Subjective Identity and Objective Reality in the “Portuguese” Novels of Antonio Tabucchi
Corrado Federici
Italian novelist and short story writer Antonio Tabucchi (1943–) has been active since 1975, the year in which his first novel, Piazza d’Italia (Piazza Italy) appeared, while his most recent, Tristano muore (Tristan is Dying), was published in 2004. Many critics (Cannon, Capozzi, Francese, Schwarz Lausten, Spunta)1 situate the narrative of Antonio Tabucchi within the category of postmodern fiction, alongside the literary production of such prominent figures as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, while a few place his work in the category of politically engaged (Jeannet, Wren-Owens)2 or fantastic literature (Guidotti, Meschini).3 I propose to examine three novels by Tabucchi, written in the 1990s and set in Portugal, with a view to demonstrating that, in each work, the author establishes a realist or mimetic foundation, which he then proceeds to undercut or destabilize by superimposing on that base, strategies habitually associated with the modernist aesthetic as well as procedures generally thought of as postmodern. By navigating skillfully among these narrative modes, Tabucchi not only performs a subtle exploration of the boundaries of novelistic subgenres, but he also speculates on such weighty themes as the nature of writing and its complex, sometimes mystifying, relationship to socio-historical reality, the fictionalization of history, and the historicization of fiction. As well, by means of these same rhetorical devices, Tabucchi reflects on the processes of the construction of personal identity as the narrators and protagonists of his novels negotiate the spaces of individual memory, history, and quotidian existence.
The Realist Bias
In Requiem (1991), Pereira Declares (1994), and The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (1997), the narrator establishes a mimetic foundation; in other words he attempts to produce a realistic or direct representation of human experience.4 Indeed Bernardelli distinguishes between “mimetic worlds” and “diegetic worlds” (143) in Tabucchi’s novels in which the diegesis or plot is set in the cities of Lisbon and Oporto (Porto). Constituting what might be called “cartographic verisimilitude” are the names of cities large and small in Portugal, from the province of Alentejo, Azeitão, Coimbra, Faro, Cascais, Setúbal, Buçaco, and from the province of Algarve to Parede, Mérida, Granja, Espinho, Beja, Serpa, Estoril, Caparica, and Estremoz. Geographical or urban specificity is enhanced by the numerous references to actual street names (Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca, Avenida da Liberdade, Rua da Saudade, Rua das Pedras Negras, Cais do Sodré, Rua do Alecrim, Largo Camões, Largo do Rato, Campo de Ourique, and Praça do Rossio in Lisbon, and Rua Alexandre Herculano, Rua S. Miguel, Rua das Flores, Avenida Heróis do Mar, and Praça da Batalha in Oporto). Indeed, the reader can trace on city maps the movements of the protagonists as they travel on trams or taxis along the avenues, past landmarks and monuments, such as Lisbon’s Misericordia Church (Church of the Mercês), Church of St. Mamede, and the statue of António Ribeiro of Chiado. Contributing to the illusion of three-dimensionality are the names of the characters themselves, both principal and secondary (Pereira, Monteiro, Silva, Marta, Damasceno, Manolo, Firmino, Senhora Maia do Vale Santares, Luis Braz Ferreira, and Fernando Diego Maria de Jesus de Mello Sequeira), titles of local newspapers (Lisboa, O Periódico dos Pobres, O Público, A Bola, Correio da Manhã, O Artilheiro, Acontecimento, Diário de Notícias), words and phrases in Portuguese and Spanish (escudos, caballeros, fados, hasta la vista, el apocalypse, les gustas, intersessionista, saudosismo),5 and phrases in geringonça, which is to say the dialect of the gypsies of Portugal, “a hotch potch of Romany, Portuguese and Andalusian” (Missing Head 2) (caricas [bottle caps], cagarrão [prison], alcide [bread], gateira [bottle of wine], caldeirada [stew]). There is also a culinary component in the reference to the foods and potables that the characters frequently consume in the many cafés, bars, restaurants, and pensions (gazpatcho, tripe à la mode d’Oporto, rojões à la mode de Minho, serrabulho, papos de anjos, feijoada, Sumol, sopa alentejana, arroz de tamboril, salt-cod fishcakes, sardines, omelettes aux fines herbes, smoked swordfish, mineral water, lemonade, Reguenas, and Madeira wine). In this regard, Manuela Spunta identifies some of the strategies used by Tabucchi in the “reproduction of spoken interaction” (143), thereby reaffirming the “transparency” of the narration.6
Two additional important dimensions of this referential function are political and literary. The most numerous depictions of political factuality are found in Pereira Declares as the novel recounts the activities of a journalist living in Lisbon under the authoritarian Salazar regime, from July 25 to the end of August 1938. The extratextual reality includes references to the Salazarist Youth Festival (Pereira 10), censorship of the media (Pereira 81), police brutality (Pereira 5), and anti-Semitism (Pereira 34). As well, the alliance between Salazar and the Nazi-Fascist dictators of Spain, Italy, and Germany is a frequent topic of conversation among the characters. For example, one figure points out: “There is a civil war raging in Spain, and the Portuguese authorities think along the same lines as general Francisco Franco” (Pereira 23); another states: “Germany is our ally…We think along the same lines as Germany does, in home as in foreign policy, and we are supporting the Spanish nationalists just as the Germans are” (Pereira 109). Historically verifiable events include the bombing of Guernica (Pereira 92), the Vatican’s excommunication of the Basque Catholic clergy, denounced as “Red Christians” for opposing the Nationalists (Pereira 93), and Mussolini’s dispatch of Italian submarines in support of Franco (Pereira 99). In the other two novels the political references are less abundant, as analepsis and other rhetorical devices are foregrounded. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, set in the 1980s, there are occasional references to the recent political history of Portugal, “while Salazar was in power” (Missing Head 92), the arrest of Jean Amery by Nazis in 1943, “tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz” (Missing Head 171), the arrest and torture of Henri Alleg in 1957 (Missing Head 134), and the 1974 revolution that brought a democratic Portuguese Republic into existence (Missing Head 92). In Requiem there are allusions to the same revolution as well as to the Salazar regime and its suppression of writers.
Adding a substantial layer of plausibility to the fiction is the impressive array of novelists, poets, philosophers, and literary critics placed in historical context in all three works. Apart from the ideas of these writers, what the narrator focuses on is their death. This is especially the case in Pereira Declares since the protagonist decides to supplement the cultural page of the Lisboa with obituaries of famous contemporary writers; he hires young Monteiro Rossi to write advanced obituaries to be printed the moment the death of a noted writer occurs. The reader encounters such statements as: “Two years ago died Luigi Pirandello” (Pereira 4), who in actuality died in 1936, “two years ago in obscure circumstances, we lost the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca” (Pereira 22), and “At eight in the evening of March 1, 1938, died Gabriele D’Annunzio” (Pereira 59). These are factual, and not imagined, events.
These strategies collectively evoke a plausible world in which fictional figures act within a verifiable framework. The plausibility of the narrative is also heightened by the discourses on naturalism or realism as theoretical concerns of the narrators. In Pereira Declares, the protagonist is translating the novels of Balzac and the short stories of Maupassant for publication in the Lisboa. Extending realism to embrace neo-realism and political engagement, many of the dialogues between Pereira and his editorial assistant Monteiro Rossi revolve around the writings of such committed writers as Bernanos, Malraux, Mauriac, Mann, and García Lorca, who spoke out against political oppression through their art. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the issue of the function of literature as social commentary is related to the theories of Georg Lukács and Elio Vittorini. Moreover, the protagonist, a Lisbon journalist sent to Porto to investigate the breaking story of the discovery of a decapitated corpse, is also a student of literature and is writing a thesis on “The Influence of Elio Vittorini on the Post-War Portuguese Novel” (Missing Head 10). By means of this technique, Tabucchi alludes to one of the sources of Italian neo-realist fiction, namely American narrative of the 1930s (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos) who “all came through Vittorini on account of the anthology he published in Italy, called Americana” (Missing Head 51). In the course of his investigation, Firmino, a journalist, is forced by the character Loton to take into account Lukács’ dialectical materialism and his “princi
ple of reality” (Missing Head 113) as he formulates his own ideas on the relationship between literature and social structure or history. Apart from the occasional references to Marxism, Requiem does not provide similar explicit reflection on the mimetic dimension of the literary text.
Contributing to the creation of the illusion of verisimilitude and “unmediated representation” is what some critics refer to as “teleological closure,” which is to say the solution or resolution of the enigma/problem posed at the outset of the story, which procedure tends to generate what Eco calls a “closed work.”7 Pereira Declares follows the progressive self-discovery of the protagonist who goes from comfortable detachment vis-à-vis the reality that envelops him, and from self-absorption, to critical awareness and the ultimate gesture of publishing his report in which he denounces the National Guard for the murder of Monteiro Rossi. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the murder is solved, culminating in the trial and sentencing of the perpetrators. Requiem too has closure as the narrator meets his guest at the appointed time and concludes the interview/séance, and the tale.
Finally, reinforcing the mimetic bias is the paratext, “cioè tutte quelle informazioni che circondano il testo, dal titolo alle indicazioni che sulla copertina dicono ‘Romanzo’” (that is, all the information that pertains to the text, from the title to such phrases as “A Novel” on the cover) (Eco 1994, 149); in other words the titles, subtitles, epigraphs, prefaces, footnotes, and marginalia that serve to frame the text.8 In the Note to Pereira Declares (omitted from the English translation), the authorial voice explains that the fiction is derived from an actual occurrence: in August 1992, the speaker bought a newspaper in Lisbon in which he read of an individual who had died at the Hospital de Santa Maria. It was someone whom the authorial voice claims to have met in Paris in the 1960s. At the time, this person was a Portuguese citizen living in exile and writing for a French newspaper. He had been a journalist in the 1940s and 1950s in Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship, had published a scathing editorial against the regime, and had been forced to leave the country to which he could not return until 1974, when Portugal became a democratic Republic. To a certain extent, the novel is an attempt to reconstruct the life and times of this figure in a historical novel of sorts. The subtitle, A Testimonial (also omitted from the English version), is ostensibly intended to lend a higher degree of reliability and authoritativeness to the declarations of the principal character. The Note to Missing Head states: “From actual fact he has drawn one very tangible episode…one night of May 7, 1966, Carlos Rosa, twenty-five years old, a Portuguese citizen, was killed in a police station of the Republican National Guard at Sacavém on the outskirts of Lisbon, and his body was found in a public park, decapitated and showing signs of torture” (Missing Head 185). Requiem contains “A Note on the Recipes in this Book,” which underscores the intention of stressing the authenticity of the experiences recounted.
