] who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues … And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman …”

Rapidly you [the He-Reader] wrest from your mind the inappropriate superimposition of the images of the Director General and Ludmilla, to enjoy the apotheosis of the Other Reader … and you savor the certainty … that between her and you there no longer exist obstacles or mysteries, whereas of the Cagliostro [Marana], your rival, only a pathetic shadow remains, more and more distant …¹²

Ludmilla is the “contingency” that makes reading a fascinating experience and makes the detection of the He-Reader not only the mental one typical of any reader but an actual, physical detection, since the He-Reader soon begins to use his pursuit of a complete text as an excuse to keep in touch with Ludmilla and to see her. Furthermore, since the He-Reader is a person who compulsively strives for order, he must unravel the mystery of the interrupted books, which jeopardizes his attitude toward reading. In fact reading is for him a vital “safety blanket,” the kingdom of order from which the “fortuitous” is banished, and where expectations are mostly rewarded. To solve the mystery is to reestablish order in reading, which otherwise is corrupted by disorder and, as is the case for Ludmilla, by the fear that anything he reads is going to be interrupted or distorted by the false “narrative voice” of the forger Marana.

Ironically, Ludmilla becomes some sort of “Dante's Beatrice.” In a sick world that makes reading (withdrawal and vicarious existence) the only possibility for “safe” expectations and enjoyment, she is the model for readers and nonreaders, the “passion-terminal” that changes their lives. Without Ludmilla they would not act as they do, and somehow their more or less successful real or mental relationships with her prompt each of them to go either deeper into the “Paradise” of the readers (the “night-side” of Porphyritch, the He-Reader) or into the “Hell” of the nonreaders (Marana, Lotaria), or even through that “Purgatory,” which is a troubled but redeeming crisis (Silas Flannery). Hence the He-Reader is right when he thinks of her success as an “apotheosis.”

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore's emphasis on reading is both a metaphor for the detection performed by any reader of any novel and simultaneously an account of literal detection. The He-Reader and Ludmilla read avidly only to find first chapters repeated—or blank, stolen, or apocryphal—and in their search for a solution come upon other tales yet more in need of a second chapter, always to be interrupted by some accident or printing problem.

As I mentioned in the overview of the metafictional anti-detective novel in chapter 2, the “hide-and-seek” relation between writer and reader occurs outside and within the fiction: 1) Writer (Calvino) deviously writing (hiding the solution of) the text and real reader trying to make sense out of it (seeking the solution—the reader as a detective). 2) Fictional “writer” (Marana, the translator-forger) forging and interrupting the texts within the text (hiding their conclusions) and fictional readers (the He-Reader and the She-Reader) trying to make sense out of them (seeking their conclusions).

What makes Calvino's book particularly sophisticated and dynamic is that these relationships outside and within the fiction overlap and interact continuously. Calvino achieves the effect of simultaneity through a game of personal pronouns. In fact the protagonist of every first chapter the He-Reader gets to read always addresses himself to a hypothetical reader and very rationally explains his emotions and describes the environment in which he acts. He is a first-person narrator very well aware of telling a tale, of being the main character of the novel he is narrating. He continuously conveys to the outside reader the feeling that the “book” he is narrating is perfectly conscious of its “bookness” and yet he undermines this abstractness by the physicality of the emotions and descriptions in the story he is narrating. Fiction (like finzione, pretense) and “reality” (the fascination, the involvement in the narration experienced by the reader because of the story-telling power of the narrator) swing back and forth in front of the outside reader. He is compelled to believe in the fiction as a “real world” and to disbelieve it, to discard its pretense a moment later when the protagonist again reminds him of the fictional mechanisms. It is like being in front of a conjuror who continuously turns the palm of his hand and sometimes there is a card and other times nothing.

As an example, we can consider the opening of the first interrupted novel, whose title, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, is also the title of the whole book.

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. … The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. … All these signs converge to inform us that this is a little provincial station, where anyone is immediately noticed. …

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather: that man is called “I” and you [reader] know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only “station” and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephoen ringing in a dark room of a distant city. … For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today. … Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind.¹³

The railway-station opening is very much evocative of the opening of L'emploi du temps (1956, Passing Time) by Michel Butor, and certainly Calvino's technique in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore owes something to the nouveau roman. This influence is present not in the relation among the “I” (narrator), the “You” (reader), and the “He” (writer), which is uncommon in the French literary movement, but rather in the sense of detachment and objectivity Calvino's writing conveys and in the precise description of things and sensations following each other in a consequential and almost automatic way. “The text writes itself” is one of the nouveau roman's major theoretical assumptions, but here Calvino enlivens the nouveau roman's descriptive and static “automatic self-writing” by the continuous shifts in the narrative voice caused by the “I-You-He” technique. The fictional game is shown off and withdrawn continuously, thanks to Calvino's ability as a conjuror of language. This technique is designed to remind the reader that he is dealing with a fictional world and to unsettle his desire to identify himself with the characters. The protagonist of the narration is an “I” who is telling a story, and thus he must address it to a hypothetical second person, a “You,” the reader. As the first-person narrator refers to the author, he must hence use the third-person singular. The “He” is an “antagonistic” personal pronoun (I and he), and this “grammatical opposition” indeed forbids any possible “complicity” between “creator” (as “He”) and “creature” (as “I”)—a complicity that the I-narrator rather tries to establish with the You-reader against “He,” the author (“Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually … a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind”). This could become in the long run a tiresome, confusing, hyperintellectual game, but Calvino uses it judiciously, with the lightness and the playfulness he perhaps derives from his experience with fairy tales. He seems always to know when to “poke” the reader's attention by the I-You-He game, that is, every time the narration rests too long on conventional techniques.

