From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  If the DVE is a treatise on language and speech acts, Genesis offered Dante many examples of primal “speech acts.” The first thing we must agree on, however, is what “speaking” means. Certainly, every sign—as Augustine had already remarked—is something perceptible to the senses that serves to bring to mind something different from itself, but this definition (which could also refer to the knot I tie in my handkerchief to remind me of a task I must do) does not yet imply a communicative relationship articulated between two subjects. Rosier-Catach (2006) sees this communicative aspect underscored instead by definitions like the one in Calcidius’s Latin translation of the Timaeus, later echoed by Thomas Aquinas (“ut Plato dicit, sermo ad hoc datus est nobis ut cognoscamus voluntatis indicia” [“As Plato says, speech was given to us so we could know signs of others’ wills”], De veritate 9, 4, 7).1 If Dante understood a speech act in this way, then we ought not to say that God “speaks” when he pronounces the fiat lux, as a result of which “there was light” (Gen. 1:3–4);2 and the same could be said for other similar expressions used in the course of creation. Here God seems instead to know “how to do things with words,” bringing into play a magic, operative, performative quality of the word—thus setting a dangerous precedent for all future followers of the occult sciences, convinced they can change the course of events simply by uttering a few para-Hebraic sounds. In the same way it is not clear what God was up to when, for example, He called (“appellavit”) light “day” and darkness “night,” seeing that He had no need to communicate those names to anyone, least of all Himself.

  Dante is nonetheless aware of the fact that the Bible often speaks in a figurative way, and he does not make these divine “words” the object of his reflection, considering that, as far as he is concerned, it is evident that the gift of speech has been conferred on man alone (“patet soli homini datum fuisse loqui,” DVE I, ii, 8). As he will repeat on a number of occasions, the ability to speak belongs only to mankind: the angels don’t have it (they are gifted with an “ineffable intellectual ability,” which allows each of them to understand the thought of all the others, or, alternatively, all of them read the thoughts of all the others in the mind of God) and the demons (who are already reciprocally aware of the depths of their own perfidy) don’t have it either. And—we may add—if the angels have no use for speech, the same is even truer of God when He was creating the universe.

  It is the intention of the DVE, therefore, to deal solely with human speech, inasmuch as man is guided by his reason, which in single individuals assumes different forms of judgment and discernment, and requires a faculty that will permit the speaker to transmit an intellectual content through signs perceptible to the senses, in a relationship between sound and sense that he can recognize (in accordance with tradition) ad placitum, in other words, as conventionally agreed upon.3

  Nevertheless, Dante still has to explain the episode recounted in Genesis 2:16–17, when the Lord speaks to man for the first time, placing at Adam’s disposal all the resources of the Earthly Paradise, and commanding him not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Clearly, what we have here is an initial act of communication, which would contradict the idea that man was the first to use language. Dante gets out of this by affirming that the fact that God communicated something to Adam does not mean that He did so verbally, but (and this traditional idea comes from Psalm 148: “fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command” [“ignis grando nix glacies spiritus procellarum quae faciunt verbum eius”—the verb “faciunt” in the Vulgate is ambiguous and could mean “that do his word” or “that make up his word”]) He could have expressed himself through atmospheric phenomena, such as thunderclaps and lightning.

  Having clarified these issues, Dante might at this point have discussed how Adam spoke when the Lord (Gen. 2:19) formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name (“omne enim, quod vocavit Adam animae viventis, ipsum est nomen eius”). Curiously enough, this role of Adam as nomothete (with the tremendous problem, touched on in Plato’s Cratylus, and which will obsess the coming centuries, that is, on what basis did Adam name the animals—with the names due to them because of their natures or with those that he himself arbitrarily chose to assign, ad placitum) is ignored by Dante. Nor is that all. Disregarding the fact that, in order to name the animals, Adam must have spoken in some way, Dante confesses to being perplexed by the fact that “according to what it says at the beginning of Genesis” the first to speak was the “most presumptuous” Eve (“mulierem invenitur ante omnes fuisse locutam” [“we find that a woman spoke before anyone else”] DVE I, iv, 3), when she engaged in dialogue with the serpent, and he finds it unbecoming that such a noble act of the human race should have emerged, not from the lips of a man but from those of a woman (“inconvenienter putatur tam egregium humani generis actum non prius a viro quam a femina profluxisse” [“it may be thought unseemly that so distinguished an action of the human race should first have been performed by a woman rather than a man”] DVE I, iv, 3, p. 9).

  In fact, this observation (apart from the puzzling display of antifeminism on the part of a poet who sang the praises of a donna angelicata or a mortal woman glorified as an angel)—if we exclude the doubtful “words” attributed to God, Adam is the first to speak—first of all when he names the animals, and then when he expresses his satisfaction with the appearance of Eve. Indeed, in the latter case, an entire utterance of his is cited for the first time: “dixitque Adam hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea haec vocabitur virago quoniam de viro sumpta est” (“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man”). Mengaldo (1979: 42) suggests that, since for Dante people speak to externalize the thoughts in their minds, and speech is therefore a dialogical phenomenon, what Dante meant to say was that what we have between Eve and the serpent is the first dialogue, and hence the first linguistic act expressed through the physical production of meaningful sounds. Which would lead us to believe that when Adam is pleased with the appearance of Eve and “says” what he says, maybe he says it to himself, and that (but perhaps we are overmodernizing Dante) the naming of the animals ought not to be considered a linguistic act but a mere metalinguistic foundation.

