by Umberto Eco
As every scholar knows, at the beginning of that seminar Doctor Lacan (just whose daughter was the girl on the chest of drawers, anyway?) collected the elephants previously distributed at the end of'Séminaire I and distributed among the participants some little owls, asserting that they were more suited to the chest of drawers than the elephants were.16 Then he noted how, as a rule, a mirror appears above a chest of drawers: but (and here, certainly, we have the stroke of genius in this seminar), while the disciples were concentrating their attention on this most abused paraphernal, Doctor Lacan, with one of his typical coups de théâtre, recognized in the comò a typical item of furniture supplied with drawers and then broached his brand-new theory of the stade du tiroir.17
The drawer is in fact the place of repression, and the poem appeared to Lacan as the very allegory of Urverdrängung, whereas the pulsatile action of the owls, only apparently inspired by desire, was revealed as a disguise, not all that implicit, of the Bemächti gungsstreich; or rather, as Lacan himself clarified in his limpid French, as an Überwältigung of the girl-object.
But it now becomes absolutely necessary to move on to a more viable—and more verifiable—Anglo-Saxon corrective for all this transalpine mist. We must bear in mind that as early as the 1960s, Noam Chomsky,18 in what he at first defined as Standard Theory of the Chest of Drawers (STCD), had attempted to analyze the WP ambarabä ciccì coccö (where WP stands for "What? phrase," from "What?!?" the exclamation of Dwight Bolinger when he was exposed, as native informant, to the utterance of the verse itself). The STCD diagrammed the verse in this fashion:
But in the successive phase (Extended Theory of the Owls, ETO), he decided to employ the usual asterisk, labeling the verse as in (1):
(1) *ambarabà ciccì coccó
Truly an ad hoc solution, confuted perceptively by Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy (1978) with a reference to Frege, for whom, given that the meaning (in the sense of Bedeutung) of every utterance is always a truth-value, and given that all phrases marked by an asterisk are neither true nor false, the meaning of (1) must be considered the equivalent of the meaning of (2):19
(2) * Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
But this has the paradoxical result that anyone wishing to make an assertion concerning the virtus dormitiva of colorless green ideas should utter (1)—which would in itself be nothing, as Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy observed, were it not for the fact that the owl poem should then be rewritten in these terms:
(3) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
three old owls on a chest of drawers
were screwing
the daughter of the doctor.
But the mother called them,
colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
While this paradoxical conclusion inspired Harold Bloom to write a probing essay20 on poetry as misunderstanding, thus furnishing Jacques Derrida the occasion for some provocatory reflections21 on interpretive drift, the attempt was firmly knocked down by Quine.22 The last-named observed that, if the utterance (3) had to be read in terms of post hoc ergo propter hoc (if the green ideas, etc., then three owls, etc.), and if we let
p = Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
q = Three owls on the chest of drawers make love with the doctor's daughter
then p could be negated only through modus tollendo tollens, namely admitting that q is not true. But since q cannot be negated, given the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, it is impossible to negate p; and thus it must be conceded that colorless green ideas may sleep furiously, which is intuitively false, salva veritate.
It is worth remembering the attempt of Chafe, Chafe, and Chafe (1978) whereby coccò would be a verb form (third person singular of the preterit of cocare) and Ambaraba Ciccì, a proper noun. In this case the sestina should be read as the story of one Ambaraba Ciccì who "coked" three owls on the chest of drawers (the authors did not face the problem of the meaning of cocare, as they sustained the legitimacy of a purely distributional analysis). But this hypothesis was famously disproved by Kripke in the light of a causal theory of meaning; it is impossible to identify the expression Ambaraba Ciccì as rigid designator, for want of evidence of an initial baptism.23
In response to Searle's objection,24 namely that Ambaraba Ciccì could be replaced by a definite description, like (4):
(4) The only man who cochoed the owls in Como
Kripke pointed out the problems that would derive from replacing a proper name with a definite description in opaque contexts, as in (5):
(5) John thinks that Nancy hoped that Mary believed that Noam suspected that Ambaraba was not a proper name
For to assert (6)
(6) John thinks that ... the only man who cochoed the owls in Como was not a proper name
is not only without meaning, but patently false, since as everyone knows,
(7) John is eager to please
and hence John would never venture to invite general reproach, by making such silly assertions.
