by Umberto Eco
But, if you remember, the title on the page that talks about the manuscript is "Naturally, a Manuscript." That "Naturally" has various resonances, because on the one hand it is intended to stress that we are dealing with a literary topos, and on the other it lays bare an "anxiety of influence," since the reference is intended to be (at least for an Italian reader) to Manzoni, who begins his novel with a seventeenth-century manuscript. How many readers will have grasped or could grasp the various ironic resonances in that "Naturally"? And supposing they have not grasped them, will they still have access to the rest of the story without losing much of its flavor? So we see that that "Naturally" suggests what intertextual irony is.
Let us return to the various characteristics attributed to postmodern fiction. As far as metanarrative is concerned, it is impossible for the reader not to notice metanarrative observations. He might feel disturbed by them, he might ignore (or skip) them, but he notices they are there. The same goes for explicit citationism, as in the Dante example. The reader might not realize that Arnaut Daniel is speaking in his own poetic language, but he will notice that he is speaking in a language that is not that of the Comedy, and that therefore Dante is quoting something else, even if it is only the Provençal way of speaking.
When we come to double coding, we can have (and this tells us how many different profiles this notion can assume): (i) a reader who does not accept the mixture of cultured and popular styles and contents, and who therefore refuses to read it, precisely because he recognizes this mixture; (ii) a reader who feels at home precisely because he enjoys this process of alternating between difficulty and approachability, challenge and encouragement; and lastly (iii) a reader who perceives the entire text as a pleasant invitation and does not in the end realize the extent to which it draws on elite styles (so he enjoys the work, but misses its references).
It is only this third case that introduces us to the strategy of intertextual irony. Faced with that "Naturally," whoever appreciates its wink establishes a privileged relationship with the text (or the narrating voice); whoever does not continues to read all the same—and will be faced with two choices: either he will understand through his own capacities that the manuscript business must be a literary artifice (he manages to appreciate the game for the first time, thus "growing" as a competent reader), or, as many have done, he will write to the author asking whether that intriguing manuscript really does exist. But one thing should be made clear: in cases, for example, of double coding in architecture, the visitor might not notice that a colonnade with a tympanum is quoting from Greek architecture, but he nevertheless enjoys the harmony and ordered multiplicity of that construction. On the other hand, the reader who does not grasp my "Naturally" knows only that he is reading about a manuscript, but misses the reference and its playful irony.
A work can abound in quotations from other texts without necessarily being an instance of intertextual irony. Just to take one example, The Waste Land requires pages and pages of notes to identify its references not only to the world of literature but also to history and cultural anthropology, but Eliot deliberately provides the notes because he cannot imagine a naive reader who could miss every single reference and yet enjoy his text in a satisfactory manner. I would say that his notes are an integral part of the text. Of course, uncultured readers could limit their appreciation of the text to its rhythm, its sound, to the hint of ghostliness that appears on the level of content, with a vague knowledge that there is something else there, and enjoying the text like someone eavesdropping at a half-open door, glimpsing only hints of a promising epiphany. But for Eliot (I believe) these would be readers who have not yet grown up, not the Model Readers that he aimed at and wanted to form.
But cases of intertextual irony are different, and precisely because of this they characterize literary forms that, however erudite, can also enjoy popular success: the text can be read in a naive way, without appreciating the intertextual references, or it can be read in the full awareness of them, or at least with the conviction that one has to go looking for them. For an extreme example, let us imagine we had to read the Don Quixote that was rewritten by Borges's Pierre Menard (and that Menard's text can be interpreted differently from Cervantes's text, at least to the extent that Borges claimed). Whoever has not heard of Cervantes would enjoy a fascinating story, a series of mock-heroic adventures whose flavor comes across despite the not very modern Castilian in which they are written. But those who catch the constant reference to Cervantes's text will be able to appreciate not only the correspondences between the original and Menard's text but also the constant and inevitable irony of the latter.
Unlike more general cases of double coding, intertextual irony, by bringing into play the possibility of a double reading, does not invite all readers to the same party. It selects them, and privileges the more intertextually aware readers, but it does not exclude the less aware. If an author happens to introduce a character saying "Paris à nous deux" the naive reader does not identify the allusion to Balzac and yet can become passionately interested all the same in a character who is keen on challenges and boldness. The informed reader, on the other hand, "gets" the reference and savors its irony—not only the author's cultured wink, but also the effects of lowering the tone or changing the meaning (when the quotation is inserted into a context that is totally different from that of the source), the general allusion to the endless dialogue that goes on between texts.
If we had to explain the phenomenon of intertextual irony to a first-year university student, or at any rate to someone who is not in the know, we would perhaps have to tell him that, thanks to this citation strategy, a text presents two levels of reading. But if, instead of someone not in the know, we found ourselves facing someone who was a habitué of literary theory, we could be put on the spot by two possible questions.
