A Riddle

23/12/2025

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Though Hollywood is often referred to as the dream factory, fiction might more accurately invoke the oneiric. Language offers more malleability than film; its words on the page demand images from the mind, or they will remain resistant. It is partly why some will insist literature is a greater form. It requires imagination: the work, no matter how vividly written, demands a meeting of minds. Film, in this sense, is potentially mindless: a camera records and a viewer witnesses. A dog, a cat, a car and a house are there for all to see, requiring neither descriptive brilliance from the writer, nor imaginative diligence from the reader. Film is much more than that, yet there is, nevertheless, a stubborn reality to its images that literature can eschew. A book could spend a hundred pages without telling us that our central character is beautiful or ugly. A film would have to rely on some clumsy devices to keep that beauty or ugliness off the screen. 

    Antonio Tabucchi (whose work has been adapted several times) opens 'A Riddle' by saying, “Last night I dreamed of Miriam. She was wearing a long white dress which, from a distance, seemed like a nightgown. She was walking along the beach, the waves were dangerously light and breaking in silence; it must have been the beach at Biarritz…but perhaps it was another beach because at Biarritz I don’t remember deck chairs like those.” Film can also create indeterminate images, even if they’re rare and still too present to pass for the sort of indeterminacy Tabucchi practices here. A viewer might say that it is Biarritz because they notice other characteristics of it, or that it isn’t — they reckon it was filmed at another beach they know well, even if it is standing in for Biarritz. The point is that unless the film seeks deliberate artificial, theatrical beach (with tin foil and a patch of sand), it cannot deny the beach-ness of its beach. Tabucchi’s beach is conjured up from his imagination and revived by ours — the beach is there and not there. It is a conjuring trick that combines potentially semiotics and quantum physics: the notion that there is no sign in literature, only a signifier and signified — the words on the page and how we perceive them in our mind; and the quantum idea that in a strict sense the famed cat is both alive and dead, suspended in a state called a superposition. The beach might be there for the writer and not there for the reader; or vice versa, or not there for both or present for the writer and the reader. It possesses a fundamental indeterminacy, as a beach in cinema does not. It is a beach we see, and so even if a voice-over tells us they are imagining a beach, we are unavoidably seeing the same beach. The complex play of beach/non-beach we propose is the case with literature is unavoidably, from a certain perspective, simplified in cinema.

   Of course, Tabucchi has created a beach in memory as many writers create a beach as fact, but no matter the beach that is in a character’s mind or one the characters is walking along, this is still a beach that doesn’t exist as a beach in film does. While arguments about the proper use of a given art form are often suspect, literature is perhaps better equipped than film to dissolve the lines between dreams and reality, partly because there is no reality but only words on the page. When films use dream sequences, they often do so as trickery: the person gets killed only to awaken; a person’s missing husband returns and hugs the wife, only for the wife to awaken, realising it was a dream. Film can pull off these tricks so easily because there is no difference between one image and another: they have equal ‘reality’ status. In literature, writers have ready access to metaphor and simile, to subjunctive moods and hypothetical states. Tabucchi's approach to narrative, according to Anna Botta “…continually trespasses beyond the threshold that separates the waking state and that of dreams; his characters wander both through real world settings--the Azores, Genoa, India, and Lisbon--and through equally realistic imaginary limbos.” (Contemporary Literature) Tabucchi says of Italo Calvino and perhaps of his own work: "storytellers have common sense, too; it's just that often, unfortunately, their common sense completely governs their narrative. But when we write, when we tell a story, we have to silence the earthbound sensibleness that accompanies daily life. Calvino succeeds in neutralizing this type of common sense, in piercing it, and so reaches the world of the fantastic that is the realm of narrative skill.” (Contemporary Literature) 

      It is this aspect that Tabucchi seems to invoke when introducing his story collection Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and says: “Misunderstandings, uncertainties, belated understandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid and irredeemable mistakes, all these irresistibly fascinate me, as if they constituted a vocation, a sort of lowly stigmata.” Here, what happens, what might have happened, what would have happened if circumstances were different, and if the narrators had knowledge they retrospectively gain, all intermingle without always arriving at categorical actualisation.

