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thinking particularly of movies such as L'Avventura and La Norte,

both by Antonioni.

The importance of these movies resides not only in the fact that they were both experimental works, but also in the fact that they were both accepted by the public—with a great deal of criticism and vituperation, yet nevertheless accepted as debatable but pos- sible visions of the world. It can hardly be a coincidence that this new narrative mode was offered to a public that had already be- come used to the new logic of live TV—that is. to a kind of narra- tion which, despite an appearance of causality and coherence, relies primarily on the mere sequence of events, and in which the narra- tive, even though it might have a thread, is constantly spilling be- yond its margins, into the inessential, the tangential, the gloss, where for a very long time nothing may happen, and the camera remains focused on the curve of a road waiting for the sudden ap- pearance of the first runner, or, weary, wanders to the facades of the surrounding houses or the expectant faces of the spectators, for no other reason than that this is the way things go, and there is nothing else to do but wait.

L'Avventura often lapses into the long, blank spells of live TV; as do the night revels in La None, or the heroine's interminable walk amid boys setting off fireworks.

All this seems to suggest that, indeed, live TV may well deserve to be included—both as a source and as a contemporary phenome- non—in any study concerning the openness of narrative structures and the possibility of reproducing life in all its multiplicity, in its casual unfolding beside and beyond any preestablished plot.

At this point, however, we must avoid a possible misunderstand- ing: life in its immediacy is not "openness" but chance. In order to turn this chance into a cluster of possibilities, it is first necessary to provide it with some organization. In other words, it is necessary to choose the elements of a constellation among which we will then—and only then—draw a network of connections.

The openness of L'Avventura is the result of a montage that has deliberately replaced pure chance with "willed" chance. If it lacks a plot it is because the director wanted to provoke a feeling of suspen- sion, of indeterminateness, in his audience—because he wanted to frustrate their "romantic" expectations and plunge them into a fic-

Lion (in itself already a filtered life) that would force them to find their way amid all sorts of intellectual and moral dilemmas. In other words, openness presumes the lasting and accurate organization of afield of stimuli.

Of course, it is quite possible that a live broadcast may be able to seize, out of a variety of facts, the very ones that lend themselves to an open organization. But at this point two essential factors come into play: the nature of the medium and its social purpose—in other words, its syntax and its audience. It is precisely because of the chance nature of its material that, in order to keep some control, live TV resorts to the most traditional and dependable forms of organization, the most Aristotelian ones, determined by the laws of causality and necessity which, in the end, are none other than the laws of verisimilitude.

At one particular point in L'Avventura, Antonioni creates a tense situation: on a scorching hot afternoon, a man overturns an ink- stand onto a freshly finished drawing by a young architect. The tension demands to be resolved. A similar situation, in a western, would culminate in a rousing fight that would psychologically jus- tify both the offender and the offended, and motivate their actions. But in L'Avventura nothing happens; the tension is constantly on the point of being resolved by a fight, which, however, never oc- curs, for both deeds and emotions are eventually absorbed into the physical and psychological weariness that dominates the entire sit- uation. Such a radical indeterminateness can result only from a "de- cantation" of the dramatic action. The violation of the most natural (i.e., plausible) expectations is here so deliberate and intentional that it must be the fruit of very rigorous calculation: if everything seems so casual, it is precisely because nothing is. This effect would be impossible to achieve during the live broadcast of a baseball game, where all the tensions and crises accumulated in the course of one or more innings have to be resolved in the temporary finality of a home run, or an RBI, whatever the case may be (and, failing this, a near home run, with the ball landing on the wrong side of the foul line, causing the audience to go wild with frustration). Even admitting that all this is imposed by the journalistic function of the broadcast, which obviously cannot fail to report all the es- sential aspects of the game, once the home run has occurred, the director could choose between focusing the cameras on the deliri-

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ous crowd—the appropriate anticlimax, the normal relinquish- ment of all control after a tense situation—or polemically present- ing random scenes on a nearby street (a bum sleeping in a doorway, a cat rummaging through a garbage can, a strutting pigeon) or any other image not even remotely connected to the events of the game. In other words, the director has the choice of confining his cameras to a rigorous presentation of the game. a limited interpretation with a mildly moral or documentary import, or of escaping all in- terpretation by means of a passive expression of nihilism, which, intelligently carried out, could produce an effect similar to that of the absolutely objective descriptions of the nouveau roman.

