Simulating Narrative Minds

Gentlemen and ladies, allow me, if you would be so kind, to refer to this here piece of prose writing as “Exhibit A,” which I have altered from its original source (that may or may not be familiar to you that are present here today).

Well, never you mind then. ’T’ain’t important. You know plenty from what you heard just now. What I am proposing to this august assembly is that this “once upon a time” establishes a pro-to-typical “situation of telling,” as we might nominate it.³ That is to say, it is itself a species of the genus, story. In particular, it is a phenomenon seemingly strange and rarefied – but in reality all too common (like mortal sin or halitosis). I am speaking of a story that itself concerns the telling of another story. Like that second story that it circles in the manner of a vine of morning glories on the post of your front porch, it has people who want things, desire things, long for things, and who want those things so deeply in the very sense and possibility of their being itself that they set themselves perhaps against tremendous odds. Or perhaps the odds are not so tremendous and are, it may be, even in their favor. But here the task they set themselves is just the telling of the second story. So, there you have it, the two of them, two storytellers and two stories, like twins looking in a curved mirror and not knowing who is who, or like those dolls the Chinese make, each one just a smaller version of the last, as you open them, one by one, as if the book itself had another book inside it. I will now turn over the podium to my esteemed and venerable colleague.

Many thanks. Let us cast our minds back to the opening of this most educative lecture, where we were introduced, by the ghost of Professor Compson, to a storyteller who is coming down the road. Suppose now that this here storyteller, who is coming down the road, is a former slave who has learned of his emancipation and is going to join the Yankees. Now, what kind of a tale will this fellow relate to our good mistress Tuckoo? Imagine it for yourselves. Suppose Tuckoo is a black child. Her calico frock is clean, but badly worn, hair a little frazzly. There she is, looking up at the man, all suspicious, as if she was thinking in her little mind of a child some big thought, like, “Who this strange ol’ man staring at me with his mouthful of teeth?” Then the man pokes her in the belly, soft-like, not hurting her none, and makes a funny noise with his mouth, like air coming out of a balloon when you pull the neck tight, a kind of a squeak. Then he says, “Why, you mus’ be li’l Baby Tuckoo! Why I ain’t seen you since you mouth was all gums like a old woman, like somebody granny done forgot her teeth that day. Now you all big – gonna be a woman soon.” Tuckoo keeps giving him the one-eyed stare, still all suspicious-like. “You know, you a free girl now – free! You looking back for your mammy – yeah, she free too. White folk don’t know it yet though. We going right now to learn ’em ’bout freedom. Yes, ma’am! We makin’ sure they get the point this here time.” Then he’s setting down his satchel and raising the girl up in his two arms like she was something he needed to lift up into the light to see better or to look through, like you might hold up a unopened envelope to see if it’s got money in it; you almost expecting him to hold the girl to his ear and give her a little shake too. But no. He cranes back his head, squinting agin’ the sun, telling her, “You don’ worry none. Uncle Isaiah gonna teach ’em good!” As Isaiah is leaving down along the road, little Baby Tuckoo’s turning her face to follow him leaving and that twisted up li’l face of hers ain’t change no more than if it was painted on the side of a store or like a photograph in a magazine, and she thinking that man got some big teeth and how, if only she knew how to talk, she’d tell her ma all about it.

Friends, friends, allow me to elucidate. You see with what ease and facility we all proceeded to fabricate and to reciprocate the fabrication, the optimism, and the illumination of that fantastical meeting between Ol’ Isaiah and Baby Tuckoo – though you never met nor even heard about them until this very day, nor could you have done so, since they are as unreal as the element of ether and the ethereal chimera. So, you can go on and on, fancying to yourself what story Isaiah’d tell to Tuckoo, and what Tuckoo might have told her mama, if only she had the gift of tongues and could speak without yet knowing language. You could even imagine my esteemed colleague – solid here as the earth that’s holding us all up from falling into Hades or Gehenna like into quicksand – you can even imagine that he too is a mere will-o’-the-wisp, a idea we all excogitate when we think up someone tellin’ us a tale about somebody else by the name of Isaiah and his little niece, Baby Tuckoo.

This, I can’t say it enough times, is simulation.

Let us follow the lead of my esteemed colleague and consider the sequelae, as my colleagues in the medical college would say. Now – just keep on imagining with me – or even fancy to yourself that you are imagining me, that I’m not standing here before you, like the preacher on a Easter Sunday, brought in from St. Louie, to tell you the fire and the Lamb and the abomination. May be that I’m a story told by my esteemed colleague, who is himself but a phantasm of wavering thought and a trick of light in the mind’s eye.

