by Umberto Eco
Nor must we think that a symbol has to be something fleeting, an image barely alluded to, appearing in the text like a brief glimpse. If for Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit— "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!"), nothing is merely suggested in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"; on the contrary, everything is described in extraordinary detail. Almost like an engineering treatise, or a legal exchange with a Talmudic flavor, the story constructs its "celibate machine," and it is the entire description taken as a whole, extending page after page, that drives us to ask the reason for that presence. Not why it is there—for it is there, and that is enough—but rather what is the overall sense of this theater of cruelty. And we will continue to ask ourselves until the end of our lives, because any allegorization of the symbol would only lead us to an obvious truth, would only tell us what we already wanted to know.
And now I come to the second part of my paper. This may seem contrary to our most cherished ideas, but all the centuries that have spoken to us about symbols knew little of the symbolic mode. Perhaps that was what the pilgrims at the temple of the god at Delphi were seeking, where the oracle neither says nor hides things but only vaguely alludes. But after that point, in order to find a notion of symbol like the one we have been outlining over the millennia, to find the symbolic mode asserting itself as a conscious strategy, we have to come to the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps it was modernity that invented the notion of poetry, seeing that those who read Homer at the time or shortly afterward saw him as an encyclopedia of universal knowledge, and medieval readers used Virgil the way Nostradamus would be used later. Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of a truth we no longer seek in religion.
Can this be enough? It will satisfy only those who have a cold awareness of the insignificance of the universe, a fervent will for redemption through the question, not through the supine acceptance of the answer.
Is this the attitude that distinguishes our times? No, and please allow me this moralistic conclusion. As soon as our age discovered the symbolic mode, it accepted only two refinements of its legacy.
The first, a learned and refined version, is that there is a deep sense concealed everywhere, that every discourse uses the symbolic mode, that every utterance is constructed along the isotopy of the unsaid, even when it is as simple as, "It's raining today." This is today's deconstructionist heresy, which seems to assume that a divinity or malign subconscious made us talk always and only with a second meaning, and that everything we say is inessential because the essence of our discourse lies elsewhere, in a symbolic realm we are often unaware of. Thus the symbolic diamond, which was meant to flash in the dark and dazzle us at sudden but ideally very rare moments, has become a neon strip that pervades the texture of every discourse. This is too much of a good thing.
It is not a bad interpretative strategy if interpreting means accumulating qualifications for university positions. But if everyone always says what he did not mean to say, we are all always saying the same thing. The symbolic mode no longer exists as a supreme linguistic strategy; we all speak indirectly, imprecisely, constantly using symbols because we are sick with language. Where there is no recognizable rule there cannot even be deviation from the norm. We all speak in poetry, we all reveal something, even when we are just saying that we will pay the insurance bill on Tuesday. What a curse, living in a world so damnably orphic, where there is no room for the language of the man in the street. In a world where the man in the street cannot speak, even the poet has to remain silent.
The second heresy is to be found in the information world, which, accustomed as it is now to conspiracies, coded phrases, half-spoken words, alliances promised then canceled, and whispers of divorce that are immediately denied, seeks a secret meaning in every event and in every expression. This is the curse of the contemporary writer, something I don't want to speak about since I do not want to talk about my own personal experiences; but I will construct a model of him based on the experience of a writer from the past who I imagine facing todays critics or journalists.
Let us say this writer is Leopardi, and let us invent his Dialogo tra il Poeta e un Facitore di Rotocalchi (Dialogue between the Poet and a Magazine Editor)...
"Signor Leopardi, the fact that you very briefly (for about fifteen lines) conducted a certain discourse on a hill where you reflected on the infinite is very stimulating and intriguing. Why did you call the hill 'ermo'(deserted)? Allow me to say that you were obviously alluding to the mutilation of the Herms, the incident which placed Alcibiades in conflict with the Athenian government, as though you were clearly, or at least up to a point, talking about the conflict which has seen left-wing politicians lining up against Forza Italia..."
"Not at all, I called the hill 'ermo because I indulged in the taste for archaism, and I admit that this is the worst line of that idyll; but the hill was certainly dear to me, because I was born near there."
"And why do you imagine 'the most profound rest'? Do not try to tell me that this is not a clear and explicit allusion to the current political situation, the anxiety of the markets, and the uncertain fate of the budget bill."
"Look, I wrote 'L'infinito' between the spring and autumn of 1819, so I could not have alluded to your political situation. Allow a poet to dream, on top of a hill, deserted almost by accident, but in a totally literal way: there is no allegory, and just four rather modest metaphors: the profound rest (but even your own Lakoff would say that spatialization is an everyday way of making metaphors), the dead seasons (which is almost a mixed metaphor), the drowning of my thoughts, and the shipwreck in a sea that is not a sea ... But as for the rest of it, there is no symbol and no allegory. Poetry does not fade into rhetoric, nor rhetoric into a legal speech ... I was there that day, and I suddenly said to myself: 'Mamma mia, the infinite...' Perhaps the only symbolic element lies in the very fact that I did this even though there was no need to. But do not try to decode this. Let my moment of weakness be, just as it is, read the poem again, and then follow any line you like in your reply."
