ABSTRACT
I think this question addresses two different issues. Looking back now, I think that the almost obsessive subject of my work has been that of how we come to know the world. This perhaps explains the ever-growing attention I have devoted to narrative universes: they constitute an Ersatz, or rather, a substitute for the world. The worldly ‘truths’ that the Earth turns around the sun or that Napoleon died in 1821 can always be called into doubt (we may have made a mistake or been led astray by false documents). In contrast, narrative universes tell us something that is indisputable (that Anna Karenina died under a train or that Pinocchio
became a human boy). Narrative universes promise a notion of truth that is comfortable and sure; the world does not. Yet we are induced to interpret the world as if it were a large story, in order to find some coherence in it - a coherence that is, however, subject to continual revision. In contrast, with narrative universes we feel reassured. This is not only because we are told, via the narration, that things went a certain way and can no longer be modified. It is also because in a narrative work (but this may also happen in a poetic work), it is always possible to find a relatively solid order that acts as underlying structure to discourse. I am thinking of Barranu’s essay that reconstructed the underlying structure of Foucault's Pendulum. Well, she has discovered exactly what I tried to do, using a structured diagram that I followed constantly in the games of flashback, even to help me decide what tenses I should use. No Barranu can find an equally precise diagram to define the underlying order of the world. The world is not a parameter according to which we should judge narrative universes, as desired by a banally realistic aesthetics; narrative universes are the parameter that enables us to judge our interpretations of the world. This does not mean, as some would have it, that the world is a text or a story; it means that we have to interpret it as if it were. This seems a rather Kantian idea to me.