The product of the procedures outlined above is the effect of looking “through a transparent window,” of imagining “real” events that occur in actual physical spaces and within specific temporal parameters. Brizio-Skov speaks of the “solidità dello spazio topologico nel quale i personaggi si muovono” (the solidity of the topological space in which the characters move) (Antonio Tabucchi 18). The self-definition or the construction of the narrator’s identity unfolds within these seemingly tangible parameters.9
In Requiem (1991), Pereira Declares (1994), and The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (1997), the narrator establishes a mimetic foundation; in other words he attempts to produce a realistic or direct representation of human experience.4 Indeed Bernardelli distinguishes between “mimetic worlds” and “diegetic worlds” (143) in Tabucchi’s novels in which the diegesis or plot is set in the cities of Lisbon and Oporto (Porto). Constituting what might be called “cartographic verisimilitude” are the names of cities large and small in Portugal, from the province of Alentejo, Azeitão, Coimbra, Faro, Cascais, Setúbal, Buçaco, and from the province of Algarve to Parede, Mérida, Granja, Espinho, Beja, Serpa, Estoril, Caparica, and Estremoz. Geographical or urban specificity is enhanced by the numerous references to actual street names (Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca, Avenida da Liberdade, Rua da Saudade, Rua das Pedras Negras, Cais do Sodré, Rua do Alecrim, Largo Camões, Largo do Rato, Campo de Ourique, and Praça do Rossio in Lisbon, and Rua Alexandre Herculano, Rua S. Miguel, Rua das Flores, Avenida Heróis do Mar, and Praça da Batalha in Oporto). Indeed, the reader can trace on city maps the movements of the protagonists as they travel on trams or taxis along the avenues, past landmarks and monuments, such as Lisbon’s Misericordia Church (Church of the Mercês), Church of St. Mamede, and the statue of António Ribeiro of Chiado. Contributing to the illusion of three-dimensionality are the names of the characters themselves, both principal and secondary (Pereira, Monteiro, Silva, Marta, Damasceno, Manolo, Firmino, Senhora Maia do Vale Santares, Luis Braz Ferreira, and Fernando Diego Maria de Jesus de Mello Sequeira), titles of local newspapers (Lisboa, O Periódico dos Pobres, O Público, A Bola, Correio da Manhã, O Artilheiro, Acontecimento, Diário de Notícias), words and phrases in Portuguese and Spanish (escudos, caballeros, fados, hasta la vista, el apocalypse, les gustas, intersessionista, saudosismo),5 and phrases in geringonça, which is to say the dialect of the gypsies of Portugal, “a hotch potch of Romany, Portuguese and Andalusian” (Missing Head 2) (caricas [bottle caps], cagarrão [prison], alcide [bread], gateira [bottle of wine], caldeirada [stew]). There is also a culinary component in the reference to the foods and potables that the characters frequently consume in the many cafés, bars, restaurants, and pensions (gazpatcho, tripe à la mode d’Oporto, rojões à la mode de Minho, serrabulho, papos de anjos, feijoada, Sumol, sopa alentejana, arroz de tamboril, salt-cod fishcakes, sardines, omelettes aux fines herbes, smoked swordfish, mineral water, lemonade, Reguenas, and Madeira wine). In this regard, Manuela Spunta identifies some of the strategies used by Tabucchi in the “reproduction of spoken interaction” (143), thereby reaffirming the “transparency” of the narration.6
Two additional important dimensions of this referential function are political and literary. The most numerous depictions of political factuality are found in Pereira Declares as the novel recounts the activities of a journalist living in Lisbon under the authoritarian Salazar regime, from July 25 to the end of August 1938. The extratextual reality includes references to the Salazarist Youth Festival (Pereira 10), censorship of the media (Pereira 81), police brutality (Pereira 5), and anti-Semitism (Pereira 34). As well, the alliance between Salazar and the Nazi-Fascist dictators of Spain, Italy, and Germany is a frequent topic of conversation among the characters. For example, one figure points out: “There is a civil war raging in Spain, and the Portuguese authorities think along the same lines as general Francisco Franco” (Pereira 23); another states: “Germany is our ally…We think along the same lines as Germany does, in home as in foreign policy, and we are supporting the Spanish nationalists just as the Germans are” (Pereira 109). Historically verifiable events include the bombing of Guernica (Pereira 92), the Vatican’s excommunication of the Basque Catholic clergy, denounced as “Red Christians” for opposing the Nationalists (Pereira 93), and Mussolini’s dispatch of Italian submarines in support of Franco (Pereira 99). In the other two novels the political references are less abundant, as analepsis and other rhetorical devices are foregrounded. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, set in the 1980s, there are occasional references to the recent political history of Portugal, “while Salazar was in power” (Missing Head 92), the arrest of Jean Amery by Nazis in 1943, “tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz” (Missing Head 171), the arrest and torture of Henri Alleg in 1957 (Missing Head 134), and the 1974 revolution that brought a democratic Portuguese Republic into existence (Missing Head 92). In Requiem there are allusions to the same revolution as well as to the Salazar regime and its suppression of writers.
Adding a substantial layer of plausibility to the fiction is the impressive array of novelists, poets, philosophers, and literary critics placed in historical context in all three works. Apart from the ideas of these writers, what the narrator focuses on is their death. This is especially the case in Pereira Declares since the protagonist decides to supplement the cultural page of the Lisboa with obituaries of famous contemporary writers; he hires young Monteiro Rossi to write advanced obituaries to be printed the moment the death of a noted writer occurs. The reader encounters such statements as: “Two years ago died Luigi Pirandello” (Pereira 4), who in actuality died in 1936, “two years ago in obscure circumstances, we lost the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca” (Pereira 22), and “At eight in the evening of March 1, 1938, died Gabriele D’Annunzio” (Pereira 59). These are factual, and not imagined, events.
These strategies collectively evoke a plausible world in which fictional figures act within a verifiable framework. The plausibility of the narrative is also heightened by the discourses on naturalism or realism as theoretical concerns of the narrators. In Pereira Declares, the protagonist is translating the novels of Balzac and the short stories of Maupassant for publication in the Lisboa. Extending realism to embrace neo-realism and political engagement, many of the dialogues between Pereira and his editorial assistant Monteiro Rossi revolve around the writings of such committed writers as Bernanos, Malraux, Mauriac, Mann, and García Lorca, who spoke out against political oppression through their art. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the issue of the function of literature as social commentary is related to the theories of Georg Lukács and Elio Vittorini. Moreover, the protagonist, a Lisbon journalist sent to Porto to investigate the breaking story of the discovery of a decapitated corpse, is also a student of literature and is writing a thesis on “The Influence of Elio Vittorini on the Post-War Portuguese Novel” (Missing Head 10). By means of this technique, Tabucchi alludes to one of the sources of Italian neo-realist fiction, namely American narrative of the 1930s (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos) who “all came through Vittorini on account of the anthology he published in Italy, called Americana” (Missing Head 51). In the course of his investigation, Firmino, a journalist, is forced by the character Loton to take into account Lukács’ dialectical materialism and his “princi
ple of reality” (Missing Head 113) as he formulates his own ideas on the relationship between literature and social structure or history. Apart from the occasional references to Marxism, Requiem does not provide similar explicit reflection on the mimetic dimension of the literary text.
Contributing to the creation of the illusion of verisimilitude and “unmediated representation” is what some critics refer to as “teleological closure,” which is to say the solution or resolution of the enigma/problem posed at the outset of the story, which procedure tends to generate what Eco calls a “closed work.”7 Pereira Declares follows the progressive self-discovery of the protagonist who goes from comfortable detachment vis-à-vis the reality that envelops him, and from self-absorption, to critical awareness and the ultimate gesture of publishing his report in which he denounces the National Guard for the murder of Monteiro Rossi. In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the murder is solved, culminating in the trial and sentencing of the perpetrators. Requiem too has closure as the narrator meets his guest at the appointed time and concludes the interview/séance, and the tale.
Finally, reinforcing the mimetic bias is the paratext, “cioè tutte quelle informazioni che circondano il testo, dal titolo alle indicazioni che sulla copertina dicono ‘Romanzo’” (that is, all the information that pertains to the text, from the title to such phrases as “A Novel” on the cover) (Eco 1994, 149); in other words the titles, subtitles, epigraphs, prefaces, footnotes, and marginalia that serve to frame the text.8 In the Note to Pereira Declares (omitted from the English translation), the authorial voice explains that the fiction is derived from an actual occurrence: in August 1992, the speaker bought a newspaper in Lisbon in which he read of an individual who had died at the Hospital de Santa Maria. It was someone whom the authorial voice claims to have met in Paris in the 1960s. At the time, this person was a Portuguese citizen living in exile and writing for a French newspaper. He had been a journalist in the 1940s and 1950s in Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship, had published a scathing editorial against the regime, and had been forced to leave the country to which he could not return until 1974, when Portugal became a democratic Republic. To a certain extent, the novel is an attempt to reconstruct the life and times of this figure in a historical novel of sorts. The subtitle, A Testimonial (also omitted from the English version), is ostensibly intended to lend a higher degree of reliability and authoritativeness to the declarations of the principal character. The Note to Missing Head states: “From actual fact he has drawn one very tangible episode…one night of May 7, 1966, Carlos Rosa, twenty-five years old, a Portuguese citizen, was killed in a police station of the Republican National Guard at Sacavém on the outskirts of Lisbon, and his body was found in a public park, decapitated and showing signs of torture” (Missing Head 185). Requiem contains “A Note on the Recipes in this Book,” which underscores the intention of stressing the authenticity of the experiences recounted.
