The Proust story, finally, is tragic. In the first version he had written: "Longtemps je me suis couché après minuit." You know what happens to a growing boy who stays up till all hours. The Narrator succumbed to a cerebral inflammation that virtually destroyed his memory. He saw the Duchesse de Guermantes the next day and asked, "Who are you, Madame?" He was banished from all the salons of Paris, because certain faux pas are beyond forgiveness in that world. In this Ur-version, the Narrator was even incapable of expressing himself in the first person, and La Recherche boiled down to a brief case history à la Charcot.
On the other hand, after I ended a novel of mine with the verse of Bernard de Morlay beginning, "Stat rosa pristina nomine," I was informed by some philologists that certain other extant manuscripts read, on the contrary, "Stat Roma," which, for that matter, would make more sense because the preceding verses refer to the disappearance of Babylon. What would have happened if I had in consequence entitled my novel The Name of Rome? I would have had a preface by John Paul II, who no doubt would have made me a Papal Count. Or someone would have made a movie with Sean Connery in a toga.
1990
Sequels
In 1991 the Italian novelist Laura Grimaldi wrote a Monsieur Bovary, recounting what happened to Charles after Emma's death; and at about the same time, a Ms. Ripley (probably a character invented by Patricia Highsmith) made a killing with her Scarlett, a continuation of Gone with the Wind. For that matter, from Oedipus at Colonus to Twenty Years After, the tradition of the sequel has earned a certain nobility.
Giampaolo Proni, with his The Case of the Asia Computer, showed that he knows how to invent narrating machines; and he suggested that I offer some other possible continuations of famous novels.
Marcel Who?
Proust's Narrator, having concluded his work with the seal of Time, exhausted by asthma, decides to visit a celebrated allergy specialist on the French Riviera and travels there by motorcar. An inexperienced driver, he is involved in a frightful accident: severe concussion, almost total loss of memory. He is treated by Aleksandr Luria, who advises him to develop the technique of the interior monologue. Since the Narrator no longer has a store of memories to monologue about and can barely assimilate his present perceptions, Luria suggests he extend the interior monologues in Joyce's Ulysses.
The Narrator struggles through the unbearable novel, and reconstructs a fictitious ego for himself, beginning with the memory of his grandmother's visits to him in boarding school at Clongowes Wood. He regains a fine synesthetic ability, and the slightest whiff of mutton fat from a shepherd's pie brings to his mind the trees of Phoenix Park and the spire of the church at Chapelizod. He dies, a Guinness addict, in a doorway on Eccles Street.
Molly
Waking from a troubled sleep on the morning of June 17, 1904, Molly Bloom goes down to the kitchen and finds Stephen Dedalus there, making himself some coffee. Leopold has gone out on one of his vague business errands; perhaps he has deliberately left the two alone. Molly's face is puffy from sleep, but Stephen is immediately fascinated, seeing her as a kind of wondrous whale-woman. He recites some cheap poems to her and Molly falls into his arms. They run away together to Pula, on the Istrian coast, and then to Trieste, with Bloom pursuing them the whole time, disguised as the man in the mackintosh.
In Trieste, Italo Svevo advises Stephen to write down his story, and Molly, who is very ambitious, chimes in. Over the years, Stephen writes a monumental novel, Telemachus. When he has completed the last page, he abandons the manuscript on his desk and elopes with Sylvia Beach. Molly discovers the manuscript, reads it, and becomes completely engrossed in it, finding herself back at the exact point where everything started, stirring restlessly in her bed in Dublin, on the night between June 16 and 17, 1904.
Crazed with rage, she follows Stephen to Paris. At the door of Shakespeare & Co., rue de l'Odèon, she offs him with three pistol shots, shouting "Yes, yes, yes!" She then takes flight, accidentally entering a comic strip by Daniele Panebarco, where she discovers Bloom in her bed making love with—simultaneously—Anna Livia Plurabelle, Lenin, Sam Spade, and Barbara Walters. Distraught, she kills herself.
Sam Again
Vienna, 1950. Twenty years have passed, but Sam Spade is still determined to get hold of the Maltese falcon. His current connection is Harry Lime, and the two of them are confabulating at the top of the Prater's Ferris wheel. "I've found a clue," Lime says. Descending, they head for the Café Mozart, where, in one corner, a black musician is playing As Time Goes By on a zither. At the little table in the rear, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, which is wearing a bitter smile, there is Rick. Among the documents Ugarte showed him, he has found a clue; he shows Sam Spade a photograph of Ugarte. "Cairo!" the private eye murmurs. "When I knew him he went by the name of Peter Lorre," Lime says with a sneer.
Rick continues: in Paris, which he entered in triumph with de Gaulle and his forces, he learned of the existence of an American spy, whom the OSS had released from San Quentin in order to set him on the trail of the falcon. The word then was that he had killed Victor Laszlo in Lisbon. He should be arriving any minute. The door opens and a woman appears. "Ilsa!" cries Rick. "Brigid!" cries Sam Spade. "Anna Schmidt!" cries Lime. "Miz Scarlett!" the black man cries, turning that gray color that blacks turn when they blanch, "You're back! Don't hurt Massa!" The woman has an enigmatic smile. "I am as you desire me.... And as for the falcon..."
"Yes?" the others all cry, in one voice.
"As for the falcon," the fascinating adventuress replies, "it wasn't a falcon. It was a hawk."
"Screwed!" Spade murmurs, "and for the second time!" He clenches his jaw, making his profile all the more sharp.
"Give me back that hundred dollars," Harry Lime says. "You never get anything right."
"A cognac," Rick orders, ashen.
From the end of the bar the form of the man in the mackintosh emerges, a sarcastic smile playing about his lips. It is Captain Renault. "Come, Molly," he says to the woman. "The Deuxième Bureau men are waiting for us at Combray."
1982
How to Use Suspension Points
In "How to Recognize a Porn Movie" we will see that to distinguish a pornographic film from a film that merely depicts erotic events, it is sufficient to discover whether, to go from one place to another by car, the characters take more time than the spectator would like or the story would require. A similar scientific criterion can be applied to distinguish the professional writer from the Sunday, or non-writer (who can still be famous). This is the use of suspension points in the middle of a sentence.
Writers use suspension points only at the end of a sentence, to indicate that more could be written on the subject ("and this point could be further elaborated, but..."), or, in the middle of a sentence or between two sentences, to underline the fragmentary nature of a quotation ("Friends ... I come to bury Caesar..."). Non-writers use these dots to crave indulgence for a rhetorical figure that they consider perhaps too bold: "He was raging like a ... bull."
A writer is someone determined to extend language beyond its boundaries, and he therefore assumes full responsibility for a metaphor, even a daring one: "The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth's human shores." Everyone agrees that Keats has allowed his fancy to soar, but at least he makes no apology for that. The non-writer, on the other hand, would have written: "The moving waters at their ... priestlike ... task/ Of pure ... ablution." As if to say: don't mind me, I'm only joking.