by Umberto Eco
42. To these causes we might add the mystics’ techniques for detachment from the world and from one’s own memories. These are certainly techniques that aim at voluntary forgetfulness, but what is to be forgotten is so global as to coincide with the annihilation of one’s own self-awareness. This being the case, I would prefer to speak of spiritual ablation, not of a technique for canceling local portions of our memory.
43. [Translator’s note: A fundamental strategy in the art of memory consisted in collocating mnemonic images or figures in a series of designated “places” along a familiar route that the orator would follow with his mind’s eye observing the images to be remembered. The art of forgetting consists, then, in eliminating these “places” or reminders. See, for example, Yates (1966) and Eco and Migiel (1988).]
44. [Translator’s note: My translation from Eco’s text (AO)].
45. Note that we cannot make an exception either for the most blatant cases of political censure—such as the photographs of the Stalinist period in which the images of the former leaders declared to be heretics and shot have been removed—precisely because that act of violence kept the memory of those eliminated alive in the collective memory. Similarly, the various attempts at revisionism, such as the theory that Kennedy’s death did not occur as the official records have it, because—as we will see later—in cases that involve the (presumed) correction of an error or a debate over two possible solutions to a problem, the tendency is to retain, not just the solution assumed to be correct, but both horns of the dilemma.
46. When, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (III, xx, 33), to remember the idea of witnesses (testes), the orator is urged to imagine a goat’s testicles (testes), what we have is an etymological association. When, in the same work (III, xxi, 33), to recall the line of verse, “Iam domum itionem reges Atridae parant” (“And now the kings, sons of Atreus, prepare their return home”), a complex image is conjured up to evoke the families of the Domitii and the Reges (a purely phonetic association), as well as a still more complex image of actors preparing for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus, which plays on the one hand on genealogical memories and on the other on semantic analogies—we do not have the impression that any systematic criterion is involved, indeed we are even entitled to wonder whether what we are presented with is really a useful mnemotechnical device, seeing that in any case the author also advises his reader to learn the line by heart.
47. “Ne mireris, quod quae pro locis supra posuimus, pro figuris nunc apta esse dicamus. Loca enim praedicta pro figuris (secundum diversos respectos) servire poterunt” (“You should not be surprised if we now say that what earlier we posited for the loci is also true for the figures. For the loci previously described could serve [according to various aspects] as figures,” Thesaurus, p. 78).
48. This is why the logical discussions concerning existential presuppositions, or on the truth value to be assigned to the assertion Yesterday Piero met his sister if we could truthfully assert that Piero has no sisters, appear ingenuous and lacking in common sense. It is in fact unlikely that someone will respond to the first assertion with Your assertion does not make sense because Piero has no sisters. It is highly likely that the answers will be: (i) Whose sister? (presumption of error in the identification of the individual); (ii) You must have been dreaming (reference to existence in a possible world); (iii) Just what do you mean by sister? (presumption of lexical error); I didn’t know Piero had any sisters (correction of one’s previous conviction). This occurs because every assertion, rather than presupposing, posits, makes present in the universe of discourse, by its semiotic power, the entities it names, albeit as entities in a possible world (cf. Eco and Violi 1987).
49. In Canetti’s Auto-da-fé Professor Kien, endowed with a prodigious memory, records in a notebook all the idiocies he is trying to forget—an ironical narrative invention if ever there was one.
50. There exist casual mechanisms by which an idea or expression is not forgotten but confused instead with other ideas or expressions. In such cases confusion can occur both between expressions (confusion by pseudo-synomymity, such as mixing up the terms paronomasia and antonomasia), or between an expression and two different meanings, say, or notions or definitional contents (like not remembering whether fragola in Italian means “strawberry” or “raspberry”). Both of these phenomena never occur by subtraction (something is there that subsequently disappears), but by addition (two notions or terms become superimposed in your memory and you no longer know which one is correct). The phenomenon usually occurs the first time we make a mistake; someone gives us the correct information; and from then on we remember the error and the correction together, without recalling which is which. The dilemma left a more lasting impression than its solution, and it is the former and not the latter that stayed in our mind. The same thing often happens with the pronunciation of a word in a foreign language. There are no voluntary devices for forgetting, but they do exist for not remembering properly: you must multiply the semiosis. We may try to forget the medieval mnemonic rhyme invented to remember the moods of the first syllogistic figure (Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio) by training ourselves to repeat over and over for several days a corrupted version “Birbiri, Celirant, Doria, Fario,” until we are no longer able to recall which of the two formulas is the correct one. We do not forget by cancelation but by superposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying the presences.
