Abstract
This article discusses the historical novels Q (Blissett, 2000) and 54 (Wu, 2002) by group authors Luther Blissett and Wu Ming. At first glance Q demonstrates the ideological and narrative achievements of the 19th-century historical novel following theories of Lukács and White, yet in playing with the theme of (multiple) identity its authors point toward what will become postmodern parody of those achievements in 54. Whereas the overabundance of meaning caused by the multiple identity of narrators (and authors) introduces a problematic conception of historicity leading from Q to 54, it will be the lack of meaning altogether in the latter which ultimately illustrates the end of historicity (as suggested by Jameson and Vattimo). I focus on the figures of the narrator and the Hitchcockian McGuffin, who function as narrative devices forwarding the plot and who, I argue, ultimately serve in illustrating the trajectory of the Italian historical novel from its inception to today.
To tell a story is a political activity. (Wu Ming, in Baird, 2006: 258)
The historical novel Q was published in February 2000 to critical and commercial acclaim, which augmented the media activity inspired by its mysterious (and at the time anonymous) collective author, Luther Blissett. 1 Comprised of four authors based in Bologna, Blissett claimed a place among the rejuvenated ranks of historical novelists who were active in the last two decades of the 20th century, 2 and successfully inserted Q into the canon of the Italian historical novel by adopting and then adapting narrative tactics frequently used in the genre by its authorial forebears. After revealing the identities of their members and disbanding in March 2000, Blissett immediately reformed with a fifth member as Wu Ming 3 and continued publishing with 54 (Wu, 2002) and Altai (Wu, 2009a), the much-anticipated sequel to Q. 4 Whereas Q often resembles a conventional historical novel from the 19th century that aspires to a unilinear vision of history, 54 embraces a wholly postmodern, heterogeneous aesthetic, although the very aesthetic that situates 54 in the postmodern age can also be seen periodically in Q. It is my intention to explore how the authors that comprise Luther Blissett knowingly plant the seeds of postmodern aesthetics in their meticulously deliberate replica of a 19th-century novel, and then how the authors of Wu Ming lay bare those same aesthetics, all the while pointing out the limits of the preceding model. These two collective projects 5 reenact the Italian historical novel’s 200-year aesthetic trajectory, which originally stemmed from ideals regarding nation-building in the 19th century – and in a sense represented the beginning of a history 6 – and is now pointing toward the very disintegration of history through the narrative devices of empty signs and overly laden identities.
The emergence of the historical novel in Italy occurred in tandem with that of Unification, or the Risorgimento. The novel that gave rise to the Italian manifestation of the genre, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1840), 7 also put Italy on course in terms of maintaining a national literature, as previously Italians had mostly been consuming the popular literature of other European nations. Although the events of I promessi sposi take place entirely in 17th-century Italy, the novel was published during the first years of the Risorgimento and is often categorized as a Risorgimentalist novel that allegorically interprets its 17th-century events of an Italy occupied by Spain as its early 19th-century version occupied by Austria. Unlike Manzoni, Ippolito Nievo directly addresses the history of Italy in Le confessioni di un italiano (1996; published posthumously in 1867) through the development of his protagonist Carlino, who takes part in real historical events leading up to Italian Unification; the events of Nievo’s novel are not allegorized, as in Manzoni, but insert its characters into Italy’s recent past. 8 If we place the publication of Manzoni’s novel at the beginning of events that would eventually lead to Italian Unification, then Nievo’s lies at the concluding position of the Risorgimento, and also at the end of the Italian historical novel’s first surge in popularity. Having given the Italian nation a clearly defined, formative historical period, the Risorgimento also gave the historical novel a clearly defined first epoch, as many examples of the Italian historical novel from this period either discuss directly or address indirectly the concept of Italy as a unified nation. 9 The parallel growth of history in the making and the rise of the historical novel in Italy that recounted, albeit allegorically, that very history in the making, is reflected throughout Europe by the budding concept and awareness of history. 10