   However, while we can say literature can more easily than film work between the actual and the possible, the real and the imagined, despite many films brilliantly pushing the art form into new areas by incorporating some of literature’s innovations (Last Year at Marienbad, Persona, Mirror, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), equally, literature’s gift can also be its curse. What happens if the reader cannot quite imagine the world the writer invokes because the words that are already abstracted signs become still more abstract in their dissolution into the metaphoric, the hypothetical and the oneiric? The question becomes, when writing fiction incorporating the various modes of the fantastic (as with Kafka, Kawabata, Borges), how does a writer offer the weight of consequence with the levity of the arbitrary? When we dream, the amniotic fluid of the oneiric dissolves in the wakeful state as our dream self gives birth to the rational: to the person who gets up in the morning, makes breakfast, takes a shower and goes to work. This doesn’t mean fiction ought to mimic the real world; more that it has to navigate the tension between a world where a writer can do pretty much anything, and the realisation that to do exactly this is to arrive at a formless work. 

      In 'A Riddle', the story goes more or less like so: Albert and the narrator run a business buying old cars, the countess of Terrail wants him to run her down to Biarritz so their 1927 Bugatti Royale can take part in a rally at San Sebastian, but the count wishes to dissuade him from doing this, offering a big cheque. The narrator says he doesn’t know what Terrail is talking about, and the count rips it up. The narrator takes the countess, Miriam, down south, and they have a torrid sexual encounter while she expresses once again a fear that she announced on their first meeting: ‘they want to kill me”, the countess says. It is the “…voice of a woman who has seen, drank, and loved too much and so was beyond lying.” 

   But we don’t so much follow the story as muse over the reliability of a narrator who appears to be dreaming the story into existence rather than telling it. And if he is telling it, what does he remember; and if he does remember, what does he know? When he asks the countess, “What’s wrong in your life?” she just lays a finger across his lips. She later promises that “tomorrow you will know everything. Tomorrow evening after the rally, we’ll meet here on the beach and go for a drive in the car. Don’t insist, please.” After the race, they have sex, and after that, he finds a gun in her handbag. He thinks her husband is trying to kill her, is aware they were almost driven off the road during the race, and he hopes to find out everything that evening on the beach at Biarritz. 

     It is as though rather than working through its story to ever greater clarification, Tabucchi insists on ever greatermystification. By the end of the tale, the narrator will admit to the man he is telling it to that he has drunk too much, adding another layer to the unreliability. “Sometimes, when you’ve drunk a bit, reality is simplified”, even if the tale he has told seems more mystifying than simplifying. When he concludes, “…why are you interested in other’s people's stories?…Can’t you be satisfied with your own dreams?”, we might counter that this is the point: a story possesses a causality that dreams usually don't; that if telling someone our dreams is of far less interest to them than our dreams are to us, it rests on an aspect that is non-communicable. They can be interpreted, as Freud insists, yet can’t be communicated, perhaps because the causality is too weak; the tenuous links that dream logic can bypass are in the rational world, links that might appear too nebulous to retain our curiosity. 

   When the narrator wonders if we are interested in other people’s stories because we aren’t satisfied with our nocturnal narratives, one answer might be that we are interested in these stories because they aren’t dreams but real events. Even if they are not, they must at least carry the conviction of a certain type of plausibility. If someone tells us that they flew with the aid of wings from Inverness to Edinburgh we aren’t likely to believe them, and if they wanted to convince us they would have to use aspects of reality to do so: they admit that it was in a hang glider and, though rare to cover such distances, that it isn’t impossible. The justification will probably pique our interest as a dream would not, as we accept that in the dream they may well have flown from one place to another without playing fair to physics. Even Magic Realists accept that while they can defy scientific laws they must create an internal logic in its place: “García Márquez gradually draws his reader into his magical-realist universe by presenting him,” Stephen Hart says, “with a fantastic event which is subsequently elaborated upon according to purely rational criteria.” '(Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Cien Anos de Soledad'’)

