On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  There are at least two inset fabulae here. One concerns a grammatically implicit agent (ego) who carries out the action of understanding or signifying and by so doing moves from confusion to a clearer knowledge of God. Let's remember that if "intelligo" interpreted as "I understand" or "I recognize," then God remains an object that is not modified by the action, but if one translates that verb as "I want to signify" or "I want to say," then the agent sets up, through the act of self-definition, his object of discourse (he makes it exist as cultural object).

  However, this object, with its own attributes, is the subject of another story. It is a subject that performs an action through which, through the fact of being, it exists. It seems that nothing happens in this adventure about the nature of God, since there is no temporal interval between the actualization of his being and the actualization of his existence (in fact, neither of these ever moves from some preceding potential to the act, because they have always been there), nor does his existence, when it comes, change his essence. Certainly this is an extreme case, where both action and the passing of time are at zero degrees (which equals infinity), and God acts always in his self-manifestation, uninterruptedly and forever producing the fact that he exists through the simple fact that he is. It is not much for an adventure story, but it is enough for the essential conditions of a fabula to emerge. There is no coup-de-scène, perhaps, but this depends on the reader's sensitivity. The Model Reader of a story like this is a mystic or a metaphysics expert, a textual cooperator who is able to feel the most intense emotions at this nonstory whose exceptional nature never ceases to strike him like a thunderbolt. Even the Amor Dei Intellectualis is a burning passion, and one feels a stupefied and continual sense of surprise in recognizing the presence of Necessity.

  If, then, our age discovers that every philosophical or scientific discourse can also be read as a narrative, this may be happening now because, more than in any other epoch, science and philosophy (perhaps even to deal with the crisis of the novel) present themselves (it has been said) as grand narratives. This does not mean—as happens for some people—that by being narratives they do not have to be judged in terms of their truth. They simply want to express some truth by using a structure that is attractive in a narrative sense. And if then the great philosophical narratives do not seem sufficient, we have seen that instead of going to look for truth in the philosophers of the past, much contemporary philosophy has gone to look for it in Proust or Kafka, Joyce or Mann. Thus it is not so much that philosophers have given up pursuing the truth as that art and literature have also taken on that function. But these are marginal observations, and Aristotle does not come into them.

  The Poetics has many faces. One cannot have a fertile book without it also producing contradictory results. Among my first discoveries of the modernity of Aristotle, I remember a book by Mortimer Adler, who had worked out an aesthetics of film based on Aristotelian principles. In his Art and Prudence he gave the following definition: "A film is a representation of a completed action, of a certain length, using a combination of images, sound effects, music and other things."* Perhaps this definition was a bit scholastic (Adler was a Thomist who also inspired Marshall McLuhan), but the idea that although the Poetics was not capable of defining "high" literature, it was still of use as a perfect theory of popular literature and art was upheld by other authors as well.†"

  I do not accept the idea that the Poetics cannot define "high" art, but it is certainly the case that, with its insistence on the laws of plot, it is particularly suited to describing the strategies of the mass media. The Poetics is certainly the theory of, among others things, the John Ford-style Western—and not because Aristotle was a prophet but because whoever wants to put on stage or screen an action using plot (which is what a Western does without any clutter) cannot do other than follow what Aristotle had perceived. If telling stories is a biological function, Aristotle had already understood all that was needed from this biology of narrativity.

  The mass media are not alien to our biological tendencies; on the contrary, the media could be accused of being human, all too human. The problem, if it exists, lies in the question whether the pity and terror they provoke genuinely lead to a catharsis; but if one understands catharsis in its homeopathically minimalist sense (have a good cry and you'll feel better), they are, in this minimalist state, applied Poetics.

  One could even say that if we stick to Aristotelian ideas for the construction of a mythos that will produce an effective ergon, we can only fall into mass-media syndrome. Coming back to Poe, if we read only the pages that he devotes to the production of emotions which he saw as his aim, we would think we were dealing with a screenwriter for Dallas. Since he wanted to write a poem that would produce an impression of melancholy ("since Melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones") in a little over one hundred lines, he wondered which was the most depressing of all melancholic subjects, and concluded that it was death, and that the most melancholy death was that of a beautiful woman, "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

  If Poe had stuck only to these principles, he would have written Love Story. Luckily he knew that if plot is the dominant element in every story, it must however be tempered with other elements. He avoided the mass-media trap (albeit an antelitteram one) because he had other formal principles. Hence his calculation of the number of lines, his analysis of the musicality of the word "Nevermore," and the deliberate visual contrast between Pallas's white breast and the blackness of the raven, and everything that makes "The Raven" a poetic composition and not a horror film.

  But we are still dealing with Aristotle. Poe calculated an appropriate and organic mixture of lexis, opsis, dianoia, ethos, melos. That is how he put flesh on the bare bones of a mythos. The mass media can make us cry, and offer us consolation, but they usually do not allow us to purify ourselves while enjoying a "great creation" that has been well structured. When they do do this, and for me the Ford of Stagecoach certainly does do this, then they really do achieve the ideals of the Poetics.