Some critics like Gianni Vattimo (1992) and Fredric Jameson (1991) argue that a sense of the end of monumental, heroic and unquestionable history celebrated in early historical novels permeates the latter part of the 20th century and continues today. 11 In giving history a beginning and an ending, these critics create a finite and thus more easily definable period, which actually permits novelists like Blissett and Wu Ming to look backward in time, to attempt to fill in the pages left blank by more authoritative sources and to rethink history from a more marginalized position. Blissett and Wu Ming enact what Hayden White (1973) calls for: a new view of the past that traditional historiography has overlooked. 12 White claims that historical discourse has packaged the past in narrative that resembles that of a 19th-century novel. This packaging, utilizing a realist aesthetic adopted by both historians and authors of historical novels, necessarily omits that which is deemed unimportant and highlights that which is deemed important, and thus adopts the authoritative ideological stance (and baggage) of the setting in which it is produced. The authors of Q stage some of the characteristics of a realist 19th-century historical novel, only to undermine them by introducing a plurality of aesthetic forms that allow us to see a marginalized viewpoint, which is highlighted and even exaggerated in 54. The latter novel represents a possible end to the kind of history that was so vital to the genre of the classic historical novel and to the field of history as a discipline at the beginning of the 19th century. The deliberate narrative strategy of the authors of Q and 54 aims to expose the limits of 19th-century historical discourse (described by White, then challenged by Vattimo and Jameson) through emulating them at the same time as they employ postmodern narrative techniques to undermine them. But just as Manzoni responded to his own narrative strategies and the use of history in his treatise ‘Del romanzo storico’ after the initial success of his work in the genre, Wu Ming have subsequently claimed that their novels specifically do not fall under the category of the postmodern, but to the mode (or sentimiento nuevo) of New Italian Epic, although their critics have reservations regarding this claim. 13
Altering the genre: The historical novel revisited
At first glance, the novel Q appears to adhere to the parameters of Georg Lukács (1983) regarding ‘world-historical’ and ‘maintaining’ individuals who appear in historical novels; 14 its protagonist is an invented yet realistic character, and his travels through several European countries in the early to mid-16th century allow him to come into contact with a number of world-historical individuals and to witness events worthy of entries in history books, all the while avoiding any direct claims about how they fit into the grander scheme of things. Nearly three years after the publication of Q, Wu Ming released 54, which narrates a series of seemingly unrelated events set in the United States, Italy and Yugoslavia during the postwar period; 54 follows the events in the lives of a few maintaining individuals who may represent significant historical trends and processes, but it also boasts several world-historical individuals as protagonists in obviously invented situations, seemingly divorcing itself from the tenets of the historical novel as defined by Lukács. Neither Q nor 54 directly discuss nation-building or defining history, but taken together they do illustrate the course of the Italian historical novel over the last two centuries, as well as a way of thinking about the end of an historical era. They do this through utilizing, altering and eventually rejecting the Lukácsian protagonist, who is ultimately the vehicle through which the author’s message is delivered, whether that message be the illustration of a canonical genre or the dismantling of its entire philosophy. The overabundance of meaning suggested by their novels’ multiple protagonists and multiple identities locates their novels in the postmodern era, and that surplus of meaning is subsequently counteracted in 54 by the profusion of objects devoid of meaning that nevertheless move the plot forward.
