by Umberto Eco
If this is what happens, then we can also record under this rubric the cases where hypotyposis requires us to imagine nonhuman experiences. Such is the case with the "fractalization of space visible only at an ant's pace," for which there is a wonderful example in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
In this case, if the human traveler is moving too fast to realize what the walls and corners of the streets of London are like, the reader is asked to imagine at what speed fog might travel. This involves slowing down our pace, as it were, while reading, and following every crevice in the wall and edge of the window—exactly as would happen if we were asked to imagine how an ant travels through the curves of a fraction of space that we can cover, in an instant, with the sole of our foot.
It is not my intention to exhaust within the limits of such a brief paper the inexhaustible typologies of hypotyposis. I will suggest only some directions for research.
The different techniques of focalization could be analyzed. For instance, the excellent analysis by Joseph Frank of the agricultural fair and speeches in Madame Bovary, which he carried out in a genuinely pre-semiotic age, should be reread: the three levels of the square, the stage and the room are set up live, as it were, that is to say in a Griffith-style parallel montage, creating a visual effect through this emphasis on simultaneous speeches. * One would have to refer, of course, to the two battles of Waterloo, Stendhal's (seen by a protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, who is inside it, and who gets lost in the space he crosses haphazardly, while he loses the sense of the global space of the battle), and the one in Les Misérables, seen from on high by an omniscient Hugo, who analyzes the spaces Napoléon does not see. Elsewhere† I have spoken of the different points of view that gradually create the space in Manzoni's "Quel ramo del lago di Como" (That stretch of Lake Como)—where idiosyncratic syntax corroborates the play of points of view. It would be worthwhile following step by step the vision of the three trees during the carriage ride in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, in order to grasp a double phenomenon: a successive shifting of point of view and the interspersing of spatial description with other reflections that take time (in reading) and space (in writing) in order to make the sense of a journey real, and justify the slow, progressive change of visual angle.
We could continue, but it is worthwhile trying to say something in conclusion about what links these different manifestations of hypotyposis. We have already alluded to this at various stages, and all we need to do now is pull the threads together. Hypotyposis is not based on a semantic rule, as happens with tropes and rhetorical figures, a rule whereby—if you disregard it—you do not understand what is being said. When metonymy uses the container to stand for the content ("let's drink a glass"), if the addressee ignores the rule, he (pedantically) assumes that he is being invited to sip a solid object. If in using a simile or metaphor someone says that a girl is a little deer, an obtuse person who ignores the rule will note with amazement that the person named is not a quadruped, nor has she horns on her forehead. But on the whole these misunderstandings do not take place, except in comic or surreal stories.
When, however, one is faced with any of the instances of hypotyposis cited up till now, the addressee can easily avoid collaborating and visualizing. He can merely grasp that he is being told that a city is being sacked, that a drawer is full of knickknacks, or that a certain Friar John was a giant-killer. We have even insinuated that in the case of Robbe-Grillet the reader can refuse, indeed may have to refuse, to see anything precise, because the author probably wanted to stimulate this refusal to activate an excess of visuals.
Hypotyposis is, then, a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon (besides, inasmuch as it is a figure of thought, like irony and similar figures, it requires complex textual strategies and can never be exemplified through brief quotations or formulas) and is a prime example of interpretative cooperation. It is not so much a representation as a technique for eliciting an effort to compose a visual representation (on the reader's part).
And indeed, why should we think that words "allow us to see," when they were invented precisely to speak of what is not before our eyes and what cannot be pointed at with a finger? The most words can do (since they produce emotional effects) is to lead us to imagine.
Hypotyposis uses words to make the addressee construct a visual representation. The proof of this is the kind of problems that arise in that exercise which is the opposite of ekphrasis (which is a verbal description of an image), and is the "translation," or visual materialization of what a verbal text allowed us to imagine. Let us go back to the description from Revelation I cited previously. The real problem for all the Mozarabic miniaturists (the illustrators of those splendid commentaries on Revelation known as the "Beati") was that of representing the four living creatures who are above and around the throne (in the Vulgate, which was the only version known to the illuminators, " super thronum et circa thronum"). How can these creatures be above and around the throne at the same time?
An examination of the solutions offered by the various "Beati" shows us how impossible the enterprise is, and gives rise to representations that do not "translate" the text satisfactorily. And this is because the miniaturists, having grown up using the Greco-Christian translation, thought that the prophet "saw" something similar to statues or paintings. But the culture of John the Apostle, like that of Ezekiel, from whose vision John drew inspiration, was a Hebraic culture, and moreover his was the imagination of a seer. Consequently, John was not describing pictures (or statues), but, if anything, dreams, and, if you like, films (those moving pictures that allow us to daydream, or in other words, visions adapted for the layman's state). In a vision that was cinematic in nature, the four creatures can rotate and appear at one moment above and before the throne, at another around it.*
But in this sense the Mozarabic miniaturist could not collaborate with the text, and in some sense, in his hands and in his mind, the hypotyposis failed to work. Proof therefore that there is no hypotyposis if the addressee does not play the game.
