“The Pragmatics of Literature”
0.1. Since 1934, when the psychologist Karl Bühler established the terms of communication in the triangle “sender/message/ addressee,” with its three corresponding functions, “emotive/referential/conative,” important findings have been incorporated into the model, although the essential articulation has remained unchanged. For example, it has been determined that the message, in order to be communicative, must refer to a “context,” or socio-physical area, recognizable by the addressee. Further, it must refer to a “code,” that is, the message must be codified from the beginning according to certain rules with respect to the semantic rapport of the sign’s components—signifier/signified—and certain other rules with respect to the concatenation of signs—syntactics—and must be decodified, at its destination, according to the same rules. Finally, it must establish a “contact,” a physical channel or psychological rapport, that effectuates the communication between sender and receiver.
The linguistic “functions” linked to the above-mentioned “factors” have been better defined: A function is “expressive or emotive” when the message centers upon the sender, “conative” when it is directed toward the addressee, “phatic” when it applies to verification of the contact, “poetic” when the message refers to itself, of the way in which it is made, “metalinguistic” when it is directed toward the code, commenting on it and verifying its use (Jakobson, 1960). More recently, scholars in the field of pragmalinguistics have published suggestions which we may confidently expect to complete the description of the phenomenon. To mention only one, Dieter Wunderlich (1971) proposed that the following factors must be clearly distinguished: (a) sender, (b) addressee (the two may coincide, for instance, in monologue or in the egocentric discourse of children), (c) moment of transmission, (d) locus and limits of the sender’s perception, (e) the enunciated message in its syntactic-phonological form, (f) cognitive semantic contents, (g) presuppositions with regard to the sender’s knowledge and ability, (h) opinion with regard to the addressee’s presuppositions and ability, (i) place and space of the addressee’s perception, (j) social rapport between addressee and sender, and (k) the sender’s intention (including its communicative functions: “representative” when the sender informs the addressee, “provocative” when the sender requires an evaluation or a particular behavior of the addressee, “evaluative” when the sender moves the addressee to the spontaneous evaluation of something, the “expressive” when the sender moves the addressee to express feelings).
0.2. It is perhaps superfluous to repeat that the latest advances in communications theory cannot help but interest those whose research centers upon the phenomenology of the literary text, for literary language is, in substance, a phenomenon of communication, although a particular kind of communication that must, for this reason, be defined in terms of its own characteristics.1
Let us return for a moment to the communicative model in its essential outline:
(a) “I” is the person who speaks—the speaker, or sender, (b) “you” is the person to whom one is speaking—the listener, or addressee, (c) “s/he, it” is the person or thing of which one speaks—the object. In comparing this basic model with that of literary communication, we observe a peculiar “doubling” at the three vertices of the triangle, which doubling constitutes the distinctive trait of the literary phenomenon. This particular question is discussed extensively in the following pages.
1.0. Let us begin with the sender. Is it possible to state that in literature the empirical subject can be identified with the subject who speaks in the text? The answer is that it is not.2 This can be shown if only by the fact that the empirical subject normally nominates the text as autosufficient and absolute authority and thereby deflects readers’ questioning of authorial intention. If anything, a writer often seems strangely interested in the various possible interpretations of the message, as if the text were not of his/her own making. Institutionally, literature is a communication “at a distance,” even of years and centuries. No exception can be made, even for “oral” transmission of the text by its author who, in such a case, acts not as a normal sender, but as a physical transmission channel; the addition of paralinguistic elements does not modify the fundamental nature of the communication. Even if an author, physically at a distance, could be reached for possible clarification as to the intent of the discourse, s/he would choose to remain “absent,” having established absence as a condition of his/her particular communicability and having founded the message upon an ambiguity that s/he does not expect to see clarified through verbal declarations of intent, but only through solitary interpretive processes carried out by readers. In substance, this speaker, at the moment of literary enunciation, has elected an “autonomous subject,” definitively delegated to represent him/her, a “subject within the text” with whom, however, s/he has decided not to share the entire responsibility.
This separation has been variously noted by modern writers and thinkers. Stéphane Mallarmé declared that one can “have a human temperament clearly distinct from the literary one” and that an artist makes himself upon the page”; Paul Valéry affirmed that the author is not in reality “anyone”; Marcel Proust distinguished between the “I” of the empirical author and the “other I” of the page; Benedetto Croce separated the “practical” from the “poetic” persona, and so forth. But this doubling had long been observed. In an earlier time, people spoke of “persona,” of “mask,” and defined the moment of creation as “divine furor,” “enthusiasm,” or “inspiration,” imagining that the real subject comes out, so to speak, from the body and enters into a kind of trance, to become the bearer of a word that in a certain sense no longer issues from the body but from a different entity, often thought of as divine (the Muse).
The presence of the split subject confers upon the literary text a character very much resembling that of the antique oracles. One heard the voice of a human being, but supposed it to carry the voice of a god whose message could not be questioned. The word of the oracle had a definitive character, but the sense, ambiguous, sibylline, could be clarified only through the infinite and uncertain effort of interpretation.
Oskar Eberle (1955) explains this practice of electing a second subject from an historical-anthropological perspective. The theatrical manifestations of surviving primitive peoples, he finds, offer testimony of customs that go back to our remote cultural past. He affirms that the essence of theater consists in an individual who represents another I, who puts on a mask, and acts with voice and gestures according to the characteristic mode of a being different from himself (which can be an animal, a god, or another man). It is not impossible—and Eberle himself shares this conviction—that each literary genre derives from primitive theater. He distinguishes, in fact, between theater and drama, indicating that theater exists with even a single actor, while drama requires more than one character, each of whom establishes specific relationships with the others. The lyric genre, then, could derive from the single-actor theater. If, as Eberle sustains, the “mask is as old as humanity,” we have the personification of otherness as a fundamental trait of the phenomenon we now call literature.
Psychoanalysis and linguistics have separately recognized that we cannot affirm the unity of the subject. Psychoanalysis teaches us that because of the existence of the “split” subject, discourse carries messages that are “effects of the unconscious.” No longer, then, can we think of the subject as a being of absolute consciousness and locus of totalization of knowledge. The psychoanalyst usually has nothing to do with literature, but with the patient’s discourse, and works toward a therapeutic goal that does not pertain to knowledge of literary discourse. Still, the split-subject phenomenon invests every type of linguistic expression, and in the language of literature, in which the subject institutes a delegated subject with whom it entertains ambiguous relationships of approximation and distance, it speaks a “voice” that makes itself programmatically receptive to every kind of projection and reverie, both of conscious order and unconscious nature, which is precisely the phenomenon once known as “divine furor.”
Modern linguistics has distinguished the “subject of the énonciation” from the “subject of the énoncé,” indicating that these are diverse entities, the one being the real subject, its nature shaped by individual impulse and cultural control, the other the grammatical subject which founds the law of the discourse and assumes its discursive function within the linguistic code (Benveniste, 1958).
Lacanian psychoanalysis has exploited linguistic distinctions to the utmost, carrying their assumptions to extreme conclusions. According to Lacan (1966, 89–97; 1977, 1–7), the subject constitutes itself solely in language, during that infantile phase when one passes from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order, which is represented by institutions, by culture, and chiefly by language. For Lacan, the subject is always, in any case, “spoken,” existing within the “mask” that constitutes its only identity. This position, extremist and nihilistic, may lead one to question the idea of the subject’s total destruction as an entity outside language, but one cannot deny that every type of cultural institution, inside which the subject inserts itself, constitutes one of its roles, and that language, which is preexistent to the subject, as are all cultural institutions, imposes its own law upon the subject, which is then defined as “subject of the énoncé.”
Literature, then, seems to institutionalize this phenomenon. It produces, within its own limits, and within the subject’s consciousness a subject of the subject, avowedly offering itself as the convention of a discourse that is pronounced by a “subject of the énoncé” from whom the “subject of the énonciation” has taken its resolute distance. Literature, in sum, as programmatic praxis of the mask, institutes an imaginary subject whose oscillating relationship with the real subject swings between the extremes of strict proximity and absolute difference.
The separation of the real from the autonomous subject is responsible for the “universal” nature of literary discourse, which is the voice of the human as opposed to the voice of the individual. Literature is the voice of man’s “oracularity,” that is, of his “objectuality.” And the idea, many times reformulated, of “aesthetic covering,” tied as it is to the soothing concept of the autonomous subject, allows literature to convey (and to receive) “unpronounceable” messages, cultural taboos for example, and anything which normally constitutes an object of moral censure (Orlando, 1978, 1979).