The product of the procedures outlined above is the effect of looking “through a transparent window,” of imagining “real” events that occur in actual physical spaces and within specific temporal parameters. Brizio-Skov speaks of the “solidità dello spazio topologico nel quale i personaggi si muovono” (the solidity of the topological space in which the characters move) (Antonio Tabucchi 18). The self-definition or the construction of the narrator’s identity unfolds within these seemingly tangible parameters.9
The Modernist Bias
The mimetic assumptions, however, are quickly and repeatedly undermined by an equally complex set of strategies designed to shift the story into a modernist framework that renders problematic temporal linearity, the psychological unity of the character, the understandability of phenomena and of the self, and the social instrumentality of literature—hallmarks of realist literature.
In Pereira Declares, dialogues frequently concern themselves with literary figures generally associated with European modernism: from Kafka, Mann, and Pirandello, to Mayakovsky, Marinetti, Pessoa, and Eliot. As Wilson notes (61), Tabucchi himself identifies the literary source for the name of the protagonist, Pereira: a character mentioned in Sweeney Agonistes, while many of Pereira’s expressions of perplexity echo J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament: “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all” (Eliot 1963, 16). In the same vein, the protagonist’s efforts to orient himself in physiological, sociological, and political terms introduce ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, and absurdity into the process of self-examination and self-construction vis-à-vis external reality. In one instance the narrator observes: “He was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead…and perhaps his life was a remnant and pretence” (Pereira 7)—a situation that is analogous to the ontological crisis faced by Mattia Pascal in Pirandello’s homonymous novel The Late Mattia Pascal where, in the Foreward, the first-person narrator writes: “I have died already twice, but the first time was a mistake” (xiii).
In addition, the novel has some characteristics of testimonial writing, as the phrase “Pereira declares” (the narratee or addressee is never explicitly identified) is not merely the title of the novel; it also functions as a marker of orality since it is repeated at least 50 times, usually twice in each of the 25 chapters. However, rather than guarantee the authenticity and reliability of the narration, as one would expect in a realistic account, the phrase serves to problematize or undermine the “testimony” because it almost always reproduces “the protagonist’s speech or thought [which] recurrently suggests a sense of doubt” (Spunta 145).10 Embedded in the “testimony” are expressions of uncertainty or reticence, such as: “Pereira cannot presume to say” (Pereira 1), “Pereira declares that he does not know why he said this” (Pereira 19), “Why had he said all that when he wanted to say quite the opposite?” (Pereira 31). Such declarative or interrogative utterances within the structure of indirect speech and free indirect speech punctuate the entire novel. Furthermore, when he/she encounters such responses as “Maybe for these reasons and for others again” (Pereira 31) and “maybe because his wife had died of consumption a few years before” (Pereira 2), the reader cannot presume to know if the speculation is expressed by the character or by the narrator who is ostensibly reporting the testimony/confession of the protagonist. It is worth noting that Pereira’s inability or reluctance to articulate explicitly his thoughts, desires, and value judgments pertains to the physical world as well as to the domain of his own psyche.
Distracting the character from the traumatic historical events unfolding around him and obstructing his engagement with the empirical world in all but the most rudimentary, physical ways, are two stimuli: one external and the other internal. The external stimulus is a photograph of his dead wife: “[Pereira] confided his thoughts to, asked it for advice” (Pereira 8). The image symbolizes the character’s detachment from the present and his obsessive attachment to the past.11 Indeed Dr Cardoso has to reprimand him: “You need to say goodbye to your past life, you need to live in the present” (Pereira 10). In the mind of the protagonist, the photographic image loses its value as signifier and becomes a signified, as absence becomes presence. The internal stimulus is the tendency to dream, with the resulting blurring of the boundary between reality and illusion, between body and soul, between life and death. Dream, memory, and hallucination appear to be coextensive with consciousness. Frequently, “his thoughts turned to other things” (Pereira 10); “he dreamt a lovely dream, a dream of his youth” (Pereira 68); and he has to be reminded: “Your whole life is backward-looking” (Pereira 101)—an observation that links up intertextually with such short stories as “The Backwards Game” in the collection Letter from Casablanca, and their many references to reversals, both real and hypothetical.
Also drawing him inward and away from the external world is his almost constant awareness of an inexplicable sense of remorse for an unspecified act that he is unaware of having performed or has failed to perform—a remote original sin that demands expiation. Typical statements are: “He felt he had something to repent of but he didn’t know what” (Pereira 69), “he felt a yearning for repentance” (Pereira 75), and “I have this desire for repentance” (Pereira 75). This sense of guilt, which evokes Kafka’s The Trial perhaps by authorial intentionality, prompts in the character the urge to confess his unspecified sin: “I ought to make a proper confession” (Pereira 91), he says or thinks on more than one occasion.
Intimately connected to Pereira’s perceptions and representations of the external world, which his body inhabits more unproblematically than does his mind, are the numerous interior monologues and conversations on the body/soul dichotomy. The character seems to be always conscious of the fact that he is eating, drinking, or sweating, while at the same time his thoughts and discussions often deal with the nature of the human soul. His crisis of identity, as it were, turns on his inability to reconcile his belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. The existential impasse also involves his inability to comprehend the difference between soul and personality. From his dialogues with Dr Cardoso, Pereira learns to think of his soul, personality, or self-image in terms that generate a contradiction or clash between his Catholic upbringing, which stresses the indivisibility of the human soul, created by God, and the theories of French psychologists Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), according to whom: “we don’t have a single personality but a lot of personalities living together under the leadership of a ruling ego” (Pereira 91).12 In this confusion with respect to the unity or multiplicity of the self, Pereira resembles Vitangelo Moscarda of Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand). Much of the novel, in fact, describes Pereira’s desire to harmonize two extremes: the unified Christian model and the fragmented, modernist model of self-identity.
While in The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro the mimetic illusion is more resistant to a modernist interpretation, since the investigation of the murder of the figure named in the book title is narrated in chronological order, devices that impede the drift toward literariness and towards the production of a lisible or “readerly” text can also be identified. For example, the narrator repeatedly foregrounds the contradiction between an eyewitness account of the crime scene and official police reports. For instance, Loton points out: &l
dquo;You claim that Manolo the Gypsy gave the police an exact description of the T-shirt but in their official communiqué the police have said that the body was naked from the waist up” (Missing Head 35). Exploiting the Pirandellian notion of the virtual interchangeability of reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, the narrating subject offers up real-life illustrations, such as the sale of Portuguese marble to Italian clients because it has properties similar to those of Carrara marble: “so there you have atriums of Roman apartments and the bathrooms of wealthy Italians filled with fine Carrara marble which comes from Estremoz in Portugal” (Missing Head 45). The lawyer Loton, with whom the protagonist/narrator discusses complex issues of theoretical law, explains to Firmino the card game of Miss Milligan, about which he observes: “some [games of patience] have mechanisms resembling the intolerable logic that conditions our life” (Missing Head 124). The game is “based…on moves each player makes to set traps and restrict the choices of the next player” (Missing Head 124). Loton goes on to draw a disturbing parallel between this game or fiction and the domain of international politics: “[in Geneva] I came to learn that her [an ambassadress] country, at that time carrying out nuclear experiments, was also committed to worldwide abolition of atomic weapons” (Missing Head 125). Symptomatic of the dizzying logical convolutions that sabotage the project of linear or direct representation is the lawyer’s quizzical suggestion that he and Firmino “work de Quincey’s paradox backwards” (Missing Head 113). However, reversing or turning a paradox upside down does not resolve the paradox since Thomas de Quincey13 hypothesized a situation in which one is simultaneously inside and outside of oneself. From the encyclopedic mind of Loton also comes a reference to the origins of the universe and the metaphysical problem of time: “a phrase [from a thesis] that said at a certain time, in the universe, time came into existence. This scientist perfidiously added that this concept cannot be grasped by our mental faculties” (Missing Head 128). It would appear that the reader is led into Hades, the mythical labyrinth, Plato’s cave, but is stranded there because Orpheus, Theseus, the philosopher, and the narrator cannot find their way out and into the realm of transcendental Truth.
On the literal or denotative level, the story of Requiem spans a 12-hour period in which the narrator finds himself in Lisbon for a meeting and, while waiting for the pre-arranged time, he travels by taxi to several locations where he encounters a variety of figures: a taxi driver, a waiter in a restaurant, the owner of a pension, an artist, a barman at the Museum of Ancient Art, and a ticket collector. The normalcy or banality of such chance meetings is, however, immediately subverted by the ambiguity of the time frame. The narrator has agreed to meet an acquaintance (who is never explicitly identified for the reader) at 12, but he is not sure whether he meant noon or midnight. Also, early in the narrative the themes of disorientation and absurdity are introduced as the taxi driver is inexplicably unfamiliar with the streets of Lisbon and has to ask his passenger for directions. Once such characters appear in the text, the common nouns are immediately transformed into proper nouns as in The Young Junkie, The Taxi Driver, The Cemetery Keeper, The Copyist, The Seller of Stories, and The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife—a device that suggests the structure of a drama rather than of a novel.14 But this is not realist drama as the characters that appear on the stage include Tadeus, Isabel, My Father as a Young Man, My Guest—all of whom are dead. These are phantoms or literary creations that may or may not correspond to actual human beings. Terms indicating incongruities or absurdities recur in the text, as in: “Why did I agree to this meeting here on the quayside? It’s utterly senseless” (Requiem 11). The quayside is, of course, liminal space, the border between stable, reassuring terra firma and the mysterious sea, a trope that is so reminiscent of similar images in the poetry Eugenio Montale, also a modernist.15 As in Montale’s poetry,16 Tabucchi’s quayside, shoreline and horizon are metaphors for the space that divides the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead, the past and the present.17 Mimicking the reaction of Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal, the narrator writes: “I glimpsed my shadow and that seemed absurd to me, incongruous, senseless” (Requiem 11). This is because the self or self-consciousness becomes commingled or confused with the real and the imaginary figures which the narrator encounters in this strange environment that is something between the “states” of waking and sleeping. Like Montale’s symbol of existential perplexity, “la bussola [che] va impazzita all’avventura” (the compass needle [that] turns madly at random) (Montale 161),18 is the reference to traveling the wrong way on a one-way street in a taxi as the narrator makes his way toward his meeting with the ghost of Fernando Pessoa: “I took another road and it’s one-way…I’ve come up a one-way street” (Requiem 22). The one-way road eventually takes the narrator to his encounter with his Guest, appropriately at the edge of the Cemitério dos Prazeres. Perhaps the most charged statement on the interchangeability of the real and the unreal comes from The Old Gypsy Woman who, in sibylline fashion, foretells the narrator his future, much as Dr Cardoso does for Pereira: “You can’t live in two worlds at once, in the world of reality and the world of dream, that kind of thing leads to hallucinations, you’re a sleepwalker walking through a landscape with your arms outstretched” (Requiem 25). Is this the narrator’s dilemma or the author’s? The reader’s perhaps?