The metafictional aspect of the “interrupted novels” in the book corresponds to a similar rapport between the writer (Calvino, the “I”) and the He-Reader (the “You”) in the introductions to the “interrupted novels” themselves. These introductions describe the vicissitudes the He-Reader and Ludmilla undergo while attempting to get a mint copy of what they think is the previous interrupted novel but which always turns out instead to be another book—which is, however, even more fascinating than the one they were looking for, so that they give up the previous and try to find the rest of the new one. Thus in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore there are two parallel pronoun-chains, which differ slightly depending on who is narrating,¹⁴ the protagonist of the interrupted novel within the novel or the writer-Calvino in the introduction to the interrupted novels:

• 1) I (the narrator of the novel)

• YOU (reader, both real reader and He-Reader)

• HE (the writer, Calvino)

• IT (the narrated novel)

• 2) I (the writer, Calvino)

• YOU (He-Reader)

• SHE (Ludmilla)

• IT (the interrupted novel, its characters)

The second chain changes at a crucial point in one of the introductions, that is, when Ludmilla gives the He-Reader the keys to her apartment so that he can go there and wait for her. He takes advantage of the keys to undertake “a detective investigation”¹⁵ of her place and discover something more about her and her tastes. At this point Ludmilla, the She-Reader, is addressed by the I-Calvino not as a “She,” but as a “You”:

What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you [the He-Reader], perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I [Calvino, the writer, who identifies himself also with the He-Reader], but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events.¹⁶

When soon afterwards the He-Reader and the She-Reader at last make love, they “read each other” (“Ludmilla, now you are being read. … And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading”)¹⁷ and from the point of view of the I-Calvino they become a you (in Italian: tu) plus a you, that is, a voi, a you second person plural,¹⁸ which makes a lot of difference, especially for the He-Reader, who is in love with Ludmilla.

As suggested since the beginning of the novel by Ludmilla's abandon to fiction reading, to read is an “erotic act,” something like “to know” in the Biblical sense. The consequence of such a view is that, ironically, fiction is as true (and erotic, corporeal, existent, alive) as lovemaking; actually, lovemaking and fiction-reading are in some ways the same thing. They are both an extension of the self toward an “object” (the text, the lover) with whom the self gets very involved (fascinated) if the object can hold his attention.

We must not forget, however, that Calvino's novel implies a division between a fiction proposed to us as “reality” (the outer story of the He-Reader and Ludmilla) and fictions proposed as such (the ten unfinished novels) in which the ultimate outcomes of the love stories narrated are never happy, as is instead the affair between the He-Reader and Ludmilla, who in the last page of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore are husband and wife. This happens not only because the ten fictions are unfinished and so the love affairs they narrate are unsolved, “unconsummated,” but also because through the ten interrupted fictions Calvino leads us in a cavalcade of the modes of the modern and contemporary novel, and recent world literature—Calvino says—seems to share a common pessimism about happy denouements. Calvino saves that kind of ending for fairy tale collections and, perhaps ironically, for “reality” (the outer story of Ludmilla and the He-Reader).

Calvino's overview of the novel genre through parodies of ten different styles and novelistic forms is a true tour de force. The ten interrupted fictions have in common a self-questioning, introspective, analytical narrator who is well aware of telling a story (e.g., “The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel.”),¹⁹ his story, and thus something that has already happened. In fact we do feel that the narrator is going in his tale toward a denouement even in the ten to fifteen pages of the interrupted first chapter, as he is telling us about something in the past that has by now been thoroughly lived and is going to be concluded through the ultimate filtration of writing and narrating it. However, we do not get to that ending that seems to exist (these are not open-ended novels, but interrupted novels) in the next chapters the He-Reader will never find. The narration is, perversely enough, interrupted in a moment of high suspense, just as it used to happen in the French feuilleton, and irrelevant and inconclusive clues are planted in the unfinished works. Names of characters (Jan, Zwida, Amaranta), of geographical places (Kudgiwa), of nightclubs (the “New Titania”) recur from one fiction to the other, but are used in different ways and contexts (e.g., Kauderer is a rich farmer in the second novel, a meteorologist in the third, the name of an ammunition factory in the fourth; Kawasaki is, of course, a motorcycle in the seventh novel and a Japanese professor in the eighth), so that it is impossible to get anything out of them except for the impression of being teased throughout the fictions. This proliferation of inconclusive clues reminds me of The Crying of Lot 49, and of the “islands” of unfulfilled suspense in John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues.

The narrators of the aborted novels, although all hyper- and self-analytical, have different voices and ways to obtain the sympathy of the reader; these ways are related to the kind of story (the kind of imitation of a novel form) they tell. The first, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, is the imitation of a spy-novel and is set in the railway station of a provincial town. The reader participates little by little in the narrator's frustration over the missed appointment with another member of the organization with whom he was supposed to switch bags in the crowded station. Thanks to the “I-You-He” technique and the pull-and-push game now emphasizing fictional involvement (the sympathy that the narrator elicits from the reader), now fictional awareness (the defamiliarization from the narration), the reader's attention is stirred continuously; he can almost smell the odors of the shabby station and see the habitués lingering around the counter of the station buffet kidding each other with the same jokes every night. The description of the scene is as visually evocative as an Edward Hopper painting. All the fictions are “translated,” filtered through the I-narrator's physical sensations in terms of smell, body contacts, weather-dictated moods, noises, lovemaking, in such a masterful way that it is really hard to resist a participation which is, however, continuously questioned by the “fictional awareness” of the narrator.

The second aborted novel is a “realistic” novel with a farm setting in Eastern Europe; the third is an existential novel, imitating the diary style of Sartre's La nausée; the fourth is the story of an uncanny ménage à trois occurring in the midst of the Russian (or of a Marxist) revolution; the fifth is a parody of the hard-boiled style set in France; the sixth is an obsessive thriller on a United States university campus; the seventh is a story of mirror games and deceitful reflections in the Borges style; the eighth is an erotic and titillating “Japanese novel”; the ninth imitates Marquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in setting and narrative voice and is about “doubles” and repetition in time; the tenth is a “metaphysical novel” that seems to come out of a De Chirico painting. This is a simplification, however, because each aborted novel cannot be really pigeonholed but has an autonomous (although “aborted”) artistic life.

