Intertextuality: Calvino, Auster and Pynchon

‘The link between text and world is reforged in postmodernism, not by an effacement of the text in the interests of a return to the real, but by an extensification of textuality such that it becomes coextensive with the real.’

"At last the horizon appears free again to us, even granted that its not bright, at last our ships may venture out again… the sea, our sea lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an open sea" (1)

One of the many interesting aspects of postmodernism is its resistance to be pinned down to a certain and specific period in time, given though that many studies of literature are still attempting to define modernism correctly it is of little wonder that that which followed it should be even more perplexing. That postmodernism then does not have a constraining linear quality to it (2) enables me to begin by quoting Friederich Nietzsche from 1882 as a means of introducing the theme of horizons in postmodern texts.

Can it be said that Nietzsche was looking forward to postmodernity when he spoke of new and perhaps dark horizons? If we attempt to define the postmodern we run into thoughts similar to those of Nietzsche, the very real sense of chaos and flux in the modern world given voice through fragmentation and paradoxically the distrust for the past. Modernism then constituted not so much a new horizon but rather a new mode of journey to reach the very same horizon, and as such something to be ultimately dissatisfied with. It was not until the rise of the postmodern that this new horizon and the means to reach it were discovered, however, as soon as the writers of the postmodern began to flex their reflective creativity the distinction between sea, land and sky was harder to discern. It is not so much that Nietzsche’s horizon was lost, rather that from now on it is much darker, harder to discover under the many layers that cover it.

Modernism and its practitioners had an aversion to boundaries; texts such as Ulysses and Orlando, authors like Joyce and Woolf would attack divisions such as class and gender in an attempt to ultimately destroy them During the last thirty years these barriers have continued to exist but now it is postmodernism that has also found them to be undesirable, but rather than attempt to eradicate them it seems that many authors would rather assimilate these boundaries thereby overcoming the original problem of definitions altogether. At the same time, however, a new set of issues have been raised by this intertextuality, issues that to some readers seem to be problematic.

One of the joys of the postmodern, but paradoxically at the same instant one of the more taxing modes to overcome, is that of the very textuality of the work (3). The most obvious operative of intertextuality as a tool and indeed a plot device is Italo Calvino. His If on a winter’s night a traveller ends:

‘"…Aren’t you tired of reading?"

And you say, "Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino." (4)’

The work of Calvino like the work of many postmodernists is built on layers; it is these layers, often built to dizzying (and tiring) effect, that help to blur the barriers that modernism wished to efface. Calvino’s text, by creating a world in which he himself is a character, as is the reader reading, becomes a construct and now rather than pointing out the differences between fictional readers/authors and their real counterparts the "duplication is sufficient to render both artificial" (5) and the ‘horizon’ blurs into its surroundings. Jean Baudrillard saw this shift from production to reproduction vital to postmodernity; simulations / models and signs cease to reflect the world but actually become the world or as he preferred to phrase it the hyperreal. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard takes Nietzsche’s ‘horizon’ to its logical conclusion;

"If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth?… If there were no more fractures, no more vanishing lines, no more lines of rupture, but only a surface that is full and continuous, surface without depth, without interruption?" (6)

In Calvino however it is exactly a series of interruptions that sweep the readers (real and fictional) to the final calm of the novel. We never succeed in finishing the book we intended to but we come to something approaching contentment by the changeling novel’s close, indeed in this case perhaps it is the fictional reader, winning as he does Ludmilla, who finishes the novel more contented than his ‘real’ counterparts. Then again, we can never really say that the novel has finished (perhaps it is also true to say that the novel never actually begins?) and as the seventh reader cries "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end?" (7) we find ourselves once again faced with Baudrillard’s sense of the hyperreal.