First question: so then does "intertextual irony" not perhaps have something to do with the fact that a text can have not just two but four different levels of reading, namely, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels, as is taught in Bible hermeneutics and as Dante claims for his own poem in the Letter to Cangrande?
Second question: but does "intertextual irony" not perhaps have something to do with the two model readers that textual semi-otics, and in particular Eco, talk about, the first one known as the semantic reader and the second as the critical or aesthetic reader?
I will try to demonstrate that we are dealing with three quite distinct phenomena. But replying to these two apparently naive questions is not a poindess exercise, because as we shall see, we are facing a cluster of relationships that are not easy to disentangle.
Let us move to the first question, namely, to the theory of the multiple senses of a text. We do not need to think of the four senses of scripture; we just have to think of the moral meaning of fables: of course, a naive reader can interpret the fable of the wolf and the lamb as a quarrel among animals, but even if the author was not keen to tell us "de te fabula narratur" (the story is about you), it would be very difficult not to glimpse some parable in it, a universal moral lesson, just as happens with the parables in the Gospels themselves.
This joint presence of a literal and a moral sense informs all fiction, even fiction that is least concerned with educating its readers, as might be the case with a cheap police thriller: even from this kind of story the clever and sensitive reader could draw a series of moral teachings, such as that crime doesn't pay, that your deeds will find you out, that law and order are bound to triumph in the end, that human reason can succeed in unraveling the most complex mysteries.
It could even be said that in certain works the moral sense is so identical with the literal one as to constitute the only meaning. But even in so obviously moralizing a novel as The Betrothed, the risk of the reader getting only the story and missing the ethical lesson forces Manzoni to insert proverbial observations here and there, precisely in order that those who devour neo-Gothic plots of garish hue are not satisfied wi
th the kidnaping of Lucia or the death of Don Rodrigo, and thereby risk the possibility of neglecting the message about Providence.
What is the real autonomy of these levels, when there is more than one of them? Can one read The Divine Comedy without grasping its anagogic message? I would say that that is what so much Romantic criticism did. Can one read the procession at the end of Purgatorio without apprehending its allegorical dimension? A good surrealist reading of it could do so. And as for Paradiso, Beatrice smiles and radiates so much that she would enchant any reader who ignores the upper levels of meaning, and some critics, inspired by criteria of pure lyricity, told us that we had to ignore these disturbing overlays of meaning in the poem as though they were totally unconnected and had to be removed.*
One could then say that those levels of reading that depend on overlays of sense can either be activated or not, depending on the historical epoch in question, and sometimes they become totally unfathomable, as can happen not only with texts from very ancient civilizations but, for instance, with many paintings of not so long ago, where—apart from those who are iconographers or iconologists—visitors to museums (and even critics who rely solely on the visual) enjoy Giorgione or Poussin without knowing what obscure mythologies their images refer to (though we are convinced that Panofksy enjoyed them even more, since he was able to read them at both levels, at the level of form and at the level of iconographical reference).
The answer to the second question is quite different. I have repeatedly built theories around the fact that a text (and particularly a text with an aesthetic aim, and in the present case a narrative text) tends to construct two Model Readers. It addresses in the first place a Model Reader of the first level, whom we will call the semantic reader, the reader who wants to know (and rightly so) how the story will end (whether Ahab will capture the whale, whether Leopold Bloom will meet Stephen Dedalus, after having accidentally crossed his path on a number of occasions in the course of 16 June 1904, whether Pinocchio will become a real flesh-and-blood boy, or whether Proust's Narrator will manage to settle his accounts with Lost Time). But the text also addresses a Model Reader of the second level, whom we will call the semiotic or aesthetic reader, who asks himself what kind of reader that particular story was asking him to become, and wants to know how the Model Author who is instructing him step by step will proceed. To put it bluntly, the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated. To find out how the story will end one usually just has to read the text once. To become a second-level model reader one has to read it several times, and some stories have to be read countless times.
There is no such thing as an exclusively second-level model reader; on the contrary, in order to become one, you have to have been a good first-level reader. Whoever has read The Betrothed and has not felt even the slightest shudder when Lucia sees L'Innominato appear in front of her cannot appreciate the way Manzoni's novel has been constructed. But it is certainly the case that you can be a first-level reader without ever reaching the second level, as happens with those who are equally enthused by The Betrothed and. Gargantua without realizing that the latter is much richer in lexical terms than the former; or as happens with those who, not unreasonably, get bored reading Hypnerotomachia Poliphili because amid all those made-up words it is impossible to understand how things will turn out.
