by Umberto Eco
An abbreviated version of a paper given at the conference on "Relaciones literarias entre Jorge Luis Borges y Umberto Eco," held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (with the assistance of the Department of Italian Studies and the Emilio Goggio Chair of the University of Toronto).
ON CAMPORESI: BLOOD, BODY, LIFE
It is difficult to say who Piero Camporesi is. Over the course of fifteen books he has studied the various aspects of what is called "the material life"—our customs, behaviors, and in particular the "lower" functions, those connected with the body, food, blood, feces, sex—and thus he is certainly a cultural anthropologist. And yet one expects a cultural anthropologist to carry out "fieldwork," exploring the customs and myths of some civilization that still exists.
Camporesi, on the other hand, reads texts. He reads literary texts, or, rather, texts that belong to the history of literature. In fact, if you go and check what his academic field is you will see that he is a historian of literature (Italian literature, as is indicated in the list of faculty at Bologna University, but Camporesi makes frequent incursions into other literatures).
However, Camporesi reads and discovers texts that histories of literature have ignored, because they deal with everyday questions, moral or physical problems. Some official histories of literature have taken these texts into consideration, but from the point of view of their style, not of their content. Camporesi, on the other hand, has spent his life rediscovering and rereading them as witnesses to a way of life. Camporesi is therefore a cultural anthropologist who, in order to find material, does not go and study the men of today, whether "savage" or "primitive," but rather the (very civilized) men of the past.
I would like to explain myself better: Camporesi is the kind of man who goes into a room where there is a carpet with beautiful patterns and colors, which everyone has always looked at as a work of art; he takes it by the edge, turns it over, and shows us that the underside of that carpet was teeming with worms, cockroaches, grubs, a whole unknown and underground life. A life that nobody had ever discovered. And yet it was on the underside of the carpet all the time.
Camporesi has spent his life reading and rereading these forgotten texts, these texts that were staring everyone in the face but which no one had yet read in that way, to tell us how in past centuries the world was inhabited by vagabonds, charlatans, healers, thieves, murderers, madmen inspired by God, fake and genuine lepers. He has rediscovered the millennial dreams of a land of Cockaigne, the dreams of peoples who were oppressed by famine: he has rediscovered the rituals of Carnival, of witches' Sabbaths, of diabolical hallucinations.
He has brought to light texts that help us understand how in the past people had different ideas of their own bodies, and of food (Camporesi is a gourmet, and he understands what the smell of cheese or the taste of milk meant in those times). He has reread passages by religious preachers about the Inferno and its torments (which meant rediscovering a vision of the body as a site and occasion of pain, punishment, and endless suffering), he has looked at the way men ate, cooked, how they clicked their tongue when swallowing, how they heightened their sexual appetite through unguents and elixirs, how in the eighteenth century they welcomed those exotic and (at that time) marvelous beverages such as coffee and chocolate, how miners, weavers, barbers, surgeons, doctors, and healers worked, what image was held of the poor, the disinherited, the scoundrel, the thief, the murderer, and the desperado.
All the things Camporesi discovers were already there, as clear as day, in books that had piled up over the course of centuries. Camporesi simply knows how to reread these books.
He is, then, a historian of literature, who invites us to rediscover the least celebrated literary texts. He is a cultural anthropologist, but one who rediscovers the customs of ancient civilizations through the traces they have left in various texts.
It is difficult to say who Camporesi is. I confess that if I had to reread at a single sitting all the books he has written, I would be seized with nausea: they amount to a sequence of insights on the way bodies were loved, dismembered, fed, anatomized, devoured, rejected, humiliated.... Camporesi's cultural anthropology is shocking, ruthless, richly documented, and true. If someone decided to read all of Camporesi's books one by one, the reader would feel horror, satiety, and a desire to escape from this orgy of fibers, intestines, mouths, buboes, vomit, and greed. Camporesi's books must be sipped slowly, bit by bit, to escape the obsession with the body triumphant, with all its miseries and glories. Reading them all at once would be like eating nothing but cream cakes for an entire week, or swimming for a week in one's own excrement (which amounts to much the same).
