Misreadings

by Umberto Eco

  MISREADINGS Abandoning the midnight in which the dream of H. C. Earwicker concluded (and in which the noc- turnal monologue of Molly Bloom concluded also), the lake of Como turns toward the noon of the south, but in the form of a "branch," this immediately recalling, thanks to the anthropological intervention of Frazer, the "bough" and the rites of fertility and rebirth. In her rebirth in a new day's light, Anna Liffey has become a lake (expanding into the image of the maternal womb), and Anna Livia, now a mature woman, image of Demeter, all bosom and belly, can then contract again and resume her course and form as a river, beginning another story. "Resume her course," because with the new story a new course begins, among the many fluxes and refluxes that are woven into the human story of which Finnegan is meant to be a condensation. The work's narrative scheme is disturbingly sim- ple; in a sense, it acts as the antistrophe of the plot of Ulysses. In that book, the apparent description of a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom was trans- formed as it proceeded into a discussion of a whole city and of the universe. Here the apparently complex tale of a series of historical events involving an entire region and an empire (the Spanish) concerns in reality the events of a single day in the life of the protagonist, Renzo Tramaglino. One morning at dawn, as he is preparing to cele- brate his marriage to his promised bride, Lucia Mon- della, Renzo learns from the village pastor, Don Abbondio, that the local feudal lord, Don Rodrigo, 168

  My Exagmination is opposed to the marriage. After a quarrel with the pastor, Renzo and Lucia flee from the village with the aid of a Capuchin monk, Fra Cristoforo. While Lucia seeks refuge in a convent in Monza, Renzo goes to Milan. There, that afternoon, the youth is involved in an uprising and therefore must escape to Bergamo, as Lucia, through the complicity of a nun, Gertrude, is abducted by another feudal lord known as the Unnamed. The Cardinal of Milan intervenes, however, to liberate her. At sunset a plague breaks out in Milan, which kills Don Rodrigo, Don Abbon- dio, and Padre Cristoforo. Renzo that evening hastily returns from Bergamo and finds Lucia safe and sound, wherefore he and she can be joined in marriage during the night. This is the story, condensed, as we have seen, into the twenty-four hours of one day; but Joyce conceals the initial scheme (secretly confided by him to Stuart Gilbert), confusing and mixing the events in such a way that the reader has the impres- sion of an unnatural and complex temporal devel- opment. Yet the development is actually quite simple and linear, and to perceive it in all its purity it must be subjected to a reading shorn of pseudointellectual complications where one merely underscores, in each episode, the basic symbol, the corresponding profes- sion, and the reference to the animal world. PART ONE. From dawn to early afternoon, 6 ^.M. to 2 P.M. Renzo Tramaglino is about to marry Lucia Mondella, when Don Abbondio informs him that Don Rodrigo desires Lucia and is opposed to 169

  MISREADINGS the wedding. Renzo asks advice of a pettifogging lawyer, but realizing that all attempts are in vain, he and Lucia flee with the help of Padre Cristoforo. Lucia takes refuge in a convent in Monza, Renzo goes to Milan. Symbol of this Part: the pastor. Profes- sion: weaving. Animal: the capon, emblern of impo- tence and castration. P^RT Two. Afternoon, 2 to 5 '.M. Renzo in Milan becomes involved in an uprising and must escape to Bergamo. Lucia is abducted by the Un- named, through the complicity of Gertrude. The Cardinal of Milan liberates Lucia and places her in the custody of a scholar, Don Ferrante, and his wife, Donna Prassede. Symbol: the nun. Profession: library science. Animal: the mule, emblem of obstinacy (of the villains). P^RT THur. r.. Sunset and evening, 5 ,.M. to mid- night. The plague breaks out in Milan, and Don Rodrigo, Don Abbondio, and Padre Cristoforo die. Renzo returns to Milan from Bergarno and finds Lucia safe and sound. Finally reunited, they marry. Symbol: the gravedigger. Profession: hospital man- agement. Animal: does not exist, because evil is de- feated. In the place of the animal there is purifying rain, which recalls the initial theme of water, as well as the washerwomen in Finnegan (Anna Livia Plur- abelle episode). I would be misleading the reader if I said that the author presents this linear scheme in all its aspects and makes it easily recognizable in the body of the story. Actually, this simple tale in itself is insignifi- 170