On close examination it is in the play between these two levels of reading that we can observe the two ways of understanding catharsis in Aristotle's Poetics, and in aesthetics in general: for we know that there is either a homeopathic or an allopathic interpretation of catharsis. In the first case catharsis stems from the fact that the spectator of a tragedy is genuinely seized by pity and terror, even to the point of paroxysm, so much so that in suffering these two passions he is purged of them, and emerges liberated by the tragic experience; in the second case the tragic text places us at a distance from the passion that is represented in it, through an almost Brechtian kind of estrangement, and we are liberated from passion not by experiencing it but by appreciating the way it is represented. You can easily see that for a homeopathic catharsis a first-level reader is sufficient (this is, after all, the kind of reader that cries when the cavalry arrives in a Western), whereas for an allopathic catharsis one needs a second-level reader—and this is what, perhaps erroneously, makes people attribute a greater degree of philosophical dignity, a more purified and purifying vision of art, to allopathic catharsis, whereas the homeopathic theory becomes linked to the celebration of Corybantism and the Eleusinian mysteries with their perfumes and drugs, or to the celebration of Saturday-night fever.
We should beware of understanding this distinction of levels as though on one side there were an easily satisfied reader, only interested in the story, and on the other a reader with an extremely refined palate, concerned above all with language. If that were so, we would have to read The Count of Monte Cristo on the first level, becoming totally enthralled by it, and maybe even shedding hot tears at every turn, and then on the second level we would have to realize, as is only right, that from a stylistic point of view it is very badly written, and to conclude therefore that it is a terrible novel. Instead, the miracle of works like The Count of Monte Cristo is that, while being very badly written, they are still masterpieces of fiction. Consequently the second-level reader is not only he who recognizes that the novel is badly written but also the one who is aware that, despite this, its narrative structure is perfect, the archetypes are all in the right place, the coups-de-scène judged. to perfection, its breadth (though at times stretched to breaking point) almost Homeric in scope—so much so that to criticize The Count of Monte Cristo because of its language would be like criticizing Verdi's operas because his librettists, Francesco Maria Piave and Salvatore Cammarano, were not poets like Leo-pardi. The second-level reader is then also the person who realizes how the work manages to function brilliantly at the first level.
However, it is certainly at this second level of critical reading that one is able to decide whether the text has two or more levels of meaning, whether it is worthwhile looking for an allegorical sense, or whether the tale is also saying something about the reader—and whether these different senses blend together in a solid, harmonious form or whether they can float about independently of one another. It is the second-level reader who will decide that it is difficult to decouple the literal from the moral sense in the fable of the wolf and the lamb (as though it were pointless without the moral sense to tell the story of that diatribe between animals). On the other hand, one can read with enjoyment and reverence the psalm "In exitu Israel de Aegypto / domus Iacob depopulo barbaro /facta est Iudaea sanctificatio eius, / Israel potestas eius" (When Israel went forth from Egypt, / the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, / Judah became his sanctuary, / Israel his dominion), even without knowing that in anagogic terms the verses mean, among other things, that the sanctified soul will emerge from the enslavement of earthly corruption toward the freedom of eternal glory—and then the second-level reader will go and find out if the psalmist's text really did mean this as well.
There are certainly many analogies between the aesthetically and critically aware second-level reader and the reader who, faced with examples of intertextual irony, catches the references to the universe of literature. But the two positions cannot be identical. Let us take some examples.
In the fable about the wolf and the lamb there are two senses (one literal, one moral), and certainly two readers: the first-level reader who understands not just the story (the literal sense) but also the moral, and the reader who recognizes the stylistic and narrative merits of Phaedrus as teller of fables. But there is no intertextual irony because Phaedrus is not quoting anyone—or if he does cite a previous fabulist, he simply copies him. Homer's Ulysses kills the suitors: just one meaning, but two readers—one who enjoys Ulysses' revenge and one who enjoys Homers art—but no intertextual i
rony. In Joyce's Ulysses there are two meanings in the biblical-Dantesque mode (Bloom's story as an allegory of Ulysses' story), but it is very difficult not to notice that the story retraces the steps of Ulysses' wanderings, and if someone did not notice this, the tide would offer him a clue. The two levels of reading still remain open, since one could read Ulysses just to know how the story ends—even though such a limited and limiting form of reading is highly improbable (in fact, it is exaggeratedly wasteful), and it would be advisable to stop the experiment after the first chapter and turn to more instantly rewarding stories. It is impossible to read Finnegans Wake except as a huge intertextual laboratory—unless you want to read it out loud to enjoy it as pure music. There are more than the four meanings of Holy Scripture here: they are infinite, or at least indefinite. The first-level reader follows the one or two possible readings of each single pun, then breathlessly comes to a halt, gets lost, moves to the second level to admire the cleverness of an unexpected and insoluble combination of etymologies and possible readings, gets lost again, and so on. Finnegans Wake does not help us to understand the distinctions we are talking about but, rather, puts them all into question, and confuses our ideas. But it does so without deceiving the naive reader by allowing him to proceed without noticing the game he is caught up in. Instead it grabs him by the throat and kicks him out the back door.