The reader of this book will find just one aspect of this unbearable representation of the human body throughout the centuries: blood, its rites, myths, and reality. As we read this book we are seized by a slight (or not so slight) anxiety. We are made of bones, flesh, and blood. Blood is important. But nowadays it is analyzed only in laboratories, and we do not have a direct relationship with our blood. If we cut ourselves with a knife, we stop the bleeding with a bandage or with a styptic pencil. When a surgeon operates on us, and the blood flows, we are asleep. If there is an accident on the highway, we call the police and the ambulance, but we try not to see the blood. And yet, as Camporesi shows us, in past centuries blood was a daily reality, people knew its smell and its stickiness.
Are we really strangers to blood? Are we really that far from those centuries Camporesi tells us about? And if so why are there still so many Satanic sects, so many blood cults? One can even find them advertised on the Internet.
Have we solved the problem of our relationship with blood? True, we no longer have public ceremonies of dismemberment, where blood flowed in rivers. But as I write, the Italian newspapers feature accounts of a Madonna who weeps blood. A superstition, of course, but is there not also an element of superstition in those charismatic sects who order their faithful to carry out a bloodbath? What is the relationship between the Madonnas who weep blood and the taste for blood that hung over the slaughter of Sharon Tate?
That brings me to what I want to say: Camporesi reconstructs customs, feelings, fears, and desires that seemed ancient to us, and invites us to look inside ourselves, to understand the obscure relationship between rites and myths of the past and our own urges today, and to discover the ancient man inside us, we who use the Internet and think that blood only concerns surgeons and those who study new epidemics on our planet.
Perhaps Camporesi must be read in small doses, because if we read all his books, we would invariably ask ourselves: "Who are we, we civilized men?"
This is a short book. Let us read Camporesi in a homeopathic dose. That is enough for the moment. Later perhaps you will want to read his other books.
Written as a preface to Piero Camporesi, The Juice of Life (New York: Continuum, 1995).
ON SYMBOLISM
I know already that whatever I say about the topic of symbolism will be refuted in an erudite essay by my friend Sandro Briosi. Moreover, I have already devoted a number of articles to this subject, in particular the entry on "Symbolism" in the Enciclopedia Einaudi, which later became a chapter in my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Whether it is because of the aging process or the persistence of adolescent hubris, I do not believe I have changed my thinking on this question. To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in—sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.
In order not to repeat what I have already said on symbols, I would like to deal with a particularly topical aspect of this vexed question, namely, the phenomenon of symbolic paranoia. But in order to get to that point I will have to reiterate in part what I have already said on the subject, since omitting it would in t
he end create an excessive gap.
"Symbol" is a word I advise my students to use very sparingly and to note the contexts in which they find it, in order to decide the meaning it has there and not elsewhere. In fact, I no longer know what a symbol is. I have tried to define the symbolic mode as a particular textual strategy. But leaving aside this textual strategy—which I will return to later—a symbol can be either something very clear (an unambiguous expression with a definable content) or something very obscure (a polyvalent expression, which summons up a whole nebula of content).
The ambiguity of symbols comes from distant roots and is justified not only by the etymology of" symballein" but by the very practice its etymology denotes. For one could say of those two matching pieces of token that they will be seamlessly put together again the day someone places them in the presence of each other and makes them fit together, removing them from the free flow of semiosis and turning each of them once more into a thing in the world of things; and yet what is so fascinating about each of the two separated elements is the very absence of the other, for it is only on absence and in absence that the most overpowering passions thrive.
But let us leave aside etymology. The first quandary facing us is that in certain contexts, mostly scholarly ones, we use the expression "symbol" to indicate semiotic processes that are extremely clear and incontrovertible, objects that are not ambiguous but, rather, aim at being read in the most univocal way possible. The proof of this is the chemical symbol, or certain definitions of symbol that indicate, as opposed to the fluctuating openness of the icon, the conventionality of the linguistic or grammatical sign.
