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Concerning this double aspect of literature, here, toward the end of my little talk, it is relevant to mention an essay by the German poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Topological Structures in Modern Literature”, which I read in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur (May-June 1966). He reviews the numerous instances of labyrinthine narratives from ancient times up to Borges and Robbe-Grillet, or of narratives one inside another like Chinese boxes, and he asks himself the meaning of modem literature’s insistence on these themes. He evokes the image of a world in which it is easy to lose oneself, to get disoriented-a world in which the effort of regaining one’s orientation acquires a particular value, almost that of a training for survival. “Every orientation, ” he writes, “presupposes a disorientation. Only someone who has experienced bewilderment can free himself of it. But these games of orientation are in turn games of disorientation. Therein lies their fascination and their risk. The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it will stray and get lost. But the labyrinth also poses the visitor a challenge: that he reconstruct the plan of it and dissolve its power. If he succeeds, he will have destroyed the labyrinth; for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists.” And Enzensberger concludes: “The moment a topological structure appears as a metaphysical structure the game loses its dialectical balance, and literature turns into a means of demonstrating that the world is essentially impenetrable, that any communication is impossible. The labyrinth thus ceases to be a challenge to human intelligence and establishes itself as a facsimile of the world and of society.”

Enzensberger’s thesis can be applied to everything in literature and culture that today-after von Neumann-we see as a combinatorial mathematical game. The game can work as a challenge to understand the world or as a dissuasion from understanding it. Literature can work in a critical vein or to confirm things as they are and as we know them to be. The boundary is not always clearly marked, and I would say that on this score the spirit in which one reads is decisive: it is up to the reader to see to it that literature exerts its critical force, and this can occur independently of the author’s intentions.

I think this is the meaning one might give to my most recent story, which comes at the end of my book t zero. In this story we see Alexandre Dumas taking his novel The Count of Monte Cristo from a supernovel that contains all possible variants of the life story of Edmond Dantès. In their dungeon Edmond Dantés and the Abbot Faria go over the plans for their escape and wonder which of the possible variants is the right one. The Abbot Faria digs tunnels to escape from the castle, but he always goes wrong and ends up in ever-deeper cells. On the basis of Faria’s mistakes Dantès tries to draw a map of the castle. While Faria, by the sheer number of his attempts, comes close to achieving the perfect escape, Dantès moves toward imagining the perfect prison - the one from which no escape is possible. His reasons are explained in the passage I shall now quote:

“If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this imagined fortress either will be the same as the real one-and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of knowing we are here because we could be nowhere else-or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here-which would be a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.”

And that is the most optimistic finale that I have managed to give to my story, to my book, and also to this essay.

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