  We come to the last ambiguity. The Poetics is the first work to develop a theory of metaphor. Ricoeur (quoting Derrida on this topic, who says that in Aristotle the defined is implicated in the person who defines) observes that, in order to explain metaphor, Aristotle created a metaphor, borrowing it from the order of movement.* In fact, the Aristotelian theory confronts us with the fundamental problem of all philosophies of language, namely, whether metaphor is a departure from an underlying literalness or the birthplace of every degree zero of writing.

  Although it is true that I remain faithful to a theory of interpretation that, when dealing with written texts, must presuppose a literal degree zero from which metaphor is the departure that must be interpreted, it is also true that if we look at things from the glottogonic point of view (whether at the origins of language, as Vico wanted, or at the origins of every text that comes into being), we must take account of the moment when creativity can emerge, for it does so only at the cost of a metaphorical vagueness that names an object that is as yet unknown or unnamed.

  The cognitive power of metaphor on which Aristotle insisted—though this was in the Rhetoric, not the Poetics—becomes manifest either when it puts something new before our eyes, working on preexisting language, or when it invites us to discover the rules of a future language. But the final Aristotelian legacy, the heretical currents of Chomskyan linguistics, and George Lakoff in particular, present us today with the problem of a more radical nature—even though this radicalism was already present in Vico: the problem is not so much seeing what the creative metaphor does with a language that is already established, as seeing how the already established language can be understood only by accepting, in the dictionary that explains it, the presence of vagueness, fuzziness, and metaphorical bricolage.*

  It is not by chance that Lakoff is one of those authors who have begun to elaborate, on the fragments of a semantics where definition was based on atomic proper
ties, a semantics in which definition is represented in the form of a sequence of actions.

  One of the pioneers of this tendency (who recognized his Aristotelian debts) was Kenneth Burke with his Grammar, Rhetoric, and Symbolism of Motives, where philosophy and literature, and language, were analyzed in "dramatic" form, through a combined game using Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose.

  Not to mention Greimas, who makes no effort to conceal the fact that a theory of narrativity presides over semantic understanding—I am thinking of that Case Grammar that works on a semantic structure in terms of Agent, Counter-Agent, Goal, Instrument, etc. (Fillmore, Bierwisch), * and of many models used in Frames Theory and in Artificial Intelligence. Dominique Noguez has recently published an amusing hoax (in which I am both hero and victim) on the Semiology of the Umbrella. He did not know that reality is stranger than fiction and that one of the models in artificial intelligence is that of Charniak, who, in order to explain to a computer how to interpret the sentences where the word "umbrella" appears, supplies a narrative description of what one does with an umbrella, how one handles it, how it is made, and what purpose it serves.†' The concept of umbrella is boiled down to a network of actions.

  Aristotle did not manage to match his theory of action with that of definition, because, imprisoned by his own categories, he thought there were substances that preceded every action they allowed or had to undergo. We had to wait for the crisis of the concept of substance to rediscover a semantics implicit not in his works on logic but in those on ethics, poetics, and rhetoric, and to think that even the definition of essences could be articulated in terms of underlying actions.

  And yet Aristotle could have developed a suggestion from Plato's Cratylus. We know that that work presents the myth of the Nomotheta, or "name giver," a sort of Adam of Greek philosophy. But the problem, which went back to before Plato, was whether the names given by the Nomotheta were provided according to convention (nomos) or because they were motivated by the nature of the things (physis). The question as to which of the two solutions Socrates (and through him Plato) opted for has generated and still generates endless pages of commentary on the Cratylus. But whatever the answer, every time he seems to adhere to the theory of "motivation," Plato speaks of cases where the words represent not the thing in itself but, rather, a source or result of an action. The strange difference between the nominative and genitive in Zeus/Dios is due to the fact that the original name expressed an action, "di'hon zen" (he through whom life is given). Similarly, it is said that "anthropos" can be reduced to "he who is capable of reconsidering what he has seen," inasmuch as the difference between man and animals is that man does not just perceive but can reason and reflect on what he has perceived. We are tempted to take Plato's etymology seriously when we remember that Thomas Aquinas, when considering the classical definition of man as a mortal and rational animal, maintained that specific differences such as "rationality" (which distinguishes man from every other species of living thing) are not atomistic accidents but names we give to sequences of actions and behaviors through which we recognize that there is a rationality in a certain creature that is not perceptible in other ways. Human rationality is inferred from symptoms, so to speak, like talking and expressing thoughts. We know our faculties "ex ipsorum actuum qualitate," from the quality of the actions of which the faculties are origin and cause.*

  According to one of Peirce's examples, lithium is not defined merely by its position in a periodic table of elements nor by its atomic number but through the description of the operations that must be carried out in order to produce a sample of it.† If the Nomotheta had known and named lithium, he would therefore have invented an expression that could, like a hook, capture a whole series of accounts of sequences of actions. He would have seen, say, tigers not as individuals embodying "tigerness" but rather as animals able to develop certain behaviors, interacting with other animals and in a particular environment—and this story would have been inseparable from its own protagonist.

