by Umberto Eco
Now this way of speaking, which Dionysius himself calls "symbolic" (e.g., De Coelesti Hierarchia, 2 and 15), has nothing to do with that illumination, that ecstasy, that rapid, lightning vision that all modern theories of symbolism see as peculiar to a symbol. The medieval symbol is a way of approaching the divine, but it is not the epiphany of something numinous, nor does it reveal to us a truth that can be articulated solely in terms of myth and not in terms of rational discourse. Rather, it is the preamble to a rational discourse, and its duty is to make clear, at the point when it seems didactically useful and appropriate to its role as preamble, its own inadequacy, its own (almost Hegelian) destiny to become real by a subsequent rational discourse. In other words, the medieval world was anxious about symbols, medieval man felt dismay, fear, and reverence before the bear and the panther, before the rose and the oak, but these were pagan remnants. Not only theology but medieval bestiaries themselves are firmly intent on deciphering these symbols, on turning them into metaphors or allegories, to stop their fluctuation.
In any case, the same thing happens with what Jung calls archetypes, which I would put under the broader category of what I term, using a metaphor, "totemic objects," which are imperious and stimulating in their very enigmatic nature. Jung was the first to explain how as soon as these archetypal images fascinate the mind of the mystic, dragging him toward an infinite drift of sense, some religious authority immediately intervenes to gloss them, subject them to a code, make them become a parable. And at that point the totemic object becomes a symbol in the more banal sense of the term, the one that makes us call the badges of political parties symbols, on which we mark our (often automatic) X of agreement. Endowed with connotative appeals at various levels (in the sense that one can become attached to or die for a flag, a cross, a crescent moon or a hammer and sickle), they are there to tell us what we have to believe in and what we have to reject. The Sacred Heart of the Vendée was no longer the same Sacred Heart that had dazzled Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. It had changed from being the experience of something numinous to a political flag.
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This idea of the symbol as an apparition that refers to a reality that cannot be expressed in words, a reality that is contradictory and ungraspable, becomes established in the West only with the spread of hermetic writings, and requires a very "strong" Neoplatonism. But as soon as the excitement caused by the flashes of the divine in Hermes Trismegistus's obscure discourse becomes a fashion, a style, a "koine," here too there suddenly emerges the desire, previously medieval, now Hermetic, to capture the symbol and give it a socializable sense.
It is curious how the baroque age was the most fertile in the production or, rather, invention of totemic objects, namely, its blazons, devices, and emblems; and it is curious how the baroque world spoke of them as symbols every time it could. Syntagma de Symbolis would be the title of one of the most famous commentaries on Alciati, Bocchi would write of Symbolicarum Quaestionum, Picinelli of Mundus Symbolicus, and Scarlatino of Homo Figuratus et Symbolicus. Emanuele Tesauro explains what these symbols are in his Cannocchiale aristotelico: "A symbol is a metaphor signifying a concept through some Figure which is visible."
In this celebration of symbols there always clearly emerges a dogmatic desire to write commentaries, in other words, to decipher. Venerable volumes astonish us with their iconological baggage made up of apparently oneiric images: these are real illustrious corpses of icons, a paradise for a psychoanalyst who does not want to read the gigantic accompanying commentary. But if we do turn to the commentary, it leads us step by step, and with considerable redundance, toward the most exact (though also the most clever) deciphering of every figure, in order to draw out a single moral lesson.
In this context the enterprise of Athanasius Kircher is quite ridiculous, aiming as it does to rediscover the mysteries of ancient Egyptian writing. It has a privileged position, since it sits opposite something that resembles a device or emblem, but one for which no Alciati, Valeriano, or Ferro has supplied the interpretation. These are old and well-known images, and once they are handed down no longer by a Christian (or pagan) tradition but by Egypt's own divinities, they acquire a sense that is different from the one they had in moralizing bestiaries. References to scripture, now absent, are replaced by allusions to a vaguer religiosity, one dense with mysterious promises. The hieroglyphics are seen as initiatic symbols.
These are for Kircher "symbols," and therefore expressions of a hidden, unknown content, one that has many meanings and is rich in mystery. Unlike a conjecture, which allows us to move from a visible symptom to some definite cause, "a symbol is a mark signifying some more arcane mystery, which is to say that the nature of a symbol is to lead us mentally, through some similarity, to the understanding of something very different from things that are offered to our external senses; something whose nature is to be concealed or hidden beneath the veil of an obscure expression [...]. It is not formed bywords, but is expressed only through marks, characters, figures" (Obeliscus Pamphilius, II, 5, [>]).
These are "initiatic" symbols because the fascination of Egyptian culture is based on the fact that the knowledge it promises is enclosed within the unfathomable and indecipherable circle of an enigma in order to remove it from the profane curiosity of the vulgar crowd. Furthermore, Kircher reminds us that a hieroglyph is a symbol of something sacred (and in that sense all hieroglyphs are symbols, but not vice versa), and its power is due to the fact it is not accessible to the uninitiated.