Version of a paper given at the Centro di Studi Semiotici e Cognitivi at the University of San Marino on 29 September 1996, during a conference on the semiotics of space. I began my paper with a reference to Sandra Cavicciolis article "I sensi, lo spazio, gli umori. Micro-analisi di In the Orchard di Virginia Woolf (in VS 57 [1990]), one of the finest analyses of space in literature. On that occasion the author was present in the room. Now that she is no longer with us, I would like to dedicate these reflections to her.
THE FLAWS IN THE FORM
I would like to reread a page from Luigi Pareysons Aesthetics;* actually, it is less than a page, just a few lines from subsection 10 of the third section ("The Parts and the Whole") of chapter 3 ("Completeness of the Work of Art"). Subsection 10 is entitled "The essential nature of each part: structure, stopgaps, imperfections."
We know that one of the central preoccupations of Pareyson's Aesthetics was its polemic against Croce's idealism and against its most deleterious consequences in militant criticism. He aimed at reclaiming the character of totality in artistic form, and therefore refused to pick out in the work sporadic moments of "poetry," like flowers growing among the (however functional) brushwood of simple "structure." It is not really necessary, but it is useful to remind ourselves that "structure" in those days, and particularly in Italy, was something to avoid; it meant scaffolding, mechanical artifice that had nothing to do with moments of lyrical intuition, and at most stood out in a Hegelia
n sense as a negative impulse, as conceptual residue, which at best served to let the moments of poetry shine like individual jewels. In his notes to the chapter Pareyson refers to Luigi Russo as a cautious champion of the "nonextraneity of structure in art," but the latter author (though he recognizes that there is a structure that is not pre-poetic, not a mere frame or skeleton on which to insert later poetic flowers, and sees structure "as though generated by the interior of the mind that has been moved to poetry") cannot avoid conceding that the mind so moved "catches its breath and rests in these havens of doctrine." So structure is absolved, but on the grounds that it does not harm the poetry, not because it too is poetry. Structure functions as a buoy to which the poetic swimmer clings: it is good that it is there, but only to let us catch our breath before we start again on the crawl of lyric effusion. As if to say that Dante, who could not see at every step "the sweet colors of the oriental sapphire," or Beatrice's "smiling eyes," took long rests by discoursing on theology and digressing on the composition of the heavens.
This concept of structure had nothing to do with the sense we would give to the term "structuralist" today; even though in this respect Pareysons theory of the totality of form could be reread in a structuralist way, his inspiration came from organicist aesthetics of Kantian and Romantic origin, not through the post-Saussure axis.
However, by opposing so decisively the poetry/structure dichotomy with his notion of the totality of artistic form, Pareyson risked falling into an organicist rhetoric.
It was one thing to say that in the complete work (and in fact right from the first moment when the initial spark starts the creative process) "tout se tient, "and that therefore theory must affirm and interpretative activity pick out the organic design supporting it, the individual rule, the "forming form" that in some dark way precedes the work, directing it as it is created, and appearing as the result and revelation of the formed form. And quite another thing to celebrate this "unity-totality of the work" in tones that frankly, forty years on, seem to us to belong more to a rhetoric of the Beautiful than to a phenomenology of forms. Just one example:
This dynamic character of the unity-totality of the work of art can explain the relations that exist within it between the parts and the whole. In a work of art the parts have a dual kind of relationship: each part with the others, and each part with the whole. All the parts are connected among themselves in an indissoluble unity, so that each one is necessary and indispensable and has a specific and non-interchangeable place, so much so that the absence of any part would disrupt the unity and any variation would return it to disorder ... Each part is set up as such by the whole, which itself has summoned up and arranged the parts of which it is made up: if changing parts leads to the dissolution of unity and disintegration of the whole, that is because the whole itself presides over the coherence of the parts among themselves and makes them work together to form the whole. In this sense the relations that the parts have among themselves do nothing but reflect the relation that each part has with the whole: the harmony of the parts forms the whole because the whole forms their unity (page 107).
Too neat. Here—as elsewhere—Pareyson seems to be seized by a Pythagorean raptus, and one day it might be worthwhile tracing the sources of his aesthetics that he does not own up to, by going back beyond Romanticism to Renaissance Neoplatonism, or Cusanus. Not to mention some readings of the mystics, with whom he was familiar even though he did not write about them.
