The Painting and the Story: The Backwards Game

Abstract

As a special example of intersemiotic interaction between a painting and a story, this analysis concentrates on the title story of the collection Il gioco del rovescio (The Backwards Game, 1988) by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. The story’s metaphorical and structural framework is provided by Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), a painting that has a special mise-en-abyme effect in Tabucchi’s anamorphosis. Its function is not to expand the story’s content through semantic analogy or to alleviate the ellipticalness typical of Tabucchi’s narrative oeuvre, but to intermedially establish the epistemological metaphors of backwardness and dreaming depicted in the story through analogy with the structural features and symbolic potentials of Diego Velásquez’s polycentric and autoreflexive painting, which are the subject of the rich hermeneutic investigation. The painting discussed is the main exhibit at the gallery of carefully selected intertextual references connecting Baroque poetics (such as Luis de Góngora and Sóror Violante do Céu) with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym pluralism. The unattainable contradiction of the various depictions of the love relationship between the protagonists, who at the same time are also admirers of Pessoa’s backwards art, acquires emblematic meaning – especially thanks to Velázquez’s Las Meninas and the hermeneutic perspectives opened up by intertextual signals. The story of the obverse and reverse of the love relationship thus changes into a story about an endless multiplication of views, which brings lasting instability into the relationship between the subject and the object. In Tabucchi’s collection The Backwards Game and other works written in the 1980s, it is this constituted polysemy that suggests narrative modalities based upon the play of perspectives, as well as narrative allusiveness and ellipticalness.