The events of Q take place during the first half of the 16th century in western Europe. Its principal protagonist, whose true identity remains unknown throughout the novel, undergoes several transformations, beginning as an Anabaptist reformer during the Peasant’s War in Germany and ending up a pimp in Venice at the novel’s conclusion. 15 In the first two parts of the novel, he is a student when Martin Luther posts his theses and then a disciple to charismatic leaders (first to Thomas Müntzer, a leader of the Peasant’s War, and then to various Anabaptist leaders in Münster); in the third part of the novel (set in the Netherlands), he is a storyteller who reframes and recounts several heretofore missing episodes of the first two parts; and in the fourth part (set in Venice) he is a bordello owner masquerading as a prophet figure (or perhaps vice versa), having become a charismatic leader himself. The novel’s historical events are not limited to a single town, region or even country, but span nations, continents, languages, social classes, outlook (from optimistic to pessimistic) and goals (from lofty and idealistic to self-serving and base). The novel’s protagonist takes part in documented historical events, from popular uprisings in Germany to the distribution of banned books in the Veneto region, to the importing of coffee to Italy from the Near East where the novel concludes. The novel’s antagonist, the titular Q, or Qoèlet, spends most of the novel searching for the protagonist at the behest of his employer, the future pope Giovanni Pietro Carafa. 16 The narrative of Q varies in style, but is always told in the first person by both its protagonist and antagonist. Whereas the protagonist’s narrative develops the majority of plotlines, Q’s letters to his employer as well as his personal diaries also reveal small yet key plot points. The novel begins with the ideological struggles of the lower classes, and although those ideals are never abandoned throughout the course of the novel, its driving plotline becomes more centered on the financial gain and means to support those ideological struggles, and ends with a nod to the economics of importing material goods and the burgeoning mode of capitalism. In a sense, this change in intent segues in an intertextual way toward some of the less philosophical and more lowbrow topics of 54: namely, matinee idols and famous gangsters. The authors of Q calculatingly stage their novel as an example of 19th-century prose aesthetic, and the authors of 54 deliberately showcase the shift in ideological focus and narrative strategies between their novel and that of Luther Blissett.
Q more than 54 reflects the conventional side of classic historical novels, in part because it displays the philosophy behind a popular ideology. In White’s terms (1987), Q fits into the category of historical narrative (as opposed to annals or chronicle), which requires an ideological, narrative closure to the events recounted according to the authority represented by the social systems at play in the narrated story. While the annals represent seemingly random events and facts in list form, and historical narrative gives moral meaning to the story it relates (and necessarily concludes), the chronicle lies in between, ‘marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure. It does not so much conclude as simply terminate. It starts out to tell a story but breaks off in medias res, in the chronicler’s own present; it leaves things unresolved … in a storylike way’ (White, 1987: 5). At first glance, 54 is more illustrative of White’s definition of the chronicle, as it follows several seemingly unconnected characters in different countries, and the story proper’s temporal parameters are set by one calendar year, not by any single narrative’s logical conclusion. Then again, the narrative events of the 110 chapters of 54 are surrounded by a preface, a short section titled ‘Antefatti,’ a Coda, and finally ‘titoli di coda,’ which introduce (albeit in a confusing manner) what will occur in the story proper and so satisfy the reader’s desire for closure by tying up loose narrative threads and providing biographical information on several of the world-historical characters who appear in the novel: ‘[t]he demand for closure in the historical story is a demand,’ White suggests, ‘for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama’ (1987: 21). White asserts that the real is made desirable when a formal coherency of a story is imposed on its events; had 54 ‘simply terminated’ with the events of any given day of the year 1954, it would not be as appealing to its assumed typical readers, whose conventional demands of narrative require a moral framework embedded throughout the story. Since history is an ongoing process, the fact that all narrative threads and characters in 54 are assigned an ending demonstrates the false and constructed nature of that very ending.
Although 54 somewhat resembles Q narratologically (both sport a cryptic introduction, multiple narrators and narrative styles, as well as sections explaining historical movements or biographical information found after the events of the novels conclude), 17 its binding structure – the calendar year of 1954 – paired with its almost too neat tidying up of loose narrative ends parodies the canonical historical novel, making it an example of Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. 18 Many of the events that 54 recounts do not resonate as ‘historical,’ but ‘popular’: movie star Cary Grant’s professional and existential crises or Lucky Luciano’s foray into the heroin trade in Naples, for example, are events that can be documented by various sources, but taken individually do not impact the greater meaning of 20th-century thought, as did the posting of Luther’s theses for 16th-century Europe (the impetus behind the events of Q). The goal of 54 is not to trace a religious ideology (such as the ideas of Luther, the beliefs of the masses, Anabaptism, the Counter-Reformation) but to examine how random events and people might be linked (or not) to one another. Although Q has two narrators and several different narrative styles, 54 follows at least a dozen characters and their respective points of view. 19 Some of the disparate plotlines and major themes of 54 besides those already mentioned include post-World War II reconstruction and discontentment in Italy, Russian spies and the politics of the Cold War. Essentially, Q is about fighting for a popular cause; the more ‘historically’-based episodes in 54 are about remembering fighting for a cause (the resistance during World War II). Q displays the materialization of history as Marxist theorists such as Jameson (1981) and Lukács would have it, illustrated through the main character’s rise to the merchant class, while 54 mocks the process of conventional history in mixing its various literary genres and modes, and presenting its world-historical figures on the same narrative playing field as its maintaining characters.