So the corresponding process, that is, “decontextualization” of the entire message, is tied—structurally—to creation of the autonomous subject within the text. As we have seen, pragmalinguistic theory proposes the “place and space of the addressee’s perception” and the “social relationships between sender and receiver” as conditions of communication. These conditions do not characterize literary communication, even though, as we shall see, the “social relationships” which characterize its formation should certainly be discussed. Indeed, a profound textual analysis which aims beyond a knowledge of aesthetic functions might recognize, and so legitimately appropriate, those “social relationships” proper to literary communication. The argument will be taken up again later, when I discuss the text directly. It is enough here to observe that the readability of poetic discourse, beyond certain conditions contingent upon its formulation, is a characteristic trait of textual autonomy, on a par with its readability through reference to the speaking subject englobed in the structure.
1.1. What constitutes this “internal subject,” how does it appear to the reader’s perception? While this “author” has not been studied as a textual element of the lyric, it has been the subject of close attention with regard to the narrative. We are indebted to Wayne C. Booth (1961) for the first ample discussion and also for probably the most exhaustive definition of the concept of the “implicit author” as a structural element that only rarely, if ever, is identifiable with the writer (73). Later, in the systematic research carried out by structuralist critics—and also in the labor of founding a narratological science—the argument was taken up again, to incorporate the “author” into a series of narrative “functions” (Todorov, 1967; Genette, 1972). Finally—to indicate only one of the major recent contributions to narratology, Krysinski (1977) has deepened our knowledge of the subject in research that must now be considered exhaustive.
1.2. What then constitutes the textual subject (apart from the problematic of whether and how much such an image may coincide with authorial reality)?
The textual subject is constituted by a complex of “behaviors” with respect to a systematics that makes up the set of social, informational, and overdeterminant rules. As Buffon said, le style c’est l’homme.
To return to a rudimentary classification that will, however, be more closely specified further on, these “behaviors” are definable in reference to norms and can be either respectful or transgressive.
As far as literature is concerned, the subject behaves with reference to two kinds of norm: the formal systems of literature and the epistemic systems of the society to which it belongs. These, in turn, form part of the englobing cultural systematics.
1.3. The empirical subject, too, is reconstructed on the basis of its behavior, but biographical research is necessarily based upon extraliterary documents and testimony. A biographer is faced with a delicate task, since the required objectivity contrasts with the fact that research involves material that must be interpreted. And interpretation is often bound to points of view, to ideologies, in some cases to prejudices, and even to moods. The first two biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the one by Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the other by John Henry Ingram, who were contemporaries of the writer, even his immediate acquaintances, produced two absolutely contrasting images, the first dictated by spiteful antipathy, the second by apologetic admiration.
It is only later that literary products can be used to compare the two behavioral reconstructions, that of the lived life and that of the text. The comparison can offer the data to establish whether the two images agree, and the author has reversed upon the page his/her own real personality, or whether the textual subject represents an absolutely imaginary projection—compensation for the writer’s failings, realization of a dream, or some morbid rumination upon purely personal aversions, and so forth. Only when extraliterary and literary images reciprocally confirm each other can we speak of an authoritative reconstruction. In any case, the practice of comparing these subjects (when it is possible—we know practically nothing, for example, of Shakespeare’s real persona) is not to be repudiated. Structuralism, which has done so much to focus attention on the text, can be understood as a reaction against an excessive concentration upon the subject-creator. This exaggerated emphasis, an inheritance of Romantic ideology, blocked examination of the artistic product in its objectuality. Now, however, some material can be recovered, and methodological extremes can be moderated. The desire to reconstruct the real subject should not outweigh the task of recognizing the textual personality, nor should an overzealous scrutiny of the textual subject lead the critic to overlook the image of the empirical subject. A comparison would certainly be advantageous, for even when there is no confirming evidence of similarity, such an examination can nevertheless provoke useful reflections upon the reasons for diversity. In any case, the exegete’s study is tangentially corroborated and illuminated, and the work assumes further referential values. This happens in particular instances, such as the works of Joyce, of Montale, or of writers of the last generation, in which the text is bound to occasions, to motivations, that occur in everyday life. These are cases in which recourse to existential situations becomes an indispensable premise of interpretation.
1.4. Umberto Eco too has alluded to the problem of the empirical subject, and he closes his Theory of Semiotics (1976a) with some thoughts on the “subject” of semiotics as one distinct from the real subject. He states that the subject of the expressive act “must be considered one among the possible referents of the message or text,” and that “as such it has to be studied by the disciplines concerned with the various physical or psychic objects of which languages speak” (314—315). He then says that the subject of semiotics is “semiosis,” that is, the “process by which empirical subjects communicate” (316). Eco does not deny—and this is obvious—“the existence and the importance of individual material subjects” (315), but simply sustains “that semiotics cannot define these subjects except within its own theoretical framework, in the same way in which, examining referents as contents, it does not deny the existence of physical things and states of the world, but assigns their verification (and their analysis in terms of concrete properties, change, truth, and falsity) to other types of approach” (316).
Nothing could be clearer; the necessity of scientific delimitation of the natural field of semiotics cannot be questioned. Now, literature too is a semiotic text, and therefore cannot have a “subject” other than that constructed within itself as “sign” or “word.” But this is not to say that the literary critic must be forbidden every foray outside the text to research the states of the empirical subject. Literary criticism is not a discipline that can aspire to such a rigorous delimitation of its own field. Among other things, to practice literary criticism (a generic term, used here provisionally, and later to be defined in its multiple articulations) is to conduct an operation that engages human and social “contents,” not only semiotic mechanisms. Further, when such criticism bears the appellative “semiotic,” that does not mean much more than a reading which takes semiotics into account as a science of signs, and recognizes in it an important doctrine, a means to sustain its own discourse. Literary criticism—even when it merits the name “semiotic criticism”—undoubtedly includes interests that the formal rigor of semiotics must exclude. Among these, it counts an interest in the empirical subject and, further, an interest in the question of reference to objects. This is because literary criticism is not concerned with the mechanisms of signification, but studies those mechanisms in the contexts in which they operate, in which they acquire “values.” This leads to considerations that reach well beyond the technical limits of communicative models.
Literary criticism, therefore, even that of a semiotic bent, will certainly have to study the “empirical subject” with the proviso that it must distinguish attentively between the subject that manifests itself in the text and the subject that remains behind the text. The lessons of semiotics confirm those of linguistics and psychoanalysis. They represent a warning not to take as given the fact that everything the message contains about its own subject is true of the subject who produces the message.
1.5. Again, we are immediately faced with the problem of literature’s formal functions, with which, in which, and in the choice of which, the textual subject’s “behavior” manifests itself. It will be useful, then, to attempt a functional typology, with the clear understanding that each isolated function which is recognizable as peculiar to a literary genre can nevertheless also appear, in the reality of actual writing, in combination with others typically belonging to different genres.