  Tabucchi’s interest seems more metafictional than Magic Realist if we accept that reverent referentially is more important than generating systematically coherent worlds. Here, a car his colleague owns may have belonged to Proust’s chauffeur, while the narrator talks of growing up in the same town where Celine lived. The narrator speaks of Americans buying cars who saw themselves as “so many Fitzgeralds”, and much of Tabucchi’s work has been intricately associated with Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet whose work so fascinated Tabucchi that he wrote several novels about him. But if literature offers the oneiric and the reflexive, location supplies fixity. Tabucchi often sets a work strongly in a given location: Biarritz here, Lisbon in Requiem and Goa and other parts of India in Indian Nights. "Although mapped out with unequivocal concreteness”, Botta says, “his short stories tend to unravel in an unstable topological space where the familiar reveals an unknown side, where phantasms and mirages become interchangeable with reality.” (Contemporary Literature) 

         This is where cinema has a huge advantage over literature. If writers can retreat from reality since the words do not directly reflect it, cinema records reality, and this is partly what makes its use of location so robust. Comparing the two mediums, Tabucchi says, “the difficulties in creation can be the same, but literature does give much more freedom than cinema….think about the forces that cinema needs - the economical effort, all that machinery, plus the cost, all this ends up limiting freedom.” (Mostra.Org) Yet perhaps this freedom in literature needs limits, otherwise the arbitrariness of its sign can drift into the irrelevant, just as at the other extreme, cinema that records reality is in danger of falling into its factuality. If film can so easily replicate reality, and literature can easily deviate from it, the difficulty then resides in how to expand the reality principle of cinema and limit the potential arbitrariness of the sign in literature. That is a big question, one with many answers in the form of individual books and films. However, it might be a way of wondering if the brilliance of Tabucchi rests in this tension, and the resistance one may feel in a story like 'A Riddle' lies in a freedom that is a little too great. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

A Riddle

Though Hollywood is often referred to as the dream factory, fiction might more accurately invoke the oneiric. Language offers more malleability than film; its words on the page demand images from the mind, or they will remain resistant. It is partly why some will insist literature is a greater form. It requires imagination: the work, no matter how vividly written, demands a meeting of minds. Film, in this sense, is potentially mindless: a camera records and a viewer witnesses. A dog, a cat, a car and a house are there for all to see, requiring neither descriptive brilliance from the writer, nor imaginative diligence from the reader. Film is much more than that, yet there is, nevertheless, a stubborn reality to its images that literature can eschew. A book could spend a hundred pages without telling us that our central character is beautiful or ugly. A film would have to rely on some clumsy devices to keep that beauty or ugliness off the screen. 

    Antonio Tabucchi (whose work has been adapted several times) opens 'A Riddle' by saying, “Last night I dreamed of Miriam. She was wearing a long white dress which, from a distance, seemed like a nightgown. She was walking along the beach, the waves were dangerously light and breaking in silence; it must have been the beach at Biarritz…but perhaps it was another beach because at Biarritz I don’t remember deck chairs like those.” Film can also create indeterminate images, even if they’re rare and still too present to pass for the sort of indeterminacy Tabucchi practices here. A viewer might say that it is Biarritz because they notice other characteristics of it, or that it isn’t — they reckon it was filmed at another beach they know well, even if it is standing in for Biarritz. The point is that unless the film seeks deliberate artificial, theatrical beach (with tin foil and a patch of sand), it cannot deny the beach-ness of its beach. Tabucchi’s beach is conjured up from his imagination and revived by ours — the beach is there and not there. It is a conjuring trick that combines potentially semiotics and quantum physics: the notion that there is no sign in literature, only a signifier and signified — the words on the page and how we perceive them in our mind; and the quantum idea that in a strict sense the famed cat is both alive and dead, suspended in a state called a superposition. The beach might be there for the writer and not there for the reader; or vice versa, or not there for both or present for the writer and the reader. It possesses a fundamental indeterminacy, as a beach in cinema does not. It is a beach we see, and so even if a voice-over tells us they are imagining a beach, we are unavoidably seeing the same beach. The complex play of beach/non-beach we propose is the case with literature is unavoidably, from a certain perspective, simplified in cinema.