  However we may wish to interpret this liberty that Dante takes as a reader of the Bible, Mengaldo’s suggestion nonetheless prompts us to clarify what a linguistic act, as distinct from a language, meant for Dante, in other words to ask ourselves whether or not there is in Dante a critical awareness of the difference (to use the Saussurean terminology) between langue and parole.

  Tendentious though he may be in the episode involving Eve, Dante is keen to defend his conviction that Adam ought to have been the first one to speak. And, despite the fact that the first sound uttered by human beings is usually a cry of pain, Adam’s first utterance could only be a cry of joy and at the same time an act of homage to his creator. Therefore, Adam’s first utterance must have been the name of God, El (DVE I, iv, 4, p. 9).

  Confronted with this first linguistic act in human history, Dante must now come to grips with the issue he had proposed to deal with at the very beginning of the DVE, precisely because the plurality of languages confirmed by his experience finds its foundation and explanation in Genesis 11:1 and following. The story is a familiar one: after the Flood “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” but pride led mankind to vie with God and to construct a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, and the Lord, to punish their pride and prevent the construction of the tower, decides to confuse their languages.

  It is true that in Genesis 10, speaking of the spreading abroad of the sons of Noah after the Flood, it is said: “By these [the sons of Japhet] were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their
nations” (10:5), and in almost the same words the concept was repeated for the sons of Ham (10:20) and the sons of Shem (10:31). This hint of a plurality of languages existing before Babel will prove a sticking point, not only for many interpreters of the Bible but also for the Utopians of the Perfect Language (see Eco 1993, English trans. 1995b). But Dante does not consider these passages.

  He is clearly convinced that before the building of the Tower of Babel there existed a perfect language, which Adam had used when talking to God, and with which he had spoken to his descendants, and that the plurality of languages had come about only after the confusio linguarum or confusion of tongues. Demonstrating a knowledge of comparative linguistics exceptional in his day, Dante shows how the various languages that sprang from the confusion multiplied in a ternary fashion, first according to a division among the various parts of the world, then, within the area that today we would define as Romance, they split up into langue d’oc, langue d’oil, and lingua del sì. The last-named, the language spoken in Italy, has become further fragmented into a plurality of dialects that sometimes, in Bologna for example, vary from one quarter of the city to another. This is because man is a mutable animal in customs, habits, and languages, over the course of both time and space.

  Dante’s project for devising a more decorous and illustrious language (what he calls the volgare illustre) for the whole of Italy is to proceed to a critique of the various regional vernaculars, given that poets have always tended to keep a certain distance from the local dialect. His aim is to identify a vernacular that is illustrious (a bearer of light), cardinal (that functions as a cornerstone [cardine] for all the others), aulic or regal (worthy of its place in the palace of a national kingdom), and curial (the language of government, of the law courts, of instruction). This vernacular represents a kind of ideal rule that the best poets have come more or less close to, and by whose standards the existing vernaculars are to be judged.

  The second, incomplete, portion of the DVE outlines the rules of composition for the one and only truly illustrious vernacular, the poetic language of which Dante considers himself to be the founder. But it is the first part of the treatise that interests us here.

  The DVE defines the vernacular as the language children learn to use when they begin to articulate sounds, which they acquire by imitating their wet nurse, and he opposes it to a locutio secundaria, called grammar (grammatica) by the Romans. Grammar meant a language governed by rules that require extended study and of which one must acquire the habitus. This locutio secundaria is the scholastic Latin whose rules were taught in the schools of the day, an artificial idiom, “perpetual and incorruptible,” the international language of the Church and the university, frozen in time into a system of rules and regulations by the grammarians who had laid down the law when Latin had ceased to be the living language of Rome.

  Faced with this distinction, Dante states unequivocally that the vernacular is the nobler language because it was the first one used by the human race; because the whole world uses it “though with different pronunciations and using different words” (DVE I, i, 4); and lastly because it is natural whereas the other is artificial.

  On the one hand, then, he affirms that the nobler language must fulfill the requirements of naturalness, while the recognized diversity of the vernaculars confirms their conventionality (and Dante admits that the relationship between signifier and signified, a consequence of the faculty of speech, is the product of convention, in other words, ad placitum). On the other hand, he speaks of the vernacular as a language everyone shares, even though vocabulary and pronunciation may vary. Since the whole of the DVE insists on the variety of languages, how are we to reconcile the idea that languages are many with the fact that the vernacular (natural language) is common to the whole human race? The answer is that it is “natural” and common to all to learn first of all a natural language without being aware of its rules, but that this occurs because all mankind has in common a natural predisposition for language, a natural linguistic faculty, which is embodied, in Scholastic terms, in different linguistic substances and forms (see also Marigo 1938: ch. 9, n. 23; Dragonetti 1961: 32).