It’s a few years later, and Isaiah is returning by the same road, but the opposite way, and he sees Baby Tuckoo and she knows him now (she’s seen him in the interim, perhaps he bivouacked in her cabin once, when the white folks had left and the Yankees were there, the cavalry pouring in from the hills like blue and brown waves of the sea). She pleads with him to tell her what has happened – to the waves of blue, to the land that they have still been planting while the white folks were gone with their bonnets and their carriages, to the words of the language itself, both beautiful and terrifying as dreams.

There, my friends, we have it. The same simulation shaped by character and situation, but here for the narration – the simulation of the narration⁴ – as Isaiah begins to tell what there is to say to a still tiny girl whose old suspicion of a child was (as she looked at the changes on her mother’s face and limbs during those months and years) replaced by a sort of tortured hope, then by hunger, and now by a desperate confusion that alternates between images of paradise and a blank futureless dark that is neither desire nor despair.

This is, as all of you must by now have recognized, the selfsame simulation – the same agents with their emotions and aims, the same scenes, the same motions and complexities of causes and consequences, the same chains of action, the same movements of the heart and of the God-given mind – interest and feeling, morals and policy.⁵ The one self-evident and incontestable difference comes in the fact that the narrator’s story is all about talk, not action. It’s about telling something to somebody. Yet its most profound and consequential element is not the author’s imagination of the speaker. There is something stuck even down in that: the imagination of the speaker’s imagination. And even more: the imagination of the speaker’s imagination of the person he or she is speaking or writing to – for that’s who the narrator aims to please and teach. And even that is inside something wider, more encompassing, like rings in a stump. That narrator and narratee are imagined by some implied author in the imagined mind of an imagining reader.⁶

And that ain’t the whole of it, neither. If we took the thing further still, we’d find arguments too, chains of logic selecting out from the possibilities of event or person or place just those that fit that author’s purposes.⁷ Most times, these are adjunct to the story itself, a story inseparable from the thematic import dramatized in the cupidity and the hate, the abomination and the purgatorial passage through, and everything else that makes for the story as it opens into the mind of the author, and the reader, and the author as a reader. But narration too may have its own argumentative and exploratory simulations, its own conclusions and enthymemes. When it does, these might circle like buzzards around a single center, may be the authority of the narrator himself, the nature and eternal falsity of the speaker who pretends to know a tale, when he has merely fabricated everything from the stories to the syllables – or, if not fabricated, then so jumbled up and modified it to his own purposes as to make all talk of knowledge or veracity or even realism both sad and laughable, like a dead man whose burying clothes don’t quite fit.

And don’t some of you begin to suspect that models are missing from this grand – one could almost say providential – scheme, in which the small reflects the great, in which the container itself is one great mirror for the contained and its multitudinous processes.⁸ These models of course include those of writing itself: the audience and the performer, the creator and the character, the author and the reader – not the real reader, mind you, but the imagined one, the one who guides the author, who himself fades to hazy implicitness through that guidance.

Now, you may say, “But Professor, ain’t that there simulated reader, ain’t that just the same old thing anyhow – the narratee ‘nominated to a more diversified appellation,’ as you might say?” Leaving aside the snipperiness of such a question, and focusing our attention solely on its substance, we would have to say no. Among other facets and developments, in the usual run of things, a narratee is a person or some group of persons, and persons are, by their nature, particular – specified, unique. But the reader – imagined, implied – can be a most generalized and abstract idea or, indeed, even less than an idea, a sort of inclination, an inarticulate sense on the part of an author that something is or is not quite right, a sense that this right here must be modified, and that over there excised like a noxious growth, and this third kept as it is.

Indeed, there is a point to be made here about simulation and other minds and, if you are so kind as to allow me, I will venture to make it. There are two types of simulation. In one, I imagine anyone, anyone at all, in the particular situation at hand, a mere formalism, without the individuating substance that grants that form its incidental properties, a simple idea or eidos, as the Platonists amongst you would have it. This is when I say the like of, “Well, who wouldn’t be scared silly in the middle of the night with the water moccasins all around, their fangs dripping poison you can almost smell, and the yapping of the bloodhounds coming closer and closer?” The other kind of simulacrum is someone, someone I know in his or her unique speciality and strangeness. That’s when you let out with, “That’s just the sort damn-fool, hidebound nonsense of abominable mule-headed persistence you’d expect from Buckwell!” In between, there are the cases where I fix a property or two, a parameter – like when I say, “Any man with a sore foot won’t be volunteering to walk all the way to Jefferson just out of the kindness of his heart to hand deliver a letter unless he plans on having a look-see at the contents.”

