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

by Umberto Eco

  Proper names, then, embarrassing signs, are not reliable as words, and are in danger of being even less so as “rigid designators.” The fewer of them mentioned the better. But, as labels, they serve their purpose: little by little the reader hangs on the name Lucia everything that the actions of the young woman have done to define her, and the characters in the novel do likewise. Obviously, the name is all the more effective the more it provides a label for a series of characteristics already defined from the outset, as is the case with Don Rodrigo, and for characters already fully defined by a hagiography that is never called into question, as is the case with Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. Don Rodrigo and Federigo are both clichés—the first damned from the opening chapters (so much so that we will never learn whether or not he was touched by grace at the point of death), the second wearing a halo of holiness before he even comes onstage. This is why their names have an almost magical power, hearing them one either shudders or is reassured.

  But, both in the case of already defined characters like Federigo, and those in the process of being defined like the Unnamed, Manzoni can name names—sidestepping his distrust of the verbal—because as a good storyteller he knows that proper names are merely hooks on which to hang precise descriptions, and the descriptions come from a playbook of behaviors and actions that manifest themselves in terms of natural semiotics.

  In any case, we cannot say that Manzoni exploits names to suggest connotations of character. The case of the defamatory nicknames of the bravoes does not count, because the bravoes appear onstage already characterized for what they are and what they have no option but to be. Let us consider instead a borderline case, that of the aforementioned pettifogging lawyer Azzeccagarbugli (Dr Quibbler).

  He seems to be defined from the start by his nickname, but this is not altogether true. The theater of visual appearances that he deploys around himself seduces Renzo in the beginning: the actions of the pettifogger are marked by humanity, his rooms are a guarantee of his learning and respect for the law (the portraits of the twelve Caesars, the bookshelf full of dusty old volumes, the table littered with statements, pleas, applications, and edicts). Nor should we forget that the dressing gown he is draped in is a legal robe, however threadbare. Renzo is taken in by a seductive mise-en-scène, and he concludes that a quibbler can quibble for a just cause as well as an evil one. The name has not yet condemned the character, indeed the mise-en-scène exalts him, at least in the eyes of someone without experience of the world. All the doctor’s gestures are reassuring to Renzo, showing him the edicts, letting him see with his own eyes that the laws exist, and so on. Azzeccagabugli only becomes odious when Renzo realizes that all this talk about the rule of law hides his desire to get around it, and the good doctor reveals his true self when he talks like Don Abbondio, using language, that is, to duck the request that is being made. At that point his gestures are unequivocal, shooing Renzo out and especially (the exercise of the symbolic has a material cost) giving him back his brace of capons.

  14.5. The Pardon of Father Cristoforo

  The solemn scene of the pardon in Chapter 4 is symbolic and liturgical in its staging. Given the solemn comportment of the actors, the time and place of the meeting, and the elaborately theatrical orchestration of the action, as well as the costumes and poses of the figures who are to decide upon the life or death of the penitent, words become irrelevant.

  The duel itself had already occurred because there were rules of behavior and precedence to be observed, in which left and right, frowns and tones of voice counted. Ludovico/Cristoforo’s repentance and his conversion were a consequence of his revulsion from the offense he had committed. “Though murder was so common in those days that everyone was used to the news of violent death and the sight of blood, the impression made on him by the spectacle of the man who had died for him, and the man who had died at his hands, was something novel and indescribable—a revelation of feelings he had never known before. To see his enemy fall to the ground, to see the change in his face, as it passed in a moment from fury and menace to the vanquished, solemn peace of death, was an experience which transformed the soul of the killer” (p. 83). But let us come to the scene of the pardon.