  My Exagmination cant, and in the course of the novel it is masked and hidden, so the reader has the impression that the events cover a much greater period of time; but I cannot express adequately my admiration for this clever fictional structure, which creates substantial indecision and ambiguity in space-time, convincing us that the events take place in the Lombard plain, whereas, in fact, if I am not trivially distorting the author's intentions, everything happens in Dublin. In the continuous and amiable dialogue--and every now and then it becomes poetry, from Donne to the Elizabethans to Spenser--that unfolds between tra- dition and the individual talent, the first rule for a selective and fertile imagination, I believe, is to pro- duce a good work. To write something valid and enduring is still the best homage that can be rendered to poetry, and if I use the word "profitable," it is because I can find no better term to express the advantage humanity derives from the existence of a good work of poetry. We achieve poetry when the imagination knows it has arrived at that condition of significant emotion whereby it is capable of creation. In my previous essays I may have professed a some- what different and more superficial view of the prob- lem,. but I have reviewed it with great attention and feel I cannot say anything less specific. This brief digression has perhaps caused us to stray from the subject of Mr. Joyce's book; but I believe it was necessary in order to clarify a point that has left the critic legitimately puzzled on more than one occasion (the ideal critic is a figure I could not define with absolute confidence, but I am convinced a critic 171

  MISREADINGS cannot be ideal if he lacks the capacity of conducting a convincing critical discourse on a given poetic text). Now, to return to Mr. J oyce's book, I further believe that simplicity and autonomy of image is still the best way for a text to speak to the reader, without his being led to superimpose complicated and toil- some keys to the reading--vitiated, in the final analy- sis, by an intellectualism that is death to poetry. Making a concerted effort to grasp the so-called plot, asking oneself, while reading a story, what is happening and how it will end--asking oneself, en- fin, as the academic does when reading a mystery, who did it--takes three quarters of the pleasure from the reading of a novel, and robs the art of four quarters of its raison d'tre. So we would consider our purpose as critic achieved if we succeeded in convincing the reader to return to the fresh spon- taneity with which the primitive reader--and with this term I mean the "natural reader" that modern industrial civilization is fast destroying--catches im- mediately, in the reading, all the allusions to the latest findings of structural anthropology or to Jung- ian archetypes without trying to superimpose over- intellectual explanations, and understands without travail the links between a character and the mystic figure of the Indian schelm according to Kerenyi. With the simplicity of leating through an old family album at home, such a reader enjoys every corre- spondence-so immediately perceptible--between the syntactic structure and the structure of the uni- verse according to the Zohar. He is not confounded, in the thrall of false scientific conceit, by a wish to 172

  My Exagmination see in the novel, at all costs, the story of a marriage opposed, but, rather, accepts in all its perspicuity the free engagement of Freudian submeanings playfully stratified in the connective tissue of the work, with no cultivated, Byzantine concern. For this reason we would warn the reader against any ambiguously philosophizing interpretation that uses several hundred pages to explain the novel as, in fact, the story of a young man and a young woman anxious to celebrate their wedding but suffering ob- stacles placed in their path by a villain. It is impos- sible not to see in this hermeneutical superfetation an attempt to reduce all the dialectic of the work to a sexual foundation, identifying the relationship be- tween the two characters as (vulgar and tediously trite!) erotic polarity, and therefore complicating out- rageously the comprehension of the novel. Whereas with great
clarity and the simplicity that only the great artist possesses, even the least prepared reader can readily observe a whole series of symbols point- ing to the textile industry and matrilocal residence, and the constant presence of Agnese as a basso ostin- ato expressing the reality of the Mutterrecht (even the most innocent reader will note the explicit influ- ence of Bachofen in the figure of this "mother" who bears such weight in the book's conclusion, carrying around the children of Renzo and Lucia and "im- planting kisses on their cheeks, which left a white mark for some time"!). The "diriment impediments" to which Don Abbondio symbolically alludes to dis- suade Renzo from marrying are obviously a mere transfiguration of the customs of avoidance ex- 173