a) The Lyric Function. This function is of course characteristic of the lyric genre. The author-function—commonly called the “lyric voice”—is marked as the special competence to exploit expressive possibilities immanent in language. It is presented as the center of an exceptional “sensibility” composed of feelings which are not stated directly; rather, the lyric voice achieves its effects by means of rhetorical manipulation of language. It is constituted, then, by the physical-technical materiality of language beyond its practical function, its conventional association with signifieds. In the lyric voice, a possible language of exceptionally refined comparisons based upon semic combinatoria—the generic field of metaphor—can be created, to carry significations over and above its normal burden. The technical limit within which sense unfolds is chiefly the “connotative”; that is, sense is not located in the signified conventionally conveyed by the social association of signifier and signified, but in those subjectively experienced values that adhere to the conceptual sphere of the signifieds. Such experience, to use the terminology and the distinction of Gottlob Frege (1892), moves within the limits of the Vorstellung, which represents a function that is added to the signified and the referent as a personal, subjective contribution. Connotativity, as we know, is not a phenomenon to be ascribed exclusively to poetic language, given that it is richly abundant in ordinary language. Proper to poetic language, however, is the insistency of expressivity within the connotative sphere as well as the technique which renders connotativity explicit in environments devoid of situational context. The exploitation of language’s virtuality occurs in a strictly “structural” sense, that is, immanent expressivity takes place only within and by means of interaction among internal relationships, within the rigorous compactness of the text’s formal components. Finally, to demonstrate the impossibility of the absolute identification of the lyric I with an intentional gesture of signification external to the text, the interaction of textual components is also understood as the autonomous production of sense by structure itself, structure which has of course been manipulated to obey certain intentions, but which also manifests, of itself, other significations that are not, strictly speaking, planned. These other significations are made possible as collateral effects of language manipulation by means of forces which could be defined as accidental. As such, they are the autonomous products of language, and those of which the empirical author acquires consciousness become proper to him/her, while others transcend his/her acts and consciousness. The text always contains more information than the author can program or the reader interpret. Biophysiological-cultural energy engages with language as its vehicle, its obstacle and its autonomy. Language is “vehicle” when its schemata transmit impulses directly; it is “obstacle” when it is felt to be insufficient and poor, and the author is impelled to sound the unexpressed possibilities of the system, and does so principally by means of the rhetorical instruments which renew linguistic expressivity and produce previously unexpressed—and extremely precise—signifieds; it is “autonomy” when it induces the author to appeal to an irrational and sometimes fortuitous combination of elements peculiar to the linguistic system. It is thus that language becomes sovereign, self-producing. As we know, some theorists have been calling this procedure the essential poetic method (pure poetry) ever since Stéphane Mallarmé advised poets “to leave the initiative to the words.”
We will come back to the problem of the text’s “intentionality,” and to that of its “unintentionality,” which, however, involve considerations which do not concern the text with its internal authorial function but rather the rapport that establishes itself between empirical and implicit authors. Indeed, it is an almost perfunctory habit to unite the two authors in a single entity and to attribute every textual sense to its intentionality.
Let me remind the reader that the points I’m making concern phenomena that are not exclusive to the lyric genre. They can be found—and generally are—in any literary composition; here, however, the major concern is to construct a typology.
b) The Narrative Function. It goes without saying that the narrative function may imply the lyric genre, just as the lyric function may imply the novel genre. As far as the narrative genre proper is concerned, the “internal author” function is fairly well articulated. One must basically distinguish three different types of narrator, with respect to the position that these assume in narrative structure. The classification concerns the degree of knowledge possessed by the narrator with regard to the fictional characters and is now familiar to all those who have followed narratological research from the beginning (Todorov, 1967). The first type is constituted by the narrator who knows more than his/her characters (omniscient narrator), the second by the narrator who knows as much as the other characters (and is therefore a kind of character among characters), and the third by the narrator who knows less than his/her characters (naive author), who for this reason, acts as a “camera” placed before the facts of narration. Clearly, this various distribution of competence is a “machine” invented, and activated, by the empirical author; this is why it is easier, in narrative, to notice the distinction between “author” and “narrator.” In some cases, particularly in first-person narration, we may be led to identify the two; however, we can postulate for the narrative as well as for the lyric that the narrative text, beyond its constitution as “machine” presents one or more narrators whose definite identities are recognizable as “functions” of the text, as well as a distant entity, difficult to grasp, whose relationship to the narrator (or narrators) is another subject of textual enquiry. The narrator is a role that the author excogitates and has his/her internal delegate assume. The “internal author” will emerge, then, in accordance with its role, as a subjectively abstract entity, thus giving the impression that the narrative tells itself, and/or as a subjectively concrete entity having the identity of a psychologically delineated person (as, for example, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). Thus, it can be presented as an extremely “competent” personality, on top of the situation, able to play the part with authority, to offer appropriate comments, and to make reliable judgments, and as an “incompetent” personality, confused, obtuse, destined to confuse the narration and to become the tiresome and often awkward interpreter of events and character.
Strictly speaking, the narrative function concerns the narration of actions from the beginning of the story to its conclusion, a level systematized in recent narratology (Genette, 1972; Bremond, 1973; Segre, 1974).
c) The Descriptive Function. This consists in the representation of places and of characters according to their “appearance.” Such descriptivity, though characteristic of narrative, can be found in both lyric and drama. Eighteenth-century authors, and also those of the Romantic period, produced an abundance of naturalistic descriptions. (The English, in particular, have written poetry directly tied to precise geographic locations: the so-called locodescriptive poems.)
d) The Directive Function. This function is indissolubly tied to the narrative function (but it also concerns the arrangement of parts in any composition). Antique rhetoric included it within the dispositio. The narrator need not follow the action in chronological order, but can divide its continuum into segments in order to recombine them at his/her pleasure and thus to compose a particular narrative order, producing in this way analeptic and proleptic figures. All the effects of narrative time are to be considered within the limits of this function—attentively studied by Cesare Segre (1974): changes of pace, summaries, foreshortenings, ellipses, etc. Certainly, everything cannot be told—Henry Fielding declared, in Tom Jones, that his most sagacious readers would require a good twelve years to satisfy their urge to fill in the lacunae.
e) The Phatic and Conative Function (see, in particular, Genette, 1972). This function concerns the rapport that the narrator establishes with the reader by speaking to him/her directly, thus being assured of constant contact and sometimes establishing the fiction of actual dialogue (a device used frequently, for example, in Tristram Shandy). It is a function that works in the lyric as well and even in the theater, in monologues and direct appeals to the audience. In such cases, the psychological image of the narrator is evident enough, and the narrative voice becomes that of an affable conversationalist.
In addition to the attitudes designated by Genette, we can add others, stemming from Booth’s suggestions, which fall within the same function. First among these is that of “irony,” consisting in a game of hidden meanings with the reader, on the basis of which the latter acquires knowledge that transcends not only the characters’ knowledge but also the explicit objectivity of the narrative. “Suspense,” too, is a most important control at the phatic level, insofar as it assures the reader’s emotional participation by sustaining curiosity as to the outcome of events. Finally, narrative control of the reader’s “states of mind” is achieved by means of those apposite descriptions which create a work’s emotional aura (such as those crafted by Poe, for instance).
f) The Ideological Function. Within this function the narrative or, sometimes, the lyric voice directly expounds its philosophical, religious, and moral convictions, and comments upon action and character, framing one and the other within the parameters of axiological order; it often assumes moralistic and didactic attitudes.
g) The Psychological Function (not listed by Genette). Here the narrator is shown to be privy to secrets buried deep within the characters’ unconscious, or, if the narration belongs to the autobiographical genre, told in the first person, it carries intimate confessions and profound self-analysis (i.e., James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist). In some cases, psychological inquiry stops before the mysteries of the human mind, leaving intact—not commented upon, not interpreted—symptomatic elements. This is how Melville presented Claggart in Billy Budd. In any case, we can say that the psychological function documents unconscious thought.
h) The Transfigurative Function (not listed by Genette). This consists in that most delicate overall operation that, by means of more or less overt allusions distributed here and there throughout the text, transfers the narrative’s materiality to levels of generalized signification. These allusions are presented—when they exist—in accordance with literary convention. We expect from literature, especially modern literature, a further meaning that reaches beyond those signified on the material plane of sensation and event. The operation can be explicitly directed by the narrator—as usually happens in the eighteenth-century narrative and also in some nineteenth-century narratives—or the work can be presented as raw material of life, although it may be “oriented” or “predisposed,” then left to the reader to complete alone the final interpretive task. Or—as in the case of Marcel in Proust’s Recherche—the narrator-character lives the events of his narrative together with the reader, with whom he matures, little by little, some general convictions that do not have apparent antecedents but seem, at any given moment, to spring out of the shared artistic experience. Whether one speaks of overt or implicit activity, it is always a question of “overcoding” (Eco, 1976a, 129–135). The transfigurative function does not of course belong only to narrative, but to all literary genres.
i) The Metaliterary Function (not listed by Genette). This consists in a narrative discourse on the nature of the work produced, including thoughts upon its genesis, its value, and sometimes with apologetic remarks upon its fragility, its imperfections, and its insufficiency. In some cases, it is used for purposes of selfjustification.
j) The Dramatic Function. This is clearly the function that the internal author assumes in a manner more or less constant in drama. We know that theater—at least in its classic forms—institutionally excludes direct authorial presence. The author is constrained not to speak in his/her own person, but to have the characters speak. The function of authorial absence is also a model of twentieth-century narrative insofar as it has rejected the omniscient point of view along with its implicit theocratic symbolism; rather, it points directly to facts, entrusting the work of interpretation to the reader’s moral and ideological freedom of choice. It is evident, as Booth showed (and this within an ardent apology for authorial absence), that the narrator is always present, if only in material choices and linguistic “direction,” in emphases. The so-called “absent narrator” is in reality a metaphor that alludes to a narrator whose morality is not revealed, who is not subjectively intrusive, one who evades the function that we have called, along with Genette, “ideological.” The narrative that uses this metaphor conforms to the dramatic ideal (Beach, 1932), and is immediately recognizable in its various points of view. (Henry James was a master of this technique.) The complex facade of the spectrum constitutes a polygonal vision of the world, respectful of its irreducible complexity.