And this, my friends, is where the problem lies. For the narrator addresses a narratee specified in one manner and one degree, whereas the author invisible behind that narrator is speaking to and writing for an imaginary reader both different and more general. The trick is to preserve the smooth artifice of narration while driving the reader on to the knowledge and the feeling and the desire – not least of all, the desire to keep on being driven. That is the falsity of narration, and its genius.

Here’s the simplest of cases – why does that very covert narrator of Hamlet, hidden as he is, like Polonius behind the arras, why does he not get on with telling us what he knows about Claudius and the murder right at the get-go?⁹ Well, we all know – it’s on account of how it would weaken the play and make us all less likely to purchase it for our classes and devote books and articles to its explication. But it’s perfectly clear that he could have revealed that information at any time it pleased him to do so. Once you get thinking about it, it’s curious.

Authors facing this crisis and dilemma usually set to it in one of two ways. The most obvious is by trying to hide the artifice, while hoping we don’t notice – and, usually, we don’t. The other is to bring the artifice right out there on the stage, then deal with it. Here too we may engage in that much derided nomination to diverse appellations, and make a further division. The artificiality may be explained or it may be flaunted. Just as a for instance, one of the main purposes of limiting what a narrator knows is to explain emplotment and make it natural-like. In contradistinction, the flaunting of narrative manipulation is a signal characteristic of what our esteemed colleagues nominate and appellate “the postmodern.”

Narration Occluded or Explained: Faulkner’s Light in August

What precisely brought Miss Lena Grove all the way to Jefferson, Mississippi, walking alone for weeks from Alabama? And what consequences did it have, for her, for Lucas Burch, and for Byron Bunch? In fine, what fancy frames Faulkner’s fiction?

Marry, it was a fine, saucy tale of seduction and abandonment, with a soupçon of the Don Juan variety. Let us summarize the events:The dear orphan, Lena, with no mother to counsel her and provide her a store of wisdom and prudence, succumbs to the enchanting endearments of Mr. Burch, who should have inspired the trust of a used snake oil dealer. Hearing that the proverbial bun is in the oven, Burch absconds, leaving Lena in lonely anticipation of his missive calling her to join him in the states of Mississippi and matrimony. Literally fed up to here [imagine appropriate gesture] with waiting, Lena heads out on her own, planning to reach at least Mississippi. Through a confusion of names, she gets herself all mixed up with some Mr. Bunch, a clinging, insignificant sort of a fellow that meant well and even took to the manly art of fisticuffs in defense of his lady love, but who, when faced with said lady love, evidenced all the backbone of a pudding. Aided by the moony Bunch, Lena does find out the elusive Burch, only to be abandoned once again – now with the babe in arms.

Celebrating Artifice: Calvino’sSe una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)

I’m afraid I have a confession to make. Perhaps you will be surprised to hear that I am not William Faulkner, nor a dead southern professor from one of his novels. On second thought, that won’t surprise you. I must botch the dialect here and there. Okay, more than here and there. Perhaps it’s so bad that you found yourself holding your ears closed and saying, “Good Lord spare me this abomination and putrefaction of the English language!” But, in fairness, you must admit that I warned you at the beginning to expect the worst.

In any case, as I say, I have a confession to make – and I believe it will give you some sympathy with my inadequacies in articulating different voices. I am, of course, the “big” narrator here – the “embedding” and (up to now) nonpersonified narrator. You may say, “Well, so, how does that mitigate your rather embarrassing overreaching (thinking you could imitate Faulkner! My God – Faulkner! It’s perfectly scandalous!)? My prediction is that no self-respecting university press will ever publish this book now.” Well, as the song says, “Call me unreliable.” But you are imagining that I’m a person, someone with his or her faculties intact, someone who really can choose to desist from pretending that he or she is Faulkner. But, you see, there’s the rub. I’m not a person. I’m just a character. Indeed, I’m a specific character. I’m the character called I in Italo Calvino’s Se una Notte (yada, yada, yada – you know the title; if you don’t, just look back at the section heading; it’s printed there).

So, can you forgive me now?

But the complications don’t end there. No, not by a long chalk. In fact, the strangest difficulty is not the narrator, but the narratee. It’s you – yes, you, sitting there, right now, with the book in front of you.

I know, set it down, close it up, look away, turn your back – try to make a liar out of me. But it won’t do. You’re still the person I’m addressing.

So, there you have it. This whole narrative – and I hope you recognize how much it is guided by an argument and, indeed, by models of narration! – this whole business about narration and particularity is being articulated by a fictional entity, a nothing, the merest suggestion of words, prompts for simulation. It is, however, addressed to and actualized by a real person – you. So just where does that mean the bad Faulkner imitation exists? Tell me that, smarty pants! The point is that there is only one person here who even can be guilty of botching this pastiche – and that is you! Yes, you. It certainly can’t be me; I don’t even exist.