As the paratext provides authorial support for a mimetic reading, we should not be surprised to find, in the same paratext, elements that support a modernist reading. In the Note to Pereira Declares, the authorial voice tells us that “Il dottor Pereira mi visitò per la prima volta in una sera di settembre del 1992” (Doctor Pereira visited me for the first time one September evening in 1992) (Sostiene Pereira 211), which is one month after the “actual” reading of the death of the Portuguese journalist, whose life and times the novel loosely reconstructs. More telling, however, is the qualification of his protagonist as “un personaggio in cerca d’autore” (a character in search of an author)—a conscious reference to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Indeed the literary debt is reiterated in the statement: “Non so perché scelse proprio me per essere raccontato” (I don’t know why in the world he chose me to have himself narrated) (Sostiene Pereira 211). The implied author, generally defined as the “implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes,” (Onega and García Landa 147)19 also confirms the literary source of the protagonist’s name: “un piccolo intermezzo di Eliot intitolato ‘What about Pereira’ in cui due amiche evocano, nel loro dialogo, un misterioso portoghese chiamato Pereira, del quale non si saprà mai niente” (a short interlude by Eliot titled “What about Pereira?” in which two friends evoke, in their dialogue, a mysterious Portuguese man by the name of Pereira, about whom nothing will ever be known) (Sostiene Pereira 213). In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the epigraph quoted f
rom Carlos Drummond de Andrade functions in a similar way: “The Martian met me in the street / and was frightened by the possibility of my being human / How can a being exist, he wondered, who invests / the business of existing with so huge a denial of existence?” De Andrade (1902–1987) was a poet whose work exhibits many features of Brazilian modernism. As well, the Note contains a statement by the implied author with respect to the function of Manolo the Gypsy, a key informant: “the whole community [of gypsies] concentrated in one individual in a story to which, on the plane of what is called reality, he is extraneous” (Missing Head 85).
In Requiem both the title and subtitle influence the reader to interpret the text in a modernist key. A requiem is both a musical composition and a Roman Catholic mass performed in commemoration of the dead (also known in Latin as the missa pro defunctis). However, no Mass is celebrated in the novel and the only music is that which the narrator and his guest hear in the restaurant where they share a “Last Supper” of sorts: “muffled music filled the room, piano music, Liszt perhaps” (Requiem 105). This could be a Liszt requiem, but the piece is not identified. In the context of the Catholic liturgy the requiem has an expiatory function since the Mass offered by the living is intended to reduce the time spent by the dead in Purgatory—the abode of the shades of Tadeus, Isabel, the narrator’s father, and his guest. But in this case, it is not clear whether the “requiem” is the text written by the implied author, a prayer uttered by the narrator for the ghosts he encounters or, indeed if, in a typical Tabucchian reversal, it is the dearly departed who perform the requiem for the living narrator to ease his sense of “disquiet.”20 These devices cumulatively render the mimetic presentation highly problematic both in terms of the historical and social reality perceived or interpreted by the protagonists and their reflections on the self as a unified, stable construct. The mimetic dimension of the text, however, is not erased completely.
In Pereira Declares, dialogues frequently concern themselves with literary figures generally associated with European modernism: from Kafka, Mann, and Pirandello, to Mayakovsky, Marinetti, Pessoa, and Eliot. As Wilson notes (61), Tabucchi himself identifies the literary source for the name of the protagonist, Pereira: a character mentioned in Sweeney Agonistes, while many of Pereira’s expressions of perplexity echo J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament: “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all” (Eliot 1963, 16). In the same vein, the protagonist’s efforts to orient himself in physiological, sociological, and political terms introduce ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, and absurdity into the process of self-examination and self-construction vis-à-vis external reality. In one instance the narrator observes: “He was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead…and perhaps his life was a remnant and pretence” (Pereira 7)—a situation that is analogous to the ontological crisis faced by Mattia Pascal in Pirandello’s homonymous novel The Late Mattia Pascal where, in the Foreward, the first-person narrator writes: “I have died already twice, but the first time was a mistake” (xiii).
In addition, the novel has some characteristics of testimonial writing, as the phrase “Pereira declares” (the narratee or addressee is never explicitly identified) is not merely the title of the novel; it also functions as a marker of orality since it is repeated at least 50 times, usually twice in each of the 25 chapters. However, rather than guarantee the authenticity and reliability of the narration, as one would expect in a realistic account, the phrase serves to problematize or undermine the “testimony” because it almost always reproduces “the protagonist’s speech or thought [which] recurrently suggests a sense of doubt” (Spunta 145).10 Embedded in the “testimony” are expressions of uncertainty or reticence, such as: “Pereira cannot presume to say” (Pereira 1), “Pereira declares that he does not know why he said this” (Pereira 19), “Why had he said all that when he wanted to say quite the opposite?” (Pereira 31). Such declarative or interrogative utterances within the structure of indirect speech and free indirect speech punctuate the entire novel. Furthermore, when he/she encounters such responses as “Maybe for these reasons and for others again” (Pereira 31) and “maybe because his wife had died of consumption a few years before” (Pereira 2), the reader cannot presume to know if the speculation is expressed by the character or by the narrator who is ostensibly reporting the testimony/confession of the protagonist. It is worth noting that Pereira’s inability or reluctance to articulate explicitly his thoughts, desires, and value judgments pertains to the physical world as well as to the domain of his own psyche.
Distracting the character from the traumatic historical events unfolding around him and obstructing his engagement with the empirical world in all but the most rudimentary, physical ways, are two stimuli: one external and the other internal. The external stimulus is a photograph of his dead wife: “[Pereira] confided his thoughts to, asked it for advice” (Pereira 8). The image symbolizes the character’s detachment from the present and his obsessive attachment to the past.11 Indeed Dr Cardoso has to reprimand him: “You need to say goodbye to your past life, you need to live in the present” (Pereira 10). In the mind of the protagonist, the photographic image loses its value as signifier and becomes a signified, as absence becomes presence. The internal stimulus is the tendency to dream, with the resulting blurring of the boundary between reality and illusion, between body and soul, between life and death. Dream, memory, and hallucination appear to be coextensive with consciousness. Frequently, “his thoughts turned to other things” (Pereira 10); “he dreamt a lovely dream, a dream of his youth” (Pereira 68); and he has to be reminded: “Your whole life is backward-looking” (Pereira 101)—an observation that links up intertextually with such short stories as “The Backwards Game” in the collection Letter from Casablanca, and their many references to reversals, both real and hypothetical.
Also drawing him inward and away from the external world is his almost constant awareness of an inexplicable sense of remorse for an unspecified act that he is unaware of having performed or has failed to perform—a remote original sin that demands expiation. Typical statements are: “He felt he had something to repent of but he didn’t know what” (Pereira 69), “he felt a yearning for repentance” (Pereira 75), and “I have this desire for repentance” (Pereira 75). This sense of guilt, which evokes Kafka’s The Trial perhaps by authorial intentionality, prompts in the character the urge to confess his unspecified sin: “I ought to make a proper confession” (Pereira 91), he says or thinks on more than one occasion.
Intimately connected to Pereira’s perceptions and representations of the external world, which his body inhabits more unproblematically than does his mind, are the numerous interior monologues and conversations on the body/soul dichotomy. The character seems to be always conscious of the fact that he is eating, drinking, or sweating, while at the same time his thoughts and discussions often deal with the nature of the human soul. His crisis of identity, as it were, turns on his inability to reconcile his belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. The existential impasse also involves his inability to comprehend the difference between soul and personality. From his dialogues with Dr Cardoso, Pereira learns to think of his soul, personality, or self-image in terms that generate a contradiction or clash between his Catholic upbringing, which stresses the indivisibility of the human soul, created by God, and the theories of French psychologists Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), according to whom: “we don’t have a single personality but a lot of personalities living together under the leadership of a ruling ego” (Pereira 91).12 In this confusion with respect to the unity or multiplicity of the self, Pereira resembles Vitangelo Moscarda of Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand). Much of the novel, in fact, describes Pereira’s desire to harmonize two extremes: the unified Christian model and the fragmented, modernist model of self-identity.
While in The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro the mimetic illusion is more resistant to a modernist interpretation, since the investigation of the murder of the figure named in the book title is narrated in chronological order, devices that impede the drift toward literariness and towards the production of a lisible or “readerly” text can also be identified. For example, the narrator repeatedly foregrounds the contradiction between an eyewitness account of the crime scene and official police reports. For instance, Loton points out: &l
dquo;You claim that Manolo the Gypsy gave the police an exact description of the T-shirt but in their official communiqué the police have said that the body was naked from the waist up” (Missing Head 35). Exploiting the Pirandellian notion of the virtual interchangeability of reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, the narrating subject offers up real-life illustrations, such as the sale of Portuguese marble to Italian clients because it has properties similar to those of Carrara marble: “so there you have atriums of Roman apartments and the bathrooms of wealthy Italians filled with fine Carrara marble which comes from Estremoz in Portugal” (Missing Head 45). The lawyer Loton, with whom the protagonist/narrator discusses complex issues of theoretical law, explains to Firmino the card game of Miss Milligan, about which he observes: “some [games of patience] have mechanisms resembling the intolerable logic that conditions our life” (Missing Head 124). The game is “based…on moves each player makes to set traps and restrict the choices of the next player” (Missing Head 124). Loton goes on to draw a disturbing parallel between this game or fiction and the domain of international politics: “[in Geneva] I came to learn that her [an ambassadress] country, at that time carrying out nuclear experiments, was also committed to worldwide abolition of atomic weapons” (Missing Head 125). Symptomatic of the dizzying logical convolutions that sabotage the project of linear or direct representation is the lawyer’s quizzical suggestion that he and Firmino “work de Quincey’s paradox backwards” (Missing Head 113). However, reversing or turning a paradox upside down does not resolve the paradox since Thomas de Quincey13 hypothesized a situation in which one is simultaneously inside and outside of oneself. From the encyclopedic mind of Loton also comes a reference to the origins of the universe and the metaphysical problem of time: “a phrase [from a thesis] that said at a certain time, in the universe, time came into existence. This scientist perfidiously added that this concept cannot be grasped by our mental faculties” (Missing Head 128). It would appear that the reader is led into Hades, the mythical labyrinth, Plato’s cave, but is stranded there because Orpheus, Theseus, the philosopher, and the narrator cannot find their way out and into the realm of transcendental Truth.
