From the Tree to the Labyrinth (90 page)

In the course of his visit to the Unnamed in chapter 20, the way Don Rodrigo offers his respects is through a complex liturgy of greetings and gifts to the bravoes of his host, while the latter—whose profession is announced by room after room whose walls are covered with muskets, sabers, and halberds—at once, even before speaking, scrutinizes Don Rodrigo’s hands and his face.

In chapter 33, when Don Rodrigo experiences the first signs of the plague, he becomes aware of unequivocal internal symptoms, about which he cannot be deceived, and Griso immediately grasps his master’s state by observing his face. In a universe in which, as Manzoni has told us in the foregoing pages, the whole of society has vied with one another in ignoring or not comprehending the symptoms of the sickness—and was able to do so by translating the visual evidence into verbal reports—Don Rodrigo’s symptoms can only be interpreted in the correct way, because they cannot be verbally mediated. We are faced with the natural evidence of “a filthy bubonic swelling, of a livid purplish color” (p. 608). Language, however, immediately steps in to cover up the reality. Don Rodrigo lies, saying he feels well. Griso lies, encouraging him, with words, and professing his obedience, and all the while he is preparing to hand him over to the scavenging
monatti.
Don Rodrigo and Griso understand each other with looks and deceive each other with words.

But if so far we have tried to extrapolate from various episodes an implicit semiotics, Manzoni is far more explicit in the chapters on the plague (31 and 32).

When he recounts how the contagion spread, while the whole of society repressed the idea, and how, when the reality of the disease became undeniable, a human agent was invented and the figure of the “anointer”
(untore)
was constructed (in the sense in which the press constructs a monster or a conspiracy), Manzoni speaks of “public madness” (p. 581) and “a confused and terrifying accumulation of public folly” (p. 601). A delirium of reason, to be sure, but the way in which the author explains it is a description of a process of semiosic teratology, a chronicle of falsification of signifiers and of substitution of signifieds.

The first signs that appear (a number of corpses) are without a code—“symptoms [
segni
] quite unfamiliar to most of the survivors” (p. 566). It is Ludovico Settala, a doctor who has lived through the previous plague, who provides the code to interpret them. But when similar symptoms occur in Lecco, the commissioners send representatives who gather evidence—verbal evidence—from an ignorant barber, who provides a different, mendacious code: autumnal vapors from the marshes, the privations and torments caused by German troops.

Fresh proofs arrive: the “marks” (p. 567) of the pestilence are found in various localities. The usual reports are sent, in writing, to the Governor, who takes them for what they are worth and protests that he is too busy with the weightier affairs of war. For its part the population, passionately concerned to suppress its fears, compete among themselves in giving credit to the most bizarre codes, attributing the symptoms to the most unheard-of causes.

Finally somebody sees a bubo for the first time. In this case the signifier ought to be referred, according to a tried and true symptomatological tradition, to its proper signified. But the majority have only heard
talk
about the bubo, seen only by a few. On the other hand the edicts, which proliferate in an inane manner in the hope of forestalling contagion, add to the verbal confusion, and are as usual ignored. Furthermore, it seems that the news that arrives is insufficient, and “the rarity of the cases itself diverted most minds from the truth” (p. 572). Here begins a process that an epistemologist would attribute to the intrinsic weakness of any inductive method (how many cases are needed to justify the formulation of a law?) but which in fact brings into play a rhetorical insecurity, a perplexity over how consistent a part must be before it can represent the whole by synecdoche, or how evident an effect must be to be a good metonymy for the cause. However that may be, confronted with the uncertainty with regard to the symptoms, the doctors have an effective verbal stratagem to fall back on. They attribute to the imprecise symptoms “various names of ordinary diseases [which they had] ready to describe all the instances of plague that they were called on to treat, whatever signs or symptoms they might exhibit” (p. 572).

The opposition between symptoms and signs and names is clear. The natural visual signifier is hidden by a verbal signifier that prevents it from being recognized.

