And if that wasn’t enough to make us distrustful of language, we have only to see what Don Ferrante, with his extensive library, does with it when it comes to discussing the plague (chapter 37). After two chapters of nonverbal evidence, thanks to which the reader is by now fully informed, the Aristotelian librarian, with a few well-chosen syllogisms (the contagion cannot be a substance) and an equal number of paralogisms (the contagion cannot be an accident), succeeds in covering up reality to such a point that he can recognize it only when he will no longer be conscious of it. And, as just punishment for the arrogance of the word, his famous library “may well be still lying around on the secondhand bookstalls” (p. 700).
That discourses lie, or can never be sufficiently explicit, seems clear enough. If proof were required, we need only recall the fact that many readers, of Manzoni’s novel, with understandable indolence, skip all the examples of those inconclusive, ambiguous, and confused discourses, living parasitically off one other, that are the seventeenth-century edicts against the bravoes.
What is it then that, read correctly, does not lie? I would say, primarily, what is not oral, but visual, and, if it is oral, what belongs to the sphere of the paralinguistic, the suprasegmental, or the tonemic—the inflections, volume, and rhythms of the voice.
14.2. Popular Semiosis
We referred at the beginning to a natural semiosis as opposed to the semiosis of the word. It would be inexact to say that in Manzoni the classical distinction between motivated, unintentional, natural semiosis and conventional and arbitrary semiosis is clearly discernible. The best I can do, to define the first term of the opposition, is to call it “popular” semiosis. On the one hand we have verbal language, artificial (deceptive), at the beck and call of the powerful, on the other we have various systems of signs, which of course include the so-called natural signs, medical and atmospheric symptoms, physiognomic traits, but also those “languages” that are not natural, and are instead the effect of rules and habits, like dress, bodily posture, pictorial representations, the productions of folklore, liturgy—that somehow appeal to an ancestral and instinctive competence that belongs, not only to the learned, but also to the meek. Because of the natural nature of this competence, of the instinctive popularity of the encyclopedia to which it refers, we could call this type of semiosis, though it may be founded on rules and custom, the natural effect of a long-term deposit in the collective memory, not subject to the same rapid and reserved variations as the exercise of the verbal arts.
It is not that popular semiosis is more “true” that the verbal kind: we will see how and to what extent it too can give rise to misunderstanding and mendacity. But to the meek it seems more comprehensible than verbal language, and they therefore consider it more reliable. So much so that when they make a mistake or are deceived about these forms of signification, they appear more vulnerable, because they do not employ the same systematic diffidence toward them that they employ toward verbal language. Take what happens (and we will have more to say about this later) during Renzo’s visit to Azzeccagarbugli (Dr. Quibbler) or in the entire case of the plague and the anointers (untori).
The meek are suspicious of verbal language because it imposes a logical syntax abolished by natural semiosis, since the latter does not proceed by linear sequences but by “pictures,” or lightning “iconologemes.” Whereas the threads of the linguistic sequences may multiply ad infinitum, while the simple-minded become lost in this dark wood, natural semiosis on the other hand permits, or seems to permit, an easier access to the truth of things, of which it is a spontaneous vehicle: an authentic, instinctive gesture can reveal the intentional falsity of a previous gesture. The notary who arrests Renzo speaks to him encouragingly, Renzo distrusts the words but he could be taken in by the tone; the notary, however, has him handcuffed, and, seeing this sign, Renzo realizes without the shadow of a doubt that he is in trouble.
The object of the narration is this popular semiosis in all its forms, because from it and through it the reader, no less than the characters, learns what is really happening, in other words the story, beneath the veil of the discourse.
We constantly find, throughout the novel, this opposition between “natural” sign and verbal sign, between visual sign and linguistic sign. Manzoni is always so embarrassed by the verbal sign, so anxious to demonstrate his diffidence, that in all the instances of enunciation with which the novel is studded, he makes excuses for the way he is telling the story, whereas, when he assumes a veridictive tone, it is to point out the credit that must be given to a proof, a piece of evidence, a trace, a symptom, a clue, a finding.
His characters act in the same way: either they speak with the deliberate intention of using language to lie, confuse, or conceal the proper relationships between things, or they apologize and complain that they are incapable of saying what they know. Though Renzo wants his children to learn how to read and write, he cannot help calling these verbal and grammatological artifices birberie, “a scoundrelly business” (p. 719). Renzo is suspicious of the language par excellence, Latin, and the only time that he quotes it he makes up a Babelic version (siés baraòs trapolorum, p. 279). Only once, in the final chapter, when by that time he has made his peace with Don Abbondio, does he say that he accepts the Latin of the wedding ceremony and the mass, but that is because it is “an honest, holy sort of Latin … and besides, you clerical gentlemen have to read what’s written in the book” (p. 709). The good Latin of the liturgy is not a spoken language; it is chant, formula, psalmody, plainsong, gesture, but it does not say anything and therefore cannot be false. It is like an article of clothing, a wave of the hand, a facial expression: all signs (and “signs” [segni] is what Manzoni calls them over and over again) that are part of a natural semiosis.
At this point we would be advised to go through the entire novel to see if our hypothesis holds, whether it is true that at every stage there is this clear opposition between natural semiosis and language. It will be sufficient for now, however, to verify it in a few essential episodes.
14.3. The Meeting with the Bravoes
Don Abbondio has lived, and he is able to interpret many signs. He comes on the scene exhibiting the sign par excellence, the index finger, which he places in his breviary (per segno, as a sign, Manzoni naturally remarks). He passes an example of visual communication, a clumsily painted tabernacle, in which there can be no doubt that certain “long, snaky shapes with pointed ends … were meant by the artist and understood by the local inhabitants to be flames” (p. 27), and he sees “something he did not expect or want to see at all” (p. 28). Don Abbondio’s entire life, lived under the sign of tranquility, rests upon his faith in tried and true patterns of action, habitual frames and scenarios; and his tragicomedy begins the moment these expectations are frustrated—from then on he starts to see a number of things that he could never have expected, including a scoundrel who becomes a saint. Don Abbondio immediately recognizes the bravoes by “certain unmistakable signs”—their dress, their attitudes, their appearance—“which left no doubt about what they were” (p. 28). There follows the famous description of the bravoes, on the strength of which the reader will be able to recognize them every time they appear in the novel—except when they are described in words by the edicts, because from that confused set of injunctions, threats, and prescriptions the descriptions that emerge are vague and poorly defined.