Hence the forger of novels in the novel (Marana) corresponds to a masterful outside forger. Calvino, who lets himself be identified by the reader with three of the main characters: Marana, the He-Reader,²⁰ and Silas Flannery, the writer who can no longer read or write. Silas Flannery seems to be a self-parody, as is the He-Reader (who, more exactly, is a playful projection of the writer's self, the double of the writer, that is, the reader) but, further than that, Silas Flannery-Calvino supplies the key to the whole fiction:

I [Silas Flannery] have pondered my last conversation with that Reader. [In his attempt to solve the mystery of the unfinished novels, the He-Reader went to visit Silas Flannery.] 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 …²¹

Unexpectedly, the “book aware of its bookness” explains itself through the writer within the book who is a fictional reflection of the writer outside the book, Calvino himself. And, of course, the ten interrupted novels are all characterized by suspense because they have been “written” by a thriller-writer, Silas Flannery.

Calvino's magic hat always produces a new white rabbit for his amazed reader, who almost resents this “waste” of imagination, of beautiful but unfinished stories that an old writer in crisis (who is not in crisis at all) mockingly flashes at him behind a flight of mirrors. One might even say that Calvino is eventually undone by the height of his talent; toward the end of the book the reader is not yet bored but certainly stunned and a bit confused by the rarefied games the writer is playing on him (think of the just mentioned “turn of the screw” by which Flannery explains the whole book). An overlong exposure to thin mountain air does not help one to breathe, and when the reader gets off Calvino's merry-go-round on the top of the mountain he certainly enjoyed the trip, but he may have a slight headache and be especially glad to be back on solid ground.

At any rate, the ten aborted novels from around the world offer quite a mine of themes and deceitful clues that some rethinking and a second reading (which seems to be an operation mandatory for most anti-detective novels) can partially sort out. For example, in the seventh novel, In una rete di linee che si intersecano (In a network of lines that intersect) there is again a mirror-map-labyrinth pattern. This is how the novel opens: “Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me. … I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity.”²² The narrator is a crooked financial genius; he “translates” the mirror's activity (to reflect = to think) into devious thinking to cheat his business enemies, and (to reflect = to reproduce illusorily) into creating an impression of power “[by] multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, [by] enlarging credit, [by] making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives.”²³ In his house he builds a “catoptric room,” basically a labyrinth of mirrors, on the design of a seventeenth-century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher. Since he is afraid of being kidnapped, he plans ahead on a mapboard of the city his route and then cancels or modifies it at the last minute in order to baffle possible spies and kidnappers. Hence this unfinished novel enhances the mirror-labyrinth-map pattern neither at a chronological level (e.g., the nouveau roman's concept of time) nor at a literal level (e.g., the pattern in Eco's Il nome della rosa), but rather focuses on the deceitful aspect of mirrors and their consequent creation of labyrinths as an endless number of reflections. Even tracing a route on a map implies no “solution,” no affirmation of a certainty (while in Il nome della rosa drawing the map of the labyrinth meant making sense out of it), but rather becomes a misleading bait against kidnappers. Of course, this is a very Borgesian vision of mirrors and their games; think, for example, of the story “El Aleph,” in which the Aleph is a sphere where the whole world is mirrored, reflected.

Mirrors refract images that are specularly opposite to the “original.” So Lotaria is the mirror image of Ludmilla,²⁴ the Wing of Shadow faction of the OAP is the mirror image of the Wing of Light, and Silas Flannery, the “impotent writer,” is the mirror image of Calvino. Opposite dualities and mirror images go hand in hand. Even the He-Reader and the She-Reader are “opposite dualities” (at least in terms of sex) but they are even more than that: they are a couple of detectives looking for a book (just like William and Adso in Il nome della rosa) and going through elusive and intricate adventures—another version of the labyrinth pattern. The inner duality of the Poesque detective (“creative” and “resolvent”) is here split, externally and more innocuously, into a couple in which we may glimpse traces of a “creative force” in Ludmilla (the passion-terminal) and more of the resolvent side in the especially persistent, clue-following He-Reader. Likewise, in Il nome della rosa, Adso ends up being the “creative” force behind the story: he evokes, “creates,” the story by finally writing it down many years after the events occurred; William is, of course, mainly resolvent—just as it always happened with Watson and Holmes in Doyle's stories.

As in Falling Angel and in The Crying of Lot 49, in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore a disproportionate conspiracy is set up against a “detective” (Ludmilla). The OAP wants now to destroy the relation of trust between the reader and the text, but the whole conspiracy had originally been mounted by Marana for the exclusive manipulation of one single person, Ludmilla Vipiteno, because she loved books more than she did him.

In The Crying of Lot 49 the conspiracy was connected with the hunt for the corrupted version of a book, The Courier's Tragedy, which had been forged by the Scurvhamites, who wrote an apocryphal pornographic version of it (the one containing the line about Tristero Oedipa was looking for) “as a moral example,”²⁵ in order to celebrate purity through its opposite. Similarly, the Wing of Shadow wants to steal the “true book” Flannery tries to write during his crisis on the assumption that the “true book” of a great liar would represent the ultimate falsity. In Il nome della rosa by Eco the hunt for a book was also present, as William and Adso were looking for a mysterious codex, which turned out to be the lost second part of the Poetics by Aristotle. In this case the book was the solution to the mystery as it contained a truth (the saving grace of laughter) which prompted lugubrious Jorge to hide and poison it and thus to cause indirectly the deaths of the monks looking for it. The problem of the inadequate translation and of the consequent hunt for the original, which is so central to Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979), is also present in Il nome della rosa (1980), albeit peripherally, since it appears only in the preface. In fact in the preface the “translator” Umberto Eco tells the reader that the text he is about to read is the Italian translation of a French translation of a book in Latin, and that, after a vain chase for the Latin original, he decided to print his translation from the French version. Also, in the account of his labyrinthine “search for the Latin original,” Eco mentions—very slyly—the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher who is the seventeenth-century author of a book on mirrors mentioned by Calvino in the seventh interrupted novel of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. This is, indeed, metafiction.