Enter the ghost of Italo Calvino.

Peace, sweet mole! I broach the matter presently. Well, this is a bit silly. When do we address an individual? In part, it’s a matter of how we define “address.” But a reasonable definition might be something along the following lines: An utterer addresses an individual when he or she has either perceptually or conceptually isolated that individual uniquely. For example, suppose I look at Calvino’s ghost and say, “Art thou a spirit damned or have flights of angels sung thee to thy rest?” In that case, I am addressing the individual that I perceive. Alternatively, suppose I organize a séance and, through some credentialed medium, cry out to the spirit world, “Oh, most splendid author of the incomparable Le Città Invisibili, pour the sweet nectar of thy heavenly speech into the longing portals of my anxious ears!” I am addressing someone picked out conceptually – roughly, the author of Le Città Invisibili.

So, do authors ever address actual readers? Yes, they do – but it’s pretty rare. The obvious case is love poetry. Shakespeare addressed his sonnets simultaneously to an anonymous readership (including you and me) and to a particular beloved (or, rather, two beloveds, depending on the sonnet). But that’s it. My author, Calvino, wasn’t addressing any real reader any more than I am. I’m so sorry if that disappoints you. I suppose it might make you feel special to have a nonexistent being really talk to you, and only to you, with every other reader only overhearing things, like the furniture repairer with Lena and Byron. It would make me feel special. Perhaps you could convince a love poet to write sonnets to you. That might help some.

But if I’m not really addressing you personally, why does it seem that I am? Well, that’s where modeling comes in. I’m simply modeling my narratee on a generalized idea of the reader. It’s just what Faulkner does with the furniture repairer’s wife. The difference is that, in this case, I’m flaunting the artifice, rather than obscuring or explaining it.

So, that leads us back to my creator. Surely he is addressing you, isn’t he? I’m sorry to say – no, he’s not addressing you any more than I am. Take the first chapter of Se una Notte. There he merely imagines what a reader in general is likely to be doing – for example, how he or she bought the book. But even a mere moment’s reflection should have told you that this imaginary reader is not you. It’s just some reader, a generalized reader, an abstract simulacrum. Indeed, even careful attention to the language shows this. “Stai per cominciare” (3) tells us that we are on the verge of beginning the novel; it goes on to instruct us in preliminaries – settling ourselves in the chair and so on. But as soon as you read “stai,” you have already begun the novel and are already settled. The first chapter simply cannot address what you are doing. It addresses, rather, what some reader might already have done. Of course, it wouldn’t matter if you were really doing it (perhaps you hadn’t thought to put up your feet and, as you read the words, you do just that – a perfectly sensible decision, although why didn’t it strike you before?). It’s still an artifice, a coincidence between the generally imagined narratee and you as a real reader.

Indeed, that is presumably part of the thematic point. If Calvino is flaunting the artifice of the fiction, he is surely not saying that he directly addresses me or you or the fellow over in the corner of the Starbucks who seems to be reading – yes, what a coincidence … it’s a copy of … Italo Calvino’s Se una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore! He’s right at the beginning. Let’s wait – yes, now he’s putting up his feet. But you lose interest in observing him before you see whether he tries the yoga position mentioned in the novel. It’s time to leave Starbucks anyway. Perhaps you have to go to a session at the Modern Language Association convention. Perhaps you are delivering a paper yourself. There you are, listening to everyone go on and on about how we must interrogate the site of the binary in the conjunctural moment of hybrid historical constructedness.

But eventually you return to Calvino. You are now finishing up the first chapter. Here, you are told that you expect to “recognize” the characteristic “accent” of the author – and, of course, you do expect that. But then you are told that it is absent from this book, that the only constant characteristic of this author is that he changes so much from book to book (10)! But, surely, that is not true. Could anyone other than Calvino have written this book?¹¹ (Okay, perhaps Pirandello – but we know he didn’t.) That, again, dear reader, is a flaunting of simulation and a flouting of the convention that authors should use art to conceal art.

Of course, the narration here is not entirely wrong. The beginning of the novel proper (the first interchapter), while not wholly different from what you expect from Calvino, is also not wholly the same. There is novelty in it, and it does therefore provoke your curiosity (10). But, even here, in stating the function of the novelty, as Calvino does, he to some degree makes the artifice itself salient. (Wait, am I beginning to sound like that MLA speaker? If I say anything about the text inviting you into the conjunctural space of dialogic performativity, you should immediately close the book and send it back to amazon.com for a refund – well, I mean anything other than this sentence here, of course; this sentence itself doesn’t count.)