A vigorous change of direction was imposed on the whole debate by the generative semanticists (see in particular Fillcawley; Mcjackendoff; Klima-Toshiba and Gulp, 1979). Working with the English version of the poem, they decided to abandon the inconclusive analysis of the first verse to concentrate their attention on the verses that follow, simplified as in (8), for which they devised the accompanying diagram.
(8) Three owls are screwing the girl on the chest of drawers
The stern polemic among transformationalists, generativists, and philosophers of language was finally settled thanks to the intervention of Montague (1977)25. In an exemplary essay on the poem of the owls, he posited a predicate P
***
P = being three owls on the chest of drawers who make love with the daughter of the doctor until the mother calls them
whereby the whole poem can be formalized (indexing a possible world wl):
P x w1
Note that, if we assume that in another possible world, w2, the predicate P can be stated as:
P = being the sole individual for whom life is a tale told by an idiot
King Lear can properly be represented as:
P x w2
—which demonstrates almost iconically the profound affinity among all works of art worthy of the name.
But, reacting against the hypersimplification of the Anglo-Saxon schools, Greimas and the Ecole de Paris, after having identified in the poem, as the fundamental level, four actants (Subject, Object, Sender, and Receiver) and having stressed the actorialization implicit in the anthroponyms owl, girl, chest of drawers, and mother, went on to identify two narrative programs: the first F [S1 → (S1 ∩ Ov)°] in which the owls fornicate with the value-object girl, and the second F [S2 → (S1 ∪ Ov] in which the mother separates the owls from their object of value. In the course of the first program, given a semiotic square on the order of
the girl (who does not know what the owls are doing to her) seems to play and not play (and is the victim of the owls' lie), while the owls find themselves as the addressees (destinataires) of a secret (they make love but do not "seem," and pretend to play doctor with the girl). In the course of the second narrative program the mother discovers the truth and identifies the seeming with the being of the owls. To skip over the intermediary passages of the gripping Greimasian analysis, at its conclusion the author discovers that the profound oppositions of the poem can be depicted on the square as follows:
***
But—and here lies the punctum dolens of this otherwise extremely acute study—Greimas in the end no longer knows what to do with the chest of drawers and decides to donate it to the Salvation Army.
The limits of this essay prevent us from considering countless other critical contributions to the fascinating problem of the owls. For the moment we will end by citing the recent essay of Emanuele Severino in which, with a luicid sense of Destiny and with far greater pregnancy and depth than are usually found in the application of the weary methods of every struct
uralism or formalism, the owls exercising their dominion over the doctor's daughter are seen as the very essence and the vocation of the West.
Only the arrival of the mother thwarts the owls' will to power; so she can be seen as a negation of the nihilism of the essence of the West, a reference to the "second corsair" and the "will of Destiny." But to accept this the owls must necessarily understand that only by renouncing dominion over the world can they comprehend the falsehood of the second utterance, according to which it cannot be true that it is not true that being is nothingness. What is willed is impossible, and the sense of truth is eternally what cannot now or ever succeed in being. Thus the initial Ambaraba and the final Ambaraba confirm, as scansion of an eternal return, the nothingness of becoming as the irruption of the unheard-of. And the mother only makes evident how predictable the unpredictable was for those who had and cherished a desire to anticipate, ante-capere, pre-capture the owls and their defeat. Whence, as at the beginning, always and again Ambaraba. The whole is unchangeable.