If it were accessible, the baroque age would have had to invent its own writing of the unfathomable. That is what Kircher wants, and he delights in this with delirious enthusiasm in the letter to the emperor that opens his Oedipus Aegyptiacus.
I parade before your eyes, most sacred Caesar, the polymorphous reign of Hieroglyphic Morpheus: by this I mean a theater decked out with an immense variety of monsters, and these not naked monsters of nature, but so adorned with enigmatic Chimeras of a most ancient knowledge that here I am confident that sagacious minds can trace the boundless treasures of science, which is not without benefit for literature. Here the Dog of Bubastis, the Saitic Lion, the Mendesian Goat, the terrifying Crocodile with the horrendous opening of its jaws, all reveal the occult meanings of the divinity, of nature, of the spirit of Ancient Wisdom, beneath the shadowy play of images. Here the thirsty Dipsodes, the poisonous Asps, the wily Ichneumons, the cruel Hippopotami, the monstrous Dragons, the swollen-bellied toad, the snail with its spiral shell, the hairy caterpillar, and countless specters parade the miraculous, ordered chain that is revealed in the tabernacles of nature. Here are presented a thousand exotic species of things transformed into one image and then another by metamorphosis, turned into human figures and then restored again to their former shape in a mutual intertwining, the feral with the human, the human with the craft of the divine; and finally the divinity who, as Porphyry says, flows throughout the universe, and engineers a monstrous marriage with all beings; where now, sublime in their variety of faces, raising their canine necks, are displayed the Cynocephalus, and the foul Ibis, and the Sparrowhawk covered with its beaked mask [...] and where also, luring us with its virginal looks, under the covering of the Scarab, the sting of the Scorpion is concealed [...all this and more in a list that goes on for four pages] we can meditate in this all-changing theater of Nature, spread out as it is before our gaze, under the allegorical veil of an occult meaning.
It is precisely because of the fascination of the secret meanings in the ancient Egyptian language that Kircher celebrates it as opposed to the bland and highly codified iconic language of the Chinese, where every ideogram corresponds to a precise idea; something that might have fascinated Bacon but not him. Egyptian symbols " integros conceptos ideales involvebant" (enclosed complete ideal concepts), and by "involvebant" Kircher did not mean "collected," or "offered," but "concealed," "enclosed"...Egyptian icons had to be like flirtatious women, constantly luring their admirers into the vortex of an unsatisfied cog
nitive passion but never yielding themselves up to them.
But what does Kircher do after this preamble, for thousands of pages and throughout at least three entire works? He tries to decipher it all, makes his victory as an Egyptologist consist in revealing to us the secret meaning of these signs; he translates them, convinced that he is translating them in the only correct way possible. He makes an enormous mistake, we know, but what we object to now are not his results but his intentions. Champollion would carry out the same operation as Kircher in a more secular spirit, and without making a mistake; he would tell us that those were conventional signs, endowed with phonetic values, and would try to rid every symbol of any ambiguity. Yet Kircher had already begun the process. Those who, in a less Catholic and theological spirit than Kircher, try to preserve a charge of unresolved mystery in these hieroglyphics would turn them into party badges for down-market occultism, and in fact would be fascinated not by their unfathomable qualities but by the sense of confidence they give, these rigid emblems that they have now become. But somewhere a mystery exists, a mystery that will never be revealed, not because it is unfathomable, but because those who administer it will have decided not to fathom it so as to be able to sell it as a kind of trademark, or promise of an elixir, to collectors of the absolute or those who frequent Masonry's Grand Guignol.
Our notion of the symbolic is rooted in a universe that is by now secular, where a symbol no longer has to reveal or hide the absolutes of religion, but the absolute of poetry. Our approach to symbols is profoundly affected by French symbolism, for which Baudelaire's Les Corréspondences serves nicely as a manifesto: the living columns of nature allow only confused words to emerge, "comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent I dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité I vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté" (like distant echoes that dwindle in the distance / in a deep, dark unity, / vast as the night and brightness).
Only then can one say with Mallarmé "une fleur" and not decide on what the word should summon up for us, because that will be only the very absence, a pregnant absence, of all "flowerness," and therefore everything and nothing, and we will sit in a daze asking ourselves endlessly what is meant by "le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui. "
But at this point objects no longer exist, whether they are emblems, mysterious figures, or isolated words that have symbolic value in themselves. Not even Mallarmé's flower would be that were it not inserted into his strategy of the blank page. The symbolic becomes an effect of meaning produced by the text, and as such any image, word, or object can assume the status of a symbol.
What semiotic key can be offered, not for interpreting, but for identifying the textual strategy that I have decided to call the symbolic mode?