On the literal or denotative level, the story of Requiem spans a 12-hour period in which the narrator finds himself in Lisbon for a meeting and, while waiting for the pre-arranged time, he travels by taxi to several locations where he encounters a variety of figures: a taxi driver, a waiter in a restaurant, the owner of a pension, an artist, a barman at the Museum of Ancient Art, and a ticket collector. The normalcy or banality of such chance meetings is, however, immediately subverted by the ambiguity of the time frame. The narrator has agreed to meet an acquaintance (who is never explicitly identified for the reader) at 12, but he is not sure whether he meant noon or midnight. Also, early in the narrative the themes of disorientation and absurdity are introduced as the taxi driver is inexplicably unfamiliar with the streets of Lisbon and has to ask his passenger for directions. Once such characters appear in the text, the common nouns are immediately transformed into proper nouns as in The Young Junkie, The Taxi Driver, The Cemetery Keeper, The Copyist, The Seller of Stories, and The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife—a device that suggests the structure of a drama rather than of a novel.14 But this is not realist drama as the characters that appear on the stage include Tadeus, Isabel, My Father as a Young Man, My Guest—all of whom are dead. These are phantoms or literary creations that may or may not correspond to actual human beings. Terms indicating incongruities or absurdities recur in the text, as in: “Why did I agree to this meeting here on the quayside? It’s utterly senseless” (Requiem 11). The quayside is, of course, liminal space, the border between stable, reassuring terra firma and the mysterious sea, a trope that is so reminiscent of similar images in the poetry Eugenio Montale, also a modernist.15 As in Montale’s poetry,16 Tabucchi’s quayside, shoreline and horizon are metaphors for the space that divides the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead, the past and the present.17 Mimicking the reaction of Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal, the narrator writes: “I glimpsed my shadow and that seemed absurd to me, incongruous, senseless” (Requiem 11). This is because the self or self-consciousness becomes commingled or confused with the real and the imaginary figures which the narrator encounters in this strange environment that is something between the “states” of waking and sleeping. Like Montale’s symbol of existential perplexity, “la bussola [che] va impazzita all’avventura” (the compass needle [that] turns madly at random) (Montale 161),18 is the reference to traveling the wrong way on a one-way street in a taxi as the narrator makes his way toward his meeting with the ghost of Fernando Pessoa: “I took another road and it’s one-way…I’ve come up a one-way street” (Requiem 22). The one-way road eventually takes the narrator to his encounter with his Guest, appropriately at the edge of the Cemitério dos Prazeres. Perhaps the most charged statement on the interchangeability of the real and the unreal comes from The Old Gypsy Woman who, in sibylline fashion, foretells the narrator his future, much as Dr Cardoso does for Pereira: “You can’t live in two worlds at once, in the world of reality and the world of dream, that kind of thing leads to hallucinations, you’re a sleepwalker walking through a landscape with your arms outstretched” (Requiem 25). Is this the narrator’s dilemma or the author’s? The reader’s perhaps?
As the paratext provides authorial support for a mimetic reading, we should not be surprised to find, in the same paratext, elements that support a modernist reading. In the Note to Pereira Declares, the authorial voice tells us that “Il dottor Pereira mi visitò per la prima volta in una sera di settembre del 1992” (Doctor Pereira visited me for the first time one September evening in 1992) (Sostiene Pereira 211), which is one month after the “actual” reading of the death of the Portuguese journalist, whose life and times the novel loosely reconstructs. More telling, however, is the qualification of his protagonist as “un personaggio in cerca d’autore” (a character in search of an author)—a conscious reference to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Indeed the literary debt is reiterated in the statement: “Non so perché scelse proprio me per essere raccontato” (I don’t know why in the world he chose me to have himself narrated) (Sostiene Pereira 211). The implied author, generally defined as the “implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes,” (Onega and García Landa 147)19 also confirms the literary source of the protagonist’s name: “un piccolo intermezzo di Eliot intitolato ‘What about Pereira’ in cui due amiche evocano, nel loro dialogo, un misterioso portoghese chiamato Pereira, del quale non si saprà mai niente” (a short interlude by Eliot titled “What about Pereira?” in which two friends evoke, in their dialogue, a mysterious Portuguese man by the name of Pereira, about whom nothing will ever be known) (Sostiene Pereira 213). In The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, the epigraph quoted f
rom Carlos Drummond de Andrade functions in a similar way: “The Martian met me in the street / and was frightened by the possibility of my being human / How can a being exist, he wondered, who invests / the business of existing with so huge a denial of existence?” De Andrade (1902–1987) was a poet whose work exhibits many features of Brazilian modernism. As well, the Note contains a statement by the implied author with respect to the function of Manolo the Gypsy, a key informant: “the whole community [of gypsies] concentrated in one individual in a story to which, on the plane of what is called reality, he is extraneous” (Missing Head 85).
In Requiem both the title and subtitle influence the reader to interpret the text in a modernist key. A requiem is both a musical composition and a Roman Catholic mass performed in commemoration of the dead (also known in Latin as the missa pro defunctis). However, no Mass is celebrated in the novel and the only music is that which the narrator and his guest hear in the restaurant where they share a “Last Supper” of sorts: “muffled music filled the room, piano music, Liszt perhaps” (Requiem 105). This could be a Liszt requiem, but the piece is not identified. In the context of the Catholic liturgy the requiem has an expiatory function since the Mass offered by the living is intended to reduce the time spent by the dead in Purgatory—the abode of the shades of Tadeus, Isabel, the narrator’s father, and his guest. But in this case, it is not clear whether the “requiem” is the text written by the implied author, a prayer uttered by the narrator for the ghosts he encounters or, indeed if, in a typical Tabucchian reversal, it is the dearly departed who perform the requiem for the living narrator to ease his sense of “disquiet.”20 These devices cumulatively render the mimetic presentation highly problematic both in terms of the historical and social reality perceived or interpreted by the protagonists and their reflections on the self as a unified, stable construct. The mimetic dimension of the text, however, is not erased completely.
The Postmodern Bias
There is an additional aesthetic layer at play that dislodges the three works being discussed from a strictly modernist classification. While the novels are rich in correspondence with several classics of European modernism, as noted above, narrative strategies that could be called postmodern engage the reader in different ways again and cause him or her to reassess his or her interpretation of each text. Schwarz Lausten states: “credo che egli [Tabucchi] rappresenti molti aspetti postmoderni, come la strategia intertestuale e l’atteggiamento nei confronti della condizione postmoderna di perdita di senso” (I believe that he represents many aspects of postmodernism, such as the intertextual strategy and the attitude in the face of the postmodern condition of the loss of meaning) (13). The term itself appears in Requiem where the narrator uses it in his description of a bar in which he encounters one of the other characters: “It’s a place that broke with tradition by embracing tradition, you could describe it as a compilation of several different styles, that’s what I would call postmodern” (Requiem 94).21 Furthermore, if the foregrounding of intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and meta-literariness are identifying features of postmodern narrative, as Linda Hutcheon and others contend, Tabucchi’s fiction is unquestionably postmodern. In characterizing Dream of Dreams (1992) as “a playful metaliterary fiction,” for example, Capozzi (223) in essence identifies a characteristic feature of many of Tabucchi’s narrative texts.
In Pereira Declares the names of the characters generate a rhizomatic network of intratexts and intertexts. Pereira, for instance, not only evokes the character in T.S. Eliot’s work but, as the authorial voice states, “In Portoghese Pereira significa albero del pero, e come tutti i nomi degli alberi da frutto, è un cognome di origine ebraica” (In Portuguese Pereira means pear tree and, as are all the names of fruit trees, it is a surname of Jewish origin) (Pereira 213). This semantic thread underscores the fictionality of the figures, weaving together linguistic and ethnographic elements. In addition, the politically engaged Monteiro Rossi, who is beaten to death by the National Guard in Pereira Declares, is associated phonetically with Damasceno Monteiro, murdered by the National Guard in the homonymous novel. Monteiro is the surname of a victim in one novel, but is also the name of the Marxist activist in another (reversing first and last names in a typical Tabucchian inversion). As well, Capek-Habekovic points out that, according to the authorial voice, “the name Damasceno Monteiro stems from a street similarly named in Lisbon” (140). Moreover, Pereira’s confessor is Father António and the title of the Hieronymus Bosch painting that the narrator of Requiem visits in the Lisbon Museum of Ancient Art is The Temptation of St Anthony. Of course, Anthony (Antonio) is the empirical author’s Christian name, suggesting that the demons that assail the saint in the sixteenth-century artwork correspond to the ghostly figures that haunt the imagination of the narrator and the novelist. In an interesting inversion, some of the creatures in the painting have heads but no torsos, while Monteiro’s corpse has a torso but no head. In addition, the lawyer who sues the state police on behalf of the murder victim’s family is nicknamed Loton, which is supposedly based on the name of the actor Charles Laughton, according to one of the characters in the novel, but it is also phonetically similar to that of Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman, on whose theories Firmino bases his thesis. In Requiem the Lame Lottery-Ticket Seller is the same figure that “was always bothering Bernardo Soares” (Requiem 14), one of the heteronyms adopted by Fernando Pessoa in the production of his fiction. Schwarz Lausten calls these Tabucchi references to his own works “ponti intertestuali” [intertextual bridges] (108).