Hunts for lost, corrupted, and complete texts play a main role in the mystery (Il nome della rosa) or the conspiracy (The Crying of Lot 49, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) against which the detective fights; they link together Eco's, Pynchon's and Calvino's novels. In Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, however, the antibook conspiracy assumes paradoxical and ludicrous connotations extraneous to The Crying of Lot 49, Todo modo, and Falling Angel, the deconstructive anti-detective novels in which a conspiracy is present. For example, Arkadian Porphyritch, Director General of the Police Archives in Ircania, states wryly:

What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? … To be sure, repression must also allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down.²⁶

In fact, in the metafictional anti-detective novel the relation between reader and writer gets more overt and teasing than in the other two categories. Somehow it also influences the general tone of the narration, which resorts more often to light humor and parody than do the other kinds of anti-detective novels. Anti-detective novels having a first-person narrator do not get “filtered” and de-dramatized by the playful relation among narrator, reader, and writer typical of metafictional anti-detective fiction, or by the critical authorial voice typical of third-person narrations. Compare, for example, the sometimes dramatic I-narration of Angel in Falling Angel with the humorous and diversified I-You-He technique in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, or even with the often ironical third-person narration of Sciascia in A ciascuno il suo.

Metafictionally, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore proposes a playful “intertextual solution” to the mystery of the unfinished novels which is connected to a “circular ending” of the novel. In fact the He-Reader, who has been diligently jotting down all the titles of the aborted novels, discovers during a conversation with other readers in a library that all the titles connected together form a long complete sentence which makes sense, and that “[t]he ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”²⁷ This last consideration (life is short) prompts the reader to marry Ludmilla, and the novel, which opened with the beginning of the reading (“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler”),²⁸ concludes itself with the end of the reading:

Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings.

Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow, and says, “Turn off your light, too. Aren't you tired of reading?”

And you say, “Just a moment, I've almost finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”²⁹

Beginning and end close a circular structure; the novel finds a solution within itself by connecting its titles in a way which reminds me of John Barth's Letters which, by some very metafictional coincidence, was published at exactly the same time.

Letters and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore seem to owe something in both technique and conception to the most recent fringes of the nouveau roman. Calvino, who had been living in Paris for a long time when he wrote Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, is wryly aware of playing with a literary movement, for he opens the novel with “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel [Italo Calvino's nouveau roman!], If on a winter's night a traveler.”³⁰

From a more distanced perspective, in a very nouveau roman fashion, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore designates no other reality but its own, and actually even finds a “solution” in its macro-structure (the ten titles composing a complete sentence). This connection among the titles and thus among the narrative voices (which deliberately stress the artificiality of the fictional mechanisms) emphasizes the autonomy of the novel, of the microcosms the novel “writes and reads about.” While the nouveau roman writers and critics claim that the text writes itself, Calvino enlivens this assumption by the I-You-He game and shifts the emphasis to reading, since the text, no matter if it writes itself or not, does justify its existence because of the act of reading. No matter which emotion the text wants to convey, it exists because of the readers who read it, who in Calvino's novel become the detectives within and outside the text (the He-Reader and the She-Reader within; the real reader outside). The perfect reader, however, is neither the real reader nor the He-Reader, but Ludmilla; both reader and detective, but especially reader, she gives life to the text through her sensual reading, through her participation in it. Ultimately the text is only a means of communication and “detection” between two creators, the writer and the reader, a “pale fire” that is the result of the writer's filtration and personal “rearrangement” of reality, in turn filtered and rearranged by the reader's perceptions and personal response to the writer's creation.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S PALE FIRE

Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov anticipates in terms of anti-detective themes and techniques both The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979). As in the case of Pynchon's and Calvino's novels, Pale Fire includes the hunt for a text; however, while Oedipa and the He-Reader simply want to get the “right text” (Oedipa the Scurvhamite version of The Courier's Tragedy; the He-Reader the rest of the novels he tries to read), Kinbote goes to the roots of the problem. In fact he does not hunt an already written text, but a text that will be written, Shade's poem-to-be. This allows him to think he can influence the text, “make it right,” that is, have it written according to his desires. Kinbote's quest for the text is not in the past (in the realm of the “already written”), but in the future, and his hopes of success ironically rise as the potential (the future) turns into actual (present). When he narrates to the reader of his pseudocommentary to “Pale Fire” that “finally, under the date of July 3 [he wrote in his journal]: ‘poem begun!’”³¹ he describes the crucial moment of the passage from potentiality to actuality. When Shade starts writing his poem, the victory Kinbote dreams now as certain becomes indeed defeat, since Shade is not writing about Zembla.

Kinbote's efforts to push Shade into writing his story are characterized by an obsession with time in general and with the past in particular. It is no accident that twice in his commentary Kinbote mentions Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Somehow Shade's writings about Zembla should give Kinbote's fantasy both reality and artistic eternity. He says to Shade: “Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive … as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth.”³² Hence thanks to Shade's alleged epic of Zembla, Kinbote's “past with no past” would have the timeless reality of art. Kinbote attempts quite an original enterprise: he tries to impose on the future (what will be written by Shade) the poetry of a never existent past. Eventually both “tenses” (times) escape him: the future (Shade's text) disappoints him, the past was never real; however, Kinbote does have the present. While we are reading, he reminds us continuously that he is writing the commentary at that very moment, that there is an amusement park outside, quite a noisy one, and that he is typing and living in his mind, once again, the story of Zembla, the “distant northern land”³³ of which he dreams himself the exiled king, Charles the Beloved.

Kinbote is a harmless juggler of time; anybody can do what he wants with his past, even invent it, and an imaginary past is easily “evoked” in the present, actually exists only in the present. As he talks with a lady at a party, sympathetic Shade implicitly recognizes that Kinbote is, at least potentially, a brilliant artist: “‘That [mad] is the wrong word,’ he [Shade] said. ‘One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand.’”³⁴ As the lady tells Kinbote about a railway-station man (she is actually talking about Kinbote) who “thought he was God and began redirecting the trains,”³⁵ he agrees with Shade: the man was not a loony but a poet. In fact Kinbote replies that “We are all, in a sense, poets, Madam [poets, that is, madmen].”³⁶ Kinbote, for once, rightly anticipates his future: by writing his distorting commentary he will prove to be a brilliant “poet.”