The hyperreal is very relevant to Calvino and his readership. The concept of which Calvino we are reading soon passes over to a whole series of authors, translators, forgers and perhaps most interestingly counterfeiters as we lose ourselves deeper and deeper into the text;

‘"Don’t ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond…" (8)’

Thanks to the advent of the Internet Calvino has that rare honour of continuing to produce text from ‘the beyond’ in a way that it is difficult to imagine he ever envisaged; ‘lost pieces’ by Tazio Bazakbal and Silas Flannery can now be found at http://mfp.es.emory.edu/zlh-index.html. These authors of course should be purely fictional, nothing more than the creations of Calvino and as such imprisoned within the pages of If on a winter’s night a traveller. However, just as in the novel, the formula of Silas Flannery has been found and counterfeiters are even now producing web based texts in his name (9). Extra chapters of If on a winter’s night a traveller meant for insertion into the printed text can also be found online (10). It matters little whether these extra helpings of Calvino are good or even that Calvino didn’t write them, what is important is that his If on a winter’s night a traveller had such an effect on its readership that it has surpassed the form it started in. The textuality was deemed so intense that the bindings of the book were not enough to hold it and it has literally become coextensive with the real. In this way ‘Calvino’ can go on producing chapters to his novels years after he has died.

Despite the obvious success of the novel If on a winter’s night a traveller can seem at times a frustrating challenge but I believe this was not only recognised by Calvino but encouraged by him. Each chapter ends with the ultimate cliff-hanger in that we the reader never get to go back or move on from those cliffs, we become as frustrated as the protagonist reader, our only hope being that we recognise what Calvino is doing in a way that the reader trapped in the novel does not – each layer it seems has its rules and as the reader comes to the end of his book he has no knowledge that he himself is a part of that book, or at least one of its tiers. For us, the ‘real’ readers if you like, the decoding of the novel begins before even the first chapter, before we even read on the first page that we "…are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller." In Calvino’s world no part of the novel is wasted and that includes the contents page, as we read the chapter headings we find hidden in plain view a poem-like series of lines that only at the end of the novel will we see as a kind of punchline to the text itself; ‘"Yes, a novel that begins like that…" he says, "I could swear I’ve read it…" (11)’ The very chapter headings then form what is to become the entrance and the exit of a labyrinth or as Borges would have it a "Garden of Forking Paths" (12).

Once past the opening pages we find no sanctuary but rather find ourselves going deeper into the maze, at once losing sight of the horizon that most novels pride themselves on maintaining eye contact with throughout. How perplexing of a reader of Calvino to find himself not even safely out of the book store but already assimilated into the very book he or she carries. It may have fallen to modern authors such as Gide to hold the looking glass up to themselves and their society but with authors such as Calvino the looking glass becomes distorted and often becomes a rabbit hole.

In his thoughtful essay Chinese-Box Worlds Brian McHale takes the concept of layering and textual extensification "towards infinite regress" and moves on somewhat from the idea of a multitude of worlds all spinning within one another to the idea of non-existence entirely. Again this follows Baudrillard’s path from a lack of rupture to a lack of interruption but McHale has to concede that his ‘boxes’ or ‘babushka dolls’ are creations and as such fictions. Another quality of postmodernism is its ability to allude to its own Fictionality. While this is obvious in Calvino it presents itself a little more subtly in say the works of Samuel Beckett. In Molloy for example the text reveals to us its own falsehood as it closes:

"Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." (13)

Beckett here points out to us that fiction, by very definition, lies. Yet we constantly assume it to be telling the truth. In the above quote for example, the line "It is midnight" has no less of a claim to be truth than "It was not midnight" Postmodern authors will not allow the reader the ‘comfort’ of conventional 'truth'. So just as Calvino’s readers are as non-existent as Ludmilla, Beckett's Murphy himself does not exist at all. We know this because another of Beckett's characters The Unnamable claims he has created him along with most of his other protagonists. McHale’s horizon is here not merely lost but practically sabotaged by an author intent on staring into the abyss.

"Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out." (14)

The fiction of Beckett deals with the building of worlds that slowly collapse in on themselves (15), rather than uncover layer after layer in the style of Calvino, Beckett takes the reader so far inside his protagonist’s world that eventually only the voice is left and we come face to face with all that is left; the Unnamable. Ironically it seems that when we are left with nothing more than the language even that is unacceptable and "meaningless". The only escape is to true silence and death but of course that is the release that never arrives in Beckett’s world as the Unnamable concludes "I can’t go on, I’ll go on." (16)

In both Calvino and Beckett the comfortable worlds we expect to find in side the covers of their work is in the case of Calvino presented to us in a frustrating and labyrinthine style or in the case of Beckett simply missing completely. Other authors however may build a more recognisable environment for us only to have it fracture the more we become drawn into it. This can be most unsettling to the reader and works effectively in both Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, both of which can lay claim to be that most maligned piece of fiction, the detective story.