51. For these operations performed by a culture, see also Demaria (2006).
52. Cited in Brown (2012: 109).
53. “This was precisely what the medieval encyclopedia … aspired to, not only through the topical arrangement of knowledge, but also, more concretely, by means of diagrams, miniatures, illuminated initials, and so on. With a single image it was possible to embrace the whole of being, from God to the angels, from man to the stones, and retain it in the memory thanks to the power of the imagination” (Cevolini 2006: 96).
54. On textuality as one means of creating forgetfulness, see Lotman and Uspensky (1975), as well as Demaria (2006: 43): “Cultural memory is the result of different strategies of selection of what may become a memory—that is, of different enunciative praxes which form identities in different ways.”
2
Metaphor as Knowledge
Aristotle’s Medieval (Mis)Fortunes
In Chapter 1 we observed that Aristotle’s major contribution to the theory of metaphor lay in the emphasis he placed on its cognitive value. Since we are accustomed to seeing the Middle Ages as the age of the rediscovery of Aristotle and indeed of his near-canonization, it should prove interesting to inquire whether the Middle Ages somehow picked up on and profited from this suggestion of his. Let us say from the outset that our investigation was sparked by the conviction that the answer is in the negative. What we must try to understand, then, is why there exists no medieval theory of metaphor as an instrument of knowledge, at least in the aforementioned Aristotelian sense. The answer, which we will attempt to document in what follows, is that not only did medieval authors gain access to the Poetics and the Rhetoric at a very late date, but they also became acquainted with these texts in translations that were, to say the least, somewhat misleading. We will see later (in Chapter 3) what the other sources of medieval reflection on metaphor were, and what other tools (such as, for example, the concept of analogia entis or “analogy of being”) they did attribute a cognitive function to.
2.1. The Latin Aristotle
It is no secret how protracted and tormented were the fortunes of the Aristoteles Latinus. In the sixth century Boethius had translated the entire Organon, but for centuries only one section of it, the so-called Logica Vetus—translations, in other words, of the Categories and the De interpretatione, accompanied by a version of the Isagoge by Porphyry and a number of treatises by Boethius on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms, on division and on topics—was in circulation, and that for the most part in a corrupt form.1 Boethius had also translated the Prior Analyt
ics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, but these works did not circulate at all until they were revised or retranslated, from Greek or Arabic,2 along with the Posterior Analytics, in the twelfth century. True, this last-named work had also been translated by Boethius, but his version had been lost and remained practically unknown.3 With the twelfth century the Libri Naturales also make their appearance: the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the De generatione et corruptione, the Meteorologica, the De anima, the Parva Naturalia are translated, first from Arabic then from Greek. The Metaphysics too appeared, first in partial form in a translatio vetustissima by James of Venice, while another extended portion appeared—translated from the Greek—in the same century (the so-called translatio media). Thomas Aquinas will own a complete version only when William of Moerbeke, completing his rendering, will make Book K available to him. Partial versions of the Greek text of the Libri Morales also go back to the twelfth century. In the mid-thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste translated the Nicomachean Ethics, later revised by Moerbeke, and it will be the 1260s before the latter will provide a complete version of the Politics. It is likewise in the thirteenth century that Michael Scotus made versions of the books on animals from the Arabic, while at a slightly later date Moerbeke will also translate them from Greek. A rendering of De motu animalium by yet another translator was known to Albertus Magnus.
Coming to the two texts that most concern us, we note that Moerbeke did not translate the Poetics until 1278—in other words, after Thomas’s death in 12744—while Averroes’s Middle Commentary—composed in 1175—appears, translated by Hermann the German (Hermannus Alemannus), around 1256.