The chronicler of this critical adventure would like, if he might, to stop at this point, for chronicle is not tautology of the factual, but interrogation and drift; the supreme condition (interrogative arrest) remains that of going forward, and proceeding to return to the origin, and saying not to say, and not saying to be and to remain in the identity of the different. To the point where (the owls have spoken for us, or we for them, and/or the language for all, or silence for the word) no voice will be able to remain silent in the full ef-fability of its own void.
This, and only this, is what Poetry demands of us.
1982
Editorial Revision
These days, especially in the United States, implacable copy editors demand of authors not only stylistic revisions but even changes in plot, new endings, whatever commercial necessity dictates. But when we Italians recall—for example—the summary way the novelist-editor Elio Vittorini dealt with young writers some decades ago, can we honestly say that they ordered things so differently in the past?
Take the usually overlooked fact that the first version of a well-known poem by Philip Larkin originally went: "They do you harm, your father and mother." It was only the insistence of Larkin's editor that inspired the now-famous variant. And the first draft of Eliot's Waste Land opened: "April is the cruellest month. And March isn't all that great, either." Weakened in its impact by this peevish insistence on climatic details, the earlier text denied April any implied link with the rites of vegetation. As everyone knows, Ariosto at first submitted to his publisher a very brief poem that went: "Of women and knights, arms, loves, courtly rituals, and bold ventures I have nothing to say." And that was that. "How about developing it a bit?" the editor suggested. And Messer Ludovico, who was having enough trouble as civil governor of a remote Tuscan province, said, "What's the use? There are dozens of epics of chivalry already. Leave it. I want to urge poets to try new genres." And the editor replied, "Yes, of course, I understand, and, personally, I agree with you. But why not try approaching the form from another angle? With irony, for instance. Anyway, we can't sell a one-page book, particularly one with only two verses on the page. It looks like imitation Mal-larmé. It would have to be a limited, numbered edition. So unless we can get Philip Morris to sponsor it, we're screwed."
The Manzoni case is important. He began the first version of his novel with "That stretch of Lake Garda." It seems simple enough, but if he had stuck to that lake, he might have written the whole history of the Venetian Republic and never got beyond Riva. You can imagine how long it would have taken Renzo to get to Milan. He'd never have made it in time for the bread riot. And afterwards nothing significant would have happened to the poor youth. Lucia would have sought protection from the Nun of Rovereto, an abbess of impeccable behavior; the whole novel would have ended after a few trivial mishaps before the happy wedding.... Even Brother Cadfael has more exciting adventures.
The Leopardi story is still more serious. The wandering shepherd of Asia, in the first draft, cried: "What are you doing, Jupiter, in heaven? Tell me, what are you doing, silent Jupiter." Nothing wrong with that excellent planet, of course, but it is visible only during certain seasons and has hardly any emotional or metaphysical connotations. In fact, Leopardi's composition consisted of just a few verses, at the end of which the shepherd concluded that, as far as he was concerned, Jupiter didn't amount to much. Luckily, the editor's intervention saved the day: "Professor Leopardi, give me a break! Use the old imagination. Why not try one of Jupiter's satellites?" "Oh, please!...that would only make things worse. What would a wandering shepherd of Asia know about satellites? Maybe the moon ... at most. You want me to have him cry out to the moon? Really! I do have some self-respect." "Well, you never know. Run it through the machine."
The Proust story, finally, is tragic. In the first version he had written: "Longtemps je me suis couché après minuit." You know what happens to a growing boy who stays up till all hours. The Narrator succumbed to a cerebral inflammation that virtually destroyed his memory. He saw the Duchesse de Guermantes the next day and asked, "Who are you, Madame?" He was banished from all the salons of Paris, because certain faux pas are beyond forgiveness in that world. In this Ur-version, the Narrator was even incapable of expressing himself in the first person, and La Recherche boiled down to a brief case history à la Charcot.