Perhaps not to the extent of Eco’s The Name of the Rose,22 Tabucchi’s books are about books as much as they are about external reality.23 The narrator and the characters with whom he dialogues continually quote or paraphrase excerpts from such works as Luigi Pirandello’s Sogno (ma forse no) (Pereira 4), Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (Pereira 22), F. T. Marinetti’s War the World’s Only Hygiene and Zang Tumb Tumb (Pereira 31), Honoré de Balzac’s Honorine (Pereira 47, 57, 83), Alphonse Daudet’s Contes du lunedi (Pereira 63, 70, 80, 85), Georges Bernanos’ Journal d’un curé de campagne (Pereira 97), Elio Vittorini’s Americana (Missing Head 51), Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (Missing Head 78), Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Missing Head 79; Requiem 101), Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (Missing Head 97), Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Missing Head 126), and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Requiem 14). The number and complexity of such references activate what Eco calls the cultural encyclopedia of the Lettore Modello (Ideal Reader),24 which is projected in all narrative as “un insieme di istruzioni testuali” (a body of textual instructions) (Eco 1994, 20), but is especially relevant in postmodern texts with their emphasis on the fruition of a wide range of expressive forms: oral, written, and visual. As well, Roland Barthes’ notion of the scriptible or “writerly” text, with its emphasis on the role of the reader in the production of meaning, and Jorge Luis Borges’ library/labyrinth apply, as does Italo Calvino’s notion of the literary text as combinatorial art. This is especially true of Requiem in which the nine chapters can be read either as a linear progression of vignettes or as separate modules that can be arranged in any number of ways, much like Invisible Cities. Postmodern too is the transgression or amalgamation of sub-genres. In this case, Tabucchi moves subtly and easily among the historical novel, the murder mystery, the short story, and the philosophical essay, blurring the boundaries as he proceeds.
Finally, an important feature of postmodern narrative is the absence of the closure that typifies realist texts. In Pereira Declares, there is closure of sorts in that the protagonist eventually decides to publish his denunciation of the crime committed by the authorities, but the reader does not actually see the article in the newspaper. As well, Pereira’s final gesture is to leave the city of Lisbon with one of the fake passports that Monteiro Rossi had prepared for himself and his fellow political fugitives. The reader does not know what becomes of Pereira who simply dissolves into the night or the imagination from which he had appeared. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, as noted, ends in the trial of the agents responsible for the mutilation of Monteiro’s corpse; however, the perpetrators are deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, rather than of murder, and are either reprimanded or merely suspended from duty for a short time. As well, the trial proceedings, taped by Firmino, have many gaps and muffled sounds (due to poor acoustics in the courthouse, according to the narrator), producing a discontinuous, incomplete transcription of what was actually said in court. Spunta argues that the gaps in the tape recording are indicative of the author’s attempts to “reproduce the unsaid, the ambiguous, the postmodern shift in meaning (147). Finally, Requiem ends as enigmatically as it began, lea
ving the narrator and the reader with more questions than answers. The much anticipated meeting with the guest dissolves on the quayside: “I turned around and only then did I realize that my Guest had vanished” (Requiem 107), in a scene reminiscent of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
This interweaving of realist, modernist, and postmodern modes of storytelling, which produces an intertextual thread that runs through works of literature, political science, philosophy, science, and art, appears to be Tabucchi’s preferred technique for reflecting on the function(s) of literature relative to the subject’s capacity to comprehend itself and the world into which it is thrown, in a Heideggerian sense. To this end, Tabucchi illustrates the capacity of literature not only to consider themes and arguments formulated in such domains as law, philosophy, psychology, art, and theology, but also to enter into dialogue with itself.
In terms of literature’s dialogue with other disciplines, there are numerous instances in the three novels being discussed. For example, Loton and Firmino exchange views on the ethical implications of Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law,25 specifically his notion of the Grundnorm, described as the founding principle of jurisprudence, “except that for Kelsen it is situated at the apex of the pyramid, it’s a basic norm in reverse” (Missing Head 84), as well as Georg Lukács’ “principle of reality” (Missing Head 113) and his Marxist theory of literature. Dr Cardoso and Pereira consider the applicability of Freud’s theory of the interpretation of dreams, the opinion of French theologian Marcel Jouhandeau26 that “the essential object of literature is the knowledge of human nature” (Missing Head 89) and psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich’s27 “image of the Crucified Christ [as] an image closely connected with our culture” (Missing Head 136). As one character (not necessarily the narrator or the implied author) states, “In literature everything has to do with everything else” (Missing Head 97). That being the case, the writer and the reader come into contact with empirical reality as it filtered through the thought of these literary figures. As do the narrators and protagonists of each tale, the real author constructs aspects of his identity inside the framework of these mediated realities.
Within the discourse of literature itself, Tabucchi appears to assert a given function only to qualify or subvert that assertion. For example, he installs narrative’s capacity to mirror or represent material reality, not only in the mimetic aspects of his own writing but in the presence of journalistic, realist, and neorealist writing that is both intertextual and extrareferential. Tabucchi acknowledges the social relevance of journalistic factual reporting of political abuse and corruption (especially in Pereira Declares and The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro), the insights into class distinctions of Maupassant, Daudet, and Balzac, and the political engagement of Bernanos, Mauriac, Malraux, Mann, and García Lorca. However, this same assertion is undercut, or at least diluted, by the fact that the realities depicted in the Tabucchi novels are second-hand accounts, realities once-removed from the empirical world to which the originals refer. Tabucchi’s readers are not the readers of the authors cited above. Additionally, the implied author inscribes the modern and postmodern challenge to dogmatism and trust in authorities or hegemonic agencies (the ghost of Pessoa says to the narrator: “Please…don’t abandon me to all these people who are so certain about everything, they’re dreadful” [Requiem 99]), and yet he expresses admiration for writers who tell the truth (one of his characters refers to The Trial as “the most courageous book of the century, he [Kafka] has the courage to say that we are all guilty” [Requiem 101]).
Furthermore, Tabucchi installs literature’s function as an instrument of self-understanding and of reflection on one’s relationship to memories and to the external world, while casting doubt on the legitimacy of that project. For instance, the protagonist of Requiem is allegorically reunited with the dead, but he does not come away from the appointments with answers to his existential questions. Indeed, his encounter with Isabel, the suicide victim, is prepared but not presented to the reader. In other words, the narrator arrives at the Casa do Alentejo where he plans to meet Isabel. In the final paragraph of chapter 7, the narrator says to the Manager of the Casa do Alentejo: “Would you show her [Isabel] into the bar, please.…I’ll be there in a minute” (Requiem 89). However, the very next chapter opens with the narrator sitting “on the pedestal beneath the statue of Dom José” (Requiem 91) and moves on to a new episode. As well, Tabucchi inscribes the postmodern paradigm of the text as intertextual play, as retelling of stories and fragments of stories; yet his narrator muses: “I was writing and wondering why I was writing, the story I was working on was a strange story, a story without a solution, what had made me write a story like that?” (Requiem 76). This description applies to almost all of Tabucchi’s tales. In this regard, it would seem that Claudio Pezzin is quite correct when he says that, in Tabucchi’s writing, “La letteratura è rovina archeologica, territorio tumefatto, ‘archivio’ e ‘necrologio,’ galleria di scrittori defunti” (Literature is an archeological ruin, a cemetery, an ‘archive’ and ‘obituary,’ a gallery of dead authors) (94).
In other words, at one end of the communicative spectrum, literature appears to deal with defunct realities and to serve as a commemorative or ritualistic totem with little or no impact on the present external conditions. Yet, counterbalancing such a restricted view, the empirical author has his character Marta counterpoise the epistemological reach of philosophy and that of literature: “Philosophy appears to concern itself with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself with fantasy, but perhaps it expresses the truth” (Pereira 18)—a last reversal or “open” structure. It appears that, for Antonio Tabucchi, the value and function of literature are not reducible to simple categories or binary oppositions in that literature is not a vehicle for uncovering scientific or ontological Truth but, rather, for uncovering truths; in this sense, it functions, as one character puts it, like “a message in a bottle” (Pereira 48) that “only people who had ears to hear it could receive it” (Pereira 85). In this respect, the present reading of Tabucchi’s novels tends to coincide with Schwarz Lausten’s interpretation of Tabucchi’s oeuvre in terms of philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s notion of “pensiero debole” (weak thought).28 Moreover, the hypothesis proposed in this portion of the present essay reiterates Spunta’s assertion that, for Tabucchi, “Reading reality as fiction and vice versa…seems to be the primary role of literature” (162).
As for the identity of the subject, I would argue that the identity of the self is constructed through narrative, both oral and textual.29 In the first instance, the narrators construct their sense of self in their dialogues with others as well as in monologues (or artificial dialogues) with photographs or hallucinatory figures. With respect to textual narrative, the self is constructed through readings of books and interaction with the ideas contained in those books. However, it must be pointed out th
at the process is fragmentary, incomplete, and open-ended. Perhaps the best illustration of this perspective is the narrator’s encounter, in Requiem, with the Copyist in the Museum of Ancient Art. This figure produces large paintings of the details of Bosch’s The Temptation of St Anthony, which are purchased by an American art collector and displayed in his home in Texas—as though they were self-contained works. Each detail is thus removed from its context, so that the spectator responds to the visual information provided by that image alone. In the context of the painting as a whole, the individual detail assumes a completely different meaning and value. For Tabucchi, existence is the “painting” as a whole; however, unlike the Bosch masterpiece, which can be viewed in its “closed” wholeness, the phenomenon of existence is forever “open.” The subject must, therefore, construct his sense of self on the basis of experience, which is of necessity fragmentary. In a sense, the subject lives trapped within the hermeneutic circle.