   Of course, Tabucchi has created a beach in memory as many writers create a beach as fact, but no matter the beach that is in a character’s mind or one the characters is walking along, this is still a beach that doesn’t exist as a beach in film does. While arguments about the proper use of a given art form are often suspect, literature is perhaps better equipped than film to dissolve the lines between dreams and reality, partly because there is no reality but only words on the page. When films use dream sequences, they often do so as trickery: the person gets killed only to awaken; a person’s missing husband returns and hugs the wife, only for the wife to awaken, realising it was a dream. Film can pull off these tricks so easily because there is no difference between one image and another: they have equal ‘reality’ status. In literature, writers have ready access to metaphor and simile, to subjunctive moods and hypothetical states. Tabucchi's approach to narrative, according to Anna Botta “…continually trespasses beyond the threshold that separates the waking state and that of dreams; his characters wander both through real world settings--the Azores, Genoa, India, and Lisbon--and through equally realistic imaginary limbos.” (Contemporary Literature) Tabucchi says of Italo Calvino and perhaps of his own work: "storytellers have common sense, too; it's just that often, unfortunately, their common sense completely governs their narrative. But when we write, when we tell a story, we have to silence the earthbound sensibleness that accompanies daily life. Calvino succeeds in neutralizing this type of common sense, in piercing it, and so reaches the world of the fantastic that is the realm of narrative skill.” (Contemporary Literature) 

      It is this aspect that Tabucchi seems to invoke when introducing his story collection Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and says: “Misunderstandings, uncertainties, belated understandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid and irredeemable mistakes, all these irresistibly fascinate me, as if they constituted a vocation, a sort of lowly stigmata.” Here, what happens, what might have happened, what would have happened if circumstances were different, and if the narrators had knowledge they retrospectively gain, all intermingle without always arriving at categorical actualisation.

   However, while we can say literature can more easily than film work between the actual and the possible, the real and the imagined, despite many films brilliantly pushing the art form into new areas by incorporating some of literature’s innovations (Last Year at Marienbad, Persona, Mirror, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), equally, literature’s gift can also be its curse. What happens if the reader cannot quite imagine the world the writer invokes because the words that are already abstracted signs become still more abstract in their dissolution into the metaphoric, the hypothetical and the oneiric? The question becomes, when writing fiction incorporating the various modes of the fantastic (as with Kafka, Kawabata, Borges), how does a writer offer the weight of consequence with the levity of the arbitrary? When we dream, the amniotic fluid of the oneiric dissolves in the wakeful state as our dream self gives birth to the rational: to the person who gets up in the morning, makes breakfast, takes a shower and goes to work. This doesn’t mean fiction ought to mimic the real world; more that it has to navigate the tension between a world where a writer can do pretty much anything, and the realisation that to do exactly this is to arrive at a formless work. 

      In 'A Riddle', the story goes more or less like so: Albert and the narrator run a business buying old cars, the countess of Terrail wants him to run her down to Biarritz so their 1927 Bugatti Royale can take part in a rally at San Sebastian, but the count wishes to dissuade him from doing this, offering a big cheque. The narrator says he doesn’t know what Terrail is talking about, and the count rips it up. The narrator takes the countess, Miriam, down south, and they have a torrid sexual encounter while she expresses once again a fear that she announced on their first meeting: ‘they want to kill me”, the countess says. It is the “…voice of a woman who has seen, drank, and loved too much and so was beyond lying.” 

