Behind this semiotics there lies a metaphysics: reality exists, and can be investigated, so long as people follow “a method which has been recommended to them for long enough—the method of observing, listening, comparing and thinking before they begin to talk” (p. 583). This rule is not as simplistic as it might appear at first sight. It repeats in a popular form a precept of Galileo’s, which the positive and prudent characters in the novel, however, when confronted with everyday reality, put into practice in the light of common sense and not according to the dictates of the Accademia del Cimento. But when it comes to applying it to historical reconstruction, Manzoni shows us nonetheless how it works. Given that words are misleading, and what we know about things that happened in the past we know only through verbal accounts, Manzoni instinctively appeals to a precept already formulated by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana. When confronted with the various versions of the sacred books, all of them translations of translations, while the mystery of the original Hebrew text, by now hopelessly adulterated, remains unknown, all we can do is compare the versions among themselves, set them one against the other, and obtain from the one clarification of what is lacking in the other.
This is what Manzoni does, in dealing with the manuscript of the anonymous author, which has unreliability, so to speak, written all over it, given the verbal excesses with which, with typical baroque emphasis, it is embellished. Since he feels that behind this discourse (which is verbal) there lies “such a good story” (and a story is a fabula, a sequence of events or, as Aristotle would have said, the imitation of an action, something nonverbal), Manzoni decides “to search among the memoirs of the period, to satisfy ourselves whether that was really the way things happened in those days” (p. 21). And his investigation, in the form of a collation of texts, dissipates all doubt: though camouflaged by so much literary artifice, something must indeed have occurred.
The same procedure is followed with regard to the plague. Consider the opening of chapter 31: “The plague … really had arrived,”1 where that word “really,” a verificative intrusion of the narrative voice, liquidates once and for all any doubts to which the conflicting verbal texts might give rise. The thing in itself, the Dynamical Object, is there somewhere or other, or was there; our problem is to interpret the signs and make it reappear. But even here, as long as what we are dealing with are verbal accounts, “Every one of them leaves out essential facts which others record … every one of them contains material errors, which can be recognized and corrected with the help of one of the others, or of the few official documents that have come down to us in published or unpublished form. Often one writer gives us the cause of effects which we have already seen floating unconnectedly in the pages of another” (p. 564). And therefore, “examining and collating” the various sources we may hope, not only to identify the most salient facts, but also “to arrange them in the order in which they happened” (p. 565).
We are dealing here, not with Manzoni’s idea of historical truth or with his theory of knowledge, which is what it is. What we want to underscore is that, unless philological scrupulousness is exercised to the full, verbal accounts are deceptive by their very nature. The author Manzoni may well reconstruct the order of events through language, but the characters in the novel are either poor devils or persecutors of poor devils (only the positive characters are gifted with a kind of paraphilological, so to speak, intuition), and as a rule, in the novel, language is a bearer of wind, if not of lies.
Let us take a look at the passage which Manzoni (not Quine) devotes in chapter 27 to the impossibility, not so much of translation between one language and another, but of that daily process of interpretation by which an illiterate person tells the scrivener what he wants to say, the scrivener writes down what he understands to have happened or what he thinks should have happened, the reader recruited by the addressee interprets it for himself, and the illiterate addressee, seeking criteria for interpretation in the facts that he knows, distorts the message in his turn. This is an extremely effective representation of how, through successive interpretations, the message becomes completely garbled and is made to express, not only what the original sender did not mean to say, but also what the same message, as the linear manifestation of a text, set against a code, ought not to say, if a community of interpreters inspired by common sense and respect for the rules were to get together and agree on a publicly acceptable reading. Which is not what happens; and Manzoni’s description comes across as a portrait of a process of interpretive drift. With, in the end, “the two sides … at the same stage of mutual understanding as two medieval scholars might once have been after four hours of argument about the entelechy” (p. 497).
The peasant who cannot write, and needs something written, turns to someone who has learned to use a pen. He chooses him, as far as he can, among those of his own class; for he is either shy of approaching others, or does not trust them sufficiently. He tells the man what has gone before, with such clarity and logical order as he can muster, and then tells him, in the same style, what he wants to say. The literate friend understands part of what he says, and misunderstands another part; he advises him, suggests a couple of changes, and then says ‘Leave it to me!’ He takes up his pen, and puts the first man’s thoughts in literary form, as best he can; corrects them or improves on them, adds emphasis or takes it away, even leaves bits out, as seems best to him. For there is no getting away from it—a man who knows more than his neighbors does not care to be a passive tool in their hands, and once he has become involved in their affairs, wants to give them a little guidance. Moreover, the literate friend may not always succeed in saying what he means. Sometimes he says something quite different. (We professional writers of books have been known to do the same.) When such a letter reaches the other correspondent, who is equally ignorant of his ABC, he takes it to another learned man of the same caliber, who reads it and explains it to him. Then doubts arise over what the letter really means. The interested party, with his knowledge of what has gone before, maintains that certain words must mean one thing; but the man who is doing the reading, from his knowledge of the written language, claims that they must mean something else. In the end the man who cannot write must put himself in the hands of the of the man who can, and must charge him with the task of replying. The answer will be composed in the same fashion as the first letter, and will be submitted to the same sort of interpretation. (p. 497)