By approaching these texts with the regular preconceptions that most readers have of the genre, the reader is at first pleasantly surprised when events begin to veer ever so slightly away from that which has been expected. In Auster’s City of Glass for example the opening is a classic piece of writing that would not be out of place in the work of Chandler;

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone that he was not." (17)

The plot develops rapidly from that point and our protagonist is drawn out, a writer and further more an author of detective fiction but it is only when Auster returns to the opening line’s ‘wrong number’ that once again the textuality of what we are being drawn into causes the two worlds or their horizons to phase into one another;

"’Is this Paul Auster?’ asked the voice. ‘I would like to speak to Mr Paul Auster.’"

As with If on a winter’s night a traveller the inclusion of the author himself as one of his own creations is an auspicious action that could in the hands of lesser writers at best jar the reader from the page or at worse be deemed as narcissistic. That this is not the case here is owed in part to Auster’s skill with the form and in part to the fact that the reader is now much more intrigued than he or she would have been if the story had not diverged from its stereotypical path. Calvino actually notes this early on in his own layered text;

"But then you go on and you realise that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is." (18)

That all the authors cited confound the readers expectations is no coincidence, it seems to be one of the underlying principles of the postmodern text, and there is something profoundly unsettling at finding not only the author but yourself reflected in the text. Many readers smile wryly at Calvino’s overview of the shelves of a bookstore but to produce that effect it must be acknowledged that Calvino knows not only what people expect of authors but also how readers themselves act, reading and in some cases "Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Other Purposes Than Reading…" (19) not reading at all.

As we have seen then, avoiding the stereotypical but to be acutely aware of them also is significant. Part of the aim of this postmodern need for the text to become self referential is purely a need for writing to progress; Modernism urged writers to dismiss the heavy air of authors such as John Galsworthy despite the success and indeed humour of his work. That modernism produced such works as Ulysses would have been problematic if no way forward after Joyce had been found, indeed how does one try to better Ulysses? The answer of course is not to even attempt it but to find a new route, "a new path to the a waterfall."

One of the instruments carried along this path is a heavy but enjoyable use of irony that shines through in both Auster’s and Pynchon’s work, indeed it is also obvious in Calvino;

"You prepare to recognise the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognise it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said that this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next." (20)

The reader then submits to the unrecognisable in much the same way that the characters do, so just as Quinn in City of Glass has no expectations of where his new identity will take him neither does the reader as he turns the page, despite the self-referential and ironic quality of the writing;

"It wasn’t his appointment, it was Paul Auster’s. And who that person was he had no idea."

These texts now begin to take on a Kafkaesque quality to them, in City of Glass Quinn cannot quite grasp that he is a character in a novel but he does sense that his world has a strange prefabricated feel to it.

"It was not until he had his hand on the doorknob that he began to suspect what he was doing. ‘I seem to be going out,’ he said to himself. ‘But if I am going out, where exactly am I going?’" (21)

We have now moved away from the reader’s absorption into a fictitious world into that realm where the character in a novel is on the verge of realising he is fictitious. It would seem that in postmodern work that the mirror reflects both ways and that a novels textuality is not something solely experienced by the reader and writer. (22)

"It suddenly did not seem to matter anymore. He felt remarkably calm, as if everything had already happened to him." (23)

Postmodernism now raises the problems of characters themselves pondering their very fictitious existence.

The links between an author such as Beckett and Auster are not at first easily recognisable, Auster is so much more accessible than Beckett but nevertheless Auster has similar concerns contained in his text as those that Beckett returns to again and again.