But not only is it possible to identify the internal narrator in the novel of authorial silence, of multiple focus. This indispensable being is recognizable, as the internal author, even in drama. Flaubert called Shakespeare a prime example of the perfectly dramatic author—one, that is, who always abstains from endowing characters with his own point of view, an idea reconfirmed by Benedetto Croce who spoke of an “exceedingly impersonal” author. All this notwithstanding, the immanent author can be discovered in the “style” of the piece (style in a wide sense: unmistakable rhythms of language, particular ways of structuring events, of conceiving character), and it is possible to deduce an internal subject who cannot in all truth be conceived as absolutely neutral or indifferent. The subject-function in the play’s structure permits us to recognize what the subject loved, what s/he repudiated, as Booth established with regard to the dramatic novel. To illustrate this point, let me refer to Jan Kott’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s historical dramas (1961), his most impersonal, if you will, because they are constructed in strict accord with documentary sources. A Shakespearian vision of history can be derived from these plays, given that each begins in a struggle either for the conquest of the throne or consolidation of its power and ends either with the death or with the coronation of the monarch. Each offers the following paradigm: a series of crimes committed to eliminate adversaries; the vendetta of one of them—young prince, son, nephew, or brother of the victim—who returns from exile and gathers the outcasts about him; he represents the hope of a new order of justice and peace, but the process of crime, violence, and deceit recommences from the beginning. This cycle, which Kott calls the “Great Mechanism,” is a criminal vision of history at the level of power.
1.6. I turn now to “behaviors” of the subject with respect to the other great systematics that is constituted by the epistemic systems of the period to which the subject belongs. Such behaviors derive from the subject’s activity within the text’s formal functions—now no longer considered as signifiers but as signifieds—and in particular will emerge from an analysis of the lyric, ideological, psychological, and transfigurative functions.
As we have already suggested (1.2), it is against the background of these functions that our identity as individual agents stands out. Behavior makes sense only with reference to a supersubjective systematics. Man is substantially formed of biophysiological and cultural elements, the former responsible for his hereditary information, the latter constituting that complex of systems that the individual inherits from the culture to which s/he belongs (family, church, school, etc.). These informants are slowly assimilated and in part come to rest in the unconscious, so becoming automatic elements, to the point of inducing the idealist to consider some of them natural or archetypal structures. What happens, in sum, with all cultural systems is what happens with the major (though not the only) means of communication and of presenting a world view, language, which rests in the unconscious as “competence” (langue) and manifests itself as “performance” ( parole) in activities that are in part unconscious or preconscious. The personality appears in the way the subject behaves in relation to its basic constitution. Man is, on the one hand, “person,” that is, we are individual entities formed by our values and the aims which we pursue; on the other hand, we are epistemic beings, existences immersed in a human world historically structured and organized. A major undertaking for a structuralist sociologist would be to study the “set of generative rules, historically selected by the human species, governing simultaneously the mental and practical activity of the human individual viewed as an epistemic being, and the range of possibilities in which this activity can operate. Since this set of rules precipitates into social structures, it appears to the individual as a transcendental law-like necessity; owing to its inexhaustible organizing capacity, it is experienced by the same individual as his creative freedom” (Bauman, 1973, 76—77). The ideas proposed of late on the question of cultural determinants should not necessarily lead to a totally deterministic conception of the human race, to the idea that in substance we would always react on the basis of overdeterminations. It is a fact that history moves, and moves transforming itself; sometimes violence erupts, quickly producing substantial destruction and restructuration. Man has obvious possibilities for innovation, even within overdetermined systems. But we must see the fallacy of absolute determinism in the same way that we must see the conception of human action as unconditioned liberty and as absolute creativity. The conception of culture as a set of systems, in large part taken over by semiotics, reduces the romantic point of view of ideal liberty, and full sovereignty of the individual, and corrects the assumption that the artist must consider him/herself as one who inhabits the void, and so must recreate the world anew.
1.7. The discourse on cultural systematics is flourishing.3 I will try, in the following pages, to reformulate the theoretical framework, not only making use of ideas already suggested by various scholars, but trying as well to contribute unifying ideas and to sharpen certain arguments. I’ll begin with a schematic formulation, then proceed to fill in the details.
1.8. Culture appears, from the semiotic perspective, as a system-complex (meaning by system a set of functionally interrelated elements, and therefore constituents of an organized whole, ordered by laws). These systems are as follows: ethical, ideological, historical, philosophical, mythical, juridicial, anthropological, political, ethnic, literary, aesthetic, psychological, rhetorical, symbolical, ludic, and so forth. They have a conventional character, collective (even though they do not necessarily belong to the entire community; in fact, each social group has its own systems).
1.8.1. The systems a) represent the world (otherwise chaotic and without sense), b) organize both subject and community, and therefore establish norms of behavior (mental and practical), and c) permit communication.
To speak of “culture” is to speak, ipso facto, not of structure only but also of structurations. The “structured being” and the “being capable of structuring” appear to be the two central factors of the human condition.
1.8.2. The systems present two “operations” (Eco, 1976, 32—47), as follows:
a) They establish rules that combine their unities (Eco calls this operation “the s-code”); and
b) they establish rules that correlate the elements of one “system” with those of another (“code”). Roland Barthes, studying the system of fashion (1967) indicates, for example, (i) the rules which combine elements of clothing—color, shape, etc.—and (ii) the social significance of clothing. Given the correlation among the elements of a system A with those of a system B, the system A elements become the signifiers of the system B elements, and the system B elements the signifieds of the system A elements. In this way meanings are established and become recognizable.
Such an operation presides, then, over “communication,” insofar as it “constructs” messages (process of encoding) and “deciphers” them (process of decoding). Above all, to construct messages means “to actualize systems.”
A “message” (which can also be an “automessage,” when the sender directs the message to him/herself) is always a “text,” that is, it is the syncretic actualization of several “systems.” (The literary work is a macroscopic example, constituted as it is by a very parcel of actualizations; but even in ordinary language, there is the actualization of the “phonological” system, of the “lexical” and “syntactic” systems, of a “primary semantic system” and, occasionally, of a “secondary semantic system.”)
1.8.3. In the modelization used in semiotics, a culture comprises, in general, three types of systems: (a) stable systems, (b) systems in the process of dissolution, and (c) systems in the process of formation and affirmation. (In addition—as we shall see better later on—it reveals a peripheral margin which is not yet systematized.)
1.8.4. The systems that form a culture establish three types of reciprocal relationships. These can be
a) matchable (in which two or more different systems can be considered as variations of an invariant, and therefore reducible to a single model). Lotman (1971) defines them as “structural systems.”
b) contradictory (as, for example, the “mythic” together with the “scientific” orientation, Lotman and Uspenskij, 1973); or
c) irreducible (a plurality in no way structurable, which Lotman [1971] calls “mechanical”).
1.8.5. According to the point of view of the person who considers them, cultural systems appear in “hierarchal” form; that is, they divide themselves into “hegemonic” and “subordinate” systems.
1.8.6. In establishing the terms “system”/“behavior” to indicate the rapport between the norms of the system and the kind of thought or action man practices in this connection, four types of behavior can be distinguished.
a) Systematic: Man acts in conformity with the norms of the system. As I’ve said, this behavior is often automatic.
b) Variationistic: Man respects the system, but gives it certain original actualizations, possibly even exploiting its latent possibilities.
c) Destructive: The system—even though this rarely happens—can be refuted in its totality. In political systems, for instance, this is called revolution.
d) Substitutive: In general, the rejection of the system leads man to hypothesize, or to effectuate, a new system. In art, hypothesized systems remain as a rule limited to the sphere of individual ideas, though the influence that literature exerts upon thought and on the inception, or coming to consciousness, of thought cannot be denied, and thus its eventual contribution in promoting action.
