From the Tree to the Labyrinth (16 page)

At this point, we understand how, every time we construct a local “ontology” in order to disambiguate a proposition in a given context (as we observed in paragraph 1.7), we are performing
ad hoc
the same operation that a culture performs in constructing its own Median Encyclopedia. We prune, we narcotize, we eliminate some notions, retaining only those we consider pertinent.

How do we go about identifying—in our efforts to pinpoint the appropriate context—the notions to prune? We consider the context as if it was a text, and we behave exactly as we behave when we are trying to understand a text. A text (in addition to being a tool for inventing and remembering) is also
a tool for forgetting
, or at least for rendering something latent.
⁵⁴

Classical mnemonics could not be used for forgetting because a mnemonic technique is a
mutilated semiotics
. A semiotics in the Hjelmslevian sense is a system that—in addition to a lexicon—also contains rules for syntactic combination, and allows us to develop discourses, or, in other words, texts. A mnemonic technique on the other hand was more like a simple dictionary or a repertory of significant units that cannot be combined among themselves. A mnemonic technique did not facilitate the articulation of mnemotechnical
discourses
.

But if a mnemonic technique, insofar as it is a semiotics, cannot be used to forget, a semiotics that is not a mnemonic technique can produce forgetfulness or cancellation at the level of the textual processes themselves.

If in a semiotics the correlation is not based on simple automatic equivalence (
a
=
b
), but on a principle of inferentiality, however elementary (if
a
, then
b
), the meaning of an expression is a potentially huge package of instructions for interpreting the expression in different contexts and drawing from it, as Peirce would have it, all the most remote inferential consequences, in other words, all its interpretants. On these bases we ought then to know in theory every possible interpretant of an expression, whereas in practice we know (or remember) only the portion that is activated by a given context. Interpreting the expression in context means magnifying certain interpretants and narcotizing others, and narcotizing them means removing them temporarily from our competence, if only for the duration of the current interpretation (cf. Eco 1979, 1984).

If the interpretation of a sign, as Peirce maintained, always makes us learn “something more,” this something more (in a given context) is always learned by giving up something less, that is, by excluding all the other interpretations that could have been given of the same expression in another context.

If, as a matter of principle (and on the strength of the ideal global encyclopedia), knowing how many miles Paris is from Bombay is part of the meaning of the name
Paris
, when we are reading
Les Misérables
we learn many things about Paris, but we are expected to forget the distance (and to act as if we had forgotten it—if we already knew it) between Paris and Bombay.

There are many cases in which, in the course of the interaction between a reader and a text, instances of forgetfulness occur, encouraged in some way by the text itself. If, as I recalled in my
Role of the Reader
(1984), a text is a strategy that aims at stimulating a series of interpretations on the part of a Model Reader, there may be texts that presuppose, as part of their strategy, a presumption of forgetfulness on the reader’s part and direct and encourage it. Often the text wants something to be read, so to speak, in a subliminal fashion, and then consciously disregarded as being of little relevance. The most explicit case of encouraged forgetfulness is provided by the mystery novel. To cite one of the most famous examples,
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie, it is no secret that the novel intends to surprise the reader in its denouement with the revelation that the narrator is the murderer. To make the revelation still more telling, the author must convince readers that they fell into the trap not as a result of the author’s manipulation but because of their own naiveté (in other words, the author wants readers to admire the cleverness with which the narrator not only makes them fall into the trap, but then insists that they assume the responsibility themselves for having done so). To this end, in the final chapter, entitled “Apologia,” the novel’s first-person narrator assures the reader that he had not in fact kept anything from him. “
I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following?
” And at this point the narrator—and with him the author—lists a series of rapid allusions, all present in the text, that the reader can only have forgotten due to their strategical irrelevance, but which, had they been interpreted along the lines of a syndrome of suspicion, would have anticipated the revelation of the truth. Naturally the reader could not be expected to harbor suspicions vis-å-vis the narrator, and herein lies the relish of the game, but the entire novel appears to be the very epitome of textually encouraged forgetfulness. The Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia rightly observes, in his afterword to Christie’s novel in the Mondadori “Oscar del Giallo” series, that “Poirot arrives at the conclusion that Dr Sheppard is guilty by reading everything that the narrator has to tell us; in other words, by reading the same story we are reading.” But Poirot is more than Christie’s model reader, he is her accomplice and he does what she did not want her model reader to do.

A series of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares,
Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi
, appears to be based on the same procedure, but taken to the nth degree, indeed, I am tempted to say, to the point of metaphysical parody. Listening to the stories and reports of a series of bizarre and unreliable characters, Don Isidro, who is serving a sentence of life imprisonment, never fails to solve the mystery, and he succeeds because he recognizes as pertinent a certain piece of information mentioned in the account. With the result that the reader cannot help wondering why he too was not a winner, since he was dealt the same narrative cards as Don Isidro. Borges’s subtlety lies in the fact that the details accumulated in the story are so many, and all of them given the same degree of emphasis (or, if you will, the same zero degree of emphasis), that there was no apparent reason for the reader to recall detail A rather than detail B. Indeed, there is no apparent reason why detail A should be stressed as pertinent by Don Isidro. The fact is that Don Isidro is a monster, even more so than Borges’s other character Funes the Memorious, because not only does he never forget anything, but within the flux of memories that obsesses him he is able to single out the one detail that counts for the purposes of the solution.