Kinbote's juggling with time ultimately proves itself quite fortunate: while by a scholarly correct commentary he would at best explain “Pale Fire,” by performing on the poem an “inverted detection” (that is, not explaining but hiding things in it), he creates another “poem,” his own Zemblan epic, which “Pale Fire” was supposed to create and actually did not. In his foreword, Kinbote remembers that, as he was one day going to help the Shades who were “having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway … [he] lost [his] footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. [His] fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over [him] as it swung into the lane.”³⁷ The “fall” of Kinbote's expectations about Shade's poem has a similar function: it is a “chemical reagent” that brings Kinbote's potential as an artist into actuality.

As he denies his work as a commentator and refuses to explain the poem (although he claims that he has “no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstruous semblance of a novel”),³⁸ he does actually write a novel and gives to Shade's homey and Frostian “Pale Fire” a theatrical and Wagnerian antithetical dimension. As John Hagopian points out, “[u]nlike Shade, Kinbote does not observe, respond to, and draw from the real world; he makes of it a stage on which he enacts his own fantasies (Charles the Beloved fled from Zembla through a theater, and theatrical images abound in his account).”³⁹ The two men themselves are one the opposite of the other:

Shade is heterosexual, married, family-oriented. Kinbote is a homosexual. … Shade is gregarious, friendly and at ease with others, kind and generous; Kinbote is a social pariah, demanding and tense. Shade has a sick body, but a healthy mind in tune with nature; Kinbote has a healthy athletic body, but a sick mind and fears nature.⁴⁰

In a parallel way Shade's “Pale Fire” and Kinbote's commentary could not clash more; they are a thesis and its antithesis, something monstrous like a horse with wings. But the reader fulfills the synthesis, the horse miraculously flies and Pale Fire becomes a “Pegasus,” a perfect creation, half poem and half prose, which merges the fascination of poetic magic in everyday life and of magic folly in a timeless dreamland. Actually it is Kinbote the scholarly hack who finds his wings. Like Oedipa, thanks to a “legacy” he becomes a “reluctant artist” since, realizing that Shade did not translate his fantasy into poetry, he is compelled to do it himself by his pseudocommentary. We know that Inverarity's testament came to Oedipa totally unexpectedly and chance (or Inverarity's devious scheme) had on her an effect perhaps different from the one anticipated by the California tycoon, if her running into the Tristero had really been planned. In fact by her discovery of the Tristero Oedipa risks indeed her mental sanity but, more than that, grows to maturity and compassion. As she tries to “project a world”⁴¹ and to make sense out of Inverarity's entangled assets, she is creative and resolvent, an “artist” and a detective. Kinbote wants and actually snatches Shade's “legacy,” “Pale Fire,” but he finds an unexpected content (“I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament”).⁴² Quite ironically and consistently, Kinbote's madness and topsy-turvy vision of sexuality turn into an inverted detection. In fact he does not create and resolve as Oedipa does, but first refuses to resolve the text as a commentator would be expected to do, and then, out of rage, he creates his own text and fulfills his Zemblan dream. By refusing to be a commentator, a “scholarly detective,” by inverting the Poesque classical sequence (first “creation” and then “resolution”) into refusal of the resolution and thus only creation, Kinbote becomes an anti-detective secondarily and an artist primarily, while Oedipa is an “artist” secondarily and a detective primarily.

As in any detective novel, the murder (John Shade's death) “starts” the reader's detection but, since the murder is described at the end of Kinbote's pseudocommentary, the reader very likely has to reread it to discover clues related to the fact that the assassin is not Jakob Gradus sent by the Shadows but only crazy Jack Grey escaped from the asylum for the criminally insane. At the same time, the murdered man is not Judge Goldsworth—the assassin was misled by a physical resemblance—but proves to be the poet John Shade. Thus the murder at the end of Pale Fire (and not at the beginning as in a conventional detective novel) is explained through the reader's discovery of clues and slips concerning invented (Gradus-Grey) or mistaken (Goldsworth-Shade) identities in Kinbote's pseudocommentary.

The first hint concerning the fact that the imaginary Jakob Gradus (whom Kinbote names also Jacques d'Argus, Jack Degree, Vinogradus, etc.) is actually Jack Grey is given by Kinbote while he is describing an album in the house of Judge Goldsworth “in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus).”⁴³ The reader eventually becomes aware that Kinbote is crazy and that his fancied assassin from Zembla is indeed only a maniac Goldsworth had sent to prison and who had escaped to take revenge. It was by chance (perhaps) that Shade, who resembles Goldsworth, was in front of the judge's house with Kinbote, who had rented it while the judge was on sabbatical in England. Thus Shade is mistaken for the judge and shot by Jack Grey. The solution is almost given away when Kinbote tells the reader:

[After Shade's murder] I did manage to obtain, soon after his [Jack Grey's] detention, an interview, perhaps even two interviews, with the prisoner. … By making him believe I could help him at his trial I forced him to confess his heinous crime—his deceiving the police and the nation by posing as Jack Grey, escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there [the judge].⁴⁴

It is hard to see how Kinbote could be allowed in a prison to talk with someone recently convicted of murder. His vagueness about the number of interviews he had with him arouses suspicion in the reader. The truth has been “inverted,” is what Kinbote denies: Jakob Gradus is actually Jack Grey, escaped from the insane asylum. The connection between Goldsworth's and Shade's similar features is made in a more indirect way, by stressing the resemblance between the judge and a cafeteria maid who is also said to look like Shade.⁴⁵ Thus in Pale Fire there is no detective but the reader, who has to be continuously alert to pick up the clues that Kinbote, unawares, scatters around. The mad scholar is rather an anti-detective, as he hides evidence and tries to impose on the reader a hallucinated version of the facts.