In approaching the end of history, the historical novel, perhaps anticipating its own dissolution, becomes more and more piecemeal, seeming to belong to multiple genres. This is not a sudden occurrence or a distinct break in the development of the genre, but a process begun already toward the end of Unification, and manifesting itself at key points subsequently in Italian literary history. 20 Similarly, Q displays traits of various genres, as Gian Paolo Renello (2001: 357) says: ‘Q in effetti non è solo un romanzo storico; è epistolario, diario, diario di viaggio, poliziesco, romanzo d’amore e d’avventura; è anche un manuale di lotta e un testo politico.’ In true postmodern fashion, Q is a difficult novel to place into one single category. In fact, Renello (2001: 354) describes Q as ‘[u]n romanzo multiplo di identità multiple di autori multipli.’ To expand on Renello’s thought: its authors are multiple, the styles in which it is written are multiple, the categories of genre within which the novel can be placed are multiple, the plotlines are multiple, the identities of its characters are multiple, its narrators are multiple and thus the truths represented by those narrators are multiple. 21 Even though Q’s protagonists and plot developments display characteristics of the classic historical novel as described by Lukács, its authors also begin to subtly mark their novel as a postmodern text, a product of late-20th-century literary trends that might be inevitable to deny in their path toward becoming Wu Ming and writing 54, a novel that emphasizes its postmodern traits (however much its authors would deny it later). The multiplicity of truths represented in historiographic metafiction makes the presentation (i.e. the narrativization) of these (competing) truths more complicated than that of a single truth or metanarrative (see Lyotard, 1984) that is usually held to prevail in conventional historical narratives. While truth or ideological content in conventional narratives is usually conveyed by an omniscient narrator, multiple or competing truths in historiographic metafiction are accordingly presented by multiple or unreliable narrators (Hutcheon, 1988). The multiple genres and styles displayed in the novel Q are reflected by the technical process by which it was constructed – by the four authors who comprised Luther Blissett. Although reading any author’s biography into his or her work is counteractive to the interpretive process (as Barthes has shown us), the fact that Q and 54 have multiple narrators calls attention to their origin in multiple authors. Both novels complicate this process even further when they assign multiple identities to their multiple narrators.
Revelation and re-veil-ation of the narrator
In Q the protagonist is, like his authors and the genre to which he belongs, difficult to define. He does not have a fixed identity, and in fact we as readers never know his true identity, but we become accustomed to his habit of taking on different identities throughout the novel as soon as the one he is currently wearing becomes inconvenient or dangerous. The protagonist changes his name and assumes a new identity (sometimes adopting that of someone else, sometimes stealing that of a dead person, sometimes inventing a new one altogether or even being assigned one) with each different ‘chapter’ of his life story, some of which are only alluded to briefly. 22 The ease with which he adopts new names and then discards them initially leads the reader to believe that these names along with their correlating identities are, in fact, disposable, interchangeable and unimportant. During the first part of the novel that recounts the Peasant’s War, the reader has no reason to believe that the protagonist is using anything but his real name, yet we never read what that name is: he is never addressed directly by the other protagonists, although they are repeatedly called by name. In denying this basic information to his readers, the protagonist deems himself marginal. The first person narrative, in addition to creating a feeling of proximity to its readers, also augments this anonymity, as the protagonist tends to highlight the importance of the Lukácsian world-historical characters that appear in his story, while relegating himself to the background. 23
Q, of course, writes in the first person in his letters and diary, as does the protagonist in the other parts of the novel. Thus, the story oscillates between two narrators in the first person.