  With these reflections I have perhaps strayed too far from Aristotle, but I was still on the track of his suggestions about action.

  In any case, the conference was devoted to contemporary strategies of appropriation of antiquity, and every act of appropriation implies a certain amount of violence. Just as I am convinced that Kant said the most interesting things on our cognitive processes not in the Critique of Pure Reason (where he was speaking in fact of cognition) but in his Critique of Judgment (where he seems to be discussing art), in the same way why should we not go and look for a modern theory of knowledge not (or at least not only) in Aristotle's Analytics but also in the Poetics and Rhetoric?

  Abbreviated version of a paper presented at the conference "Les Stratégies contemporaines d'appropriation de l'Antiquité," held at the Sorbonne in October 1990. The proceedings were published as Nos grecs et leurs modernes, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

  THE AMERICAN MYTH IN THREE ANTI-AMERICAN GENERATIONS

  The extract that follows is taken from l'Unità, 3 August 1947, at the start of the cold war. I remind you that l'Unità was the official daily paper of the Italian Communist Party, which was at that time heavily committed to celebrating the triumphs and virtues of the Soviet Union and to criticizing the vices of Americas capitalist culture:

  Around 1930, when Fascism began to be "the hope of the world," some young Italians happened to discover America in American books, an America that was thoughtful and barbaric, happy and quarrelsome, dissolute, fertile, laden with all the world's pasts, and at the same time young and innocent. For a few years these young men read, translated, and wrote with a joy of discovery and rebellion that made official Fascist culture indignant, but their success was such that it forced the regime to tolerate it in order to save face.... For many people the encounter with Caldwell, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and even with old Sinclair Lewis opened up the first chink of freedom, the first suspicion that not everything in the world's culture came down to the Fasces....At this point American culture became something very serious and precious for us, a sort of enormous laboratory where with a different kind of freedom and different methods people pursued the same goal of creating a taste, a style, a modern world that the best among us were seeking, perhaps with less immediacy but with just as much stubborn determination.... We noticed, during those years of study, that America was not another place, a new start in history, but just the giant theater where everyone's drama was played out with greater openness.... At that time American culture allowed us to see our own dramas being worked out as though on a giant screen.... We could not take part openly in the drama, in the tale, in the problem, so we studied American culture a little bit like we study past centuries, Elizabethan theater, or the poetry of the dolce stil novo.

  The author of this article, Cesare Pavese, was already a famous writer, a translator of Melville and other American writers, and a Communist. In 1953, in the introduction to a posthumous collection of Pavese's essays (he had committed suicide), Italo Calvino, who was then a member of the Communist Party (which he left at the time of the Hungarian crisis), expressed the feeling of left-wing intellectuals toward the United States in these terms:

  America. Periods of discontent have often witnessed the birth of a literary myth that sets up a country as a term of comparison, as in Tacitus's or Mme de Staël's re-creation of Germany. Often the country discovered is only a land of Utopia, a social allegory that has barely anything in common with the real country; but despite this it is just as useful, indeed the aspects that are emphasized are the very ones the situation needs.... And this America invented by writers, hot with the blood of different races, smoky with factory chimneys and with well-watered fields, rebellious against church hypocrisies, shouting with strikes and masses in revolt, really did become a complex symbol of all the ferments and realities of the time, a mixture of America, Russia, and Italy, along with a taste of primitive lands—an unresolved synthesis of everything Fascism tried to deny and exclude.


  How could it have come about that this ambiguous symbol, or, rather, this contradictory civilization, was able to fascinate a generation of intellectuals that had grown up in the Fascist period, when schools and mass propaganda only celebrated the pomp of Romanitas and condemned the so-called Jewish demoplutocracies? How could it have happened that the young generation of the 1930s and '40s went beyond official stereotypes and created a sort of alternative education for themselves, their own flow of counterpropaganda against the regime?

  I remind you that this second day of our conference is dedicated to "The image of the United States in Italian education." If by "education" we mean the official school curriculum, I cannot see why this topic should interest us. Italian students should know that New York is on the East Coast, and that Oklahoma is a state and not just a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But if by "education" we mean what the Greeks called "paideia, "our task becomes more exciting. "Paideia" was not just the transmission of knowledge: it was the ensemble of social techniques through which young men were initiated into adult life after an ideal education. To achieve this "paideia" was to become a mature personality, a man, someone who is "kaloskagathos, "beautiful because good and good because beautiful. In Latin "paideia" was translated as "humanitas," which the Germans translate, I believe, as "Bildung, "which is in turn more than just "Kultur."