Hence after solutions with no justice, solutions through wrong clues, nonsolutions, and satanic solutions, we arrive in Pale Fire at the “double solution” (Kinbote's version and the reader's version) concerning the mystery of Shade's murder. The double solution coincides with the rational and irrational currents typical of detective fiction. In fact the choice is between a rational and plausible solution (the one the reader detects thanks to Kinbote's slips, that is, Jack Grey meant to kill Goldsworth and mistook Shade for him) and an irrational and “artistic” one, made up by hallucinating Kinbote. Of course, the reader knows which is the right version of the facts, but art has its own truth, and “artifice … is the only thing that can make reality endurable.”⁴⁶ Certainly John Shade's assassination seems less meaningless if performed by Jakob Gradus rather than by Jack Grey. In the first case an old poet stumbling “by chance into the line of fire”⁴⁷ saved the life of a young king in exile; in the second a madman clumsily and senselessly mistook a poet for a judge. “Poetic justice” resides in the first “solution” since it is the one through which Kinbote's commentary finds its reason to exist and to complete with fantastic wings the Frostian resonance of Shade's “Pale Fire.”

Kinbote is an anti-detective, a distorter of the text and not a “maker of meaning.” Thus he can be easily connected with Calvino's Marana, who, however, is not an editor, but a translator who forges and mangles texts not out of love for an imaginary past but out of love and hate for a real woman. The readers of Pale Fire and of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore must go through a similar operation because of these two characters. In comparison with Pale Fire, Calvino's novel requires an additional metafictional transition, for the real reader's reaction to the ten interrupted novels are “mirrored” and anticipated by the He-Reader and the She-Reader within the fiction. In fact Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore presents one relation between writer and reader outside the fiction and one within: 1) Writer (Calvino) deviously writing (hiding the solution of) the text and real reader trying to make sense out of it (seeking the solution—the reader as a detective). 2) Fictional “writer” (Marana, the translator-forger) forging and interrupting the texts within the text (hiding their conclusions) and fictional readers (the He-Reader and the She-Reader) trying to make sense out of them (seeking their conclusions).

In Pale Fire the “hide-and-seek” relation between writer and reader is simplified by the fact that there is no reader within the fiction: 1) Writer (Nabokov) deviously writing (hiding the solution of) the text and real reader trying to make sense out of it (seeking the solution—the reader as a detective). 2) Fictional “writer” (Kinbote, the commentator-distorter) distorting the text within the text (the poem “Pale Fire”) by his comment.

Like Calvino's ten novels, “Pale Fire” also is unfinished, for Shade has not yet added the 1,000th line when he is shot by Jack Grey. Of course, Kinbote is happy to complete it for him by using as last the first line of the poem (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”)⁴⁸ which does rhyme with the 999th (“Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.”)⁴⁹ and gives “Pale Fire” a sense of circularity. This urge for circularity comes from the same anxiety for artistic timelessness that drove Kinbote to impose his fantasy on Shade and finally to write it himself in the hope to exorcise (to “complete”) his Zemblan obsession through art.

The fact that Kinbote is hardly aware of being an artist as good as Shade when he writes in fiction what he wanted Shade to write for him in poetry does not make any difference. As usual, Kinbote's perception is “inverted,” and, as in a game of mirrors, it becomes true if refracted again. In fact he says in his foreword: “Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all … a reality that only my notes can provide.”⁵⁰ Rather, it is just reality that Shade provides, while Kinbote takes care of its antithesis, theatrical fantasy, and the reader must provide at last a synthesizing appreciation.

The hunt for a text and the circular structure are not the only characteristics by which Pale Fire anticipates Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, another characteristic Nabokov's work shares with Calvino's and Pynchon's novels (and also with the other deconstructive anti-detective novels) is a sense of conspiracy. Actually, Pale Fire includes the “classic conspiracy,” which degenerates into a revolution and forces Charles the Beloved to flee his country through a secret passage in the royal palace. The passage leads into a theatre and from there the king reaches the border in a romantic hike through the mountains of Zembla. As in Falling Angel, The Crying of Lot 49, and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, the conspiracy in Pale Fire is mounted (imagined) for the exclusive “benefit” of one person, John Shade, who should write it all down in verses along with the rest of the story of Zembla. Of course, the conspiracy is too good to be true, is actually as theatrical as it is imaginary and partakes of Kinbote's persecution mania in real life. His homosexuality does sometimes cause the feelings of disapproval or of hostility he is ready to recognize in other people's attitudes toward him. These feelings are, however, more often motivated by his aggressive personality and by his irrepressible madness. In fact, as Kinbote is writing and living again his past with no past in the cottage in Cedarn, Utana (or in a madhouse?), he is gradually breaking down and giving the reader hints about the real state of his mind and thus about his special unreliability as a narrator. He candidly relates the episode in which a woman in a grocery store tells him: “‘You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil [Shade] can stand you,’ and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: ‘What's more, you are insane.’”⁵¹ At Wordsmith University in New Wye, the notion of Kinbote's insanity is common, as even a mimeographed letter from the English department states that he “is known to have a deranged mind.”⁵² Out of his persecution mania, Kinbote also tells the reader of his commentary about a “brutal anonymous note saying: ‘You have hal——-s real bad, chum,’ meaning evidently ‘hallucinations,’ although a malevolent critic might infer from the insufficient number of dashes that little Mr. Anon [the alleged anonymous writer], despite teaching Freshman English, could hardly spell.”⁵³ Kinbote is at least correct in being perplexed about the number of dashes, which in fact are rightly filled if one substitutes “halitosis.” Thus Kinbote's defensive interpretation provides another clue that supports the reader's doubts about his sanity. His mentioning throughout the commentary that he is tortured by excruciating headaches⁵⁴ is a further hint of his impending mental breakdown. Kinbote almost gives the game away at the end of the commentary, as he did in the problem of the Gradus-Grey identity:

Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. … My work is finished. My poet is dead.

“And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?” a gentle young voice may inquire.

God will help me, I trust. … I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. … I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things. … I may huddle and groan in a madhouse.⁵⁵

In his usual theatrical fashion, Kinbote tells the reader the truth by reducing it to a project for a soap opera. When he mentions that he “may huddle and groan in a madhouse,” even the Cedarn cottage disappears, and we envision a shabby mental institution where a logorrheic madman is building worlds of words for a silent audience of fellow inmates, as his self is “petering out.”