But now you see something strange and wonderful. The interchapter begins the book within the book. It is “Se una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore.” Does that mean that the novel itself is embedded within an interchapter that is itself embedded within the novel? What fun! That Calvino is really something (you say to yourself). The thrill of paradox – especially a paradox of recursion! That’s why he refers to Zeno (18, 26), best known for just these sorts of paradox. (If Zeno and a turtle are both trying to finish reading a novel, the turtle will win because Zeno must finish half of the novel before he finishes all of it, and he must finish half of the remaining half, and half of the remaining quarter, and so on, to no end point. I think we have all read novels like that.)

“Excuse me – excuse me – could I say something here?”

Well, it’s rather unorthodox for a real person to insert himself into a discussion with someone who is only a fictional character.

“Oh, I’m just a simulation myself. Indeed, I’m not even sure who my author is. I’ve been going to Mr. Pirandello’s salon, but he leaves me alone in the corner while he talks with that harlot and her father.”

In that case, be my guest.

“Thanks so much. Here is what I’m thinking. Perhaps this fascination of ours results from adaptation. For example, recursion is a key feature of language. Thus children need to take an interest in recursive processes, to focus on them and imitate them. And they do. But we tend to dwell only on things that have some hedonic element. (Sorry to talk so much like a psychologist. It’s against my nature. But one has to keep up with the times! Especially those of us who have been orphaned by our creators.) It’s at least imaginable that children attracted by recursion were more successful in assimilating recursive practices. That, then, would be one adaptive mechanism that spread interest in recursion throughout the population.”

Just so!

“But, like all mechanisms, it has nonadaptive consequences as well. Our strange delight in paradoxes of recursion might be one case of this.”

So true. Yet your delectable ecstasy – well, at least amusement – in seeing the novel you are reading contained in a part of that novel that is itself printed in the novel you are currently holding in your hands (and that you will never actually finish reading because you always have at least half of the rest left to read) – is not all that strikes you. There are other emotions. There are themes – why, there is the flaunting of artificiality itself, what you just heard about at the MLA convention as “an invitation into the heteroglot space.” (No, you don’t get to return the book yet. I just cited the phrase; I didn’t actually use it! There’s a difference.)

But then again the interchapter does not really reproduce the novel. It presents me – a character from the novel – describing the novel. For example, it does not begin with the first words of the novel (whatever those might be). It begins with me explaining to you how the novel begins. In doing this, I continually refer to features of both the story world (e.g., the train station) and the book itself (the pages, the paragraphs, the sentences). The purpose of this is clear. It makes salient the multiple levels of embedment. Our inclination is always to forget, to put out of our minds, the fact that the book we are reading is a book. This happens again with a book within a book. By repeatedly referring to the physical object as well as the story, I keep the book itself salient. (Or perhaps my author does that. I’m not sure. It certainly feels to me as if I’m doing it.)

Other instances concern the asking of questions, which, as you know, is so important for reading. For example, at one point, I infer that you, dear reader, might be wondering about the exact historical setting of the events. Is this a station today (i.e., in 1979 – that once was today, even if you are so young that it seems as if 1979 must have been a time when only dinosaurs roamed the earth)? Or is it a station from the past? But, I explain, the author hasn’t actually told us. Indeed, perhaps he hasn’t simply withheld the information, “perhaps the author is still undecided” (13). “How strange! How … interesting!” you say to yourself. “I must read further. Why, this is turning out to be a real page-turner!”

Here (I think you’ve probably noticed this by now), my beloved progenitor, I. C. (“I.” for short), simply does what Faulkner did – although, of course, I. created a much more fascinating and, if I may say so, better-looking character than that furniture repairer. But Faulkner partially conceals the artifice by putting your questions into the mouth of that furniture repairer’s wife. I. obtrusively links the question with you yourself – right there at the library, with your mouth half open, almost asking things out loud and disturbing the other patrons in the reading room – and with the author himself. This is that postmodern purpose of flaunting artificiality. Or perhaps I am doing that. Yes, I think it’s me – not that author, who thinks he is some sort of little god. Or maybe not. In any case, it’s one of the three of us. This all has the rather banal thematic purpose that all you literary critics recognize (pardon me for lumping you all together like this; the author of the present book, himself a literary critic, is now strenuously objecting to this stereotype – look at him over there, fussing and cursing and getting all red in the face. But I’m sticking to my guns!). I know, I’m the one who introduced that theme a few paragraphs ago. (I realize it seems longer.) But I’m already beginning to get bored with it. It’s fine once or twice, but its interest fades quickly. Alright, alright – enough already! We get it! Narration is artificial. Well, aren’t we all so clever!