1.8.7. As Lotman and Uspenskij (1971) have indicated, cultures autodefine themselves by means of metacultural processes.
1.8.8. “Systems” can be classified in order to found a typology of culture. According to Lotman’s definition (1971,1967,309), culture is the “set of non-hereditary information accumulated, conserved and transmitted by the various collectivities of human society,” and because the set consists of “information,” it can be studied as a text, “to which the general methods of semiotics and of structural linguistics are applicable.” The specific task of cultural typology is threefold:
a) to describe the principal types of culture that, variously combined, give origin to various single cultures (according to Lotman their number should be relatively limited);
b) to determine the universals of human culture; and, finally,
c) to construct a single system comprehending the typological characteristics relative to fundamental cultural codes and to the universal traits of that general structure which is the “culture of humankind” (310–313). The system of cultural systems, then, should be derived from this typology of culture.
1.8.9. I turn now to a more extensive commentary on the foregoing schema. The subject can be “aware” of the cultural system, but for the most part is “unaware.” Our own period is particularly concerned to discover underlying and unknown systems. Psychoanalysis and Marxism study, respectively, the unconscious determinants of the ego, and the more varied and evidently free behaviors of capitalistic society arising from economic determinants. Semiotics is now particularly taken up with the problem of revealing the set of various determining structures. Finally, the effort to bring about the coming-to-consciousness vis-à-vis a cultural system is often the task, more or less declaredly, and more or less directly, undertaken in our works of art.
The fact that the system can be unconscious is due to a condition that it will be well to remember when we make use of schematizations such as the above. Generally, man is not ahead of culture, but in culture. This means that it is not always possible to objectify and rationalize the operations proper to the history in which we live. Our behavior, more often than one would think, is comparable to musical variations—to give an efficacious example used by the gestaltists—on a theme one does not recognize. It is precisely the task of historical, philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical disciplines, and also, in their way, of the arts, to find the theme that precedes the variations.
To remain within our specific subject, let us consider the artistic system that is usually called the “period style.” This style—as Arnold Hauser has said—“is a structure that one cannot deduce from the characteristics of its bearers nor by means of additions nor by means of abstraction. Renaissance style is at the same time more and less than that which finds expression in the works of the Renaissance” (1958, 232). The artist—also one who is most original and autonomous—is within the style, or styles, of his/her period, and moves there at first as within a natural environment. One can take as paradigmatic the fact that Stéphane Mallarmé, indisputably one of the greatest revolutionaries of literary history, composed his first lyrics in full observance of the Parnassian style. And we can refer again to the example of a system such as the ideological (to specify anew that every culture counts several ideological systems, which are tied to the plurality of its groups). The artist—man in general—behaves according to a series of orientations that seem perfectly natural to us all: to return to the musical example, S/he—like his/her neighbors—performs variations on a theme that is more or less unconscious.
To become conscious of ideology and of its limits—and, in the same way, of a literary style and its limits—is a process that is nearly always accompanied by discontent with a determined state of things and by a search, often neither programmed nor lucid, for changes that may lead to a more satisfying state. In any case, the same situation pertains to the writer, who works, on the basis of concepts and impulses more or less determined, toward the realization of a book. No artist can possess a work already formed in the mind, just as s/he does not always possess with absolute clarity the reasons why s/he is led to prefer his/her own values as opposed to those of the ruling system. The way will be uncertain and full of trial. And this is the reality of all existence. We live within systems that history has consigned to us and in which it has formed us, and of which we are more or less aware. We move, because we are not satisfied, toward mutations that are more or less programmed, from which we hope to derive more satisfying existential conditions. It is the task of historians, philosophers, scientists, and also of artists to illuminate the unconscious systems that support a culture; in point of fact, it is impossible, within this perspective, to separate the work of those who in different disciplines and with diverse methods aim at knowledge of their own estate.
1.8.10. Cultural conditions (I am still following Lotman and Uspenskij) reveal three fundamental aspects: (a) culture, ( b) non-culture, and (c) anticulture.
“Non-culture” is that which a culture refuses as “non-existent” in the image that it produces of itself. As I have said, every culture establishes what it is by means of metacultural texts.
The Soviet scholars point out that the image a culture offers of itself must not be confounded with the researcher’s image of the same culture. The latter is an interpretation, therefore a model. (As such, it is difficult to see how the procedure can be scientific, as Lotman and Uspenskij claim.)
Non-culture is distinguishable from anti-culture. Culture opposes itself to non-culture as the cosmos opposes itself to chaos, ectropy to entropy, culture to nature, and so on. Culture opposes itself, rather, to anti-culture as a system of opposite signs that exists and is structured, even if the official culture refuses it (i.e., Christ v. Anti-christ). One could say—Lotman and Uspenskij write—that anti-culture “is perceived as a culture of negative signs, almost as though it were its own specular image (in which the basic elements are not overthrown, but commutated to their opposites). Correspondingly, from the point of view of a given culture, every diverse culture—with another expression and other basic elements—comes to be perceived as anti-culture” (1971; 1975, 55a, 79b)
1.8.11. From the technical-literary point of view, a writer who decides to produce a literary text is doubly situated, as follows:
a) within one or more stylistic systems practiced at the time of writing, and
b) confronting the over-all system of literature, in its entirety, constituted by its formal functions and by various concrete experiences of all periods. This means that we must refer to a “general system” and to “subsystems” that operate as intermediaries between the general system and its single actualizations. Sociolinguistics demonstrates, with regard to natural language—but the situation is analogous in every other system—that the speaker, whose every utterance always relates to an all-comprehensive and all-ruling langue, nevertheless possesses a multiplicity of other langues defined within that langue. As far as ideological systems are concerned, for example, it is correct to refer not only to subsystems but also to alternative systems (such as in the case of “counterinformation,” with regard to the official culture). Returning to the practice of letters, its systems are the “formal” (see Section 1.5 on the text’s formal functions), which supplies the rules necessary to make literature, and the “particular systems” of sensibility, i.e., currents of taste, which supply the rules that order formal choices and choices of content in order to make a particular kind of literature.
In any case, whether the writer conforms to rules in force at the time of writing or returns to the praxes of the past, s/he makes literature by means of literature. Gian Biagio Conte (1974) has demonstrated—with regard to Latin literature—that the Saussurian rapport langue/parole, while valid for ordinary language, is not so for literary language; to reflect the situation of literature, it ought to become langue poétique/parole poétique. It is thus that he could treat Latin literature as a praxis of “allusion” and “recollection.”
“We do not know,” writes Hauser (1958, 406), “what aspect the first artistic representations of things may have had . . . we know only that the artistic representations known to us refer to preceding attempts, because each such representation evinces several means of expression that in and of themselves would be comprehensible to no one.”
Along with the overarching rules, then, are rules of taste and sensibility—the “period styles”—in which constant characteristics can be distinguished, either those of a formal order—in practice “choices” of particular “behaviors” in the heart of the general rules—or those of the order of content—in practice “choices” of systems as “themes,” “motives,” “plots,” “lexicons,” “ideologies,” etc. The work becomes, in this way, a complex montage of systems—some formal, some not.
We have already pointed out that recent sociolinguistic scholarship has demonstrated that it is not correct to refer to a single langue, that one must refer to a plurality of diverse systems. For example, every social group does have its specific competence but there can also be—and there generally are—cases in which the speaker is competent on diverse planes. Then there is the alternative competence of the systems pertaining to non-hegemonic or non-official classes. The writer can present particular cases of poly-linguism, since s/he couples extremely various layers of language together with layers characteristic of the current stylistic system. Certain authors, such as James Joyce or Carlo Emilio Gadda, immediately come to mind as practitioners of this strategy.
1.8.12. The study of “literary systems” goes back to the Russian Formalists of the ‘20’s and, according to A. Veselovskij, all these “material” systems reach back into folkloric tradition, and into prehistory. It is superfluous to recall—in this connection—Vladimir Propp’s well-known 1928 study which, even though limited to Russian fairy tales, can be applied—and has been—to all other literary genres. In Italy, this reconstruction of systems (not to be confused, to be sure, with the traditional “source” research) has had revealing results (see, in particular, Avalle, 1975, 1977, to whom we owe as well a lucid theorization of the process, 1972). Avalle has declared that the great victory of semiotics is to recognize itself in the reduction of literary research to sociology; and, on the basis of the Saussurian opposition langue/parole, suggests that the activity of the semiotician be clearly distinguished from that of the structuralist: on the one hand semiotics, as a study of “systems,” on the other structuralism, as a study of “behaviors”—a very precise division of labor.