24
The two general types of the novel’s narration represented by the principal character’s narration and Q’s letters to Carafa comprise most of the novel’s style until two-thirds of the way through. The antagonist Q, as opposed to the more anonymous and nameless protagonist, reveals more of himself toward the end of the novel when passages of his diary appear as chapters. Q’s first diary entry contains the following information:
Sul Beneficio di Cristo
Sono quasi due anni che il libro è stato stampato …
Sul Concilio
29 giugno 1542: pubblicata la bolla papale di convocazione del Concilio ecumenico … Su Carafa … … Padrone mio e Monaco, maestro di simulazione e dissimulazione, da genía nata per comandare, vescovo prima e poi povero teatino per voto. Nemico dell’Imperatore, che tenne infante sulle ginocchia, già disprezzandolo (Blissett, 2000: 423–424)
Q writes down what appear to be his notes and general ideas about his employer Carafa, a Papal Council, and the distribution of a heretical book, the last two events of which are integral to the novel’s denouement. In effect, what the authors are accomplishing here – via the ruminations of one of their principal characters – is a brief summary (in chronicle form) for the reader of what is happening in the novel, reminding us of important dates, places and character traits. According to White’s parameters, the protagonist’s story has meaning because it concludes; Q’s letters and diaries, like his life, simply terminate suddenly (like a chronicle) and he becomes another minor character lost in the ranks of Carafa’s underlings.
At the same time, the chronicle entries in Q’s diary serve a different narrative function: surrounding and perhaps disguising the expository intent of his recapitulation, distracting readers from the facts they are being fed. The diary entry just cited begins and ends with references to its author Q as part of recorded history: Nell’affresco sono una delle figure di sfondo. Al centro campeggiano il Papa, l’Imperatore, i cardinali e i principi d’Europa. Ai margini, gli agenti discreti e invisibili, che fanno capolino dietro le tiare e le corone, ma che in realtà reggono l’intera geometria del quadro, lo riempiono e, senza lasciarsi scorgere, consentono a quelle teste di occuparne il centro. Con tale immagine nella mente mi risolvo a tenere questi appunti … Pro memoria: capire, annotare, non tralasciare dettagli in apparenza irrilevanti, che potrebbero risultare chiavi di volta di un’intera strategia … ………
Su di me
L’occhio di Carafa. (Blissett, 2000: 422–424)
This entry begins rather abruptly, describing a fresco in which he himself appears. The fresco that Q describes depicts world-historical figures: popes, emperors, cardinals and princes, as well as their ‘discreet agents.’ Q analyzes the fresco’s arrangement of the figures, both central and marginal; he derives the structure of his diaries and his work as Carafa’s spy from the structure that he sees in the fresco. He sees himself in the margins of the painting, but also acknowledges his importance as a figure who ‘regge l’intera geometria’ of the fresco; he is structurally necessary to the activities of its central figures, geometrically, artistically, figuratively and historically. Q is a unique figure in the trajectory of the historical novel because he understands enough to recognize that he himself will not be a remembered part of History’s process, but he does realize that he is an integral part of that process without which the framework would not hold. He closes his first diary entry by mixing its two distinct parts: he lists himself (‘Su di me’) among the other relevant people and events to note, but he then defines himself in terms of how he is useful to one of the major players in History, a future pope. To simplify, he shows a painting to his reader and then evaluates its composition in Lukácsian terms. The structural integrity of the fresco mirrors that of the historical process as questioned by postmodern theorists: we tend to focus our attention on the figures in the forefront as the artist intended, but once we spend some time examining the painting closely we see that the figures in the shadows or off to the sides also play key roles. 25
On the other hand, Blissett’s protagonist does not appear in the fresco at all. To extend the analogy, the fresco as History features Carafa and to a much lesser extent, his minion Q, both of whom are representative of a pre-20th-century unilinear vision of history that focuses on a central event or figure (a 19th-century model of narrative). 26 Q does appear in the pictorial narrative, even if it is in a secondary role: he has left a trace (here, a visible one) and thus is identifiable, whereas the protagonist is not. Naturally the protagonist as the opposing force of the powerful figures does not appear in narratives of history – pictorial or otherwise – produced by those who prevailed and still hold all the power (and thus produce the grand narratives of history). What makes the protagonist successful in eluding Q for most of the novel is his lack of true identity. The protagonist’s changing identity makes Q’s task of finding him that much more complicated, and gives the protagonist the upper hand; conversely, the fact that Q’s identity remains mostly static makes the protagonist’s identifying him somewhat simpler. The protagonist knows he is being followed from afar; once he realizes who his pursuer is, the roles are reversed and the pursued becomes the pursuer. Yet, along with the fame and power claimed by the protagonist in his later identities, he also cedes his anonymity and will eventually be identified by his nemesis Q. On a larger scale, the shifting power relations between Q and the protagonist suggest the rising importance of the unknown protagonists of History, as the end of historicity (and the novel) approaches and we can look backward in time in order to fill in its blank pages, which is what the protagonist has been doing all along. 27