In the same year Hermann translated the Rhetoric from the Arabic. This translation is accompanied by the anonymous Translatio Vetus, from the Greek. And finally, around 1269 or 1270, there appears a version from the Greek by Moerbeke.
Thus, the Rhetoric and Poetics, when they finally appear in Latin, do so at an advanced date (and at a moment when a Logica Modernorum is on the rise—more interested in the Organon than in the remainder of Aristotle’s works). Thomas is the typical example of a thinker who was not influenced by any suggestion of Aristotle’s on this subject, and his theory of metaphor that “non supergreditur modum litteralis sensus” (“does not exceed the literal sense”) offers sufficient proof of this fact.5
2.2. The Poetics: Averroes’s Commentary and Hermann’s Translation
Averroes did not know Greek, he scarcely knew Syriac, and he was reading Aristotle in a tenth-century Arabic translation, derived in turn from a Syriac version.6 Both he and his sources have trouble rendering the various aspects of Greek poetry and dramaturgy to which Aristotle refers, and consequently try to adapt their examples to the Arabic literary tradition. Imagine what the Latin reader was able to make of Aristotle with the aid of Hermann the German’s Latin translation of an Arabic text, based in turn on an attempt to fathom the Syriac version of an unknown Greek original!
Furthermore, Hermann decided to translate only Averroes’s commentary, because, on account of the different metrical systems and the obscurity of the lexicon, he was not able to make complete sense of Aristotle’s work from the Arabic version, as he remarks in his “Proem.”7
Today we possess an English translation of Averroes’s Arabic text (Butterworth 1986) and, when we compare the two, we must admit that Hermann did not go wrong on the fundamental points. But he certainly adds to the confusion when he attempts to translate the poetic examples from Arabic; and he occasionally decides to replace them with Latin examples taken from the rhetorical tradition. When, for instance, Averroes proposes as an example of metaphor a fine line of Arabic poetry “the horses of youth and its trappings have been removed” (Butterworth 1986: 61), meaning that, in old age, love and war, activities associated with youth, are no longer practicable, Hermann substitutes the tired old chestnuts, pratum ridet (“the meadow smiles”) and litus aratur (“the strand is plowed”).8 In addition he gets badly tangled up in the rhetorical terminology. He translates what was intended as the term for metonymy as translatio and the term for metaphor as transumptio, but when Averroes cites both as species of the genus “substitution,” he proceeds to use the term concambium (p. 42). When Averroes says that poetic discourse is imitative, Hermann translates with the adjective imaginative, with quite drastic results for the comprehensibility of the text (ibid.).
Things go from bad to worse when Averroes, for “peripeteia” and “anagnorisis,” uses terms equivalent to “reversal” and “discovery”; the best Hermann can come up with is circulatio and directio, choices that are of little help in making the concepts clear (p. 53).
But the blame is not all Hermann’s. Butterworth is convinced that the Middle Commentary has been unjustly condemned and is more useful than previously thought, and he may be right as far as the comprehension of Averroes goes, but he is overindulgent with Averroes when it comes to a proper understanding of Aristotle.
Many readers will recall Borges’s 1947 short story entitled “Averroës’ Search” (in Borges 1998) in which the Argentinian writer imagines Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn-Aḥmad ibn-Muḥammad ibn-Rushd (aka Averroes) as he endeavors to write a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. What bothers him is that he does not know the meaning of the words “tragedy” and “comedy,” which he had already come across nine years earlier when reading the Rhetoric. The problem is an obvious one, since these artistic forms were unknown in the Arabic tradition. The irony of Borges’s story stems from the fact that, while Averroes is struggling over the meaning of these obscure terms, beneath his windows a group of children is role-playing, impersonating a muezzin, a minaret, and a congregation, in other words, they are performing theater, but neither they nor Averroes are aware of the fact. Later on, somebody tells the philosopher about a strange ceremony he once witnessed in China, and from the description the reader is able to deduce that it was a theatrical performance—but the characters in the story are not so perceptive. At the end of this veritable comedy of errors, Averroes returns to his meditations on Aristotle and concludes: “Aristu [Aristotle] gives the name “tragedy” to panegyrics and the name “comedy” to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur’àn and the mu’allaqat of the mosque” (Borges 1998: 241).