1.8.13. I should like to dwell, for a moment, upon the concepts of “determinism” and of “liberty,” which concern the individual in relation to cultural systems. Idealism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis tend to annul the subject. For Hegel the spirit of history manifests itself through individuals; for Marx, ideology holds man in captivity; for Freud, and the Freudians, the unconscious activates the individual; and later, for Lacan and the Lacanians, the individual is the unconscious.
From my own point of view, I wish to state at once that not even when I wrote of “systematic behavior” did I intend to allude to a full and mechanical determinism. Certainly, determinism cannot be absolutely affirmed, even with regard to ordinary linguistic behavior, given that the speaker who operates within norms always has the possibility of manifesting a certain originality of actualization. Even within the rules, there are infinite behavioral possibilities. The player obeys fixed rules, but the games to be played are infinite, and each one carries the countersign of an individual personality, of a particular style. Recently (1976b, 4) Umberto Eco has indicated that “the code, even when it is rule, is not for this reason a rule that “closes,” but can also be a mother-rule that “opens,” that permits the generation of infinite occurrences.” In art, systematic behavior “opens” an infinitely wide range of possibilities to the original artist, especially when the subject sounds the immanent virtuality of the same system to which s/he conforms, thus enlarging its expressive possibilities (in the case that we have called “variationistic”). It is enough to remember that J. S. Bach was one of the most traditional composers in the whole history of music, yet none would dream of denying his great originality. The principle of absolute innovation, the idea of producing works with no resemblance to those of other artists, is of recent origin in the history of art, and even so, it is tied to a system, that is, to the romantic cult of personality.
Even in conformity with ideological systems—a conformity of undoubted strength and durability—behaviors differ in kind and number. The author is, as it were, trapped in an ideology, and often conforms unaware. However, even when speaking for and in the sense of the group to which s/he belongs, an author can be most original, even indirectly, as a revealer of latent factors. This is one of the requisites of great literature which, to be great, need not necessarily be utopian or reactionary.
On the basis of these considerations, we can now distinguish between that which is systematized and that which is an act of systematization. The “systemized” are cultural systems that the subject finds preconstituted and is constrained to inhabit; “acts of systematization,” rather, are all those responsible behaviors that transform cultural systems or propose alternative systems (now generally called “antimodels,” cf., Corti, 1978b). The history of science reveals that an original investigation attempts neither the organization of pre-existent interpretive systems nor their reformulation in more refined formal models, but to discover new heuristic models. The creative observer sees in something familiar, an object of common observation, that which had not been observed before. The subject is not only “structured,” but also “structuring,” a truth relegated to the back of the mind, or simply forgotten, by those who would indiscriminately apply the theory of cultural typology, the theses of linguistic determinism, and the psychoanalytic doctrine of the total destruction of the subject to “discourse.” The scientific process is made up of continuous acts of resystematization of the material. And art, as an imaginative hypothesis of the world is, itself, an act of systematization. And interpretation of the world is also an act of systematization, not when it is limited to recognizing culturalized systems or projecting them into the text, but when it proposes an original hermeneutic systematization (if not otherwise than by systematizing the various cultural systems, historical and heterohistorical, into a single inclusive system).
It appears, then, that cultural systems are infrasubjective and passive, while the “systematizations” are original subjective procedures. On the basis of this distinction, I shall use the word “system” for everything that is institutionally systematic, and the word “model” for everything that is an original systematization.
With this, I’ll leave aside the extremely complex problem of “perception,” which closely concerns the mechanisms of modelization. I shall say only that, from my perspective, it is essentially a gestalt problem, and that every “observation,” which is necessarily framed in some cultural system, is nevertheless transformed the moment it forms part of the “model,” internally regulated by its own structural laws.
1.8.14. Lotman and Uspenskij (1971; 1975, 41—42a, 63-64b) define ordinary language as a “primary system” of modelization of the world, and all the others as “secondary systems,” structured according to the language model. In other words, culture organizes the world structurally but needs a “stereotyping device,” namely that constituted by ordinary language. With apparent reference to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1921; 1971)—according to which syntax and lexicon determine one’s view of things—these semioticians declare that language transforms “the ‘open’ world” of realia into the ‘closed’ world of nouns, constraining men to interpret as structures phenomena whose structurality, in the best case, is not evident (42—433, 65b).
1.8.15. Lotman and Uspenskij add that if cultural systems are structured like a language—and normally are translated into the system of natural language—they naturally serve to communicate. That is, they come to be used by senders to form texts and by receivers to recognize sense.
Stefan Žòlkiewski (1974) has pointed out that the two Soviet scholars do not deeply probe the pragmatic problem of cultural texts, and affirm, justly, that given that culture is a conflict of historical and social groups which struggle for a monopoly of information, a collateral and necessary study is to ascertain who transmits the cultural text and who receives it (including the “way” in which it is received). Such a study should reveal a dynamic image of culture, one closer to reality than the static image which results from the Lotman-Uspenskian systematization.
1.8.16. A contribution to cultural systematics, now under discussion, is the “theory of possible worlds” (Vaina, 1977; Eco, 1978; Volli, 1978), which refers to “possible states of things” and thus to conceptual schemes of competence common to a culture (Umberto Eco’s “Global Semantic Universe,” 1976a, 2.12, 2.13). Aside from the application the theory has had in modal logic, where the notion of possible worlds first saw the light (see Ugo Volli, 1978, 124–128; and, in particular, G. E. Hughes and M. J. Cresswell, 1973), the concept is applicable to literature, which is, by statute, a possible world. The Aristotelic definition of tragedy was not, in fact, the “description of things that really happened, so much as of those which in given conditions could happen; that is, things which may be possible according to the laws of verisimilitude or of necessity,” a definition that coincides with that of Ugo Volli, according to whom the possible world is something that “is not, but could be” or better “is not, but—for all we know—is not contradictory” (cit. 136).
If, for example, we read Umberto Eco’s most recent contribution (1978) in which he examines a narrative text, we gather that the “possible state of things” concerns either a series of possible characters, gifted with a series of possible qualities, or a series of possible actions (possible development of events), or a series of possible meanings for each lexeme. Such criteria of “possibility” help the author to construct a story and help the reader to read and interpret it. On the reader’s part, the “possible worlds” are a system of expectations that in the act of reading come to be satisfied or frustrated. The study of possible worlds in literature will furnish a quantity of schemes to fill in the “detail” of the cultural system-complex. For example, what are the “possible worlds” in the order of the fantastic? Eco mentions the possible world of the fable, where one admits as “possibility” that animals talk, that men devoured by animals do not die, and so forth (see Schmidt, 1976, cited by Eco). And what are the differences between the possible worlds of one period and those of another? It is obvious with reference to character, for example, that possible behaviors vary in accordance with variation in customs and ideologies. A case in point is the difference in the portrayal of female character in the Victorian novel, on the one hand, and the modern novel on the other. Such considerations will also lead, naturally, to a diachrony of possible worlds where we can observe the metamorphoses of the frame of relative possibility.
1.8.17. Another important consideration: Lotman and Uspenskij specify that culture, while clearly structured at the center (polistructured, that is, in a system-complex) has peripheral zones in which “non-evident or non-demonstrated structural formations are gathered” (1971; 1975, 43a, 65b). They refer to the “recuperation” of this more or less amorphous periphery by virtue of the formation of “parastructures.” The problem is not scientifically defined (cf. Cesare Segre’s critical revision of Lotman-Uspenskian thought, 1977, 9, et seq.), but it is, however, fundamental to have established that the “systematization” of the world, a work of culture, pushes itself only up to a certain point. Lotman and Uspenskij state (1971; 1975, 84b, 59a) that the cultural system has two functions:
a) to describe “the most ample and extended set of objects,” including “objects not yet known,” or to declare “nonexistent” those objects that it does not describe;
b) to put order in the world of the unformed.
As these scholars suggest, culture “never comprehends in itself the totality of human facts, but constitutes in a certain way a separate sphere” (61-62b, 40a). We would therefore have to imagine a culture as a series of concentric circles, well structured at the center, and with external rings that are (a) “structured, but rejected,” or (b) “unformed.”