The different lives that the protagonist inhabits in the first parts of the novel (student, follower, farmer, heretic, etc.) belong to varying positions that cut a path through the lower and middle classes of Europe’s midsection. He represents a series of maintaining characters, whose chapters are then sewn together, and his identity (or the absence of identity) actually becomes a narrative device that propels the story forward, a process that mirrors that of history itself. One of the last incarnations that the protagonist of Q chooses is that of an Anabaptist prophet who makes brief journeys into rural regions of the Veneto; he adopts the name Tiziano in order to garner attention for his cause and to distribute his message to the largest public possible. 28 On a superficial level, the protagonist’s assumption of the name of the Venetian painter who was so well known for his sensual depictions ironically clashes with his own spiritual message. The protagonist’s choice also represents a turning point in the narrative and a claim of power, as he consciously chooses a famous name to attract attention, whereas many of his previous identities were carefully chosen to hide behind anonymously. Now he speaks of himself in the aggrandizing manner of the Caesarian third person, having risen in standing from student, to follower, to prophet. In a sense, the protagonist’s various life chapters are representative of a progressive, 19th-century history that Benjamin questions along with Marx and Nietzsche before him (Vattimo, 1992). The protagonist projects the idea of a unilinear history, demonstrated by his sequential identities that progress through higher social statuses toward what Vattimo would call a ‘realization of civilization’ (1992: 3). On the other hand, the very existence of multiple (albeit not contemporaneous) subject positions in one character betray the logic of a realist aesthetic that would reject such heterogeneity, and once again tell us that his authors are consciously working toward exposing that model as inadequate and dated.
The collapsed, multiple and simultaneous identities of the character Cary Grant in 54 consequently dismantle the possibility of the unilinear history demonstrated by the separate, multiple and asynchronous identities of the protagonist in Q. The authors of 54 complicate this deconstruction even further when they disrupt the narrative styles of the novel – which vary from third person omniscient narration, to first person court documents, to the free indirect discourse of a homing pigeon – when they relate a scene in the second person (singular and plural): E ora…siete di nuovo due. Due, perché sei tu, <<Mr. Grant>>, quello costretto a camuffarsi perché nessuno lo riconosca, ma sei tu, Archibald Alexander Leach, quello paradossalmente libero da camuffamenti, autorizzato a respirare, sei tu che … percorri le strade della tua città natale, in procinto di incontrare Elsie. Vostra madre. Elsie, che continua a chiamarvi <<Archie>>… Poche ore dopo il commiato dalla vecchia madre, Cary—alloggiato sotto il nome di <<George Kaplan>> in un alberghetto di Swindon (2002: 275–277)
Archie Leach was the historical Cary Grant’s given birth name, and he naturally associates his pre-Hollywood life with his ‘first’ identity. In 54 when Cary Grant returns to England to visit his mother after many years, the two identities representing his present (Cary Grant) and past (Archie Leach) both appear to belong to him at the same point in time. The passage concludes with yet another assigned identity, that of George Kaplan, which Cary Grant must assume in order to protect his public and present identity as Cary Grant. Outside the diegesis of the novel 54, George Kaplan is the name of the agent invented by the CIA and for whom Grant’s character Roger Thornhill is mistaken throughout Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest. The future identity of George Kaplan is, however, either a temporally misplaced identity, as its appearance in the film occurs five years later than the events in Blissett’s novel, or an identity taken from Cary Grant’s life and relocated to Hitchcock’s seminal film, in a sense reversing Bloom’s idea of anxiety of influence. 29 Juggling three distinct identities simultaneously creates confusion in the protagonist’s mind, as all three belong to different time periods and at least one (George Kaplan) belongs to a different narrative and medium altogether (a film yet to be made). Whereas in Q multiple identities presented one after the other illustrated the forward progression of unilinear history, in 54 multiple identities represent the impossibility of that kind of history and a presence of multiple versions of history contemporaneously; 30 they reveal a process that mirrors that of history as interpreted by Vattimo, White, Jameson, et alia. Furthermore, the permutation of multiple identities in both novels is a narrative device to advance the plot, akin to the Hitchcockian McGuffin.