"Oh come on, my little Count, you can't pull the wool over our eyes. Three years, just three years after the Congress of Vienna, you are going on about timeless abandons, while Europe is in the process of becoming what it is ... Will you at least allow us to read your text for what it really says?"
That is the end of my little game. Incapable as we are of finding or identifying a symbol where it actually exists, infected by the culture of suspicion and conspiracy, we look for it even where it does not exist as a textual mode. Or where, at best, not every single feature but rather the text taken as a whole, its unavoidable and open unintentionality, which makes it appear when nobody would have expected it, becomes a symbol, if you like, of the human condition.
In actual fact the world of the mass media does not go looking for symbols, because it has lost the capacity and talent for doing so. Deprived of a God to allude to, we seek allegories everywhere, mysterious connections between the stabbing of two girls (when statistics tell us that to find two murders with similarities in the space of ten years is absolutely normal), short circuits flashing in the dull texture of everyday life. And as a result we are losing the gift for identifying the symbolic mode where it does lurk.
Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull. The lust for a second sense ruins our ability to see second or even one thousand senses where they actually exist, or have been placed.
We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: "a rose is a rose is a rose."
The symbolic mode exists at that point where we finally will have lost the desire to decode at any cost.<
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Revised version of a paper given at a conference on Symbolism, held in Siena in 1994 (published in Sandro Briosi, ed., "Symbolism," special issue of L'immagine riflessa, n.s. IV, 1, [>]). This revised version is dedicated to Sandro Briosi, who was still with us at the time.
ON STYLE
From the way it first appeared at the beginning of the Latin world right down to contemporary stylistics and aesthetics, the term "style" exhibits a history that is anything but uniform. Even though there is an original nucleus that can be identified, which means that from the word "stilus"—the instrument from which it derives by metonymy—style becomes synonymous with "writing" and therefore with the way one expresses oneself in literary terms, it is nevertheless true that this way of writing is understood in different ways and with different intensities over the course of the centuries.
For instance, already in the early years of its usage, the term indicates literary genres that are highly codified (the sublime, middle, low style; the Attic, Asian, or Rhodian style; the tragic, elegiac, or comic style). In this, as in so many other cases, style is a way of writing dictated by rules, usually very prescriptive rules; and it was accompanied by the idea of precepts, imitation, and close adherence to models. Usually we think that it is only with mannerism and the baroque that the idea of originality and genius becomes associated with the notion of style—and not only in the arts, but also in life, since with the Renaissance idea of " sprezzata disinvoltura" (effortless nonchalance) the man of style will be he who has the wit, courage (and social standing) to behave in violation of the rules—or to show that he has the privilege to break them.
Nevertheless, even Buffon's famous saying, "Le style est l'homme même," must be understood not in an individualistic sense at this stage but rather in the sense that style is human virtue.
The idea of a style that goes against the rules appears rather with Cesare Beccaria's Ricerca intorno alia natura dello stile (Inquiry into the Nature of Style), and reappears later in organicist theories of art, so that with Goethe style will emerge when the work acquires an original, complete, inimitable harmony of its own. Finally we arrive at the Romantic notion of genius (Leopardi himself will say that style is the particular manner or facility that is called originality). So much so that by the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the dandy and Decadence, the concept has turned 360 degrees, to the point where style is identical with bizarre originality, the contempt for all models; and it is from this source that the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde movements will emerge.
I would single out two authors for whom style is a distinctly semiotic concept, namely, Flaubert and Proust. For Flaubert style is a way of fashioning ones work, and certainly it is inimitable, but through it a way of thinking of and seeing the world is revealed. For Proust style becomes a sort of intelligence that is transformed or incorporated into the subject matter, so much so that, for Proust, Flaubert's innovative use of the past definite, the perfect, the present participle, and the imperfect renews our vision of things almost as much as Kant.
From these sources derives the idea of style as a "way of giving form," which lies at the heart of Luigi Pareyson's aesthetics. And it is clear that at this stage, if the work of art is form, the way of giving form involves more than just lexis or syntax (as can happen in what is called stylistics), and includes every semiotic strategy deployed both on the surface and in the depths of a text's nervous system. To the realm of style (as a way of giving form) belongs not only the use of language (or of colors, or of sounds, according to the semiotic systems or universes used) but also the way of deploying narrative structures, portraying characters, and articulating points of view.
