From the Tree to the Labyrinth (13 page)

This means that on the one hand all of the connections were certainly culturalized before Joyce justified them by pretending to institute them or discover them, while on the other they become evident to us (and allow us to reconstruct the ontology underlying the text) only because Joyce brought them to light (by making obvious the relationships among the terms of a
domain
that he himself brought into focus).

What makes the pun creative is not the series of connections (which potentially precedes it because they are already culturalized): it is the decision to oblige us to construct, by way of an unfamiliar ontology,
short circuits
that are possible but not yet evident. Between
message
and
dream
there is no phonetic similarity and only a weak semantic contiguity (whereby, but only in certain cultures, or as part of a psychoanalytic
koiné,
a dream is a message), and to bring them together the reader has been obliged to make the leap over unconnected points of the diagram so as to get from
songe
to
mensonge
or from
message
to
mensonge.
But from that moment—from the moment when the text has spoken—those points are no longer unconnected.

Language, carrying to creative outcomes the encyclopedic process of unlimited semiosis, has created a new polydimensional network of possible connections. This creative “gentle violence,” once set in motion, does not leave unaffected the collective encyclopedia (and indirectly, not even the one shared by those who have not read Joyce). It has left behind a trace, a fruitful wound.

However intriguing this reconstruction of a “Joycean ontology” may have proved to be, it cannot be denied that the model of a reduced labyrinth illustrated in
Figure 1.21
is infinitely more impoverished than
Finnegans Wake
taken as a whole. As useful as it has been in understanding a series of implicit and explicit connections at the basis of a number of puns, and as instructive as it perhaps is as a miniaturization of an encyclopedic network, nevertheless, just like the rest of the ontologies we have spoken of so far, it fatally reduces the riches of the Maximal Encyclopedia (of which the entire text of
Finnegans Wake
is in any case only a part) to which it certainly refers us, though by means of a work of domestication.

We remarked in
section 1.4
that a Maximal Encyclopedia cannot be consulted in its entirety because it represents the sum total of everything that was ever thought or said, or at least of everything that could in theory be discovered, to the extent to which it has been expressed through a series of materially identifiable interpretants (graffiti, stelae, monuments, manuscripts, books, electronic recordings)—a sort of World Wide Web far richer that the one to which we have access through the Internet.

Pavel (1986) invited us to try a fascinating mental experiment. Let us suppose that an omniscient being is capable of writing or reading a
Magnum Opus
that contains all of the true assertions regarding both the real world and all possible worlds. Naturally, since we can speak of the universe using different languages, and since each language defines it in a different way, there exists a Maximal Collection (Pavel calls it the “Total Image”) of
Magna Opera.
Let us now suppose that God charges a number of angels with writing Daily Books for each individual human being, in which they take note of all the propositions (concerning the possible worlds of that individual’s desires and hopes and the real world of his acts) that correspond to a true statement in one of the books that make up the Maximal Collection of
Magna Opera.
The collection of Daily Books belonging to a given individual must be produced on the Day of Judgment, along with the collection of the Books that assess the lives of families, tribes, and nations.

But the benevolent genie who writes a Daily Book is not content to align true statements: he connects them, evaluates them, builds them into a system. And since on the Day of Judgment individuals and groups will each have a defending angel, the defenders will rewrite for each individual another astronomical series of Daily Books in which the same statements will be linked together in different ways, and differently compared to the affirmations of some of the
Magna Opera.

Since infinite alternative worlds make up each of the infinite
Magna Opera,
the angels will write an infinite number of Daily Books in which affirmations that are true in one world and false in the other will be mingled together. If we further hypothesize that some of the genies may be clumsy and mix up affirmations registered as mutually contradictory by a single
Magnum Opus,
what we will end up with will be a series of compendiums, miscellanies, compendiums of fragments of miscellanies that amalgamate strata of books of different origins, and at that point it will be very difficult to say which books are truthful and which fictional, and with respect to what original. We will have an astronomical infinity of books each of which will straddle different worlds and we will no doubt consider as true stories that others have considered as fictional.
³⁷

This gives us a good idea of what the Maximal Encyclopedia might look like, if we substitute for the angels the human beings who took time to leave behind their traces (from the bison depicted in the Altamira caverns to the invention of writing and beyond). The legend Pavel narrates gives a reasonable representation of our situation when confronted by the universe of affirmations that we are accustomed to accept not as “true” but in any case enunciated.
³⁸

In the preceding sections we saw how, confronted with the virtual immensity of the Maximal Encyclopedia (a regulatory hypothesis, a stimulus to the understanding of sentences of every type), we usually attempt to reduce its format, to construct local representations with the purpose of understanding a single context. Nevertheless, this entire dialectic between local and global is not so simple. In other words, recognizing it does not mean answering a question but formulating one. When in a given context we endeavor to reconstruct the portion of encyclopedia probably activated by some enunciator, to what format of the encyclopedia are we referring? Clearly, if a child tells us that the sun has moved, in our understanding of what the child means we do not refer the statement to complex cosmographical notions concerning a galactic revolution of the sun, but instead to the set of “ingenuous” habits of perception on the basis of which we say that the sun rises and sets. But what encyclopedic format do we refer to when we are talking to a scientist, to an educated person, to a farm laborer, to an inhabitant of a far-off country?