But what truly fascinates you about Calvino’s book (beyond its utterly enchanting central character and narrator) is that, after making artifice salient, it then goes on to show that making artifice salient is itself artificial. Moreover, it indicates that the apparently artificial quality of narration and emplotment are also real. That’s what makes the book more than some undergraduate exercise in postmodern narratology.

So, let’s begin with the story world. Up to this point, we have only looked at works that follow some cross-cultural prototype. The fragment of Se una Notte suggests a more localized genre – one focusing on espionage. Although not a cross-cultural genre per se, it does derive in part from recurring motifs of espionage in cross-cultural genres. These prominently include the heroic plot and the revenge plot, as I showed you in Hamlet. (I should perhaps confess here that I have been narrating this book all along, even though I embedded a fictionalized version of the author – I believe his name is Ohman[n?] – in my narration. In consequence –

1. “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me!”

2. “What is it now?”

3. “My name is Hogan!”

Very well, then – in consequence, it should be clear that I am solely responsible for the content of these arguments and analyses while the admirable “My name is Grogan!” over there deserves neither praise nor blame for them, despite the fact that his name appears on the cover of the book, and on the contract with the press, although this is due only to the fact that the law does not recognize property rights for fictional characters, a form of blatant discrimination that I must leave aside for the present.) These recurring motifs are strongly affected by their usual generic contexts, and also by the authorial model that they commonly involve. Specifically (just in case you’ve forgotten this from Chapter 5 – well, I know you haven’t forgotten, but some other readers, you see, they are getting old and forgetful; they remember when it was 1979; it’s sad, really; one has to be kind to them), they often include a version of the unseen audience that is quietly overhearing all us characters speak to one another. Not only in plays, mind you. For all my self-confident assertions, I can’t actually see you. You can see me – well, hear me; well, read what I’ve written – well, something, but I actually have no idea what you are doing. Perhaps you are smiling benevolently. Perhaps you are laughing derisively – well, no; I’m sure you are not doing that. Perhaps you are weeping because we will never have the opportunity to meet in person (which is certainly very sad, for you especially). Perhaps you are reading this passage aloud to another audience at the MLA annual convention and praising my brave challenge to the discourse of truth and the apparatus of power. In any case, the point is that espionage – based as it is on unobserved observation and the concealment of a fictional artifice – is a very fitting means for rendering salient the artifice of fiction.

And – as you might figure from the reference to genres – espionage has not remained confined to motifs. It has become a genre as well. It is a very diverse genre, with multiple concerns and stories. Indeed, it has its own recurring motifs. These include secret meetings between people who do not know one another and recognize one another only by a sign or token, anonymity and multiplication of identities, intentional or unintentional switches of properties or people (e.g., mix-ups of luggage in which sensitive and incriminating materials are lost), misrecognitions (e.g., in which a random passerby happens to say the password for the secret meeting).

Such motifs recur not only in narratives that seek to cover their tracks (so to speak) – thus more “traditional” narratives, as one might say. They also appear in experimental fiction. A prominent case is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le Labyrinthe. Although not a spy story, Robbe-Grillet’s famous novel takes up these motifs in the context of a (broadly) postmodern work. Indeed, it is just the sort of work that is often taken to have many of the standard postmodern thematic concerns. Thus a common view of the novel is that it is not about warfare and clandestine operations at all. It is, rather, a fiction about fiction, a text about producing the text (see, for example, Leki 78–79 and Morrissette 184).

This is relevant to our purposes because Calvino suggests at the beginning of the second chapter that his embedded novel is actually a work by Robbe-Grillet. Specifically, perhaps Robbe-Grillet’s most famous stylistic feature is the cyclical repetition of phrases, images, and events with only slight variations. The second chapter of Se una Notte begins with me explaining something to you. (If you think back on your experience of the novel embedded within the interchapter embedded within the novel, you’ll remember this – or, rather, you would if “you” here actually did address you, rather than some implicit narratee.) Specifically, recall how “at a certain point you observe[d]” that this or that sentence “does not appear to be new.” Indeed, you thought – “This entire passage … it seems to me I’ve read it before” (28). After a time you concluded that this is one of those literary virtuosi who repeat a paragraph now and again – or an entire page, or – hold your horses! This is the same book. Look at the page numbers – once you come to page thirty-two, you advance again to … page seventeen! It’s a printer’s error.