Let us take a passage from Proust's "Observations on Style," where he claims that Stendhal was less careful about style than Baudelaire. Proust suggests that Stendhal "wrote badly," and this is an obvious point, if by style we mean lexis and syntax:
When he describes a landscape as "those enchanted places," "those delightful spaces," or one of his heroines as "that adorable woman," "that fascinating woman," he did not want to be any more precise. He was even so devoid of precision as to write: "She wrote him an endless letter." However, if one considers the huge, unconscious framework that is covered by the conscious ensemble of ideas to be an integral part of style, there is undoubtedly precision in Stendhal. I would take great pleasure in showing you that every time Julien Sorel and Fabrizio del Dongo forget their vain cares in order to live a life that is disinterested and voluptuous, they are always in some elevated place (whether it be Julien's or Fabrizio's prison or the Abbé Blanès's observatory).*
By this time speaking of style means discussing how the work of art is made, showing how it gradually emerged (even though sometimes this is only through the purely theoretical progression of a generative process), explaining why it offers itself to a certain type of reception, and how and why it arouses this reception. And, for those who are still interested in pronouncing judgments as to aesthetic value, it is only by identifying, tracking down, and laying bare the supreme workings of style that we are able to say why a given work is beautiful, why it has enjoyed different kinds of reception in the course of time, and why, although it follows models and sometimes even precepts that are scattered far and wide in the sea of intertextuality, it has been able to gather those legacies and make them blossom in such a way as to give life to something original. Only then will we be able to say why, although each of the different works by one artist aspires to an inimitable originality, it is possible to detect the personal style of that artist in each of these works.
If this is the case, I believe two points must be made here: one, that a semiotics of the arts is nothing other than searching for and laying bare the workings of style; and two, that semiotics represents the most advanced form of stylistics, and the model for all criticism.
Having said this, I do not really need to add anything further. Everyone remembers how much light has been shed on texts (already loved by all, though in an obscure way) by certain pronouncements by the Russian formalists, by Jakobson, by narratologists and analysts of poetic discourse. But we really are living in obscure times, at least in Italy, where one hears with increasing frequency polemical voices accusing semiotic studies (which they sometimes also call, with pejorative connotation, formalist or structuralist studies) of being guilty of a decline in criticism, of being pseudomathematical discourses, full of illegible diagrams, in whose mush the flavor of literature evaporates, and where the ecstasy to which the reader succumbs is plotted out as in double-entry bookkeeping—where the je ne sais quoi and the sublime, which were supposed to be the supreme effects of art, evaporate in an orgy of theories that crudely abuse, insult, humiliate, and crush the text, removing its freshness, magic, and capacity for ecstasy.
We must therefore ask ourselves what is meant by criticism (of art or literature), and for the sake of convenience I will restrict myself to dealing with literary criticism.
I think that first and foremost we must distinguish between discussing literary works and literary criticism. One can have the most varied discussions of literary works, and a work can be taken as a field of sociological inquiry, a document in the history of ideas, a psychological or psychiatric report, or as a pretext for a series of moral considerations. There are cultures, above all the Anglo-Saxon world, where—at least until the advent of the New Criticism—the discussion of literary works was conducted above all in moral terms. Now all these approaches are legitimate in and of themselves, except that as soon as they come into play, they presume, imply, suggest, or refer to a critical or aesthetic judgment that someone else, or perhaps even the author himself in another work, already pronounced.
This kind of discussion is the discourse of criticism in its proper sense, and it can be articulated in three ways—although we must be clear about the fact that these three ways are "critical genres," ideal types of criticism, and it is often the case that, under the aegis of one genre or
mode, someone provides illustrious examples of another genre, or mixes, to good or bad effect, the three types together.
Let us call the first type the "review," where one tells readers about a book they have not yet read. A good review can also turn to more complex modes, such as the other two types, which I shall discuss later, but it is inevitably linked to immediacy, to the brief space that intervenes between a work appearing, then being read and subjected to a written verdict. In the best cases, a review can restrict itself to giving its readers a summary idea of a work that they have not yet read, and then imposing on them the critic's judgment (of taste). Its function is clearly to inform (it says that a work has been published that is roughly as described) and to offer a reliable diagnosis; the reader believes the reviewer just as he trusts the doctor who makes him say "Ah," and then immediately identifies the beginnings of bronchitis and prescribes a cough mixture. Such a diagnostic review has nothing to do with the chemical analyses or exploratory probes that nowadays the patient himself can follow on a television screen, and during which he can see and understand what the problem is, and why his body is reacting in that manner. In a review (as in the doctor's home visit) the reader does not see the work, he only hears it spoken of by a third party.
The second critical mode (the history of literature) discusses texts that the reader does know or at least ought to know, since he has previously heard people talk about them. These texts are often only mentioned, or sometimes summarized, maybe with the help of some typical quotation, and are then grouped together, assigned to various schools, and organized in chronological sequence. A history of literature can be just a dreary manual, but occasionally it becomes at the same time a survey of the works and a history of ideas, as in De Sanctis's History of Italian Literature. In the best cases, historical criticism pushes the reader toward a final and comprehensive understanding of the work, establishes the reader's horizon of expectations and his tastes, and opens up infinite panoramas.