  Blood will have blood: the fact that Cristoforo has repented, that he is seeking forgiveness, that he has gone so far as to renounce the world and take the habit of a Franciscan friar, cannot wash away the offense. It is washed away by a magnificently mounted scenario that articulates, in terms of a strict code of etiquette, what words cannot say—a seventeenth-century idea if ever there was one, which Manzoni captures with a fine pictorial sense. Hence the gathering of all the deceased’s relatives in the great reception hall, with capes, plumes, ceremonial swords, starched and pleated ruffs, flowing simars—a secular aristocratic liturgy.

  The two friars process ritually between the two wings of the crowd, and already at that point “Brother Cristoforo’s face and manner proclaimed unmistakably to the assembled company” (p. 88) that he had truly repented. Whether Cristoforo is sincere or not is unimportant: he behaves in a sincere way, with the tone of a sincere man, which he somehow instinctively theatricalizes, true son of his century that he is, and cannot help theatricalizing, since he must stay within the parameters that have been carefully preordained. After which Cristoforo sticks to his script. He kneels, crosses his hands over his chest, bows his shaved head. At that point he speaks and pronounces words of forgiveness, but it is clear from the narrative that it is not those words that convince the dead man’s brother and the crowd of nobles. Their conviction has already taken place. The dead man’s brother’s “stance was meant to suggest strained condescension and suppressed wrath” (he strikes a pose, like a character in an opera), but the gestures of the penitent (his ritual posturings) make it clear that the bearing of the offended party may now be modified. This is the context, liturgical and clearly ecclesiastical in nature, for the embrace and the kiss of peace, the petition for and the bestowing of the bread of forgiveness.

  Cristoforo is fully aware that this bread is something more than part of the paraphernalia of the ceremony, that, rather than being mere evidence of his forgiveness, it has performatively created that forgiveness and will continue to keep it alive as long as the bread itself lasts. He will carry a morsel of that bread with him for the rest of his life. In the plague hospital, after reminding Renzo that in thirty years he has still not found peace for what he did, he entrusts the bread to the two betrothed as inheritance, warning, pledge, and viaticum. Cristoforo does not feel blasphemous using that bread as a relic, because he knows that it has been consecrated in the course of a ritual.

  14.6. Further Examples

  We could continue, and heaven help us if we couldn’t. In the meeting between Don Rodrigo and Father Cristoforo, the courteous words Don Rodrigo pronounces at the start of their conversation are belied by “his way of uttering them” (p. 108). Don Rodrigo asks in what way can he be of service, but his tone plainly says: remember whom you are speaking to. And Cristoforo indulges in a little stage business himself when, in order to strike terror into the heart of the villain, given the patent inadequacy of verbal threats of divine retribution, he has recourse (or Manzoni has recourse for him, which amounts to the same thing) to striking another theatrical pose, this time more nineteenth-century than baroque: “stepping back a couple of paces, poised boldly on his right foot, with his right hand on his hip, he raised the other hand with his forefinger outstretched towards Don Rodrigo and looked him straight in the eye with a furious glare” (pp. 110–111).

  Before the reader has learned about her terrible life, the Signora of Monza is introduced, in a passage that owes much to the Gothic novel, behind the convent grille, condemned by her physiognomic ambiguities, by her gaze, by the not unworldly way her waist is laced and a curl of black hair allowed to emerge from the band on her forehead, against every rule of the cloister (p. 171). As yet we know nothing about Gertrude, and already we can guess a great deal. The only ones who
cannot guess are Lucia, she too as yet a novice when it comes to the codes of natural semiosis, and the Father Superior, who has given up trying to read behavior for political reasons.

  Moreover, Gertrude’s entire education consists of visual signs more than words, from the religious dolls given to her as a child down to her segregation as a consequence of her rebellion, a segregation that takes the form of a play of absences, evasive glances, silences, reticence: “The days went by, without her father or anyone else talking to her about her application, or her change of mind, and without any course of action whatever being urged upon her, either with caresses or with threats. Her parents’ behavior to her was unsmiling, gloomy and harsh, but they never told her why” (p. 182). The opportunity to speak, and at some length, is restored to her only after she has surrendered, because by now what she was expected to understand she has understood without words.