Well, needless to say, the virtuoso here is Alain Robbe-Grillet. The joke is that readers of Robbe-Grillet have exactly the opposite experience. One doesn’t imagine that the repetition is a literary technique only to find that it is a printer’s error. Rather, a reader is likely to wonder if there is a printer’s error – only to find that it is a literary technique! In short, Calvino (through my voice, thank you) is parodying the entire postmodern approach that we just claimed his novel was exemplifying!

Well, this leaves us in a pickle. What is going on thematically here? Is this novel teaching us about the arbitrariness of narration? Or is it a great takeoff on those techniques that pretend to teach us about the arbitrariness of narration? I suppose it could even be both. The novel makes artifice salient but then goes on to show that making artifice salient is itself artificial. (Oh, I said that already. Well, I’ll just make out that the repetition was intentional. Note to copy editor: Leave this in. It will make readers think I’m parodying Robbe-Grillet.)

Or am I (or is Calvino) even making the initial thematic point at all (that narration is artificial)? The story concerns a man (that’s me) with a suitcase, at a train station in a provincial town. I am supposed to meet someone else from the organization. We will inadvertently exchange suitcases. I will leave. It does not take much commitment to biographical criticism to see in this story elements of Calvino’s own time in the anti-Fascist resistance, even if I (and Calvino) never bother to tell you that.

This leads us in an entirely different direction. The disruptions and inconsistencies of the narrative may not tell us how artificial fiction is with respect to life. They may suggest something about how life itself operates, at least its most intense and difficult moments. In a letter discussing his brief time as a partisan, Calvino wrote that it was “a series of reversals” involving “dangers” that were “unnarratable” (he didn’t send the letter to me, but it is quoted by some fellows named Barenghi and Falcetto on page xxiii; I can’t vouch for their reliability; perhaps they are just making it up and there is no such letter, but we can only go with the evidence we have before us). He seems to have included literary representations in the scope of this statement. Not only are the dangers “inenarrabile.” Moreover, the “reversals” are peripezie, which commonly translates Aristotle’s term for a narrative “reversal,” peripeteia.¹²

This suggests that the thematic focus of this part of the work is perhaps not so much writing or the novel but rather such terrible events of life as comprise the struggle against Fascism. Indeed, it is easy to understand the entire section in terms of simulations that would necessarily pass through the mind of a partisan given such an assignment. He is told the plan, or part of it – the commander does not tell him everything; he does not identify everyone or explain all the details. The commander is, then, like an author who does not tell everything to the reader, or inhibits the narrator from telling everything to the narratee, like the furniture repairer does not tell everything to his wife. But now the partisan begins the ordinary process of simulation. He is told that it is “a perfect plan” (18) – but, he wonders, what if the train is simply late? Here, then, it seems that Calvino is using a fictional simulation to help clarify the nature of ordinary, practical simulation. It is almost the opposite of foregrounding artificiality.

Indeed, the connections go further. My worries about being an obtrusive presence for the people in the station are the worries of a partisan faced with a mission to an unfamiliar place to meet an unknown contact, risking arrest at any moment; they are perhaps the worries of Calvino himself who could not help but “place in this ‘I’ a little of himself,” of what “he imagines feeling” (17). I am also like that partisan, whether Calvino or someone else, in my envy of the normalcy in ordinary lives (“Yes, envy. I’m looking from afar at life on an ordinary evening in an ordinary town … who knows how long I will be far from such ordinary evenings” [19]). Such normalcy is not the stuff of fiction and – this is the crucial point of connection here – it is not the stuff of a partisan’s life for, like a reader, a spy does not know from moment to moment what peripeteia will follow (“In an existence like mine, one cannot anticipate” even “the next half-hour” [22]). Normalcy, after all, defines precisely what is not part of fiction, or what is there only as background – like the “bits of conversation that seem to have no other function than to represent the life of a provincial city” (20).

That normalcy itself is complex, however; it is a composite of its own banalities and its own consequences. Anything could provide the spy with a hint as to a threat or opportunity, just as anything said in a novel could provide the reader with a clue as to who is the murderer and who is innocent. Thus, “to read well,” whether in literature or espionage, “you must register” both what is noise and what reveals “hidden intention” (20–21).

In short, the thematic significance of Se una Notte, at least in this section, is not primarily a matter of foregrounding and flaunting the artificiality of fiction; nor is it centrally a matter of parodying such postmodern disruption (although there are undoubtedly elements of both in the novel). The main thematic orientation here does not seem to be toward writing but rather toward life. Nor does it seem to be a matter of life generally – our now clichéd “postmodern condition” of disorientation and uncertainty. Or, rather, this section does focus on disorientation and uncertainty, but of a different sort. Specifically, this part of the novel faces us with the discontinuities and uncertainties of real simulation, the places where simulation is unreliable – the points where it must change rapidly and where the stakes are high. In connection with this, it is no coincidence that the people in the bar are gambling, betting on small, possibly cumulative, chance events.

