Faced with the charade-like nature of literary texts, readers who are more or less aware and astute end up finding themselves in the shoes of the riddle-maker. Even if they do not display the talent of Poe, who, reviewing a novel by Dickens that was not yet finished after a few installments, managed to discern the author's plan, which was then modified during the course of the work, they are still forced to untangle real clues and red herrings, allusions and coups de théâtre, imbalances and second thoughts, veils and revelations. When he cannot figure it out, ‘the book closes’, and the ‘strange powers of life’ made up of words that inhabit it slip into silence.
But both their sphinx-like remoteness and the deceptive light of familiarity under which they sometimes appear to us—reassuring “neighbors” with familiar features—are dispelled by the exercise that most profitably leads us toward full understanding: giving importance to the smallest signs hidden on the surface, to those imperfections, scars, and inconsistencies that are anything but insignificant residues, and without which the textual machine could not function. Working with small clues requires the meticulous skill of the decipherer and a taste for microscopy, as well as the infallible ear that drives the analyst, “setting aside the patient's official statements,” to pay attention above all to “slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and tone of voice.”
Lavagetto masterfully moves the protocols of circumstantial reconstruction from ‘fragments of a theory’ to Balzac to Collodi to Stendhal, from melodrama to Freud to Proust to Svevo. He follows paths mostly ignored by critics, such as the footsteps of the Unknown, the nameless character who bursts onto the scene in 19th-century fiction, or the tales of Pinocchio, who tells his story in wonderfully varied ways and forms depending on the performative needs of the moment, or the intermittences of a never-realized King Lear who haunts Verdi's projects like a ghost.