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.
14.8. In Conclusion
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.
Let me make it clear from the outset, if it were not already obvious, that the primum that forms the starting point for any interpretation may also be a previous interpretation (as when, let’s say, a judge interprets the statements of a witness who gives his own interpretation of what took place). In such cases too, however, the previous interpretation (to be interpreted) is taken as a given, and that, and nothing else, is what is to be interpreted. If anything, the interesting problem is why the judge decides to start from that particular piece of evidence and not another. But this is precisely the theme of what follows.
15.1. Peirce Reinterpreted
Having made that clear, let me recap briefly what I said in K & P. First of all, I put this whole discussion into a section (2.8) entitled “Peirce reinterpreted.” This title was ambiguous since it could be understood in two different ways: as just one more interpretation of Peirce’s theory (but such, naturally, as to present itself as the only faithful and trustworthy reading) or as a free reformulation of some of Peirce’s suggestions.
The fact that what I was proposing was meant in fact to be a reformulation ought to have been clear from the section’s beginning, where I reminded the reader that Peirce, in endeavoring to steer a course between Ground, perceptual judgment, and Immediate Object, was attempting to solve, from the standpoint of an inferential view of knowledge, the problem of Kantian schematism. Since, however, Peirce himself had given not one but several different answers, I felt authorized to come up with one of my own, without claiming it was his. In fact, I wrote: “And so I don’t think it is enough to trust in philology, at least I have no intention of doing so here. What I shall do is try to say how I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words, I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only that way will I be able to understand what he meant to say” (K & P, p. 99).
Suffice it to say therefore that my proposals regarding primary iconism were all my own work and that, not being Peirce, I have the right to think differently from him, so I can’t be accused of saying something that cannot be justified from the standpoint of Peircean semiotics.
As the Italian proverb says, it’s not fair to throw a stone and then hide your hand in your pocket (tirare il sasso e nascondere la mano). Not only were my proposals constantly based on Peirce’s texts, but the problem at issue touched closely on one of the fundamental principles of his semiotics, his anti-intuitionism, a principle with which I am still inclined to agree. Finally, the object of my discourse was precisely that stage of the semiosic process that Peirce called Firstness, and it is undeniable that Peirce identified Firstnesss with the Icon (as he identified Secondness with the Index and Thirdness with the Symbol), and this explains my use of a term like “primary iconism,” despite the fact that for some time now I have been attempting to demonstrate that “iconism” is an umbrella term that covers a range of phenomena differing considerably among themselves.