Still, there are persons who, in spite of everything, are able to “see” the approaching catastrophe. And they are branded with the “name” of enemies of their country. The case of Ludovico Settala, who risks lynching for insisting on saying what he had seen, is typical. Against him there arise the negligent doctors, who, faced with “those sinister livid patches and bubonic swellings,” take refuge in “a mere fraudulent play on words” and speak of “pestilent fever” (p. 574).

At this point a kind of new rhetorical figure comes into play, which articulates the universe of natural semiosis. The deaths of personages who are well-known (by antonomasia) become more convincing than the deaths already known. Somehow or other what had so far been
said
now becomes of necessity
seen,
in the form, if nothing else, of a conspicuous absence.

In this tangle of visual signs confused by verbal definitions, it finally occurs to someone that only public visual proof can combat the manipulations of the word. “At the time of day when the crowd was at its thickest, in the midst of the throng of carriages, riders and people on foot, the corpses of that family were carried, by order of the commission of health, to the same cemetery. They were borne naked on a cart, so that the crowd could see the manifest signs of the plague on their bodies.… There was more belief in the existence of the plague after that” (p. 582).

At this point it would seem that the plague should become self-evident and its symptoms begin to be interpreted correctly. But the manipulations of a false conscience are reproduced on another level. No longer able to deny the existence of the evil, the deniers try to hide the causes of the contagion (so successfully that the Cardinal will be obliged to hold a solemn public propitiatory procession, thereby increasing, of course, the opportunities for infection). The promotion of the myth of the anointers has begun.

At the end of chapter 31, Manzoni himself sums up what has taken place in this process of semiosic pestilence as an action performed by the spoken language (which defines and names) upon the natural expressivity of natural signs, already abundantly misunderstood on account of the preceding encrustations of passion that had obfuscated right reason.

(i) “In the beginning, then, there had been no plague, no pestilence, none at all, not on any account. The very words had been forbidden.”

(ii) “Next came the talk of ‘pestilent fever’—the idea being admitted indirectly, in adjectival form”: the signifier is modified to avoid evoking its proper signified.

(iii) “Then it was ‘not a
real
pestilence’—that is to say, it was a pestilence, but only in a certain sense.” And now the content has begun to be modified.

(iv) “Last of all, it became a pestilence without any doubt or argument—but now a new idea was attached to it, the idea of poisoning and witchcraft, and this corrupted and confused the sense conveyed by the dreaded word” (pp. 582–583). And here, as can be seen, a radical transformation has taken place, whereby the word, which has as its content a symptom that refers to a cause
p,
is made to correspond to a symptom which ought to have as its content a cause
q.
A total alteration of the meaning, using the possibility language offers of modifying the natural expressivity of visual signs and natural symptoms.

Here it appears that, instead of arranging words to mask the visual evidence, the bad conscience of society begins to operate through the staging of visual evidence. Some people “thought they saw” someone anointing a partition in the cathedral; the partition was brought, along with several pews, outside the church, where it was decided to give them a wash. But “the sight of that mass of woodwork had a very frightening effect on the crowd” and “it was generally said and believed that all the benches in the cathedral had been anointed” (p. 579). A curious process of amplification: if previously many deaths had not provided a sufficient synecdoche for the disease, now a few planks of wood provide a more than sufficient synecdoche for the entire temple, and for the general pollution. The following morning “another sight, stranger still and more significant” appeared. If the pews outside the church door had been an accidental mise-en-scène, now this “strange sort of yellowish or whitish filth,” daubed over doors and walls, whether a practical joke or an act of terrorism, is quite clearly an intentional mise-en-scène.

This is where the folly or madness really gets going. Manzoni knows, or suspects, that the history of this delirium is not just a psychiatric history, but the history of a machination, or at least the history of a metastasis of demented semiosis, since he declares that “the most interesting and instructive aspect that we can study, when considering human errors—especially those of the crowd—is their mode of progression, the shapes they take on and the methods they adopt to obtain entry into the minds of men and dominate them” (p. 580). It seems to me that there is no better way to indicate a process of formation of public opinion through a distorted interpretation of signs, whether it occur for casual and instinctive reasons, or as the result of a project or “wicked plot” (p. 579).

