Re: Svart och vitt
Every author, even a writer of Harlequin novels, foresees two readers, though they may both be the same person. The first is the one I call the "naïve" reader, the one who reads to know what happens. Then there is the "critical" reader, who goes backwards or rereads, though not necessarily physically, to see how the book convinced him as a naïve reader. Every act of reading involves these two levels, and once there are two there can be 2,000. You have a book like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, that a reader can reread 10,000 times and every time discover a new connection, a new level. Then there are books that try to reduce this plurality of levels -- a phone book reduces it to the minimum -- and books that play upon the possibility of producing many levels. My pleasure in writing a novel is to produce these levels. In this book, there are ultraviolet innuendoes and allusions that probably are clear only to me. And then sometimes I meet somebody who says, "I discovered that connection." But nobody has discovered that one of the "files" in Foucault's Pendulum is a novel written by Benito Mussolini, because it is not literally quoted but interwoven with the whole damn thing. That's a pleasure for me. Belbo, a character in Pendulum, is playing with literary memories and quotes Mussolini, who in his youth wrote a novel taking place in a monastery with an evil monk. In The Name of the Rose, the first 50 or 70 pages were difficult in order to give the reader the necessary exercise. He had to learn how to breathe in order to start mountain climbing. In this new book, I open with a Hebrew quotation nobody is able to understand. This is in order to say, "O.K., do you want to play this game? You are my friend, and we go. Otherwise, too bad for me or for you." I think it is untrue that my books are impenetrable. On the contrary, I think I am a sort of great vulgarizer. I put down certain difficult stuff, but I give my readers clues to understand what this kind of stuff is.
Sorry, jag vet att "naiv" är värdeladdat och därför satte jag det inom situationstecken, därför att jag inte hade något bättre ord för tillfället och därför att termen "naive reader" används av min idol Umberto Eco. Varför inte låta Eco själv förklarar vad han (och jag) menar:
Every author, even a writer of Harlequin novels, foresees two readers, though they may both be the same person. The first is the one I call the "naïve" reader, the one who reads to know what happens. Then there is the "critical" reader, who goes backwards or rereads, though not necessarily physically, to see how the book convinced him as a naïve reader. Every act of reading involves these two levels, and once there are two there can be 2,000. You have a book like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, that a reader can reread 10,000 times and every time discover a new connection, a new level. Then there are books that try to reduce this plurality of levels -- a phone book reduces it to the minimum -- and books that play upon the possibility of producing many levels. My pleasure in writing a novel is to produce these levels. In this book, there are ultraviolet innuendoes and allusions that probably are clear only to me. And then sometimes I meet somebody who says, "I discovered that connection." But nobody has discovered that one of the "files" in Foucault's Pendulum is a novel written by Benito Mussolini, because it is not literally quoted but interwoven with the whole damn thing. That's a pleasure for me. Belbo, a character in Pendulum, is playing with literary memories and quotes Mussolini, who in his youth wrote a novel taking place in a monastery with an evil monk. In The Name of the Rose, the first 50 or 70 pages were difficult in order to give the reader the necessary exercise. He had to learn how to breathe in order to start mountain climbing. In this new book, I open with a Hebrew quotation nobody is able to understand. This is in order to say, "O.K., do you want to play this game? You are my friend, and we go. Otherwise, too bad for me or for you." I think it is untrue that my books are impenetrable. On the contrary, I think I am a sort of great vulgarizer. I put down certain difficult stuff, but I give my readers clues to understand what this kind of stuff is.
Jag svär, det finns massvis av litteratur där jag helt klart själv utan vidare räknar mig till skaran av "naiva" läsare.
Ja, fast jag antar att det här förklaringsinlägget ändå inte räcker för att du ska bli av med din misstänksamhet.