   But we don’t so much follow the story as muse over the reliability of a narrator who appears to be dreaming the story into existence rather than telling it. And if he is telling it, what does he remember; and if he does remember, what does he know? When he asks the countess, “What’s wrong in your life?” she just lays a finger across his lips. She later promises that “tomorrow you will know everything. Tomorrow evening after the rally, we’ll meet here on the beach and go for a drive in the car. Don’t insist, please.” After the race, they have sex, and after that, he finds a gun in her handbag. He thinks her husband is trying to kill her, is aware they were almost driven off the road during the race, and he hopes to find out everything that evening on the beach at Biarritz. 

     It is as though rather than working through its story to ever greater clarification, Tabucchi insists on ever greatermystification. By the end of the tale, the narrator will admit to the man he is telling it to that he has drunk too much, adding another layer to the unreliability. “Sometimes, when you’ve drunk a bit, reality is simplified”, even if the tale he has told seems more mystifying than simplifying. When he concludes, “…why are you interested in other’s people's stories?…Can’t you be satisfied with your own dreams?”, we might counter that this is the point: a story possesses a causality that dreams usually don't; that if telling someone our dreams is of far less interest to them than our dreams are to us, it rests on an aspect that is non-communicable. They can be interpreted, as Freud insists, yet can’t be communicated, perhaps because the causality is too weak; the tenuous links that dream logic can bypass are in the rational world, links that might appear too nebulous to retain our curiosity. 

   When the narrator wonders if we are interested in other people’s stories because we aren’t satisfied with our nocturnal narratives, one answer might be that we are interested in these stories because they aren’t dreams but real events. Even if they are not, they must at least carry the conviction of a certain type of plausibility. If someone tells us that they flew with the aid of wings from Inverness to Edinburgh we aren’t likely to believe them, and if they wanted to convince us they would have to use aspects of reality to do so: they admit that it was in a hang glider and, though rare to cover such distances, that it isn’t impossible. The justification will probably pique our interest as a dream would not, as we accept that in the dream they may well have flown from one place to another without playing fair to physics. Even Magic Realists accept that while they can defy scientific laws they must create an internal logic in its place: “García Márquez gradually draws his reader into his magical-realist universe by presenting him,” Stephen Hart says, “with a fantastic event which is subsequently elaborated upon according to purely rational criteria.” '(Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Cien Anos de Soledad'’)

  Tabucchi’s interest seems more metafictional than Magic Realist if we accept that reverent referentially is more important than generating systematically coherent worlds. Here, a car his colleague owns may have belonged to Proust’s chauffeur, while the narrator talks of growing up in the same town where Celine lived. The narrator speaks of Americans buying cars who saw themselves as “so many Fitzgeralds”, and much of Tabucchi’s work has been intricately associated with Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet whose work so fascinated Tabucchi that he wrote several novels about him. But if literature offers the oneiric and the reflexive, location supplies fixity. Tabucchi often sets a work strongly in a given location: Biarritz here, Lisbon in Requiem and Goa and other parts of India in Indian Nights. "Although mapped out with unequivocal concreteness”, Botta says, “his short stories tend to unravel in an unstable topological space where the familiar reveals an unknown side, where phantasms and mirages become interchangeable with reality.” (Contemporary Literature) 

         This is where cinema has a huge advantage over literature. If writers can retreat from reality since the words do not directly reflect it, cinema records reality, and this is partly what makes its use of location so robust. Comparing the two mediums, Tabucchi says, “the difficulties in creation can be the same, but literature does give much more freedom than cinema….think about the forces that cinema needs - the economical effort, all that machinery, plus the cost, all this ends up limiting freedom.” (Mostra.Org) Yet perhaps this freedom in literature needs limits, otherwise the arbitrariness of its sign can drift into the irrelevant, just as at the other extreme, cinema that records reality is in danger of falling into its factuality. If film can so easily replicate reality, and literature can easily deviate from it, the difficulty then resides in how to expand the reality principle of cinema and limit the potential arbitrariness of the sign in literature. That is a big question, one with many answers in the form of individual books and films. However, it might be a way of wondering if the brilliance of Tabucchi rests in this tension, and the resistance one may feel in a story like 'A Riddle' lies in a freedom that is a little too great. 


© Tony McKibbin