Narrative device: The McGuffin
The idea of this kind of narrative device has cinematic roots; the McGuffin, the narrative device used in many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, is what propels the plot forward or acts as the impetus of events, although it is not important to the storyline in and of itself. 31 Slavoj Žižek’s (1992: 8) Lacanian adaptation of the McGuffin posits that it ‘is clearly the objet petit a, a gap in the center of the symbolic order—the lack, the void of the Real setting in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a pure semblance of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted.’ In the novel Q, the protagonist’s assumed identities change frequently throughout the novel, but his true identity will remain unknown, and thus represents the absence of the Real, the ‘symbolic movement of interpretation’ that propels the events of the novel. Identity becomes the unattainable object of desire (for the reader as well as for Q), at once a surplus of meaning in its multiplicity but also a void, its origin unknown. Žižek’s argument continues to identify three stages in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, which are classified by his use of objects: the first type of object is the McGuffin as described above, irrelevant to the plot yet setting it in motion; the second type is imbued with meaning and is exchanged among characters throughout the film as an essential element to the plot; the third is a ‘massive, oppressive material presence’ that looms over the action of the entire film. 32 This decades-long process of one auteur’s development through objects is collapsed in the novel Q onto the protagonist’s identities: the changing identities of the protagonist at first represent a ‘simple’ McGuffin; once the antagonist Q is able to determine an early identity of the protagonist and relate that to his present identity, the protagonist is able to do the same, and the two characters symbolically exchange power positions produced by knowledge of the other’s identity. What becomes the protagonist’s identities at the conclusion of the novel stands as Hitchcock’s ‘oppressive material presence,’ an identity so massive that it effectively overshadows and looms over what represents the ‘message’ of the novel: the representation of processes of history itself.
What propels the narrative of Q forward are the changing identities of its protagonist; the object around which many of 54’s stories revolve is an American luxury television, the model of which is aptly named McGuffin.
33
The television never actually functions as such, since its main purpose within the story is as a hiding place for Lucky Luciano’s heroin. Since its physical appearance leads people to believe it is indeed a luxury television, its apparent use value is just that, and it changes hands as various petty thieves take it at face value. The various people who deem it worthless after they acquire it (a husband and wife allowing themselves a new pastime, a jealous wife being placated by a philandering husband, a neighborhood bar in Bologna that wants to increase business by showing soccer games) discard it as worthless. At the novel’s conclusion, the McGuffin sits in a dump outside Bologna: McGuffin aveva trasmesso cartoon di gatti che inseguivano topi. Il topo di nome <<Jerry>> viveva dietro il battiscopa di un tinello spazioso e ben arredato … Della padrona di casa si vedevano sempre e solo i piedi, e grossi polpacci. Con una scopa cercava di colpire il gatto di casa. Il gatto si chiamava <<Tom>>. Passava le sue giornate a inseguire <<Jerry>>. Topi e gatti si aggiravano intorno a McGuffin, in cima alla collina di rifiuti. Sovente, una gatta s’appisolava dentro McGuffin. Non somigliava a <<Tom>>. I topi avavano peli e code lunghe, e non somigliavano a <<Jerry>>. All’alba, lo schermo rotto di McGuffin rifletteva il sorgere del sole. Al tramonto, lo specchio rotto di fronte a lui rifletteva il rosso del tramonto. La notte, grilli e squittii, latrati lontani, miagolare insistente, rumori di scarpe o bottiglie lanciate ai gatti perché tacessero. Una sedia sfasciata. Manopole di apparecchi radio. Indumenta non piú rammendabili. McGuffin non poteva saperlo, ma l’odore era terribile. McGuffin lo immaginava. Non avrebbe piú captato onde elettromagnetiche per trasformarle in sogni o incubi … Tuttavia, McGuffin serviva a qualcosa. La gatta era incinta. Avrebbe partorito prima di Natale. Era passato di casa in casa. Adesso era una casa. Qualcuno aveva davvero bisogno di lui, alla buon’ora. Avesse avuto una bocca, un volto, McGuffin avrebbe sorriso. (Wu, 2002: 626–627)