This is what the director could do if his broadcasts were only apparently live and actually the result of a long elaboration, the realization of a new vision of the world rebelling against that in- stinctive mechanism that makes us connect events according to the laws of verisimilitude. Let's not forget that according to Aristotle, poetic verisimilitude is determined by rhetorical verisimilitude; that is, it is not only logical but also natural that what happens in a plot is also what all of us would expect to happen in real life, what, according to the conventions of the form, we would think should happen given certain premises. The director is generally more than ready to accept, as the normal conclusion of his artistic discourse, what his audience would commonsensically see as the normal cul- mination of a sequence of real events.

Live TV broadcasts are determined, in their unfolding, by the ex- pectations and demands of their public, a public that not only wants to know what is happening in the world but also expects to hear or see it in the shape of a well-constructed novel, since this is the way it chooses to perceive "real" life—stripped of all chance elements and reconstructed as plot.'3 _{We shouldn't forget that. after all, the}

traditional narrative plot corresponds to the habitual, mechanical, yet reasonable and functional way in which we are used to perceiv- ing the events of the world, attributing to them a univocal mean- ing. The experimental novel, instead, wants to demystify the habit- ual associations on which we base our interpretations of life, not so as to present us with the image of a nonlife but rather to help us experience life in a new way, besides and beyond all rigid conven- tions. But this involves a cultural decision, a "phenomenological"

C H A N C E A N D P L O T 1 1 9 stance, the will to bracket assumptions—a will that the average TV viewer, who watches television in order to gather some information and to find out (quite legitimately) how it will all end, does not have.

Which does not mean that, in real life, toward the end of a real baseball game, at the very moment in which a tie has to be resolved in favor of one or the other team, the overwrought spectators won't suddenly realize the vanity of it all and lapse into the most unlikely behavior, such as falling asleep, leaving the field, starting a fight with their neighbor, and so on. If this were to happen, and the TV director were to film it, he would produce an admirably realistic nonstory that would suddenly open up the currently held notion of verisimilitude. But until then, such a story will continue to be con- sidered unlikely, whereas its opposite—the delirious response of the hopeful fans—will be considered likely, normal, the realistic climax of a realistic story. The public will demand it, and the TV director will feel compelled to give it to them.

But aside from these restrictions, which mostly have to do with the functional relationship between television as a news medium and a public that demands a particular product, there is also, as I have already suggested, another kind of restriction, a syntactic one, de- termined by the very nature of the production process and the sys- tem of psychological reflexes of the director.

Life, by virtue of the element of chance, is already dispersed enough to disorient the director who tries to interpret it narratively. He is constantly in danger of losing the thread and of becoming a mere photographer of the unrelated and the uniform—not of that which is intentionally unrelated but of that which is factually acci- dental, alien. In order to avoid this sort of dispersion, he must constantly impose some organization on the available data. And he must do it there and then, without preparation and in the shortest possible time.

Obviously, given the limited amount of time at his disposal, he will tend to rely on the psychologically most immediate and easiest way of connecting two disparate events—that is, the way dictated by habit and supported by public opinion. To bring two events together by means of an unusual connection demands critical reflection, and implies an ideological choice as well as a cultural deci-

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sion. Of course, things would be quite different if we were more used to looking at the world in an unusual fashion, instinctively aiming at the unrelated, or the oddly related, or, to put it in musical terms, at serial rather than tonal connections.

This education of one's sensibility can be acquired only after a long assimilation of new narrative techniques in which few if any TV directors have had the leisure to indulge, nor does the current organization of our culture demand it of them.