In
Kant and the Platypus
I discussed the difference between Nuclear Content (NC)—a set of interpretants on the basis of which both a lay person and a naturalist can agree on the properties evoked by the term
mouse,
both understanding in the same way the sentence
there is a mouse in the kitchen
—and Molar Content (MC), which represents the specialized knowledge that a naturalist may have of a mouse. We are justified, then, in thinking that on the one hand there is a Median Encyclopedia (shared in the present case by both the naturalist and the common native speaker) and on the other an unmanageable plethora of Specialized Encyclopedias, the complete collection of which would constitute the unattainable Maximal Encyclopedia. Accordingly, we could imagine the states (or strata) of what Putnam has called the social division of linguistic labor by hypothesizing a kind of solar system (the Maximal Encyclopedia) in which a great many Specialized Encyclopedias describe orbits of varying circumferences around a central nucleus (the Median Encyclopedia), but at the center of that nucleus we must also imagine a swarm of Individual Encyclopedias representing in sundry and unforeseeable ways the encyclopedic notions of each individual.

In
section 1.3.3
we alluded to Alsted’s notion according to which, with respect to the encyclopedia, individuals are like so many containers, each capable of holding a content commensurate with his or her receptive capacity, and none capable of containing in themselves the whole sum of knowledge. In any kind of communicative interaction, it is clearly necessary to presuppose and infer the format of the individual encyclopedia of the persons speaking to us, otherwise we would attribute to them intentions (and knowledge) that they do not have. This is basically why we so frequently bring into play the
principle of charity.
But as a rule (except when we are dealing with anomalous interlocutors such as a child, a foreigner from a remote and unknown culture, or a mentally challenged individual) out of considerations of economy we have recourse to what we consider to be a Median Encyclopedia. Though its extent is difficult to measure, a Median Encyclopedia is identified with the contents of a given culture.

So, just as knowledge of the works of Plato (except for the
Timaeus
) were not part of the Median Encyclopedia of medieval culture, in which notions about Plato came from Neo-Platonic sources, in the same way part of our current Western encyclopedia is the idea that the Ptolemaic system was believed to be true in the past whereas today it is considered erroneous (without its having been forgotten). To sum up, we might say that the Median Encyclopedia is represented by an encyclopedia in the publisher’s sense of the word—and probably a mid-sized one-volume encyclopedia and not the thirty-two volumes of the 2010
Britannica.
³⁹

The fact that it is a Median Encyclopedia does not mean that all of its contents are shared by all members of a given culture, but rather that it is
shareable
(we will examine in more detail later, in
section 1.9.5
, the concept of “latency” of information). Even an educated person may have forgotten (or never have known) the date of Napoleon’s death, but that person knows that the information is accessible and usually knows where to find it. This is why it is said that a cultivated person is not someone who knows the dates of the beginning and the end of the Seven Years War, but someone who can come up with them in a couple of minutes.

The Median Encyclopedia cannot be identified with an extensive library containing thousands, even millions of volumes, because such a library, though it may not be commensurate with the Maximal Encyclopedia, nevertheless encompasses the Median Encyclopedias of exotic cultures, of past civilizations, and ideally all of the Specialized Encyclopedias, past and present. That library is instead merely an attempt to approximate the Maximal Encyclopedia, fatally incomplete because the Maximal Encyclopedia does not contain only those ideas that have been committed to the written word.

The fact that, not just the Maximal Encyclopedia, but even the “parody” of it represented by a normal library should provoke the vertigo of a knowledge so exaggeratedly extensive that nobody could ever capture or contain it in their own individual memories, leads us to the problem of memory and forgetfulness; the problem, in other words, of the Vertigo of the Labyrinth.

Since classical antiquity, the problem of the need to forget appears contemporaneously with the development of mnemonic techniques by which to commit to memory the maximum possible amount of information (especially in the centuries in which information was not as readily obtainable and transportable as it has since become, with the invention first of printing and subsequently of electronic devices). In
De oratore
(II, 74), for example, Cicero cites the case of Themistocles, who was gifted with an extraordinary memory. When someone offered to teach him an
ars memorandi,
Themistocles replied that his interlocutor would be doing him a greater service if he taught him how to forget what he wished to forget than if he taught him how to remember (“gratius sibi illum esse facturum, si se oblivisci quae vellet quam si meminisse docuisset”)
,
inasmuch as he would prefer to be able to forget something he did not wish to remember than to remember everything that he had once heard or seen (“cum quidem ei fuerit optabilius oblivisci posse potius quod meminisse nollet quam quod semel audisset vidissetve meminisse”).

Themistocles’s concern, incidentally, anticipates (and perhaps inspires) the anxiety of Borges’s Funes the Memorious, who remembered each and every detail of his experiences and perceptions, to such an obsessive and unbearable degree, down to the mere rustling of a leaf heard decades earlier, that he was practically unable to think.

The problem of the excess of memory explains why one of the terrors of the practitioners of mnemonics was that of remembering so much as to confound their ideas and forget practically everything as a result. It seems, in fact, that at a certain point in his life Giulio Camillo had to excuse himself for his state of confusion and for the gaps in his memory, citing as an explanation his protracted and frantic application to his theaters of memory. On the other hand, in his polemic against mnemotechnics, Cornelius Agrippa
(De vanitate scientiarum)
claimed that the mind is rendered obtuse by the memorative art’s resort to “monstrous” images and, being so overburdened, is led to madness. Hence, subterraneously parallel to the fortunes of the
ars memoriae,
the reappearance from time to time of the phantasm of an
ars oblivionalis
(see Eco 1987a and Weinrich 1997).

In the twentieth lesson (“Lettione XX”) of the
Plutosofia
of Filippo Gesualdo (1592), the “methods for oblivion” are reviewed.
⁴⁰
Gesualdo excludes mythical solutions such as drinking the waters of Lethe. He is aware that Johannes Spangerbergius in his
Libellus artificiosae memoriae
(1570)
⁴¹
had already reminded his readers that people forget from corruption, that is, from forgetfulness of past species, by diminution (old age and sickness), and from ablation of their cerebral organs. Likewise, it is obvious that we can forget by repression and suppression, drunkenness and drugs, but all these are cases of natural occurrences that must be studied and are studied elsewhere.
⁴²