Certainly there is some method in this madness. If we reject this last hint about the asylum, which reduces everything to a lunatic's fantasy, and accept as true at least the basic facts (Shade is killed because he is mistaken for Goldsworth, and his poem is edited by Kinbote), we are still surprised by the promptness and detachment shown by Kinbote when Shade is shot. He does not waste a second; he leaves the body lying in the grass, hurries in the house, conceals the envelope containing the manuscript of the poem (which he “happened” to carry for Shade) at the bottom of a closet, dials 11111 for an ambulance, returns with a ridiculous but apparently thoughtful glass of water “to the scene of the carnage.”⁵⁶ Everything is so perfect that it seems to have been planned and mentally rehearsed quite a few times. Could Kinbote also have “inverted” the truth about his talks with Jack Grey, rather than having made them up completely? While it is unlikely that he could have been allowed interviews with the lunatic after the murder, it is not altogether impossible that he could have talked with him before the murder and arranged Jack Grey's escape from “Zembla” (the asylum) rather than his own. He could have told him to come to the judge's house at a certain time to kill Goldsworth, perhaps even promising to bloodthirsty Jack Grey that he, Kinbote, would be with the judge, in front of his house, in order to make the assassin's task easier. The resemblance between Shade and Goldsworth, the fact that Kinbote was living in the judge's house and that Shade had been invited for dinner by Kinbote and was in front of the rented house can be seen as mere chances (quite a few, though) or as the elements on which a perfect murder has been built.

Another suspicious series of details is the following: “The armed gardener [Kinbote's gardener, who had clubbed down the killer with a spade] and the battered killer were smoking side by side on the steps … The gardener took the glass of water I had placed near a flowerpot and shared it with the killer, and then accompanied him to the basement toilet, and presently the police and the ambulance arrived.”⁵⁷ Someone who has just hurt an assassin watches out, does not smoke or share with him a glass of water, or take the assassin to the bathroom, unless everything has been prearranged.

The fact that even this third version of the murder, which does not clash with the second, but rather completes it, as it explains puzzling details (the glass of water, the behavior of the gardener, the too many coincidences), is not impossible—there is not enough evidence for it or against it—makes Pale Fire even more tantalizing and gives it an unexpected “turn of the screw” of planned and lunatic wickedness. It would not be the first time that a loony fan of a celebrity shifts his aim from adoration to assassination. But Kinbote has indeed some reasons to have Shade killed. It is the only way in which he can snatch the manuscript from the poet and at the same time be given permission to edit it. In fact it is easy for Kinbote to take advantage of Sybil's sorrow and confusion and to play on his alleged (and vain) heroic defense of the poet as related by the gardener:

[B]ut Shade's widow found herself so deeply affected by the idea of my having “thrown myself” between the gunman and his target that during a scene I shall never forget, she cried out, stroking my hands: “There are things for which no recompense in this world or another is great enough.” That “other world” comes in handy when misfortune befalls the infidel but I let it pass of course, and indeed, resolved not to refute anything, saying instead: “Oh, but there is a recompense, my dear Sybil. It may seem to you a very modest request but—give me the permission, Sybil, to edit and publish John's last poem.” The permission was given at once, with new cries and new hugs, and already next day her signature was under the agreement I had a quick little lawyer draw up.⁵⁸

When (and if) Kinbote planned the murder, he was certain that Shade's poem was about Zembla. To become the editor of the work seemed to him the only way to make the poem his own, to link his name forever with the poem and its artistic eternity. But “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with Zembla, and Kinbote has to cover up his murder in order not to get caught and not to show that he had someone killed for nothing, which would make him not only a lunatic but a fool as well. The Zemblan fantasy could even be considered a way to distract the reader from seeing Kinbote's involvement in the murder (which in a nonfantastic account of the facts would come almost as a natural connection) and to cancel its evidence by overburdening the killing with romantic and “inverted” details: Gradus is not Jacques d'Argus sent by the Shadows to kill Charles the Beloved but Jack Grey sent by Kinbote to kill his beloved Shade.

It would be nice to prove that Kinbote by his pseudocommentary—in which he imagined that the murder was not planned by him but by the Zemblan regicidal organization (the Shadows)—made one neat package of both his Zemblan fantasy and his guilt for Shade's useless death at the same time. Unfortunately, I cannot find for this theory the kind of chronological evidence which Christina Tekiner⁵⁹ finds to demonstrate that all that happens in Nabokov's Lolita after Humbert gets the letter from Lolita is a fruit of his imagination and thus he stops being a memoir writer to become an artist, for he creates the last nine chapters out of his inability to deal with reality, with a pregnant, older Lolita. In this sense, reading the manuscript of Shade's poem would have on Kinbote the same effect that Lolita's letter had on Humbert. Unable to deal with the reality of the poem, he would set himself to distorting it, creating for it a new reality through his pseudocommentary, through his imagination.

It is worth remembering that Oedipa also became an “artist” because of an unexpected letter from a law firm in which she found out that “she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity.”⁶⁰ The unexpected contents of letters and manuscripts (think also of the mysterious Aristotle codex in Il nome della rosa) play an important role in anti-detective fiction, which in turn often involves the hunt for lost (the Aristotle codex in Il nome della rosa), corrupted (the Scurvhamite version of The Courier's Tragedy) or complete books (Calvino's ten novels in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore). Books, letters, and manuscripts inside the fiction testify to the special concern for literary matters of the anti-detective novel, which is in the metafictional category a “book conscious of its bookness.”

Like Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire has both a deconstructive and a metafictional aspect, although the second is predominant. It proves itself a deconstructive anti-detective novel as it offers a “double solution”: the fantastic and irrational one Kinbote tries to impose on the reader and the plausible and rational one the reader-detective reconstructs through Kinbote's slips. The third possibility I mentioned goes along with the deconstructive aims of Pale Fire since it poses a disturbing alternative to the second version just as the reader becomes ready to accept it as the solution.

In Pale Fire, as in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, there is not a detective but an anti-detective who complicates the mystery in the text thanks to his literary job, which, rather than complicating, was instead supposed to clarify the text. In fact Kinbote takes advantage of his role as editor and commentator to distort the truth; Marana is not a translator of but a “traitor”⁶¹ to texts as he corrupts and forges them. His “opposite,” the He-Reader, trying in vain to read a complete book, certainly elicits a sympathetic response from the real reader, who experiences the same frustration. No He-Reader or She-Reader within the fiction is present in Pale Fire, in which the real reader is also the detective. As detection shifts from murder in the text to “murdered” (distorted, forged) texts, and as the reader is forced reluctantly to fulfill both the role of victim (he is deprived of the pleasure of the text) and the one of detective (he must “seek it”) at the same time, we enter the realm of metafictional anti-detective fiction.