  On the other hand Gertrude, in the end, sentences herself to burial in the cloister precisely because words are extorted from her that she would have preferred not to utter, that do not express what she feels, but, since they are ritual gestures with a performative value, no sooner have they been said than they can no longer be taken back.

  In the course of his visit to the Unnamed in chapter 20, the way Don Rodrigo offers his respects is through a complex liturgy of greetings and gifts to the bravoes of his host, while the latter—whose profession is announced by room after room whose walls are covered with muskets, sabers, and halberds—at once, even before speaking, scrutinizes Don Rodrigo’s hands and his face.

  In chapter 33, when Don Rodrigo experiences the first signs of the plague, he becomes aware of unequivocal internal symptoms, about which he cannot be deceived, and Griso immediately grasps his master’s state by observing his face. In a universe in which, as Manzoni has told us in the foregoing pages, the whole of society has vied with one another in ignoring or not comprehending the symptoms of the sickness—and was able to do so by translating the visual evidence into verbal reports—Don Rodrigo’s symptoms can only be interpreted in the correct way, because they cannot be verbally mediated. We are faced with the natural evidence of “a filthy bubonic swelling, of a livid purplish color” (p. 608). Language, however, immediately steps in to cover up the reality. Don Rodrigo lies, saying he feels well. Griso lies, encouraging him, with words, and professing his obedience, and all the while he is preparing to hand him over to the scavenging monatti. Don Rodrigo and Griso understand each other with looks and deceive each other with words.

  14.7. Public Madness and Public Folly

  But if so far we have tried to extrapolate from various episodes an implicit semiotics, Manzoni is far more explicit in the chapters on the plague (31 and 32).

  When he recounts how the contagion spread, while the whole of society repressed the idea, and how, when the reality of the disease became undeniable, a human agent was invented and the figure of the “anointer” (untore) was constructed (in the sense in which the press constructs a monster or a conspiracy), Manzoni speaks of “public madness” (p. 581) and “a confused and terrifying accumulation of public folly” (p. 601). A delirium of reason, to be sure, but the way in which the author explains it is a description of a process of semiosic teratology, a chronicle of falsification of signifiers and of substitution of signifieds.

  The first signs that appear (a number of corpses) are without a code—“symptoms [segni] quite unfamiliar to most of the survivors” (p. 566). It is Ludovico Settala, a doctor who has lived through the previous plague, who provides the code to interpret them. But when similar symptoms occur in Lecco, the commissioners send representatives who gather evidence—verbal evidence—from an ignorant barber, who provides a different, mendacious code: autumnal vapors from the marshes, the privations and torments caused by German troops.

  Fresh proofs arrive: the “marks” (p. 567) of the pestilence are found in various localities. The usual reports are sent, in writing, to the Governor, who takes them for what they are worth and protests that he is too busy with the weightier affairs of war. For its part the population, passionately concerned to suppress its fears, compete among themselves in giving credit to the most bizarre codes, attributing the symptoms to the most unheard-of causes.

  Finally somebody sees a bubo for the first time. In this case the signifier ought to be referred, according to a tried and true symptomatological tradition, to its proper signified. But the majority have only heard talk about the bubo, seen only by a few. On the other hand the edicts, which proliferate in an inane manner in the hope of forestalling contagion, add to the verbal confusion, and are as usual ignored. Furthermore, it seems that the news that arrives is insufficient, and “the rarity of the cases itself diverted most minds from the truth” (p. 572). Here begins a process that an epistemologist would attribute to the intrinsic weakness of any inductive method (how many cases are needed to justify the formulation of a law?) but which in fact brings into play a rhetorical insecurity, a perplexity over how consistent a part must be before it can represent the whole by synecdoche, or how evident an effect must be to be a good metonymy for the cause. However that may be, confronted with the uncertainty with regard to the symptoms, the doctors have an effective verbal stratagem to fall back on. They attribute to the imprecise symptoms “various names of ordinary diseases [which they had] ready to describe all the instances of plague that they were called on to treat, whatever signs or symptoms they might exhibit” (p. 572).