In Pereira Declares the names of the characters generate a rhizomatic network of intratexts and intertexts. Pereira, for instance, not only evokes the character in T.S. Eliot’s work but, as the authorial voice states, “In Portoghese Pereira significa albero del pero, e come tutti i nomi degli alberi da frutto, è un cognome di origine ebraica” (In Portuguese Pereira means pear tree and, as are all the names of fruit trees, it is a surname of Jewish origin) (Pereira 213). This semantic thread underscores the fictionality of the figures, weaving together linguistic and ethnographic elements. In addition, the politically engaged Monteiro Rossi, who is beaten to death by the National Guard in Pereira Declares, is associated phonetically with Damasceno Monteiro, murdered by the National Guard in the homonymous novel. Monteiro is the surname of a victim in one novel, but is also the name of the Marxist activist in another (reversing first and last names in a typical Tabucchian inversion). As well, Capek-Habekovic points out that, according to the authorial voice, “the name Damasceno Monteiro stems from a street similarly named in Lisbon” (140). Moreover, Pereira’s confessor is Father António and the title of the Hieronymus Bosch painting that the narrator of Requiem visits in the Lisbon Museum of Ancient Art is The Temptation of St Anthony. Of course, Anthony (Antonio) is the empirical author’s Christian name, suggesting that the demons that assail the saint in the sixteenth-century artwork correspond to the ghostly figures that haunt the imagination of the narrator and the novelist. In an interesting inversion, some of the creatures in the painting have heads but no torsos, while Monteiro’s corpse has a torso but no head. In addition, the lawyer who sues the state police on behalf of the murder victim’s family is nicknamed Loton, which is supposedly based on the name of the actor Charles Laughton, according to one of the characters in the novel, but it is also phonetically similar to that of Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman, on whose theories Firmino bases his thesis. In Requiem the Lame Lottery-Ticket Seller is the same figure that “was always bothering Bernardo Soares” (Requiem 14), one of the heteronyms adopted by Fernando Pessoa in the production of his fiction. Schwarz Lausten calls these Tabucchi references to his own works “ponti intertestuali” [intertextual bridges] (108).
Perhaps not to the extent of Eco’s The Name of the Rose,22 Tabucchi’s books are about books as much as they are about external reality.23 The narrator and the characters with whom he dialogues continually quote or paraphrase excerpts from such works as Luigi Pirandello’s Sogno (ma forse no) (Pereira 4), Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (Pereira 22), F. T. Marinetti’s War the World’s Only Hygiene and Zang Tumb Tumb (Pereira 31), Honoré de Balzac’s Honorine (Pereira 47, 57, 83), Alphonse Daudet’s Contes du lunedi (Pereira 63, 70, 80, 85), Georges Bernanos’ Journal d’un curé de campagne (Pereira 97), Elio Vittorini’s Americana (Missing Head 51), Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (Missing Head 78), Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Missing Head 79; Requiem 101), Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (Missing Head 97), Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Missing Head 126), and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Requiem 14). The number and complexity of such references activate what Eco calls the cultural encyclopedia of the Lettore Modello (Ideal Reader),24 which is projected in all narrative as “un insieme di istruzioni testuali” (a body of textual instructions) (Eco 1994, 20), but is especially relevant in postmodern texts with their emphasis on the fruition of a wide range of expressive forms: oral, written, and visual. As well, Roland Barthes’ notion of the scriptible or “writerly” text, with its emphasis on the role of the reader in the production of meaning, and Jorge Luis Borges’ library/labyrinth apply, as does Italo Calvino’s notion of the literary text as combinatorial art. This is especially true of Requiem in which the nine chapters can be read either as a linear progression of vignettes or as separate modules that can be arranged in any number of ways, much like Invisible Cities. Postmodern too is the transgression or amalgamation of sub-genres. In this case, Tabucchi moves subtly and easily among the historical novel, the murder mystery, the short story, and the philosophical essay, blurring the boundaries as he proceeds.
Finally, an important feature of postmodern narrative is the absence of the closure that typifies realist texts. In Pereira Declares, there is closure of sorts in that the protagonist eventually decides to publish his denunciation of the crime committed by the authorities, but the reader does not actually see the article in the newspaper. As well, Pereira’s final gesture is to leave the city of Lisbon with one of the fake passports that Monteiro Rossi had prepared for himself and his fellow political fugitives. The reader does not know what becomes of Pereira who simply dissolves into the night or the imagination from which he had appeared. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, as noted, ends in the trial of the agents responsible for the mutilation of Monteiro’s corpse; however, the perpetrators are deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, rather than of murder, and are either reprimanded or merely suspended from duty for a short time. As well, the trial proceedings, taped by Firmino, have many gaps and muffled sounds (due to poor acoustics in the courthouse, according to the narrator), producing a discontinuous, incomplete transcription of what was actually said in court. Spunta argues that the gaps in the tape recording are indicative of the author’s attempts to “reproduce the unsaid, the ambiguous, the postmodern shift in meaning (147). Finally, Requiem ends as enigmatically as it began, lea
ving the narrator and the reader with more questions than answers. The much anticipated meeting with the guest dissolves on the quayside: “I turned around and only then did I realize that my Guest had vanished” (Requiem 107), in a scene reminiscent of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
This interweaving of realist, modernist, and postmodern modes of storytelling, which produces an intertextual thread that runs through works of literature, political science, philosophy, science, and art, appears to be Tabucchi’s preferred technique for reflecting on the function(s) of literature relative to the subject’s capacity to comprehend itself and the world into which it is thrown, in a Heideggerian sense. To this end, Tabucchi illustrates the capacity of literature not only to consider themes and arguments formulated in such domains as law, philosophy, psychology, art, and theology, but also to enter into dialogue with itself.
In terms of literature’s dialogue with other disciplines, there are numerous instances in the three novels being discussed. For example, Loton and Firmino exchange views on the ethical implications of Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law,25 specifically his notion of the Grundnorm, described as the founding principle of jurisprudence, “except that for Kelsen it is situated at the apex of the pyramid, it’s a basic norm in reverse” (Missing Head 84), as well as Georg Lukács’ “principle of reality” (Missing Head 113) and his Marxist theory of literature. Dr Cardoso and Pereira consider the applicability of Freud’s theory of the interpretation of dreams, the opinion of French theologian Marcel Jouhandeau26 that “the essential object of literature is the knowledge of human nature” (Missing Head 89) and psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich’s27 “image of the Crucified Christ [as] an image closely connected with our culture” (Missing Head 136). As one character (not necessarily the narrator or the implied author) states, “In literature everything has to do with everything else” (Missing Head 97). That being the case, the writer and the reader come into contact with empirical reality as it filtered through the thought of these literary figures. As do the narrators and protagonists of each tale, the real author constructs aspects of his identity inside the framework of these mediated realities.
Within the discourse of literature itself, Tabucchi appears to assert a given function only to qualify or subvert that assertion. For example, he installs narrative’s capacity to mirror or represent material reality, not only in the mimetic aspects of his own writing but in the presence of journalistic, realist, and neorealist writing that is both intertextual and extrareferential. Tabucchi acknowledges the social relevance of journalistic factual reporting of political abuse and corruption (especially in Pereira Declares and The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro), the insights into class distinctions of Maupassant, Daudet, and Balzac, and the political engagement of Bernanos, Mauriac, Malraux, Mann, and García Lorca. However, this same assertion is undercut, or at least diluted, by the fact that the realities depicted in the Tabucchi novels are second-hand accounts, realities once-removed from the empirical world to which the originals refer. Tabucchi’s readers are not the readers of the authors cited above. Additionally, the implied author inscribes the modern and postmodern challenge to dogmatism and trust in authorities or hegemonic agencies (the ghost of Pessoa says to the narrator: “Please…don’t abandon me to all these people who are so certain about everything, they’re dreadful” [Requiem 99]), and yet he expresses admiration for writers who tell the truth (one of his characters refers to The Trial as “the most courageous book of the century, he [Kafka] has the courage to say that we are all guilty” [Requiem 101]).
Furthermore, Tabucchi installs literature’s function as an instrument of self-understanding and of reflection on one’s relationship to memories and to the external world, while casting doubt on the legitimacy of that project. For instance, the protagonist of Requiem is allegorically reunited with the dead, but he does not come away from the appointments with answers to his existential questions. Indeed, his encounter with Isabel, the suicide victim, is prepared but not presented to the reader. In other words, the narrator arrives at the Casa do Alentejo where he plans to meet Isabel. In the final paragraph of chapter 7, the narrator says to the Manager of the Casa do Alentejo: “Would you show her [Isabel] into the bar, please.…I’ll be there in a minute” (Requiem 89). However, the very next chapter opens with the narrator sitting “on the pedestal beneath the statue of Dom José” (Requiem 91) and moves on to a new episode. As well, Tabucchi inscribes the postmodern paradigm of the text as intertextual play, as retelling of stories and fragments of stories; yet his narrator muses: “I was writing and wondering why I was writing, the story I was working on was a strange story, a story without a solution, what had made me write a story like that?” (Requiem 76). This description applies to almost all of Tabucchi’s tales. In this regard, it would seem that Claudio Pezzin is quite correct when he says that, in Tabucchi’s writing, “La letteratura è rovina archeologica, territorio tumefatto, ‘archivio’ e ‘necrologio,’ galleria di scrittori defunti” (Literature is an archeological ruin, a cemetery, an ‘archive’ and ‘obituary,’ a gallery of dead authors) (94).
In other words, at one end of the communicative spectrum, literature appears to deal with defunct realities and to serve as a commemorative or ritualistic totem with little or no impact on the present external conditions. Yet, counterbalancing such a restricted view, the empirical author has his character Marta counterpoise the epistemological reach of philosophy and that of literature: “Philosophy appears to concern itself with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself with fantasy, but perhaps it expresses the truth” (Pereira 18)—a last reversal or “open” structure. It appears that, for Antonio Tabucchi, the value and function of literature are not reducible to simple categories or binary oppositions in that literature is not a vehicle for uncovering scientific or ontological Truth but, rather, for uncovering truths; in this sense, it functions, as one character puts it, like “a message in a bottle” (Pereira 48) that “only people who had ears to hear it could receive it” (Pereira 85). In this respect, the present reading of Tabucchi’s novels tends to coincide with Schwarz Lausten’s interpretation of Tabucchi’s oeuvre in terms of philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s notion of “pensiero debole” (weak thought).28 Moreover, the hypothesis proposed in this portion of the present essay reiterates Spunta’s assertion that, for Tabucchi, “Reading reality as fiction and vice versa…seems to be the primary role of literature” (162).
As for the identity of the subject, I would argue that the identity of the self is constructed through narrative, both oral and textual.29 In the first instance, the narrators construct their sense of self in their dialogues with others as well as in monologues (or artificial dialogues) with photographs or hallucinatory figures. With respect to textual narrative, the self is constructed through readings of books and interaction with the ideas contained in those books. However, it must be pointed out th
at the process is fragmentary, incomplete, and open-ended. Perhaps the best illustration of this perspective is the narrator’s encounter, in Requiem, with the Copyist in the Museum of Ancient Art. This figure produces large paintings of the details of Bosch’s The Temptation of St Anthony, which are purchased by an American art collector and displayed in his home in Texas—as though they were self-contained works. Each detail is thus removed from its context, so that the spectator responds to the visual information provided by that image alone. In the context of the painting as a whole, the individual detail assumes a completely different meaning and value. For Tabucchi, existence is the “painting” as a whole; however, unlike the Bosch masterpiece, which can be viewed in its “closed” wholeness, the phenomenon of existence is forever “open.” The subject must, therefore, construct his sense of self on the basis of experience, which is of necessity fragmentary. In a sense, the subject lives trapped within the hermeneutic circle.