Of course, even symbols in logic have something of the openness of what, from Romanticism onward, we consider to be symbolic in the obscure and polyvalent sense of the term. For they represent variables, and as such they can be linked to highly unpredictable contents. Think, for instance, of an expression of symbolic logic such as "If p, then q." We have the impression that "p" and "q" can stand for anything we like, but that is not the case. Let us imagine that instead of "p" we put the entire Divine Comedy and in place of "q" the assertion that "six times six equals thirty-six." This proposition would appear to be true because of the laws of material implication. However, it is impossible to invert the order of the equation. If, for example, I placed the Divine Comedy in the position of "q," because the totality of assertions constituted by Dante's text is false from the point of view of truth-function (it is not true that a Florentine ascended to Paradise while still alive, or that Charon exists), then by the same laws of material implication the inference would be false, despite having a true premise. Whereas everything would work if in place of "six times six makes thirty-six" we assigned to "p" the entire text of Mein Kampf, in that, according to the famous paradox of material implication, false plus false makes true. Semiotic balancing acts aimed at finding a relationship between symbolic logic and the obscure symbols of Romantic poetics are therefore pointless. They each have different ways of functioning, different syntax, and different natures with regard to truth.
Similarly, the use Cassirer makes of the term in his theory of symbolic forms has nothing to do with the sense that we attribute to it: instead, his is a culturological version of Kantian transcendentalism, and even Euclidean geometry is a symbolic form, where we breathe the sense of the infinite and the undecideable only in the continuation of the parallel lines that his fifth postulate promises us in a way that is itself undecideable in terms of the truth of the statement.
We could stick to a sensible definition, which also applies to a whole series of daily experiences: the symbolic is identified by the existence, in every language, of levels of secondary meaning. This is the route taken by Todorov in his book on symbols. But to identify the symbolic with every instance of secondary meaning would lead us to confuse phenomena that are very different from each other.
There are two levels of meaning in any discourse that has two senses: the classic riddle is an example. But the two levels are structured, often on the basis of treacherous homonyms, according to two isotopies that can be traced without difficulty. Just like a message in code, the double sense needs to be deciphered, and once it has been decoded we have two senses that are indisputable, without any room for demurral.
Metaphor does not belong to the order of the symbolic. It can be open to multiple interpretations and can, as it were, be continued along the line of the second or third isotopy that it generates. But there are rules governing interpretation: that our planet is, as Dante says, "the threshing floor that makes us all so fierce" (Par. 22.151) might suggest thousands of poetic inferences, but it will not convince anyone, so long as there are cultural conventions we all agree on, that it is a place where peace and benevolence flourish. Moreover, I remain one of those who believe that the first signal of metaphorical usage consists in the fact that, taken literally, a metaphorical expression would appear false or weird, or nonsensical (the earth is not a threshing floor). This is not the case in the symbolic mode, which, as we shall see, conceals its own potential for meaning behind the deceptive appearance of something inexplicably obvious.
All the more reason, then, that allegory does not belong to the order of the symbolic either, since it is a continuous double sense based not on homonyms but on an almost heraldic codification of certain images.
The modern Western tradition is by now used to distinguishing allegory from symbolism, but the distinction is a rather late one: its articulation begins in Romanticism, and is particularly striking in Goethe's famous aphorisms (Maximen und Reflexionen):
Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept and the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept in the image is always to be considered circumscribed and complete in the image, and has to be given and to express itself through it (1.112).
Symbolism transforms the phenomenon into an idea and the idea into an image, in such a way that the idea in the image remains always infinitely effective and inaccessible and, even if articulated in every language, remains nevertheless inexpressible (1.113).