Let us leave aside formations of the first type, which are clearly alternative structures, “antimodels,” expelled from the hegemonic system (not named in the metacultural autodescription), and pause to consider the “unformed” zones, which are fundamentally important to the ideas I am developing on literary work (and art in general). Beyond the structured cognitive sphere, there remain facts which are almost known, imperfectly known, or absolutely unknown. Strictly speaking, this means that a culture cannot be seen only as a “system-complex.” The reality is that it is also constituted, and moved, by non-rationalized forces which are part of it in the same way as are rationalized forces. These amorphous forces can act and determine states and mutations equivalent to those that rejected structures can at certain times bring out in the hegemonic system. If these unformed forces were not to exist, culture would be more easily predictable and orientable. Even the central structures of the hierarchy constitute a difficulty, since these are, as I have observed, more “lived” than “objectified,” objectivization being an a posteriori act. All the more reason, then, that the unformed circles should constitute a mysterious force. At this point, it is possible to attempt a brief analysis of these unformed circles to add to Lotman and Uspenskij’s ideas.
The “periphery” to which the Russian semioticians refer could be constituted either by an “unconscious,” more or less collective, or by “chance,” that is, by material forces that consciousness has not identified and thus has not dominated. (We call them “chance” not because they do not necessarily have their laws, but because these laws escape rational consciousness).
Undoubtedly, the problems of desire are connected to peripheral forces. As Freud showed, man seeks individual but above all social solutions to such problems. He thought that knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals facilitated our understanding of social institutions, in that neuroses themselves are revealed as individual attempts to resolve the problems of the compensation of desire that must be socially resolved by institutions (1922; S.E.XVIII, 235). The connection of that thought with the Lotman-Uspenskian concept of cultural systems cannot escape our attention. Cultural systems are structures that make sense of the world and that therefore render it “inhabitable.” For Freud, the substitutive means of satisfaction in a social sense consist specifically in collective ideals—art, religion, and so forth, that is, the very cultural systems of which the Soviet scholars speak. What we have called “chance” can, with the progress of knowledge, reveal itself to be an actual structure, cognitively delineated. This has occurred, to name one instance, in the Marxist discovery that economic conflicts are underlying structures, responsible for a series of phenomena (for example, alienation) that at one time were felt but not explained, that is, not systematized. It is in sum the case of once “fortuitous” elements subsequently drawn into, and absorbed by, peripheral systems.
This specification of the unformed zones closely concerns a certain operativity of art. The artist—who, among other things, does produce a text well structured (polistructured) at the center but with quasi-structured or unstructured margins, or horizons—pushes the artistic structurization into the peripheral zones. One undoubtedly important aspect of the writer’s activity is directed toward the linguistic recovery of material that exists but has no name, and is constituted either by empirical perceptive data which find no place in the global segmentation of culture, or by soundings and namings that concern the profound psychic behavior of the subject. This operativity has not escaped Corti, who indicates that the artist has—among other things—“the rigorous destiny of ingathering the deep, indecipherable obscurity of the real” (1978c, 19).
1.8.18. A summary of the artist’s activity vis-à-vis “cultural systems” must include ten possibilities. S/he may
a) actualize cultural systems (in conscious or unconscious ways);
b) combine and homologize heterogeneous systems;
c) intersect heterogeneous systems (one must see metaphorism as crossing of heterogeneous semantic systems4);
d) produce structures that are homologous to cultural systems;
e) detect the contradictions of cultural systems;
f) contest cultural systems (by direct or indirect means);
g) hypothesize new systems (utopias);
h) bring to the level of consciousness, one’s own and others’, latent cultural systems (most often accomplished by means of the indirect procedures proper to art).
i) propose, at the level of the Imaginary, systems to compensate for desire (utopias, fantastic worlds, representations of forbidden things, etc.), liberating in this way libidinal drives connected with cultural repression; and
j) explore the indistinct and obscure margins of the world (giving them “names” and conferring “systematicity” upon them).
A final observation: the artist’s activity remains almost always, in its extreme subtlety, a circumscribed operation, one that enriches a culture’s semantic system only in ideal zones, those partially, or not at all encompassed by the global and collective semantic system. Umberto Eco (1976a, 289) remarks that the global semantic system, which is a partial interpretation of the world, “can theoretically be revised every time new messages . . . introduce new positional values,” but he does not say, and rightly so, that this happens every time an artist finds a “word,” and discovers by means of the “word” a new and finer way to divide and to structure the world. Existential enrichment occurs within the system of art and does not necessarily produce effects upon the common system.
1.8.19. Semiotics has taught us to recognize in the structure of the single work many elements and structures that reappear in other works. We can therefore speak of “intertextuality” as does Julia Kristeva (1970, 67–69), and of “memory” as does Gian Biagio Conte (1974). It is possible—though rarely—to find some structures which are not historically recognizable, but the neological-reactionary structure always maintains a relation with the known structures which it totally negates, and for this very reason, the known structures justify its existence. I must add that in the history of art individual procedures are concerned with form, while in the area of content (above all ideological content) the author very rarely invents, even though we can say that a formal transformation always leads to a transformation of the world view, or, to put it better, a more precise “coming-to-consciousness” of reality. The artist gives expression to that which all the members of one culture—and other cultures with analogous problems—feel, vaguely intuit. Readers discover in the words of the poet the felt experience that belongs to them, though it was, so to say, in search of words. I’ll return to this argument. It is enough for now to say that author and reader “realize” in the work the coming-to-consciousness of their own feelings.
1.8.20. We can now look more closely at the concept of “transformation,” which makes sense of the way in which systems “change.”
Systems are in movement even if, synchronically observed, some are stable, others in dissolution, and still others in formation. Some systems, those of longues durées (Braudel, 1958), persist for centuries, while others endure for brief, sometimes very brief, periods (microhappenings, defined by Paul Lacombe as histoire évenémentielle, cited in Braudel, 1958). With regard to the language system, for instance, semantic mutations occur more rapidly than do phonetic mutations. E. R. Curtius has revealed the constants of Western literature; Marx has pointed to the longue durée of capitalism, and so on. But I am discussing the problems of literature, and in this case, the dynamism of literary systems; therefore, it is upon these that I shall focus my attention.
The unities that the scholar of literature must immediately examine are those constituted by the particular systems that we call “genres” and “styles” (meaning by “genre” a unity such as the novel, story, lyric, etc., and by “style” not the personal style of an author, but the “epochal style,” such as Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Realism, etc.). Going back to the above-indicated opposition “system”/“behavior,” we can say that a barely original work is an individual actualization of a collective system, of a certain behavior complex that has a social character. Of course, every literary work is, in some measure, innovative. Absolute non-repetition is its minimum condition. But I have pointed out as well that in original writings which are not innovative in a massive sense, but “variationistic,” there is always some behavior that refers to a “theme” to be reconstructed. This “theme,” not given but reconstructable a posteriori, which does not exist in a pure and complete state in any execution, but informs all compositions of a certain type, is the period style. With regard to “genre,” the “theme” is explicit and usually appears codified by a metacultural activity, constituted by rhetorical descriptions and prescriptions. There may also be metacultural indications of the “period style” in programs and manifestos, but for the most part it escapes precepts; it is material that comes to be rationalized after the phenomenon has taken place.
As I have said, every author is situated, initially, within a collective style. It remains to be seen if his/her behavior will be a simply variationistic acceptance or will carry itself decisively against the collective style, to transform or substitute it. In any case, even the most original and strongly innovative activity is possible only insofar as it is activity ensuing from, consequent upon, or in any case relative to, determined premises. In addition, it never happens that transformations and innovations take place in all the systems that compose a text. No work, no matter how original and revolutionary, is new in all its parts; both original and conventional traits can be recognized therein. Therefore, even when a work demonstrates a violent reaction against a style, it is always tied to the very style from which it violently differentiates itself. It is precisely the presence of rules that confer a sense, and a value, to their violation and also to their destruction.
Such thoughts lead to an inevitable axiom: the liberty of the artist is never absolute. It always has to reckon with a contingent system. And not only that: the result of a will to liberty is itself recognizable within a range of limited possibilities. In the transformation of period styles not all is possible. The possible transformations are those that are historically possible. Hauser (1958, 305) has put this matter very clearly. He says: “Not only the individual’s adjustment to a general tendency, but also his opposition to it, is in part a product of social forces. The artist creates what he will in the way that he wills; we ask only of what elements a ‘will’ is composed.” We often say that the artist is a solitary worker. W. B. Yeats affirmed that “the work of art is the social work of a solitary man;” but “solitude too”—Hauser observes—“is a social category and can be tested only in a society” (305).