Is it possible that a theorist so sensitive to the moment of actual reading of works of art could think of it as an experience so overwhelmingly totalizing, of almost Panic raptus, never disrupted by moments of perplexity or dissatisfaction, either on the part of the artist (who, when rereading, revising, or relistening to the work, may wish to correct himself) or on the part of the critic (who might be tempted to correct the artist)? The good interpreter, who has penetrated the work, is also he who, even at the peak of his enthusiasm for an author, says every now and again, "I don't like this," or even "I would have put it better" (then, perhaps out of modesty, he does not actually say anything, but is straining at the leash all the same). Yet Pareyson was the first to think of interpretation as an exercise that can also accentuate, attenuate, and put into perspective the work's various aspects, and therefore—out of loyalty to the spirit of the work—also correct it.
But it is immediately after writing the passage quoted above—and I chose that passage from the many I could have chosen precisely because of its closeness to the amazing "about-turn" I am about to discuss—that Pareyson confronts the problem of so-called inert moments, or "structure."
He confronts it in order to redeem structure, to make it part of the creative project, an essential, not a marginal or extraneous, moment: if "the whole emerges from the unity of its parts to produce something complete" there can be no trifling detail or irrelevant minutiae; and if in interpreting the work some parts are less important than others, this happens because in the organized form a distribution of functions takes place.
Pareyson is not saying—for this would be to read him as though he had written thirty years later, or had come from a different background—that The Divine Comedy is more beautiful for its theological construction than for its famous poetic pearls, which instead represent something accidental, not essential; but he certainly is saying that the Homeric structure underlying Joyce's Ulysses is as important in an aesthetic sense as Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which could not produce the effect it does were it not inserted into that structure, so that the reader must find in the monologue a whole host of infratextual quotations that necessarily refer back to other hints, apparently irrelevant and pointless, which have appeared over the course of the other chapters.
Pareyson does not express himself in these terms, of course. He writes, rather, that "the really perspicacious observation of a work ... is aimed not so much at contemplating the detail in itself as at inserting it among other details ... in order to examine its irreplaceability in that living nexus where it appears as essential to the whole as it is revelatory of it, and is ready to evoke all the other parts in the very act of being invoked by them."
And it is at this point that Pareyson realizes he has to come to terms not only with structure as framework but also with the irregularities, weaknesses, patches, mends, slips, drops in tension, and even actual faults that at times spoil the much-vaunted harmony and necessity of the structure.
Stopgaps, in fact. "Stopgap" ("zeppa"in Italian) is an inelegant word, like the flaw it alludes to, and in its sound "zeppa" conjures up cough, sneeze, regurgitation, and hiccup, whereas semantically it suggests a clumsy intrusion, an obvious repair job.*
And yet Pareyson, who is also an almost elevated writer, does not avoid this terminological stopgap when referring to an aesthetic stopgap. He uses it to describe works that appear "inconsistent and uneven, without thereby being open to the accusation of lacking poetry" (and we will allow this indulgence in the Crocean terminology to which he is so opposed; he means that certain works appear uneven and yet give an impression of great breadth and consistency of form), works in which the stopgaps function as crutches that are necessary for the whole work to proceed, they are bridges, bits of welding, "in which the artist works less carefully, less patiently or even with indifference, as though he were just getting through these bits, as though they were passages that, precisely because they are obligatory in order to move on, can be left to convention without prejudicing the whole" (p. 111).
Nevertheless, stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position. Let us deconstruct these metaphors (Pareysons aesthetics abounds in metaphors, and if we read it without bearing this in mind we risk not noticing how it questions fundamental problems of organization of systems); let us forget a personalized Whole that requires something. Pareyson is telling us that the stopgap is an artifice that allows one part to be linked to another, and thus that it is necessary.
If a door has to open gently or majestically it has to have a hinge, however mechanical its function may be. The bad architect, obsessed with aesthetics, gets irritated because a door has to revolve around a hinge, and redesigns the hinge so that it appears "beautiful" while carrying out its function; and often by so doing he manages to create a door that creaks, sticks, does not open, or opens badly. The good architect, on the other hand, wants the door to open in order to reveal other rooms, and he does not care whether, having redesigned everything in the building, when it comes to the hinge he has to resort to the eternal wisdom of the ironmonger.
The stopgap accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows us, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
I would give as an example of stopgaps what contemporary theorists have called "turn ancillaries." These are the phrases found in novels after quoted speech:
"The murderer is the viscount," pronounced the police chief.
"I love you," he said.
"Some saint will help us," replied Lucia.
Apart from a few authors who take particular care in varying their "turn ancillaries" (choosing at different times between "he retorted," "quipped," "sneered," "added thoughtfully"—and I am not saying that these are the best), the others, from the greatest to the most banal novelist, use them just as they come, as it were, and those used by a great author like Manzoni are not in the end so different from those used by a writer of feuilletons like Carolina Invernizio. The fact is that "turn ancillaries" are stopgaps; they cannot be avoided, but nor can they be embellished very much, and the great writer is one who knows that when they are there, the reader tends to skip them; but if they were not there, the dialogue would become wearisome or incomprehensible.