On the other hand, one should also consider the fact that in a sudden confrontation with a vital situation, even a writer who is perfectly familiar with new narrative techniques might resort to more elementary forms of communication based on both habit and a collective notion of causality, since, for the time being, these are still the common points of reference in our daily life.

In the summer of 1961, Robbe-Grillet was involved in an airplane accident from which he escaped unharmed. He was immediately interviewed by a group of journalists, among them a reporter from L'Express, who, in a very a musi ng artic le, not ed how Robb e- Grillet's intensely emotional account of the event had unfolded ac- cording to the most traditional, indeed the most Aristotelian, not to say Balzacian, narrative principles: not only did it have a begin- ning. a middle, and an end, but it was also charged with suspense and extremely subjective. The journalist felt that Robbe-Grillet should have narrated the event in the same objective, impersonal. flat, nonnarrative style he used in his novels. The fact that he did not, the reporter facetiously concluded, proved that he was an impostor and that he did not deserve to occupy the place of patri- arch of the new narrative techniques. The article was amusing and highly ironic; on the other hand, had it been written in dead ear- nest, and had the accusation of insincerity been sincere (in suspect- ing Robbe-Grillet of having, at a crucial moment, forsaken his vi- sion of the world to assume the one he had always countered), the novelist would have been the victim of a very serious misunder- standing. Nobody, in fact, would expect a scholar of non-Euclid- ean geometry to use Riemann's geometry to measure his room so that he could build a wardrobe for it; or a supporter of the theory of relativity to adjust his watch according to Lorentz's transforma- tions, after getting the time from the first motorist who happens to zoom by. New parameters can provide us with tools that are per-

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fectly suited to experimental situations (whether in a lab or in the pages of a novel) but are not functional in everyday life. Which, of course, should not be taken to mean that they are not valid but that, on a daily basis (at least for the time being), more traditional pa- rameters with a wider diffusion might be more effective.

The interpretation of something that is happening to us now and to which we must immediately respond—or that we must imme- diately describe televisually—may well be one of those cases in which the more conventional response is also the most effective. This is the situation of televisual language in a particular phase of its development, and in a particular cultural context which de- mands that it fulfill a particular function vis-a-vis a particular public. On the other hand, given different historical circumstances, live TV could well become some sort of initiation into a freer exercise of one's sensibility and other enriching associative experiences; in other words, it could be a big step toward another psychological and cultural dimension. For the time being, however, a description of the aesthetic structures of live TV broadcasts must keep in mind the reality of the phenomenon and look at the medium and at its laws in relation to a particular audience. Today, a TV commentary resembling L'Avventura would probably still be considered a very bad broadcast, and its cultural reference would appear merely ironic.

For all its contemporariness, the poetics of the open work is not yet suited to every form of artistic communication. The structure with a "plot" in the most Aristotelian sense of the term, is still the most widespread, even at the highest levels (for, after all, aesthetic value doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the novelty of a technique—even though the latter is frequently the symptom of an originality of both thought and method on which art often thrives). As for live TV, as long as it responds to this deep need for a plot that all people feel—a need that will always find satisfaction in some form or other, whether old or new—it will have to be judged according to the demands it satisfies and the structures it uses to satisfy them.

This, of course, does not mean that live TV is doomed to remain a closed form. Not at all, for it already has numerous possibilities for opening its discourse and launching into an exploration of the

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profound indeterminacy of daily events. All it has to do is enrich the main event, filmed according to all the laws of verisimilitude, with a variety of marginal annotations, with rapid inquiries into the surrounding reality, with all sorts of images unrelated to the primary action but relevant precisely because of their unrelatedness, given the new perspectives, the new directions, and the new possibilities they propose for the same set of events.

Live TV might then have a rather interesting pedagogical effect: it could give the viewer the feeling, however vague, that life—that even he himself—is not confined to the story he so eagerly follows. These digressive annotations would then jolt the viewer out of the hypnotic spell woven by the plot, and, by distancing him from it, would force him to judge, or at least to question, the persuasiveness of what he sees on the screen.

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