The stern polemic among transformationalists, generativists, and philosophers of language was finally settled thanks to the intervention of Montague (1977)25. In an exemplary essay on the poem of the owls, he posited a predicate P
***
P = being three owls on the chest of drawers who make love with the daughter of the doctor until the mother calls them
whereby the whole poem can be formalized (indexing a possible world wl):
P x w1
Note that, if we assume that in another possible world, w2, the predicate P can be stated as:
P = being the sole individual for whom life is a tale told by an idiot
King Lear can properly be represented as:
P x w2
—which demonstrates almost iconically the profound affinity among all works of art worthy of the name.
But, reacting against the hypersimplification of the Anglo-Saxon schools, Greimas and the Ecole de Paris, after having identified in the poem, as the fundamental level, four actants (Subject, Object, Sender, and Receiver) and having stressed the actorialization implicit in the anthroponyms owl, girl, chest of drawers, and mother, went on to identify two narrative programs: the first F [S1 → (S1 ∩ Ov)°] in which the owls fornicate with the value-object girl, and the second F [S2 → (S1 ∪ Ov] in which the mother separates the owls from their object of value. In the course of the first program, given a semiotic square on the order of
the girl (who does not know what the owls are doing to her) seems to play and not play (and is the victim of the owls' lie), while the owls find themselves as the addressees (destinataires) of a secret (they make love but do not "seem," and pretend to play doctor with the girl). In the course of the second narrative program the mother discovers the truth and identifies the seeming with the being of the owls. To skip over the intermediary passages of the gripping Greimasian analysis, at its conclusion the author discovers that the profound oppositions of the poem can be depicted on the square as follows:
***
But—and here lies the punctum dolens of this otherwise extremely acute study—Greimas in the end no longer knows what to do with the chest of drawers and decides to donate it to the Salvation Army.
The limits of this essay prevent us from considering countless other critical contributions to the fascinating problem of the owls. For the moment we will end by citing the recent essay of Emanuele Severino in which, with a luicid sense of Destiny and with far greater pregnancy and depth than are usually found in the application of the weary methods of every structuralism or formalism, the owls exercising their dominion over the doctor's daughter are seen as the very essence and the vocation of the West.
Only the arrival of the mother thwarts the owls' will to power; so she can be seen as a negation of the nihilism of the essence of the West, a reference to the "second corsair" and the "will of Destiny." But to accept this the owls must necessarily understand that only by renouncing dominion over the world can they comprehend the falsehood of the second utterance, according to which it cannot be true that it is not true that being is nothingness. What is willed is impossible, and the sense of truth is eternally what cannot now or ever succeed in being. Thus the initial Ambaraba and the final Ambaraba confirm, as scansion of an eternal return, the nothingness of becoming as the irruption of the unheard-of. And the mother only makes evident how predictable the unpredictable was for those who had and cherished a desire to anticipate, ante-capere, pre-capture the owls and their defeat. Whence, as at the beginning, always and again Ambaraba. The whole is unchangeable.
The chronicler of this critical adventure would like, if he might, to stop at this point, for chronicle is not tautology of the factual, but interrogation and drift; the supreme condition (interrogative arrest) remains that of going forward, and proceeding to return to the origin, and saying not to say, and not saying to be and to remain in the identity of the different. To the point where (the owls have spoken for us, or we for them, and/or the language for all, or silence for the word) no voice will be able to remain silent in the full ef-fability of its own void.
This, and only this, is what Poetry demands of us.
1982
Editorial Revision
These days, especially in the United States, implacable copy editors demand of authors not only stylistic revisions but even changes in plot, new endings, whatever commercial necessity dictates. But when we Italians recall—for example—the summary way the novelist-editor Elio Vittorini dealt with young writers some decades ago, can we honestly say that they ordered things so differently in the past?
Take the usually overlooked fact that the first version of a well-known poem by Philip Larkin originally went: "They do you harm, your father and mother." It was only the insistence of Larkin's editor that inspired the now-famous variant. And the first draft of Eliot's Waste Land opened: "April is the cruellest month. And March isn't all that great, either." Weakened in its impact by this peevish insistence on climatic details, the earlier text denied April any implied link with the rites of vegetation. As everyone knows, Ariosto at first submitted to his publisher a very brief poem that went: "Of women and knights, arms, loves, courtly rituals, and bold ventures I have nothing to say." And that was that. "How about developing it a bit?" the editor suggested. And Messer Ludovico, who was having enough trouble as civil governor of a remote Tuscan province, said, "What's the use? There are dozens of epics of chivalry already. Leave it. I want to urge poets to try new genres." And the editor replied, "Yes, of course, I understand, and, personally, I agree with you. But why not try approaching the form from another angle? With irony, for instance. Anyway, we can't sell a one-page book, particularly one with only two verses on the page. It looks like imitation Mal-larmé. It would have to be a limited, numbered edition. So unless we can get Philip Morris to sponsor it, we're screwed."
The Manzoni case is important. He began the first version of his novel with "That stretch of Lake Garda." It seems simple enough, but if he had stuck to that lake, he might have written the whole history of the Venetian Republic and never got beyond Riva. You can imagine how long it would have taken Renzo to get to Milan. He'd never have made it in time for the bread riot. And afterwards nothing significant would have happened to the poor youth. Lucia would have sought protection from the Nun of Rovereto, an abbess of impeccable behavior; the whole novel would have ended after a few trivial mishaps before the happy wedding.... Even Brother Cadfael has more exciting adventures.
The Leopardi story is still more serious. The wandering shepherd of Asia, in the first draft, cried: "What are you doing, Jupiter, in heaven? Tell me, what are you doing, silent Jupiter." Nothing wrong with that excellent planet, of course, but it is visible only during certain seasons and has hardly any emotional or metaphysical connotations. In fact, Leopardi's composition consisted of just a few verses, at the end of which the shepherd concluded that, as far as he was concerned, Jupiter didn't amount to much. Luckily, the editor's intervention saved the day: "Professor Leopardi, give me a break! Use the old imagination. Why not try one of Jupiter's satellites?" "Oh, please!...that would only make things worse. What would a wandering shepherd of Asia know about satellites? Maybe the moon ... at most. You want me to have him cry out to the moon? Really! I do have some self-respect." "Well, you never know. Run it through the machine."