"‘Wrimble click crumblechaw neloo. Clack clack bedrack. Numb noise, flacklemuch, chewmanna. Ya, ya, ya. Excuse me I am the only one who understands these words.’" (24)

The above quote could easily of fallen from the mouth of any of Beckett’s characters. Peter Stillman in City of Glass has come to recognise the Unnamable only after being trapped in the darkness for nine years with only language to form his landscape. The questions that Stillman asks are similar to Beckett’s, if language is ultimately all we have what happen to us when that, like everything else, fails? Is it possible to still be human or even just be?

"‘Sooner or later I will run out of words, you see. Everyone has just so many words inside him. And then where will I be?’" (25)

In both Auster’s and Beckett’s world "one more word" (26) is usually enough to push someone over that edge and down into the eloquent abyss.

That City of Glass can also be read as an essay on the actual process of writing is not something that is lost on the reader and is yet another way that the text reconstructs itself in the real world. That Auster’s protagonist, Quinn, is a writer pretending to be a private detective named Paul Auster feeds directly into McHale’s reading of the postmodern; the mysterious Auster in the novel lives in one diegesis while the author Auster obviously functions above, Godlike. The interesting thing about City of Glass is that rather than find a further deeper layer, Auster has his protagonist Quinn take a sideways step if you like, and begins to represent a new ‘Auster’ this one running parallel to the character he is slowly becoming. So at once Quinn can remark that "It was the first time in more than five years that he had put his own name in one of his notebooks" and directly nod to the fact that he is unconsciously mimicking the author who created him. "Listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name." (27)

Eventually of course Auster directs Quinn to the end of himself, the theme of identity and of identity formed by language (indeed the whole city is formed by it, literally) comes to its conclusion and Quinn ceases to be. The Unnameable of Beckett could never cease to be but Auster in the inclusion of a new voice allows Quinn to fade away and disappear;

"At a certain point, he realised that the more he wrote the sooner the time would come when he could no longer write anything…. The last sentence of the red notebook reads: ‘What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?’"

Quinn had finally realised that the notebook had become his world and as such something that his existence depended on, that his red notebook mirrored Auster’s novel is the final clue to be cracked in a truly postmodern piece of detective fiction. The murderer is Paul Auster himself who in creating characters must also ultimately take them to their prospective ends and it is in recognising this that Auster’s readers coexist with the characters.

Auster’s endings are often commented on by Auster as just that ‘Endings’ - it is rare in his work that a character or a story comes to an end without Auster commenting upon it, although in Mr Vertigo the titular character is allowed to evaporate into the nothingness of one last flight. In Ghosts for example Blue has come to the end of his own particular story but Auster is not content to allow him to ‘evaporate’ without some comment:

"But the story is not yet over. There is still the final moment, and that will not come until Blue leaves the room. Such is the way of the world; not one moment more not one moment less."

There then follows a brief rhapsody of ‘what might have been but ultimately Blue has to leave the story "And from this moment on, we know nothing." (28)

If anything Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is a tale with no ending but like The New York Trilogy attempts to rewrite the familiar form of detective fiction by bringing in elements of the postmodern. To begin with the novel has a protagonist in Oedipa Maas that strictly speaking isn’t a detective at all but as she attempts to get to the bottom of the riddle at the heart of the tale she has found herself in, more than a little detective work is involved. Oedipa begins to uncover on one hand what seems to be a nationwide conspiracy but on the other could be nothing more than a gigantic hoax. The text begins to feel rather like that of Calvino’s as we are drawn further and further into an elaborate tale involving forbidden Jacobean plays, machines powered by demons and a subversive postal system. The plot twists become more extravagant as we continue but ultimately, like Oedipa, we know all will be revealed with the crying of lot 49. The novel of course ends before that point.

By the end of the novel however, it matters little to the reader whether the Tristero system exists or not, the text is such that it is the very world in which Oedipa exists that has been effaced. Happily, unlike her Classical counterpart Oedipa does not reach a final revelation and while this can be deemed as perplexing to a reader it is not an unsatisfying conclusion to what has gone before. In creating Oedipa Pynchon has provided the reader with his or her own version of a Maxwell’s Demon, (29) as we sit back and expect Oedipa to ‘sort out’ the clues for us and lead us to a direct revelation. Pynchon has no intention to make the ‘reading’ of Lot 49 that simple for us and we have to work to understand exactly what ‘waste’ Pynchon here is concerned with; not content to stop at Beckett’s and indeed Auster’s portrayal of the failure of even language, Pynchon takes a step back and reveals to us the nihilism inherent in the very imagination itself. In The Crying of Lot 49 it seems that even before words/ideas are formed or written they are wasted.