On the other hand, after I ended a novel of mine with the verse of Bernard de Morlay beginning, "Stat rosa pristina nomine," I was informed by some philologists that certain other extant manuscripts read, on the contrary, "Stat Roma," which, for that matter, would make more sense because the preceding verses refer to the disappearance of Babylon. What would have happened if I had in consequence entitled my novel The Name of Rome? I would have had a preface by John Paul II, who no doubt would have made me a Papal Count. Or someone would have made a movie with Sean Connery in a toga.
1990
Sequels
In 1991 the Italian novelist Laura Grimaldi wrote a Monsieur Bovary, recounting what happened to Charles after Emma's death; and at about the same time, a Ms. Ripley (probably a character invented by Patricia Highsmith) made a killing with her Scarlett, a continuation of Gone with the Wind. For that matter, from Oedipus at Colonus to Twenty Years After, the tradition of the sequel has earned a certain nobility.
Giampaolo Proni, with his The Case of the Asia Computer, showed that he knows how to invent narrating machines; and he suggested that I offer some other possible continuations of famous novels.
Marcel Who?
Proust's Narrator, having concluded his work with the seal of Time, exhausted by asthma, decides to visit a celebrated allergy specialist on the French Riviera and travels there by motorcar. An inexperienced driver, he is involved in a frightful accident: severe concussion, almost total loss of memory. He is treated by Aleksandr Luria, who advises him to develop the technique of the interior monologue. Since the Narrator no longer has a store of memories to monologue about and can barely assimilate his present perceptions, Luria suggests he extend the interior monologues in Joyce's Ulysses.
The Narrator struggles through the unbearable novel, and reconstructs a fictitious ego for himself, beginning with the memory of his grandmother's visits to him in boarding school at Clongowes Wood. He regains a fine synesthetic ability, and the slightest whiff of mutton fat from a shepherd's pie brings to his mind the trees of Phoenix Park and the spire of the church at Chapelizod. He dies, a Guinness addict, in a doorway on Eccles Street.
Molly
Waking from a troubled sleep on the morning of June 17, 1904, Molly Bloom goes down to the kitchen and finds Stephen Dedalus there, making himself some coffee. Leopold has gone out on one of his vague business errands; perhaps he has deliberately left the two alone. Molly's face is puffy from sleep, but Stephen is immediately fascinated, seeing her as a kind of wondrous whale-woman. He recites some cheap poems to her and Molly falls into his arms. They run away together to Pula, on the Istrian coast,
and then to Trieste, with Bloom pursuing them the whole time, disguised as the man in the mackintosh.
In Trieste, Italo Svevo advises Stephen to write down his story, and Molly, who is very ambitious, chimes in. Over the years, Stephen writes a monumental novel, Telemachus. When he has completed the last page, he abandons the manuscript on his desk and elopes with Sylvia Beach. Molly discovers the manuscript, reads it, and becomes completely engrossed in it, finding herself back at the exact point where everything started, stirring restlessly in her bed in Dublin, on the night between June 16 and 17, 1904.
Crazed with rage, she follows Stephen to Paris. At the door of Shakespeare & Co., rue de l'Odèon, she offs him with three pistol shots, shouting "Yes, yes, yes!" She then takes flight, accidentally entering a comic strip by Daniele Panebarco, where she discovers Bloom in her bed making love with—simultaneously—Anna Livia Plurabelle, Lenin, Sam Spade, and Barbara Walters. Distraught, she kills herself.
Sam Again
Vienna, 1950. Twenty years have passed, but Sam Spade is still determined to get hold of the Maltese falcon. His current connection is Harry Lime, and the two of them are confabulating at the top of the Prater's Ferris wheel. "I've found a clue," Lime says. Descending, they head for the Café Mozart, where, in one corner, a black musician is playing As Time Goes By on a zither. At the little table in the rear, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, which is wearing a bitter smile, there is Rick. Among the documents Ugarte showed him, he has found a clue; he shows Sam Spade a photograph of Ugarte. "Cairo!" the private eye murmurs. "When I knew him he went by the name of Peter Lorre," Lime says with a sneer.