2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

22
P RELUDE
dimensions of the mind. From description and narrative we move into meditation.
The Book reflects then the conclusions of its protagonist in the narrative structure itself.
The total combinatorial structure that is needed, as we saw, for the final triumph over the
anxiety of death and the transfiguration into the harmonic world of play is exhibited by the
text itself as its raison d’être. The whole range of possible experiences is carefully subdi-
vided and totally covered by the exemplary texts included in the book. We must not be de-
ceived by the extreme narrative focalization of the single texts and recall instead how the
knight pawn was employed by Kublai to represent a marching army as well as a equestrian
statue precisely because of its intrinsic plurivocity. The carved piece of wood assumes a
universal meaning because it comes to represent, inside the closed world of chess, one of
the (few) possibilities of movement, i.e. one of the possible interactions with the world. In
other words, one of the possible experiences. Similarly, the reading of a wave that opens
the book is much more than the faithful transcription of the obsessive musings of a middle-
aged character: once assumed inside the closed world of Mr. Palomar’s experience as strat-
egy 1.1.1, it becomes the universal signifier of the indirect and im-mediate interaction with
the world, in whatever form, time, or occasion it happens to occur. Thus, Mr. Palomar’s
meditations are necessarily written a posteriori, after the experience of the failed death.
They must be interpreted as a total systematization of experience into a system of equiva-
lent strategies. This system is necessarily written after, After the end of an essentially his-
torical ‘world’ like ours: it can be written only after having entered that ‘Sunday of Life’,
to repeat Hegel’s and Queneau’s expression, that follows the end of history. If we leave
aside the secondary difference between the number of possible experiences in the chess
world—6, since there are as many pieces—and those presented in the index, then the ho-
mology between the two universes is complete. Such homology is, furthermore, certified
by the author himself in the authoritative modality of paratext. Thus, the index is the true
explication du texte providing the ‘truth’ of the work to the reader by justifying and autho-
rizing one among the possible interpretations of its last words. The place of the index—ex-
ternal with regard to the text—gives it the necessary authority to put an end to the