The focus of the novel is no longer the relation among the characters, as it is in conventional novels, but rather the one among the writer, the reader, and the text. In fact the writer makes the reader continuously self-conscious about his fictional creation and even addresses himself directly to him. In Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore the various narrators of Calvino's unfinished novels remind the reader continuously that he is reading fiction and so does Calvino himself in the introductions to the unfinished novels, as he plays with the personal pronouns. In Pale Fire Kinbote reminds the reader continuously that he is reading fiction by his absurd notes to “Pale Fire,” which is a poem, a “fiction” onto which he is trying to impose another “fictional truth,” his commentary, in which he addresses himself to the real reader.

In the metafictional category the anti-detective novel becomes mainly ‘assassination” of texts and “hide-and-seek” between the writer and reader. The detective game is rarefied and intellectualized to such an extent that it becomes the sophisticated ritualization of the timeless game between writer and reader present in any good novel. The roles of the murderer and of the detective are here played mainly outside the fiction by the writer and by the reader respectively. The text is the “corpse,” as it is mutilated (“translated” by Marana) or disfigured (“edited” by Kinbote). The reader can bring the textcorpse “back to life” by solving the mystery, that is, by piecing together its unfinished parts (the titles which compose a “solution” in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) or by making sense out of the distortion imposed on it (Kinbote's commentary). In both cases, the corpse is no longer within the text, but is the text itself; consequently the main relation between detective and murderer is not within the text but outside it, since the reader's role is to reconstruct the corpse that the writer offers him.

Largely, the game is again between the creative side of M. Dupin (the writer who creates and “murders” the fiction) and his resolvent side (the reader, who tries to “resurrect”—and thus also to “recreate—the murdered fiction by making sense out of it). The Poesque duality here becomes the polarization of the relation between writer and reader, between the fictionmaker and his active recipient.

Notes

1. The structure of Calvino's novel seems evocative of the one of Statements, a novel described in Borges' short story “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain” (“Analysis of the Work of Herbert Quain”), published in Ficciones.

2. Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1979) came out in English in a translation by William Weaver (If on a winter's night a traveler [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981]). I disagree with Weaver's clumsy translation of lettore as “the Reader” and of lettrice (lettrice is the feminine correspondent to the masculine lettore) as “the Other Reader,” since it misses the crucial masculine/feminine opposition present in the two Italian nouns. I will quote, however, from Weaver's translation, since it is the only one published. Nevertheless, throughout the text, I am going to refer to the lettore as “He-Reader” and to the lettrice as “She-Reader,” while Weaver's translation (“the Reader” and “the Other Reader”) will of course remain in the quoted passages.

3. Italo Calvino (b. 1923), If on a winter's night a traveler, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 27.

4. Calvino, p. 4.

5. Calvino. p. 4.

6. Calvino, p. 30.

7. Calvino, p. 32.

8. Calvino, p. 159.

9. Note the parodical assonance between “Silas Flannery” and “Sean Connery,” the name of the actor who played Ian Fleming's James Bond.

10. Calvino, p. 189.

11. Calvino, pp. 169, 170, 171.

12. Calvino, pp. 240, 241. Italics mine.

13. Calvino, pp. 10, 11, 12.

14. For an exhaustive study on the theory of narration and the notion of point of view, which are only peripheral concerns in this work, it would be helpful to see Gérard Genette's structuralist “classic,” Narrative Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Original title: “Discours du récit,” a portion of Figures III (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1972).

15. Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, p. 141.

16. Calvino, p. 141.

17. Calvino, p. 155.

18. Unlike English, in Italian the second person plural (voi) differs from the second person singular (tu).

19. Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, p. 132.

20. Remember the following passage: “What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you [the He-Reader], perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I [Calvino]” (Calvino, p. 141; italics mine).

21. Calvino, pp. 197-98.

22. Calvino, p. 161.

23. Calvino, p. 162.

24. Calvino, p. 215.

25. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966), p. 156.

26. Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, pp. 235, 236.

27. Calvino, p. 259.

28. Calvino, p. 3.

29. Calvino, p. 26.

30. Calvino, p. 3.

31. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1962), p. 81.

32. Nabokov, pp. 214, 215.

33. Nabokov, p. 315.

34. Nabokov, p. 238.

35. Nabokov, p. 238.

36. Nabokov, p. 238. Italics mine.

37. Nabokov, p. 20.

38. Nabokov, p. 86.

39. From the entry on Vladimir Nabokov by John V. Hagopian in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 2: American Novelists since World War II (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1978), p. 360.

40. Hagopian, p. 361.

41. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 82.

42. Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 296. Italics mine.

43. Nabokov, p. 183. See especially Mary McCarthy's penetrating interpretation of Pale Fire (“A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Republic, 4 June 1962).

44. Nabokov, p. 299.

45. See Nabokov, p. 267.

46. Patrica Merivale, “The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8 (Spring 1967), p. 308.

47. Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 212.

48. Nabokov, p. 33.

49. Nabokov, p. 69.

50. Nabokov, pp. 28, 29.

51. Nabokov, p. 25.

52. Nabokov, p. 195.

53. Nabokov, p. 98.

54. See Nabokov, pp. 107, 189, and 194.

55. Nabokov, pp. 300, 301.

56. Nabokov, p. 295.

57. Nabokov, p. 295.

58. Nabokov, p. 298.

59. Christina Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” Modern Fiction Studies 25 (Autumn 1979), p. 3.

60. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 9.

61. In Italian traduttore (translator) and traditore (traitor) are very similar words. Ironically, Marana's role in the novel fits perfectly the assonance between the two nouns. Furthermore, Marana recalls the Italian marrano (traitor) and Ermes, Marana's first name, is in Greek mythology the name of the god of thieves.