  The opposition between symptoms and signs and names is clear. The natural visual signifier is hidden by a verbal signifier that prevents it from being recognized.

  Still, there are persons who, in spite of everything, are able to “see” the approaching catastrophe. And they are branded with the “name” of enemies of their country. The case of Ludovico Settala, who risks lynching for insisting on saying what he had seen, is typical. Against him there arise the negligent doctors, who, faced with “those sinister livid patches and bubonic swellings,” take refuge in “a mere fraudulent play on words” and speak of “pestilent fever” (p. 574).

  At this point a kind of new rhetorical figure comes into play, which articulates the universe of natural semiosis. The deaths of personages who are well-known (by antonomasia) become more convincing than the deaths already known. Somehow or other what had so far been said now becomes of necessity seen, in the form, if nothing else, of a conspicuous absence.

  In this tangle of visual signs confused by verbal definitions, it finally occurs to someone that only public visual proof can combat the manipulations of the word. “At the time of day when the crowd was at its thickest, in the midst of the throng of carriages, riders and people on foot, the corpses of that family were carried, by order of the commission of health, to the same cemetery. They were borne naked on a cart, so that the crowd could see the manifest signs of the plague on their bodies.… There was more belief in the existence of the plague after that” (p. 582).

  At this point it would seem that the plague should become self-evident and its symptoms begin to be interpreted correctly. But the manipulations of a false conscience are reproduced on another level. No longer able to deny the existence of the evil, the deniers try to hide the causes of the contagion (so successfully that the Cardinal will be obliged to hold a solemn public propitiatory procession, thereby increasing, of course, the opportunities for infection). The promotion of the myth of the anointers has begun.

  At the end of chapter 31, Manzoni himself sums up what has taken place in this process of semiosic pestilence as an action performed by the spoken language (which defines and names) upon the natural expressivity of natural signs, already abundantly misunderstood on account of the preceding encrustations of passion that had obfuscated right reason.

  (i) “In the beginning, then, there had been no plague, no pestilence, none at all, not on any account. The very words had been forbidden.”

  (ii) “Next came the talk of ‘pestilent fever’—the idea being admitted indi
rectly, in adjectival form”: the signifier is modified to avoid evoking its proper signified.

  (iii) “Then it was ‘not a real pestilence’—that is to say, it was a pestilence, but only in a certain sense.” And now the content has begun to be modified.

  (iv) “Last of all, it became a pestilence without any doubt or argument—but now a new idea was attached to it, the idea of poisoning and witchcraft, and this corrupted and confused the sense conveyed by the dreaded word” (pp. 582–583). And here, as can be seen, a radical transformation has taken place, whereby the word, which has as its content a symptom that refers to a cause p, is made to correspond to a symptom which ought to have as its content a cause q. A total alteration of the meaning, using the possibility language offers of modifying the natural expressivity of visual signs and natural symptoms.

  Here it appears that, instead of arranging words to mask the visual evidence, the bad conscience of society begins to operate through the staging of visual evidence. Some people “thought they saw” someone anointing a partition in the cathedral; the partition was brought, along with several pews, outside the church, where it was decided to give them a wash. But “the sight of that mass of woodwork had a very frightening effect on the crowd” and “it was generally said and believed that all the benches in the cathedral had been anointed” (p. 579). A curious process of amplification: if previously many deaths had not provided a sufficient synecdoche for the disease, now a few planks of wood provide a more than sufficient synecdoche for the entire temple, and for the general pollution. The following morning “another sight, stranger still and more significant” appeared. If the pews outside the church door had been an accidental mise-en-scène, now this “strange sort of yellowish or whitish filth,” daubed over doors and walls, whether a practical joke or an act of terrorism, is quite clearly an intentional mise-en-scène.