Dear bibliopathologist,
in a society where everyone hates spoilers, I’m addicted to them. In the first chapter of each book, I feel an urgent need to scroll directly to the last page and read it, sometimes to devour the entire final chapter. Only then can I enjoy reading. Can I explain it with the need to live a safe experience in an unpredictable way, or is it just a craving for omnipotence?
– Claudia
Dear Claudia,
I’m willing to bet that your friends, when they invite you to dinner, after leaving you run to the kitchen to check that nothing is missing from the cutlery drawer. How do I know? When Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini published Enigma in place of the sea, Enzo Golino crushed him on Millelibri, and then added a perfidious post scriptum: “By the way, the murderer is …”. The authors, understandably, did not take it well: “You can say about a giant as well as the smallest author that he did a crap”, said Fruttero, “but in creating the suspense they both put a lot of work, from Homer to Tamaro” . Golino, therefore, had violated a sacred border: “We have deleted it from the list of civilized persons. Such a gesture is not made between gentlemen. It’s like being invited to a party, going there and stealing the spoons ”. What Fruttero perhaps did not suspect is that there are also readers like you, who enjoy dessert better thanks to stolen spoons.
The two explanations you give to your unusual habit – having an unpredictable safe experience, harboring cravings for omnipotence – are actually one explanation. What you aspire to is in fact a divine prerogative. You may remember, in canto XVII of Paradisothe lesson on free will, predestination and divine foreknowledge that Dante receives from his ancestor Cacciaguida.
All our contingent facts and facts, Cacciaguida tells him more or less, are present in the divine mind; but not for this reason they take on the character of necessity, “except as from the face in which it is reflected / ship that descends by torrent”. The journey of a ship does not depend on the gaze of the observer. God already knows where our boats will land, but that doesn’t make us pilots less free. It does not determine the future, it catches it at a glance from his eternal present.
The position from which you like to observe the imaginary lives of the characters in a novel is therefore the same as that of Dante’s God-eternal. You want to immediately visit the port where their ships will land, or the point where they will go down. Only then can you enjoy with superhuman foreknowledge the free ways by which they will meet their destiny. After all, if the novelist wanted to play the omnipotent and omniscient god, creating worlds and men and then scrutinizing them from a tower towering over the waters of time, why shouldn’t you expect the same as a reader, and support him as a lighthouse keeper?