It makes a considerable difference whether the poet seeks the particular as a function of the universal or whether he sees the universal in the particular. In the first case we have allegory, where the particular is valid only as an example, as an emblem of the universal, whereas in the second case the true nature of poetry is revealed: the particular case is expressed without thinking about the universal or alluding to it. Now whoever catches this living particular seizes at the same time the universal without realizing it, or only realizing it later on (279).
True symbolism is that in which the particular element represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow but as a living, instantaneous revelation of the inscrutable (314).
The classical and medieval world, on the other hand, understood "symbol" and "allegory" to be synonyms. Examples of this abound, from Philo to grammarians such as Demetrius, from Clement of Alexandria to Hippolytus of Rome, from Porphyry to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and from Plotinus to Iamblichus, where the term "symbol" is also used for those didactic and conceptualizing representations that elsewhere would be called allegories.
It is true that scholars have described the world of the High Middle Ages as the "symbolic universe," a universe where, ac-cording to the words of Duns Scotus Eriugena (De Divisione Naturae, V.3), "nihil enim visibilium rerum corporaliumque est, utar-bitror, quod non incorporate quid et intelligibile significet" (there is, I believe, no visible or corporeal thing that does not signify something non-corporeal and intelligible). The world, then, is apparently, as Hugh of St. Victor would say later, "quasi quidam liber scriptus digito Dei" (like some book written by the finger of God). So must it not have been the case that that world where "nostrum statum pingit rosa" (a rose depicts our condition) (Pseudo-Alain of Lille, Rhythmus Alter) was a world populated by symbols?
According to Huizinga (chapter 15 of his Waning of the Middle Ages), the medieval symbolic universe w
as very close to the universe of Baudelaire's Corréspondences:
The medieval spirit was never so convinced of any great truth as it was of the words of St. Paul: "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem (now we see through a glass darkly, then we will see face to face)." The Middle Ages never forgot that any object would be absurd if its meaning were limited to its immediate function and its place in the world of phenomena, and that all things extend far into the world beyond. This idea is familiar also to us, as an unformulated sensation, when for instance the noise of the rain on the leaves in the trees or the light of the lamp on the table, in a moment of tranquillity, gives us a more profound perception than daily observation, which merely serves practical activity. It can sometimes appear in the form of a morbid oppression, which makes us see things already laden with personal menace or with a mystery that one ought to recognize but cannot. More often, however, it will fill us with the tranquil and reassuring certainty that our existence too participates in that secret sense of the world.
But this is the interpretation of someone who has already seen Verlaine and Rimbaud wandering, on the borders of his own country, as exiles searching for the absolute, listening to the sound of the same rain on the leaves and letting their hearts fill with languor, or hallucinating about the chromaticism of vowels. Was this really the symbolism of the High Middle Ages, not to mention the late medieval period?
In order to accept the Neoplatonic inheritance it was essential to conceive, as Dionysius the Areopagite does, an idea of the One as unfathomable and contradictory, where the divinity is called the "most luminous obscurity of the silence which arcanely teaches ... the most luminous darkness" (Theologia mystica, passim). It is true that for Dionysius the concepts of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful are applied to God, as though they were on a par with Light, Lightning, and Jealousy; but these concepts will be used to describe him solely in a "hypersubstantial" way: he may be these things, but in a way that is commensurately but also incomprehensibly more intense. What is more, Dionysius reminds us (and this is emphasized by his commentators), precisely in order to make clear that the names we attribute to God are inadequate, that it is important for them to be, as far as possible, different, incredibly unsuitable, almost provocatively offensive, extraordinarily enigmatic, as though the common quality that we are searching for between the symbolizing element and what is symbolized were indeed recognizable but only at the cost of inferential gymnastics and disproportionate proportions: and in order that the faithful, when naming God as Light, should not get the wrong idea that there exist celestial substances that are luminous and surrounded by haloes, it will be much better to name God using the names of monstrous beings, such as the bear or the panther, or through obscure dissimilarities (De Coelesti Hierarchia, 2).