Whereas in Q the authors that comprise Luther Blissett utilize a facsimile of the process of history and narrative as White describes, the authors of 54 have laid bare their narrative device in calling it by its extradiegetic name and by pointing out its use value, its function and how those things – its identity – change throughout the novel. In addition, they imbue the inanimate narrative device with human traits and a purpose. Real cats and mice ‘si aggiravano intorno a McGuffin,’ in much the same way as Hitchcock’s characters race around their cinematic McGuffins, the wine bottles filled with uranium in Notorious (1946), for example. At the same time, the difference between reality and representation is highlighted in the cited passage above through the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry, whose stories the McGuffin television once transmitted, and the real cats and mice that now surround and in one case will live inside, the McGuffin. 34 All the same, the television remains the sought-after object of desire, whether it be as a television set or as a large shipment of heroin. Its use value as a cat’s home at the novel’s conclusion points out the empty meaning of its face value, and perhaps the empty meaning of the novel itself.
The McGuffin television, which is behind the impetus of much of the narrative events of 54, remains an empty container at the end of the novel, the embodiment of Žižek’s description of it as ‘an indifferent void’ (1992: 7). All the same, Blissett and Wu Ming do not simply engage in the conventional idea of the McGuffin; whereas Hitchcock’s McGuffins were fixed throughout his films, Q’s objects of desire (the protagonist’s identities) are multiple and changing, and 54’s McGuffin television set lays bare the novel’s narrative device in calling it by name and, in revealing the McGuffin’s emptiness, it reveals its own emptiness. Toward the end of the novel the McGuffin television, having used up its use value as both a television set (before the narrative ever begins) and as a hiding place for drugs, is literally abandoned, of no more use to the story. As such, the television set is a metaphor of (postmodern) history itself, displaced both narratively and ontologically. The television is at the same time a continuation of the McGuffins in Q and an indicator that the impetus behind the narrated events is not important (like the television set), but it is the story that counts (what happens to and around the television). This conveys the opposite intention of conventional historical novels like I promessi sposi and Le confessioni di un italiano, whose authors build their story around ideals of Unification. Ideals are lacking in 54, although movie stars and drug dealers abound, indicators of an age empty in ideological purpose.
In conclusion, although both novels encompass many of the accomplishments of Italian narrative since Manzoni re-established the Italian novel toward the beginning of the 19th century, they also display several traits of postmodern narrative (multiple narrators and storylines, rejection of a metanarrative, etc.). The underlying theme of both novels is multiplicity, rooted in their origins of multiple authors who contest any single ‘authority,’ both in their novels and in their practice of writing. 54 adopts some of the same narrative tactics that appear in Q, but it consequently disputes them. Although White’s idea of historical narrative is illustrated in Q, 54 mocks that in its deus ex machina ending(s), forcing conclusions (and thus, meaning) upon many of its major and minor characters. 35 Q, on the other hand, has an open ending that alludes not only to a lucrative future for the protagonist but to yet another beginning, one explored in Altai. 36 Finally, the narrative devices of the McGuffin and similar objects either laden with or devoid of meaning in both novels illustrate the process of History through its narrativization, and then point out that History itself has been sent to the dump. Q recreates some of the major achievements of the 19th- and 20th-century historical novel, and 54 tells us that those achievements are irrelevant at the beginning of the 21st century: the authors Luther Blissett and Wu Ming have been in on the joke the whole time.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.