Prepared for by the protracted deceit of the experts, who under various pretexts had denied the contagion, and by the simple fear of the uninformed, who out of natural passion had attempted to suppress the evidence, the popular semiosic ability, which throughout the course of the novel has combated the word of the schemers, has become definitively corrupted. The story of the anointers is a story of collective dementia, in which a distorted meaning is attributed to every symptom, or in which every fact, every gesture, forcibly isolated from its everyday context, from the customary scenarios, is transformed into a symptom of a single obsessive signified. People recognized as strangers by their dress are seen as anointers, an elderly man is lynched because he has dusted a pew, Renzo is practically lynched because he knocks on a door. Someone asks directions, removing his hat, and people immediately suspect that he has the powder he plans to throw at his victim in the brim of his hat; someone else touches the facade of the cathedral to see what the stone feels like, and the crowd charges at him like a wild beast …

The system of normal expectations collapses. Don Abbondio, seeing the bravoes, had seen something unexpected, because he knew what he was supposed to see and what, if he saw it, would be a harbinger of bad news. Now no one can see anything anymore, no one expects anything; or rather, they see and they expect, they expect and therefore they see, always the same sign. A single signifier for a single signified. That is what obsession is like; that is public madness.

Verbal language versus popular semiosis? To invalidate this conjecture all we have to do is to observe how Manzoni, in his novel, celebrates the defeat of the word and the triumph of popular semiosis, precisely by means of the narrative word. But this objection strikes at the implicit semiotics of Manzoni, who is not celebrating the limits of language, but demonstrating how an author can set forth (in words, of course) his pessimistic conception of the power of the word. A happy contradiction, that becomes somewhat less contradictory when we realize that every novel presents itself as a machine (necessarily linguistic) which strives to bring to life, linguistically, signs that are not themselves linguistic, signs which accompany, precede, or follow language, with their own instinctive and violent autonomy.

This ability that verbal language has to evoke that which is not verbal has a name in rhetorical terminology: hypotyposis.

Since we cannot avoid using words (“talking—just talking, by itself—is so much more easy than any of the other activities mentioned, or all of them put together, that we human beings in general deserve a little indulgence in this matter” [p. 583]), we will say that Manzoni’s
I promessi sposi
succeeds in elaborating and exemplifying its own implicit semiotics, and presenting itself as a verbal celebration of popular semiosis, only thanks to an uninterrupted chain of examples of hypotyposis.

A linguistic machine that celebrates itself by negating itself, the novel tells us something about other ways of signifying, and it suggests that, as a verbal object, it is at the service of these other ways, because it is a narration not of words but of actions, and even when it narrates words it narrates them to the extent to which they have assumed the function of actions.

This essay originally appeared in Manetti (1989) and was republished in Eco (1998c).

1
. [
Translator’s note:
This is a literal translation of Manzoni’s Italian. Bruce Penman’s English translation (Manzoni 1972), which we have otherwise followed and to which subsequent page numbers in the text refer, does not follow Manzoni’s precise wording at this point and omits the adverb “really”
(davvero).
]

15

The Threshold and the Infinite

Peirce and Primary Iconism

This essay was written in response to a number of objections raised by the section in my
Kant and the Platypus
(hereinafter
K & P
) in which I proposed the notion of “primary iconism” to explain the perceptual processes. I hypothesized a starting point or
primum,
which was at the origin of all subsequent inferential processes. The fact that I insisted on this point reflected a concern first evidenced in 1990 with my
Limits of Interpretation
and which became clearer in philosophical terms in the opening chapter of
K & P,
where I postulated a “hard core of Being.” The nucleus of my thesis was that, if and precisely because we are arguing for a theory of interpretation, we cannot avoid admitting that we have been
given
something to interpret.