1. The passage quoted here and subsequent quotations from the same author were presumably translated by Weaver from the Italian version cited by Eco, namely, Gabriel de Foigny. La terra australe, trans. Maria Teresa Bovetti Pichetto. Napoli: Guida, 1978. No page references are provided.
2. English translation: D’Alembert (1963: 46–49).
3. See “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in Borges (1964: 103).
4. See “Doctor Brodie’s Report” in Borges (1972: 117).
5. See “Tlön, Ucbar, Orbis Tertius” in Borges (1962: 8).
12
The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre
In the story of the centuries-old search for a perfect language, a central chapter must be devoted to the rediscovery of a series of matrix languages or of a primordial mother tongue. For many centuries, the leading claimant for the position of mother tongue was Hebrew. Subsequently, other candidates would appear upon the scene (even Chinese, for example), but finally the search would lose its utopian fervor and its mystical tension as the science of linguistics was born and, with it, the Indo-European hypothesis (see Eco 1993: ch. 5).
For a long time, though, the idea of a primigenial language not only had a historical significance (rediscovering the speech of all mankind before the confusion of Babel) but also a semantic one. In fact, this primigenial language was supposed to incorporate a natural relationship between words and things. The primigenial language also had revelatory value for, in speaking it, the speaker would recognize the nature of the named reality. This tendency, which Genette (1976) has called “mimologism,” has an ancient and distinguished ancestry in Western tradition, its prime example being the Cratylus of Plato. The idea—already contested in the two previous centuries through the hypotheses known as Epicurean and polygenetic—underwent a crisis in what Rosiello (1976) would have called “the linguistic of enlightenment.” But this crisis occurred at the level of the official (which is another way of saying victorious) philosophical and linguistic culture, and the notion survived in many mystical and philosophical trends and has resurfaced even today in the work of those whom the nineteenth-century French tradition had begun calling les fous du langage.
I am indebted to Andrew White (1917: 2:189–208) for some suggestions on the way the mystical version of the monogenetic hypothesis was prolonged in the theosophical ambience of the late eighteenth century (in Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, De l’esprit des choses, for example) and among the French Catholic legitimists such as De Bonald (Recherches philosophiques, III, 2) and Lamennais (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion). White also quotes Joseph de Maistre, an alluring clue, because Maistre represents a fusion of the themes of classic legitimism (of which he can be considered the initiator) and those of the theosophism hovering in the circles of Scottish and Templar masonry to which Maistre had at first belonged, though he broke with them for reasons of religious orthodoxy (reaffirming the authority of the Church and the pope against that of any clique of Illuminati).
In a debate on the subject, Raffaele Simone suggested that much of the search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words an expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly disappointed. This is certainly true. In the legitimist tradition, the assertion of the sacrality of language aims not so much at reconstructing a primigenial language as at rediscovering the traces of our natural languages. The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all the Epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.
Since it is linguistically difficult to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things (not least because of the plurality of languages), the way followed by the monogeneticists does not differ much from that of the most fanciful etymologists of the past, Isidore of Seville at their head. The fact that many of these etymologies also reappear in some contemporary thought (in Heidegger, for example) only indicates the toughness of the dream, or perhaps an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.
If we take a look at the text in which Maistre discussed at greatest length the nature of languages, his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, we see that the first declarations simply repropose what is found even today among authors who hark back to tradition as the source of all knowledge, opposing the degenerate learning of a secularized culture, “modern,” “enlightened,” or “scientistic.”
Listen to what wise antiquity has to say about the first men; it will tell you that they were marvelous men, and that beings of a superior order deigned to favor them with the most precious communications. On this point there is no discord: initiates, philosophers, poets, history, fable, Asia and Europe, speak with one voice. Such agreement of reason, revelation, and every human tradition forms a demonstration that cannot be contradicted. So not only did men begin with science, but with a science different from our own, and superior to our own because it had a higher origin, which is what made it more dangerous. And this explains why science was always considered mysterious in principle, and why it was always confined to the temples, where the flame finally burned out when it could serve no purpose but to burn. (Second Dialogue 41)
But just when readers might expect proof of this theory, they always find themselves confronted by inconsistent, circular arguments. Maistre recalls that Julian the Apostate in one of his discourses called the sun “the seven-rayed god,” and he wonders where the emperor found such a singular attribute. His answer is that the idea could have come to him only from the ancient Asiatic tradition to which he recurred in his theurgic renovation. Maistre cites, for example, “the sacred books of India,” which speak of seven virgins gathered to celebrate the advent of Krishna when the god suddenly appears to them, inviting them to dance. When the virgins object that they have no dancing partners, the god divides into seven, giving each virgin her own Krishna.
There is really nothing so strange about Julian’s choice of imagery, inasmuch as the hebdomad, the mystique of the number seven, is found in many ancient cultures, and Julian could have absorbed it either from Indian sources or from others. But what indicates a strange disjuncture of thought is the series of examples that follows hard upon Maistre’s evocation of Julian. First of all, he notes, the “true” system of the universe was known from most remote antiquity, as is shown by the pyramids of Egypt, which are rigorously oriented according to astronomical criteria. Then, whether as proof or consequence of this fact, we observe that a people like the Egyptians, who could create colors that have lasted thirty centuries, raise boulders against every law of mechanics to a height of six hundred feet, carve in granite birds of all known species, could hardly fail to excel in every other art, and therefore they must have known things of which we are ignorant. Finally, in Asia, consider the ancient astronomical observations carved on the walls of Nimrud, which rose on land still damp from the Flood. All this drives one—notice the conclusion—to ask oneself, “So where will we place the so-called times of barbarism and ignorance?” (42).
We cannot see a direct rapport between the metaphor of the seven rays and the pyramids, unless it is to be found in the fact that different myths and archetypes tried to explain astronomical phenomena and furnished a pre-Galilean version of a world written in mathematical characters. But to confirm the existence of these trends Plato would again suffice, with his Timaeus. If anything, it is the knowledge that even more ancient images circulated in African and Asian culture that explains why Julian followed this tradition. Whether he followed it or revitalized it, however, this does not show that he was its direct and authorized heir or that the tradition spoke any truth.