In point of fact, by presenting a character who remembers everything, Borges’s text speaks to us meta-narratively of a reader who does not remember anything, and of a text that does everything in its power to induce him to forget.

All the texts we have cited induce forgetfulness through a cluttered over-abundance of details. No one can remember everything was in Leopold Bloom’s drawer as described in the penultimate chapter of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Given that what we have is a microcosm containing everything, no one can say what was in there (unless they have read the chapter several dozen times—though in that case we would be dealing with mechanical memorization, as when someone learns a poem by heart).

It may be argued that the forgetfulness produced by a text is transitory, a collateral effect, ascribable to considerations of interpretive economy. True, one cannot forget an existential tragedy by immersing oneself in a good novel (at best one’s distraction is of limited duration), but it is equally true that certain individuals claim to have dulled the ache of a painful memory by devoting themselves heart and soul to an engrossing task. Be that as it may, what a text does is not what Gesualdo had in mind when he laid out a series of impossible techniques for eliminating a particular item from our memory. Nevertheless, when we re-read the passage quoted in
section 1.9.2
, we realize that Gesualdo, without being aware of it, was describing metaphorically the way a text somehow makes us put into parentheses (in other words, forget, at least for as long as we continue reading) what it has no intention of speaking about.

A text in fact obscures that immense portion of the world it is not concerned with; it paints it over with a coat of whitewash; it substitutes for the images we have of the world those that belong exclusively to its own possible universe, so that, with Gesualdo’s “great care and mental effort,” it is the latter that are imprinted and remain dominant in our imagination. And still more so if we read the text (or look at it, if it is a visual text) as though we were isolating ourselves with it or in it “in the dark and quiet of the night,” in such a way that “the intense and vivid idea” of the fresh images “drives out the first Ideas.” A text, if it absorbs our attention, cancels the world that existed prior to the text, about which it is silent, to which it makes no reference, as if its discourse were “a great storm of winds, hail, dust, ruined buildings and places and temples, a flood that leaves everything in a state of confusion,” as if, with respect to the external world, it were “an Enemy … who, with a troop of armed companions, enters and passes impetuously among the places and with scourges, cudgels and other weapons drives out the likenesses, assaults the people, shatters the images, puts to flight through doors and windows all of the animals and animate persons who were in the places,” and finally presents us with another universe “clear, calm and quiet.”

We might analyze the various cultures of the past by considering the texts that helped eliminate a series of notions from their Median Encyclopedia. It was the rigoristic polemic of so many Fathers of the Church that led to the suppression of so many pagan texts, texts that the Renaissance would subsequently rediscover—irony of the processes of cancelation!—in the same monastic libraries where they had nonetheless been preserved. It was the excess of texts of
histoire événementielle
that led to the neglect of the data for a history of material relations, data that only at considerable cost subsequent schools of historiography were able to recover in the byways of the Maximal Encyclopedia.

To conclude, if cultures survive, one reason is because they have succeeded in reducing the weight of their encyclopedic baggage by placing so many notions in abeyance, thus guaranteeing their members a sort of vaccination against the Vertigo of the Labyrinth and the Themistocles/Funes complex.

The real problem, however, is not the fact that cultures
pare down
their encyclopedias (which is, in any case, a physiological phenomenon), but rather that what has been placed in abeyance can always be recovered. For this reason the regulatory idea of a Maximal Encyclopedia is a powerful aid to the
Advancement of Learning
—and having to confront ever and anon the Vertigo of the Labyrinth is often the price we must pay for calling into question the laziest of our ontologies.

1
. Probably Aristotle does not include difference among the predicables because it appears when, registered along with genus (
Topics
I 101b 20), it constitutes the definition. In other words, definition (and therefore species) is the result of the conjunction of genus and difference: if we add definition to the list there is no need to include difference; if we include species there is no need to include definition; if we include genus and species there is no need to include difference. Furthermore, Aristotle does not list species among the predicables because species is not predicated of anything, being itself the ultimate subject of every predication. Porphyry will insert species in the list because species is what is expressed by definition.

2
. On this topic Lovejoy (1936) remains fundamental.

3
. Aristotle says that accidents too are susceptible of definition, though only with reference to a substance; see
Metaphysics
VII 1028a 10–1031a 10.

4
. As for the proprium, it belongs to a species, but is not part of its definition. There are different kinds of proprium—one that occurs in a single species but not in every one of its members (like the healing ability in humans); one that occurs in an entire species but not only in that species (like having two legs); one that occurs in the entire species and only there, but only at a given moment in time (like getting grey as you get older); and one that occurs in one and only one species and at all times (like the ability to laugh in humans). This last type is the one most frequently cited and has the relatively interesting characteristic of being reciprocable with the species (only humans laugh and those who laugh are all human). Nevertheless, the proprium is not essential to the definition because laughter is only an occasional behavior, and therefore an “accident,” and does not characterize human beings in a constant and necessary manner.

5
. Medieval tradition takes up this idea out of mere fidelity to the traditional example, just as all of modern logic assumes, without further verification, that the evening star and the morning star are both Venus.

6
. We are ignoring the fact that four-leggedness must be a proprium and not a difference, seeing that elsewhere two-leggedness is given as an example of a proprium.

7
. For a clear and unequivocal clarification of this point, see
Posterior Analytics
(II, 13, 97a 16–25).

8
. It might be objected that
two-legged
or
not the sum
are indeed differences, but not specific; but we saw a moment ago in
Figure 1.4
that specific differences such as
rational
may also occur twice (at least) under different genera.