One suggestion was given to us some time ago, by a passionate and necessarily determined seeker after second meanings: Saint Augustine. When something in scripture appears semantically understandable but seems to us out of place, excessive, inexplicably emphatic, that is where we have to seek a hidden second meaning. Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there. This something is not a metaphor, because otherwise it would have gone against common sense, it would have polluted the stark purity of the degree zero of writing. It is not allegory, because it does not refer to any heraldic code. It exists, it is there, it does not disturb us that it is there, at most it might slow down our reading, but it is the surplus that it represents, its blameless incongruity, its presence looming so large in the economy of the text, that makes us suppose that its placement means it may be saying something else as well.
It is this figure's superfluity, its gratuity, that makes it totemic. It is the question it inspires in us ("Why are you here, and at this particular point?") that forces us to this interrogation that will elicit no answer. This is one of the rare cases when it is not our deconstructive hubris but the very will of the text that invites us to drift this way.
Why does Montale have to spend a good sixty "Old Lines" to tell us in the poem of that name how a horrible moth with its sharp beak ate through the thin fibers of a lampshade, insanely fluttering its wings over the papers on the table? It is the very irrelevance of the experience that makes it totemic, " efu per sempre / con le cose che chiudono in un giro / sicuro come il giorno, e la memoria / in se le cresce" (and it was forever / one with those things that close in a circle / as certain as the day, and are enhanced by memory).
Why, after warning us that he intends to show us something different from our shadow at morning striding behind us, or our shadow at evening rising to meet us, does Eliot tell us in The Waste Land (and it is up to us to determine whether the sense of these lines is literal or metaphorical): "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"? In this example the symbol exceeds the very powers of the metaphor. This handful of dust could certainly be a metaphor for many things, but traditionally, through association, it is for failure. How many times in our life have we ended up with nothing but a handful of dust, and we have said so using this very idiom? But is it the fear announced and produced by this that Eliot wants to evoke? Failure disappoints, hurts, and diminishes us, but it does not frighten us, since it no longer contains anything unexpected. That handful of dust stands for something else there; perhaps it has been there since the big bang, and if it is someone's failure it is that of the Demiurge. Or perhaps not; perhaps it is the epiphany of a universe without a big bang and without a Demiurge, the proof of our living-for-death (but then The Waste Land was written five years before Heidegger's Being and Time).
Epiphany: there, I've said it. Basically the Joycean concept of epiphany is the most secular, or most religious (when with Barilli it becomes "materialistic ecstasy"), version of the symbolic mode. Something appears, and we know that it is an apparition, otherwise it would not be so out of place, and yet we do not know what it is revealing to us. A symbol is an epiphany with Magi whose origins and destination we do not know, nor whom they have come to adore. The stable at Bethlehem is empty, or occupied by, let's say, an enigmatic object, a dagger, a black box, a glass ball with snow falling inside on the Madonna of Oropa, or a fragment of a railway timetable. And yet it flashes, at least for those of us who accept its invitation to the superfluous.
Returning to The Waste Land: Why does it say at a certain point, "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!'"? Because Eliot and Stetson had been together at Mylae? Because last year Stetson planted a corpse in his garden, and now it has started to sprout? Why does he have to keep the dog "far hence"?
Roberto Cotroneo, in his book Se una mattina d'estate un bambino (Milan: Frassinelli, 1994), attempts an explanation: of course, who else wore a Stetson but Pound? Why not Mylae when, after this first defense of the West, in order to exorcize Carthaginian power Rome introduced the cult of the Phrygian goddess, which was followed by the coming together of the two worlds, and fertility rites? Certainly, this reading is legitimate, and authorized by Eliot himself, since he begins his notes with a refer enee to Miss Weston. But is that the end of the story? Certainly not. The unwanted appearance of Stetson continues to disturb us, and in any case a few lines before this Eliot gives us the sign that he is fully entering the symbolic mode. He has just mentioned the fact that Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours "with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine," and at this point he inserts one of the few hermetic notes to his poem. Commenting on this line 68, he says: "A phenomenon which I have often noticed."
A sublime and totally superfluous observation. Why of all the events of that particular London, of that unreal city where a crowd flowed, so many that he did not think death had undone so many, where each man fixed his eyes before his feet, does Eliot have to tell us that he frequently observed that particular phenomenon, as though it were a Kantian noumenon?
And we readers, what are we meant to do? Eliot tells us immediately, borrowing an insult that lies at the origi
n of symbolism's poetics: "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!" By translating the vocative from French to English, he has decontextualized the address. Now it means something else. We have to ask why Stetson has appeared so suddenly, whether he is just a hat, and why we are hypocritically guilty of his arrival.
Note that once more the name Stetson is not a symbol in and of itself. It becomes one because of the context. There is an unjustified focus on it.
Nor must we think that incongruity equals lack of internal logic, or that gratuitousness means frivolity. Sometimes the symbolic mode exhibits its own rigid, though perhaps paranoid, logic, and the symbol is solid, geometric, and heavy, like the galactic obelisk that appears at the beginning of2001: A Space Odyssey.