Of course, these thematic concerns should not occlude the emotional function of Calvino’s flaunting of ordinary practices of narration and emplotment. This is not simply a matter of delight in paradox, just as the themes of the novel are not simply a reflex of postmodern self-consciousness. Rather, just as the novel draws your attention to the anti-Fascist resistance, it draws your interest and engagement toward the plight of our hero – that is, me. I hope it is clear by now that being a spy is no bed of roses. The tension only rises at the end of the chapter. Jan has been caught. You don’t know Jan. But now you know me a little, and the prospects don’t look good. Gorin warns me and I have to rush to the train, an express that is not scheduled for a stop – and I don’t even know whether I can trust Gorin. He works for the police. Is he one of us? Is this all a trap? Am I being seduced into belief and acceptance like any narratee of a romance?

This sort of simulation is necessary for us in the resistance (remember, I’m still fixed at the time of the novel, so it’s still current for me, despite my anachronistic references to the MLA and evolutionary psychology). But it is highly disturbing – nightmarish, in fact – until the escape. Flaunting the techniques of narration gives an element of comedy to a situation that is anything but comic.

“Sure, it does make you laugh, don’t it now? Yes, siree. Take that furniture repairer, what with him turning to his wife all in the dark and her asking, Well what did Bunch want to do? And him telling her right back, Why I just done showed once; should I do it again? Which one of you all ain’t laughing at that?”

Yes, you are entirely right. It’s the same in both novels. Of course, in Se una Notte, this relieves some of the anxiety – yours, and I.’s too, since he is the one with the traumatic memory of those reversals. That comedy allows you to go on with the reading – and even leads you to expect a positive outcome. Once you are absorbed in the danger, you stop laughing. But it helps sustain your confidence in an escape.

“Why, it’s the same with them other folks. There’s no risk of them being hauled off for prison. But Byron seems desperated up to force himself on the poor gal. That would not only make the whole kit ’n’ caboodle all worrisome. It wouldn’t make us care much for Byron – which would be a pity after all he done for Lena. Agin that, we might worry too that he’d leave, like he almost done. But, then, I wonder if you got it back-to-front. The way I reckon, it’s not the comic mood that makes us go on to the happy ending – well, at least what ain’t a awful, drag-through-the-mud, downright miserable ending. Instead, it’s that the comic shenanigans with the narrators and narratees and what have you all mixed up like a load of wash – it’s that what allows you to accept the happy ending as the right and sensible outcome of it all, and even to see it as a happy ending.

“But, anyways, if you’s anything like me, you been reading this here book way too long. Your husband or wife keeps begging you – ‘Sweetie pie, why don’t you just turn out that light and go to sleep. It’s already three a.m. Can’t you just finish that darn book in the morning?’ But you can tell her that there ain’t much more to go. Now you have only eight more sentences. Now seven. Now, you are just about to finish. You’re on the edge, about to cross over. First you get through half of what’s left. That leaves jus’ a tiny bit. Then you finish half of that. Now there ain’t hardly nothing left and you don’t even notice your wife or husband reaching to turn out the light, ready to click the switch right as your eyes come to the final, undividable moment of.

Conclusion

“How in the Sam Hill am I supposed to read this thing in the dark?”

But there is nothing more to read. Now you simply think back on what you have finished reading, mulling it over, letting it sink in. Suddenly, you realize that you are in complete agreement with the author (Peter something – Holbein, perhaps? Or Hoyden?) about the particularization of narration. It is identical with the simulation of story, including development and evaluation principles, prototypes (although of course they are prototypes for narration now), even the use of arguments and models – prominently including models drawn from the production and reception of literature itself. Moreover, the simulation of narration is motivated by the same emotional and thematic goals. You are also utterly delighted by the innovative and illuminating analyses of Faulkner and Calvino. “Yes, yes,” you mutter to yourself. “Rather than concealing the artificiality of narration, both authors expose it. But Calvino flaunts this artificiality, whereas Faulkner seeks to explain it!” You very nearly exclaim the final point, much to the dismay of your partner, who had finally begun to anticipate the possibility of sleep. The treatment of Calvino you found particularly enlightening because it overturned the usual reading of the novel as postmodernly self-referential, demonstrating its commentary on real-life conditions of simulation – but you considerately keep this observation to yourself. “What a truly magnificent book! The finest work of literary theory since …” Closing your eyes, you sink slowly into another world of stories and simulations.