  Dante affirms in fact (DVE I, i, 2) that the ability to acquire one’s mother tongue is natural, and this ability is common to all peoples despite the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. He is not speaking then of a specific language, but of a general ability shared by all members of the species.

  It is clear to him, then, that, while the language faculty is permanent and unchanging for all members of the species, natural languages on the other hand are capable of developing and becoming enriched over time, either independently of the wills of individual speakers or, on the contrary, as a result of their creativity—and the illustrious vernacular he is proposing to forge is meant to be a product of individual creativity. But it seems that between linguistic faculty and natural language he wishes to distinguish an intermediate moment.

  In the opening chapter of the first part of the DVE, Dante, referring to his notion of the vernacular, uses terms such as vulgaris eloquentia, locutio vulgarium gentium, and vulgaris locutio, while he uses locutio secundaria for grammar. We could translate eloquentia in the generic sense either as “eloquence” or as “speech” or “manner of speaking.” But the text contains a distinction among various lexical choices that is probably not casual. In certain cases Dante speaks of locutio, in others of ydioma, of lingua, or of loquela. He uses ydioma, for example, whenever he is referring to the Hebrew language (DVE I, iv, 1; vi, 1; and vi, 7), as well as in reference to the branching off of the world’s languages, and the Romance languages in particular.

  In I, vi, 6–7, in speaking of the confusio linguarum of Babel, Dante uses the term loquela. In the same context, however, he also uses ydioma, both for the languages of the confusion and the Hebrew language that remained intact. Similarly, he speaks of the loquela of the Genoese and of the Tuscans, but he also uses lingua for Hebrew and the dialects of the Italian vernacular. Writing again about the confusion of Babel. when he wants to say that, after its destruction, the builders of the Tower began to speak imperfect languages, he says that “tanto rudius nunc barbariusque locuntur,” (“the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke”) (DVE I, vii, 7, p. 14), while, a few lines down, referring to the original Hebrew language, the term used is “antiquissima locutione” (“the most ancient language”) (DVE I, vii, 8, p. 14).

  It might be thought that he uses all these terms as synonyms, if it were not for the fact that ydioma, lingua, and loquela are used only when what he is talking about is a Saussurean langue, while it seems that locutio is used in a more generic sense and shows up whenever the context appears to be suggesting the activity of parole. Apropos of certain animal cries, for instance, he says that such an act cannot be called a locutio because it is not a true linguistic activity (DVE I, ii, 6–7). What’s more, Dante uses locutio every time Adam addresses God.

  It would appear, then, that ydioma, lingua, and loquela are to be understood in the modern sense of “language,” while locutio seems instead to stand for discursive acts.

  In DVE I, iv, 1, Dante wonders who was the first human being to be given the faculty of speech (locutio) and what was the first thing said (“quod primitus locutus fuerit”) and where, when, and to whom, and in what language (“sub quo ydiomate”) was the first linguistic act (“primiloquium”) emitted. I believe, incidentally, that we are entitled to translate “primiloquium” in this way, by analogy with “tristiloquium” and “turpiloquium” (DVE I, xi, 2; xiii, 4), used to describe the ugly manner of speaking of the Romans and the Florentines of his day.

  Perhaps Dante wanted to stress the fact that Adam speaks to God before giving things their names, and that God had therefore given him the faculty of speech before he constructed a language.

  But what language did Adam speak? Dante criticizes those who, like the Florentines, believe their own native language superior, whereas there exist many langua
ges, and many of them are superior to the Italian vernacular. Next (DVE I, vi, 4), he concludes that, along with the first soul, God created at the same time a “certam formam locutionis” (“a certain form of language”). If we translate this expression as “a well-defined form of language” (as Mengaldo [1979: 55] does, how do we explain the fact that in DVE I, vi, 7 Dante states: “Fuit ergo hebraicum ydioma illud quod primi loquentis labia fabricarunt” [“So the Hebrew language was that which the lips of the first speaker moulded”]?

  Dante explains that he speaks of forma “with reference both to the words used for things, and to the construction of words, and to the arrangement of the construction (“et quantum ad rerum vocabula et quantum ad vocabularum constructionem et quantum ad constructionis prolationem” [DVE, I, vi, 4]), allowing the inference that, by “forma locutionis” he is referring to a lexicon and a morphology, and hence to a language. But if we translate forma as “language,” the following passage would be hard to fathom:

  And this form (forma) of language would have continued to be used by all speakers, had it not been shattered through the fault of human presumption, as will be shown below.

  In this form of language (forma locutionis) Adam spoke; in this form of language spoke all his descendants until the building of the Tower of Babel (which is interpreted as “tower of confusion”); this is the form of language inherited by the sons of Heber, who are called Hebrews because of it. To these alone it remained after the confusion, so that our redeemer, who was to descend from them (in so far as He was human), should not speak the language of confusion but that of grace.

  So the Hebrew language was that which the lips of the first speaker moulded. (DVE I, vi, 4–7)4