Notes
1. Jo Ann Cannon considers Requiem “a metanarrative novel par excellence” and notes: “The novel explores the nature of fiction more openly and more playfully than any of Tabucchi’s previous texts,” “Requiem and the Poetics of Antonio Tabucchi,” Forum Italicum 35, no. 1 (2001), p. 100. Rocco Capozzi includes the work of Tabucchi in the following critical assessment: “Fiction dealing with the postmodern notion of remakes or revisitations of classic narratives has been popular since the 1980s in Italy,” “The New Italian Novel,” Peter Bondanella and Andrea Cicarelli, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 223. Joseph Francese writes: “radical introspection no longer prompts a modernist atomization. Instead, the disarticulation of the I leads to a contestatory postmodern discovery of temporal and societal points of reference external to the self,” “Tabucchi: The Angel of History,” Narrating Postmodern Time and Space (New York: State U of New York P, 1997), p. 140. Pia Schwarz Lausten argues that “una parte del contesto culturale in cui egli [Tabucchi] agisce può essere rappresentato da teorie sul postmoderno come il pensiero debole di Vattimo e Rovatti,” L’uomo inquieto (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2005), p. 12. Marina Spunta comments on the interdependence of the visual and the verbal in Tabucchi’s narrative in which she finds metaphors of silence that convey “the inevitable fallibility of human perceptions and the ingrained void of postmodern signs,” Voicing the Word. Writing Orality in Contemporary Italian Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 160.
2. Angela M. Jeannet places Tabucchi among the “Italian authors [who] throughout the centuries have consistently addressed the connection between creativity and pragmatic concerns,” “A Matter of Injustice: Violence and Death in Antonio Tabucchi,” Annali d’Italianistica 19 (2001), p. 153. Elizabeth Wren-Owens writes: “Tabucchi’s work fulfills the criteria of the committed writer, dialoguing with and interrogating his socio-political reality. Many of his works engage in a direct way with questions of police brutality, abuses of power and of corruption,” “Engagement through Geographical and Border Spaces in Tabucchi’s Work,” Arachnofiles, p. 1. 3. Angela Guidotti’s assessment is as follows: “Il fantastico attraversa l’opera di Tabucchi coniugando tematiche note con una particolare forma di ricerca all’interno del genere in questione,” “Aspetti del fantastico nella narrativa di Antonio Tabucchi,” Studi Novecenteschi 56, Dec. 25 (1998), p. 351. Michela Meschini reads Tabucchi’s fiction within the framework of “Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as hesitation,” “Between Surrealism and Postmodernism: Notes Towards an Analysis of the ‘Fantastic’ in Tabucchi’s Fiction,” Forum Italicum 33, no. 2 (1999), p. 353.
2. Angela M. Jeannet places Tabucchi among the “Italian authors [who] throughout the centuries have consistently addressed the connection between creativity and pragmatic concerns,” “A Matter of Injustice: Violence and Death in Antonio Tabucchi,” Annali d’Italianistica 19 (2001), p. 153. Elizabeth Wren-Owens writes: “Tabucchi’s work fulfills the criteria of the committed writer, dialoguing with and interrogating his socio-political reality. Many of his works engage in a direct way with questions of police brutality, abuses of power and of corruption,” “Engagement through Geographical and Border Spaces in Tabucchi’s Work,” Arachnofiles, p. 1. 3. Angela Guidotti’s assessment is as follows: “Il fantastico attraversa l’opera di Tabucchi coniugando tematiche note con una particolare forma di ricerca all’interno del genere in questione,” “Aspetti del fantastico nella narrativa di Antonio Tabucchi,” Studi Novecenteschi 56, Dec. 25 (1998), p. 351. Michela Meschini reads Tabucchi’s fiction within the framework of “Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as hesitation,” “Between Surrealism and Postmodernism: Notes Towards an Analysis of the ‘Fantastic’ in Tabucchi’s Fiction,” Forum Italicum 33, no. 2 (1999), p. 353.
4. I am aware of the range of meanings attributed to the term “mimesis” from Plato and Aristotle, to Auerbach, Frye, and Ricoeur. I am also aware of Hutcheon’s argument that all narrative is fundamentally mimetic. However, I use the term here to indicate a deliberate attempt to reproduce nature or “fidelity” to life.
5. These terms are included in the English translation of Tabucchi’s novels. They are not necessarily correct Portuguese.-The editors.
6. Spunta does not necessarily stress the mimetic properties, but rather argues that Tabucchi, as does Gianni Celati, experiments with a new orality in the modern Italian novel.
7. The distinction between “open” and “closed” work is theorized by Umberto Eco in his Opera aperta (Milan: Bompiani, 1962).
8. For Gérard Genette paratexts “provide the text with a (variable) setting and sometimes a commentary, official or not, which even the purists among readers, those least inclined to external erudition, cannot always disregard as easily as they would like and as they claim to do,” Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1997), p. 3. 9. For a Foucauldian reading of this process of self-constitution, see Borislava Vassileva, “Discourse and the Self-Constitution of the Subject in Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares,” Romance Language Annual 10.1 (1998), pp. 398-402.
10. Manuela Bertone asks the question: “Is Dr Pereira and what he declares to be believed or not?” “Paths to Testimony in Sostiene Pereira,” Antonio Tabucchi. A Collection of Essays. Bruno Ferraro and Nicole Prunster, eds. (Melbourne: La Trobe UP, 1997), p. 176, while the subtitle of Monica Jansen’s article is “A Testimony of ‘True Fiction’ in Sostiene Pereira,'” Antonio Tabucchi. A Collection of Essays, p. 202, which sets the tone for her investigation of the “trustworthiness” of the protagonist’s account.
11. For a detailed analysis of the role of the photograph in the narrative of Tabucchi see Nives Trentini, “Una scrittura visuale. La fotografia e il sogno fra presenza e assenza,” Una scrittura in partita doppia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), pp. 75-212.
12. For a fuller presentation of these theories see Schwarz Lausten, pp. 90-91.
13. The reference is to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), originally published in 1844-45.
14. Schwarz Lausten draws an analogy with Greek tragedy as she notes: “qui il destino dei personaggi è già deciso, come nella tragedia greca, in cui le decisioni dei singolo soggetto non avevano nessuna importanza per il corso delle cose,” L’uomo inquieto, p. 94.
15. Schwarz Lausten provides the following assessment of the role that such metaphors play in many of Tabucchi’s short stories: “Queste immagini di soglie descrivono un soggetto che si trova nel momento di passaggio tra due identità, o tra vita e morte” (These images of thresholds describe a subject at the moment of passage between two identities, or between life and death, L’uomo inquieto, p. 83.
16. An example of Montale’s use of the horizon line as a metaphor for a moving point of reference are the following verses from “La casa dei doganieri”: “Oh l’orizzonte in fuga, dove s’accende / rara la luce della petroliera.” Eugenio Montale. L’opera in versi: Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, eds. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 161.
17. See Schwarz Lausten, p. 83 for additional views on this topos.
18. The poem “La casa dei doganieri” (The Customs House) closes with the following statement of non-knowledge typical of the modernist aesthetic: “Ed io non so chi va e chi resta” (and I don’t know who goes and who remains), Eugenio Montale, p. 161.
19. I use the term implied author as theorized by Umberto Eco who states: “Nella vasta letteratura teorica sulla narrativa…appaiono vari personaggi chiamati Lettore Ideale, Lettore Implicito, Lettore Virtuale, Metalettore e così via-ciascuno di essi evocando come propria contraparte un Autore Ideale o Implicito o Virtuale. Questi termini non sono sempre sinonimi.” Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi. Harvard University Norton Lectures 1992-1993 (Milan: Bompiani, 1994). Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), p. 19.
20. The reference here is to Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, Composed by Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon. Trans. Alfred MacAdam (Boston: Exact Change, 1998). Il libro dell’inquietudine, M. J. Lancaster, ed. with e Preface by Antonio Tabucchi, 1986.
21. Jo Ann Cannon comments as follows on this passage: “The tongue-in-cheek characterization of the ‘trendiness’ of postmodernism might cause one to shy away from identifying the novel as postmodern….Nonetheless, Tabucchi’s text must be certainly characterized as postmodern,” pp. 105-06.
22. Peter Bondanella calls The Name of the Rose “a pastiche and a parody of a number of other traditions-some obvious, others less so-that enable the novel to appeal to all of his intended audiences simultaneously,” The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 100.
23. This is a phrase that Umberto Eco uses in reference to his own novel, in Postcript to the Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1984), p. 20.
24. Eco discusses the relationship between his notion of the Lettore Modello and the concept of the Implied Reader in Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi (Six Walks in the Fictional Woods).
25. Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) was a jurist and theoretician whose work, General Theory of Norms, was published posthumously in 1979 by the Hans Kelsen Institute in Vienna.
26. Marcel Jouhandeau (1888-1979) was a French writer who wrote between 1921 and 1978.
27. Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982) was a German psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Frankfurt.
28. Schwarz Lausten devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between Tabucchi’s narrative and Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy. See “Pensiero debole,” Antonio Tabucchi, pp. 29-47.
29. Here my analysis coincides with that of Schwarz Lausten who writes: “Al posto dell’idea classica dell’identità, Tabucchi rappresenta una ‘formazione’ basata non solo sulle esperienze proprie rivissute attraverso la memoria, ma anche su quelle lette nei libri o viste nei film,” Antonio Tabucchi, op. cit., p. 95.
Corrado Federici is a Full professor of Italian Studies at Brock University, Ontario Canada.
This essay was originally published in Oral and Written Narratives and Cultural Identity: Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Blayer, Irene Maria F. and Francisco Cota Fagundes. New York, Bern, Oxford: Peter Lang Academic Publishings, 2007. 202-224.