  MISREADINGS pounded by Tylor. Here the poet rediscovers them as archetypal probability, recurrent and profound, betrayed by the superficially canonical expressions with which the pastor conceals his intention to pre- vent a relationship between kin (kin in that they are "promised"), and you therefore cannot fail to un- derstand the words "Error, conditio, votum, cognatio, crimen, cultus disparitas, vis, ordo, ligamen, honestas, si sis affinis . ." Similarly, despite the rivers of ink that have been spilled to place in a complicated and preternatural light Padre Cristoforo's farewell to the now reunited betrothed (end of Chapter XXVI) "Oh, dear fa- ther, will we meet again?" "Up above, I hope"-- how easy it is for the simple and spontaneous reader to catch the obvious reference to the Corpus Her- meticum and its basic dictate, sicut inferius sic super- ius, as anyone who in his childhood has so much as glanced at the works of Trismegistus will know. Now, it is precisely the "gestural" immediacy of these images, their deployment according to a shrewd communicative strategy, the spontaneous emotive pattern, that stimulates and provides the reader with the enjoyment proper to reading. Thus he can follow, for example, the demure yet bold play of plot in which an opposition unfolds between the two poles of sexual congress and impotence as existential situ- ation. It will be seen how through the character of Renzo the theme of castration as non-congress is handled, beginning with the capons he takes to the lawyer, a symbol too obvious to require commen- 174

  My Exagmination tary, then continuing with the young man's escape across the lake (escaping, he evades sexual commit- ment, and he does this through the archetype of exile, a clear reference to Thomas Mann's Joseph) and his flight to Bergamo, in which a great quantity of revealing symbols is condensed. Renzo's castration is opposed by the phallic figure of the mountain, which dominates Lucia's stream of consciousness, her interior monologue as she crosses the lake at night. Here we find a free association of images counterpointed by the presence of water, which as- sumes the form of a furrow continually closing upon itself then opened again by human intervention: "The measured slap of those two oars that sliced the blue surface of the lake, abruptly emerged dripping, and plunged in again." Here is an image that while pa- tently sexual at the same time suggests in explicitly Bergsonian terms an lan vital that, striking at the marrow of being and then passing on, is realized as psychic dure, as furrow: "The wave marked by the boat, meeting again behind the poop, traced a wrin- kled stripe, which was moving away from the shore." Now Lucia's monologue, made possible by the pres- ence of the water as duration, as psychic texture, a storehouse of elements (Thales) of a being reduced to memory, focuses lmost exclusively on the image of the mountains, whose loss she regrets and which, in a process typical of the unconscious with an ar- guable manifestation of an Oedipus complex, are identified with the paternal image ("unequal peaks, known to those who have grown up in your midst, 175

  MISREADINGS and impressed in her mind, no less than the aspect of her closest family . ."). Deprived of the union symbolized by the mountain as phallic reality, Lu- cia-in a succession of images that at times achieves the impressive power of Molly Bloom's nocturnal monologue, of which this is admittedly a minor but not unworthy copy ...... feels "disgusted and weary"' "The air seems to her burdensome and dead as she advances sad and absent in the tumultuous cities; the houses after houses, the streets opening into other streets seem to take her breath away." Anyone can see the evident expressionistic derivation of these last images (Kafka is one of the first names that come to mind) as well as the distinct influence of the most recent descriptive techniques of the nouveau roman (the description of those houses after houses and streets that become other streets all too clearly shows the mark of the Butor of L'Emploi du temps and the Robbe-Grillet of Le Labyrinthe). What now happens to Renzo, fleeing to Bergamo? The calembour contained in the name of the city is self-evident: the word has two roots, one Germanic (Berg, mountain) and the other Greek (gamos, wed- ding). Bergamo represents, in fact, Renzo's final at- tempt to restore his lost sexuality, as he yearns for symbolic marriage with the very symbol of it--but in so doing, in desiring that same symbol of his potency, he redirects his travail in an ambiguous homosexual ambiance, a clear and harmonious an- tistrophe to the equally ambiguous rapport that at the same time Lucia is establishing with the nun of 176