Readers tend to attribute this paradoxical situation to Borges’ imagination, but what he describes was precisely the quandary that beset Averroes.9 In the Middle Commentary, everything Aristotle has to say about tragedy is referred by Averroes to poetry in general, and more particularly to the poetic forms known as laudatio (praise) and vituperatio (blame). This epideictic poetry makes use of representations, but—though Averroes reminds us how men take pleasure in imitating things, not only in words but also through images, song, and dance—he speaks of them as exclusively verbal representations. Such representations are intended to instigate to virtuous actions, and their intent, then, is moralizing. Aristotle’s pragma thus becomes a virtuous and voluntary operation (Hermann: “operatio virtuosa, que habet potentiam universalem in rebus virtuosis, non potentiam particularem in unaquaque rerum virtuosarum” [“a virtuous deed that has a universal power with respect to virtuous matters, not a particular power with respect to one or another virtuous matter”] [p. 47]). Averroes understands that poetry tends toward the universal, and that its end is to arouse pity and fear in order to impress the minds of the audience. But for him these procedures too are calculated to render persuasive certain moral values, and this moralizing notion of poetry prevents Averroes from understanding Aristotle’s notion of the fundamentally cathartic (and not didactic) function of the tragic action.
The situation becomes still more “Borgesian” when Averroes finds himself obliged to comment on Poetica 1450a 7–14, where Aristotle lists the six components of tragedy. For Aristotle, as we know, these are mythos (plot), ethos (character), lexis (diction), dianoia (thought), opsis (spectacle), and melos (song or melody). Averroes interprets the first term to mea
n “mythic statements” (Hermann translates “sermo fabularis”), the second as “character” (Hermann: “consuetudines”), the third as “meter” (Hermann: “metrum seu pondus”), the fourth as “belief,” that is, as “the ability to represent what exists or does not exist in such and such a way” (Butterworth 1986: 78); for Hermann: “credulitas” or “potentia representandi rem sic esse aut sic non esse” (“the ability to represent the thing as it is or as it is not”). The sixth component is correctly interpreted as “melody” (tonus), but evidently Averroes is thinking of a poetic melody, not of the presence of musicians onstage. Things get more (or less) dramatic when we come to the fifth component, opsis. Averroes cannot envisage a spectacular representation of actions, and in translating opsis as nazar he has in mind something that leads to the “discovery of the correctness of a belief” (Butterworth 1986: 76),10 in other words a type of argumentation that demonstrates the correctness of the beliefs represented (for moral purposes). And all Hermann can do is to go along, so he translates “consideratio, scilicet argumentatio seu probatio rectitudinis credulitatis aut operationis non per sermonum persuasivum (hoc enim non pertinet huic arti neque est conveniens ei) sed per sermonem representativum” (“an examination or argument or proof of the correctness of a belief or the correctness of a deed, not by means of a persuasive statement [for that is not applicable to this art nor appropriate for it] but by means of a representative statement”).
Having failed in this way to grasp the meaning of spectacle, Averroes goes on to remark (Butterworth 1986: 79) that epideictic poetry “does not use the art of dissimulation and delivery the way rhetoric does,” and Hermann translates “non utitur carmen laudativum arte gesticulationis neque vultuum acceptione sicut utitur hiis retorica” (“laudatory verse does not take advantage of the art of gesticulation nor of putting on facial expressions the way rhetoric does”) (p. 49). On the other hand, Averroes had been led astray by 1450b 15 et seq., where Aristotle says that spectacle, however effective it may be, is not essential to the poetic art, since tragedy can also function without performance and without actors. In this way, Aristotle’s concession (tragedy can also be read) is transformed into the elimination of the opsis. Consequently, at least in the form in which it reaches its medieval readers, Aristotle’s text appears to exclude the only truly theatrical aspect of tragedy.