This is in the first instance because all of the characters in the novel (apart from Oedipa) seem obsessed by the hidden, the unspoken, again the Unnamable. Language is (d)evolved into a cryptic code and series of signs until it is hard to find the music amongst the background noise of nothingness. Finding meaning in nothing is of course the beginning of any good conspiracy and while Lot 49 may have no conventional plot it does have a ‘plot’ and one that the reader with the help of Ms Maas is urged to get to the bottom of.

The American critic Richard Poirie has also pointed out that

"Tristero may only be Oedipa's fantasy, an expression of her need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of everyone she knows toward inhumanity. Otherwise she is either a paranoid or America is Tristero and she an alien." (30)

The final deciphering of the novel belongs to each of its readers but I believe that we do not need an explanation as to why humanity drifts towards inhumanity, it is enough merely to reveal it, hence we never get further than Oedipa’s expectations of what the crying will reveal. We need no ‘conclusion’ to a novel that has already commented on such subjects as capitalism, dehumanisation and ultimately the holocaust;

"…when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look."

That the American automobile is here linked to Nazi deathcamps makes the remains of peoples lives even the more poignant.

Ultimately the links between postmodern text and the world they reflect become so merged that it becomes difficult to judge the success or failure of an individual text. Whether the author be Beckett, Calvino, Auster or Pynchon the final result I find is always clear; as readers we exist within the very texts themselves so that it becomes difficult at times to accept the idea of non-existence or the void but ultimately it is just that the authors are expressing to us and wish us to face. Patricia Waugh warns us not to turn our backs on postmodernism (31) but it is the alternative to just that that we find so haunting.

Notes:

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 5 Section 343, 1882

(2) Indeed Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a fine example of a postmodern text.

(3) The intertextuality can be initially troublesome but I hope in the case of most readers it is the overcoming of this initial jarring that leads to a deeper sense of satisfaction with the text, the author, and of course, oneself.

(4) Italo Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 260.

(5) Jean Baudrillard Simulations Semiotext[e] 1983 p 18.

(6) Baudrillard The Ecstasy of Communication Semiotext[e] 1988 p 104.

(7) Italo Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 259.

(8) Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 71.

(9) This is perhaps something that would make John Barth smile as it fits in with Borges' "contamination of reality by dream" discourse which he found so enjoyable upon reading reference to the fictional Three Impostors in The Literature of Exhaustion 1967.

(10) http://mfp.es.emory.edu/cal.html a contamination of virtualreality by dream if you like.

(11) Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 258.

(12) Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths Penguin 1962 pp 44-54.

(13) Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, Calder, 1959, p 176.

(14) Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, Calder, 1959, p 374.

(15) It is no wonder that so many of Beckett's creations find themselves trapped, whether it be under sand, in dustbins or jars.

(16) Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, Calder, 1959, p 418.

(17) Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 3.

(18) Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 9.

(19) Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 5.

(20) Calvino If on a winter's night a traveller Vintage 1998 p 9.

(21) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 12.

(22) In the short story Blue Rose by Stephen King a fictional detective is ousted into the 'real world' by his author to provide an escape route from illness and bereavement - many times it is left to science fiction and fantasy to tackle the postmodern themes head on in a much more literal style.

(23) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 13.

(24) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 17.

(25) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 19.

(26) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 27.

(27) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, p 40.

(28) Auster, The New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 1987, pp 195-6. The ending of The Locked Room goes a little further in the literal destruction of the constructed world as a notebook is torn to pieces up until the final page.

(29) Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Vintage, 1996, p59.

(30) Richard Poirier, Embattled Underground, The New York Times, May 1 1966.

(31) Patricia Waugh (ed.), Postmodernism, Edward Arnold, 1992, p206

2000