  My Exagmination Monza. Nor must we forget that Mr. Joyce, who lived for such a long time in Trieste, could not be ignorant of the sexual significance of the root mona, which we encounter once more, note, both in monaca (nun), with whom Lucia deals, and in monatti (the removers of corpses from the hospital, surrounding Lucia, when Renzo finds her there). It is obvious, then, that with the greatest simplicity of means Mr. Joyce has managed here to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the human spirit, reveal- ing its secret contradictions and realizing (triumph of ambiguity) in both leading characters the archetype of the androgyne. It is Lucia who in Chapter XXXVI accepts with joy the proposal of Padre Cristoforo, or, rather, his perceptive insinuation ("If it ever seemed to me that two people were united by God, you two were they: now I do not see why God would wish to separate you"), and, asking to be united with Renzo, she realizes in modern form the myth of Salmakis, which takes on further implica- tions if we recall that in this same chapter Padre Cristoforo, uttering the above hermetic declaration, undoubtedly refers to the neoplatonic divinity, whereby the union of the two characters becomes the figure of a cosmic union, a kabbalistic cingulum Veneris, in which the very personality of the charac- ters and their sexual individuality are joined in a higher unity. The unity is achieved, the author sug- gests, because in straightforward neoplatonic terms every impurity ceases; and in fact the decease of Padre Cristoforo (etymologically christos fero, and there- 177

  MISREADINGS fore "bearer of the anointed"), who comes to stand for impurity (there is in Padre Cristoforo the bur- den of an original sin, a youthful crime), coincides with the rainfall and therefore with water, the gen- erating and enveloping principle, the unity of the higher Sephirot, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The cycle is closed. This is the substance of the book, or at least what emerges from a first reading, for those who are reluctant to look for further hidden meanings beyond those that the narrative immediacy of the images offers. But there are infinite subtle correspondences still to be pointed out! Think of the presence of the Unnamed, who suggests with such force the figure of the stranger in the mackintosh in Ulysses! And the parallel between the episode of the library and Mr. Magee (again in Ulysses) and the library of Don Ferrante! Or between the argument of Bloom in the tavern and that of Renzo, both men victims of a "law-abiding citizen"! Or between Lucia's night in the castle of the Unnamed and Stephen Dedalus's night in the brothel of Bella Cohen (who corresponds also to the figure of the "old woman" who receives Lucia)! Such observations might lead us to speak of I promessi sposi as a minor work, a clever rehash of themes and images already exploited in previous works, but the novel, clearly demanding these back-refer- ences, becomes instead the summation and conclu- sion of all the preceding oeuvre. Must we then say that it represents the apex of the Joycean canon? Perhaps not, but it does represent its fulfilment. 178

  My Exagmination As we live in an odd country, where common sense occasionally assumes the eccentric forms of madness, there will surely be those who try to read this book in a thousand d
ifferent keys, one more absurd than the next. Father Noon, S. J., will no doubt offer his interpretation, as he has interpreted Mr. Joyce's previous work, seeking again to put this volume in a religious context, perhaps essaying (if we may prophesy) a definition of I promessi sposi as a novel of Providence. Worse still, there will be no dearth of pseudo- intellectual interpretations that attempt to see these archetypal symbols as so many "narrative charac- ters," even referring to a so-called Joycean realism. And we strongly suspect that there will be those who dwell on the beauty of the language without bearing in mind that every expression, every image here is "beautiful" because it connotes a richer symbolic reality. But the temptation to aesthetic distortion is always present in criticism as in contemporary po- etry, and thus it is difficult to know how to read a book. We therefore conclude this review of ours, which is also an invitation to direct and immediate contact with the text, by citing a statement made a few years ago by Ezra Pound when he commented on some verses of a-little poem printed by the firm of Faber & Faber, The Divine Comedy: "Rarely is clarity a gift of the poet, and for one vorticist like Cavalcanti we will always find ten academics bloated with culture like Burchiello. This means that Usury nests always in our midst, but there is always the lucidity of a phanopoeia that can save us. Why then 179