It becomes clear that one must see a work’s originality as the combined result of individual and social forces. The most innovative work always meets definite cultural conditions with a definite individual talent.5 To cite Hauser once more, “Neither the individuality and the particular talent of the artist nor the institutions and the traditions of his social milieu are sufficient to explain the singularity of a work of art. Not all is possible in every time, but even that which is possible from time to time cannot be realized by everyone; one wants the right talent at the right time and in the right place” (221).
1.8.21. I leave aside the problem of genius, and return instead to my argument. The question to ask is this: what are the objective causes of the transformations of literary systems?
First, it should be stated that two kinds of mutations exist—those owing to external and those owing to internal causes. I shall discuss the latter first. Lotman and Uspenskij (1971; 1975, 62a, 88b) observe, on the theme of dynamism of cultural systems, and speaking of the language system, that “if the inevitability of mutation, in the lexical system, can be explained by the necessity for language to mirror a different conception of the world, the mutation of phonology is rather a law immanent to the system itself.” Later on they add, with reference to fashion:
The fashion system can be studied in connection with diverse external social processes running from the laws of production to aesthetic-social ideals. At the same time, however, it constitutes as well a closed synchronic structure with a determined property: change. Fashion is distinguished from the norm because it rules the system not by orienting it on some constant, but on variability. In addition, fashion always aspires to become the norm but these are two naturally opposed concepts: it attains a barely relative stability, that only approximates norm. The reasons for changing fashion remain, as a rule, incomprehensible to the collectivity that is governed by it. This unmotivated character of fashion makes us think that we have mutation before us in its pure state . . . . a trend that manifests itself extensively, more or less overtly, in human culture. (62—63a, 88–89b)
This law of the autonomous internal dynamic is, as we see, extended to every systematic behavior, and must therefore include literature, as indeed all the arts. There is no doubt that it represents one of the fundamental characteristics of human nature, which is brought to change for reasons of mere change, at the same time that it is brought to conserve for reasons of mere defense or the need for stability.
Nevertheless, the internal changes of a literary system are also owing to a particular logic immanent to stylistic evolution. We must not forget that to make art signifies, in large measure, to resolve “technical” problems. The growth of a style is characterized by experimentation which involves a certain particular complex of expressive instruments. The growth and development of a style consists in continued efforts to refine its methods. When I said that an artist, though remaining within a system’s normative limits, nevertheless develops an activity to exploit the available possibilities of actualizing the system, I meant to refer as well to this refinement of technique within a preconstituted range of operative qualities.
There is even a theory on the “saturation” of expressive behaviors, not due to external causes, but simply to surfeit of habit. Hauser cites the exponents of this “exhaustion” theory (1958, 251), indicating, however, that exhaustion does not always determine the birth of a new style. It is possible to find spurts of renewal in every area of taste, even the most defined and closed; nevertheless, these remain in the virtual state until some important external phenomenon arises that decides a radical change. The history of Romanticism is a case in point. Researchers have been able to find precursors of romantic taste long before the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, however, the romantic style exploded full blown immediately after the French Revolution and the consequent diffusion in Europe of revolutionary ideas.
1.8.22. Now to be considered are those changes due to “external” causes.
a) In the first place, such changes are determined by social and economic changes which usually lead to the appearance of a new public financially and culturally prepared to enjoy the arts. In this regard, Sartre argued (1948) that literature tends to adapt to its potential public. There is another phenomenon which superficially seems to be the result of internal attrition, but which is actually due to changes in the socio-cultural substratum. It is characteristic of the history of the arts at the moment when certain expressive solutions and certain contents—the one inseparable from the other—are consigned to successive and diverse generations. And the passing on of the inheritance brings a sense of dissatisfaction and of inadequacy. The artist who receives these forms and these contents, and tries to use them, feels alienated. Hauser has clearly stated the questions that accompany a cultural inheritence:
We always find ourselves confronting the same questions: Does the stylistic form in use still help us get our bearings in a world that has changed? Is it still always likely to provoke impressions, to convince and incite to action? Is it still a useable arm in the struggle for life? Does it reveal or hide what must be unveiled or hidden? (1958, 26)
b) In the second place, Lotman and Uspenskij indicate that changes are determined by, or at least strictly connected to “the expansion of consciousness of the human collectivity and to the general inclusion—in culture—of science. . . . Science not only enriches positive knowledge, but also elaborates modelizing complexes” (1971; 1975, 61–62a, 86–87b).
c) In the third place (I am still following Lotman and Uspenskij [1971; 1975, 61 et seq. a, 86 et seq. b]), mutation is ideologically determined by the contrast between representations and material conditions.
d) Feelings, it is commonly said, do not change; they belong, I should say, binding myself once more to Braudel’s concept of the longue durée, to innate anthropological conditions. But surely the conventional manifestation of feeling changes; and our judgment as to which are to be manifested and which to be hidden, or which are to be privileged and which to be passed over, also changes. The reaction against Victorian literature was principally based on the open expression of feelings that convention had annulled in the sentimental manifestations of “civil” man in accordance with the concept of “civility” that the Victorian era had formulated.
e) I wish also to discuss “repercussive” mutations: Given the structural nature of systems, in which all the composing elements are necessary and strictly interrelated, the introduction of something new determines a destructuration and a consequent restructuration. Gianfranco Contini has demonstrated how this phenomenon works with regard to textual variants (see the various contributions of 1970). It is otherwise universally known that mutations within the work which regard the plane of expression unfailingly lead to repercussions on the plane of content, so much so that certain mutations of literary systems come about through innovations on a determined level of work which produce different mutations on other levels, thereby directly originating new genres. The combinatoria of elements and levels drawn from various traditions, diverse genres and styles, is one of the most common ways to transform literary systems. I have been convinced for some time that it is not the invention of new methods which enriches the history of Western literature, where everything seems already to have been invented. When novelty does appear, it is in the guise of reexaminations and of combinatoria.
f) Finally, but obviously with no hierarchal intentions in mind, the actions exercised upon the dominant structures of marginal and unformed forces must be taken into account. The phenomenon has been discussed with regard to cultural systems in general by Lotman and Uspenskij (1971). We have seen, in fact, that cultural systems are not pure structures. We find there, mixed with the factors of order, other more or less organized factors which hegemonic structures either ignore or relegate to peripheral rings of the concentric hierarchy. These “formations that surround the structure can become concrete as something that violates diverse elements of such structure and, at the same time, they tend constantly to become assimilated within the culture’s nucleus” (1975, 83b, 59a). Such a phenomenon, because of the transformations or substitutions which occur, has a powerful effect upon the dynamics of systems. Naturally, the same applies to literary systems, as D’Arco Silvio Avalle demonstrated when he took up the discourse of the Russian semioticians, adding his own integrations and clarifications (1969; 1979). Rejected parts of a structure often combine to form other structures which may undermine, and even overthrow affirmed and hegemonic structures.
The collision of contradictory elements within a system plays a specific part in this dynamism. Umberto Eco has shown (1976) how the dialectics of sign production and the mutation of codes is based upon the internal contradictory nature of the Global Semantic System. With regard to this subject, he recalls the Greimasian carré ( 1968) that, with its formal contradictoriness, is situated centrally within the life of meaning. And I have indicated elsewhere how the English Baroque, in the figure of William Shakespeare, actuated its own dramatic dynamic on some antinomies fundamental to sixteenth and seventeenth century culture (1976). Recently, Maria Corti has offered illuminating examples with regard to the twentieth century (Neo-realism, Neo-avant-garde, Neo-experimentalism) and to the thirteenth century:
Every society creates in determined moments its own ideology, from which are born some social and some literary models of the world. These are models of semiotic structures that can persist for a long time in the society, outliving the ideology that has created them and colliding with a new, nascent ideology. Thus, a conflictual semiotic process is created within the society and, by extension, within the literary system, and new structuring models, that is, new semiotic structures, are required. These coexist along with the diversely oriented structures inherited from the past. It is from this temporal juxtaposition, from the coexistence of the “diverse” in the culture and the particular and specific in the way literary groups and movements react to such diversity that fields of tension are born. (1978a, 22–23)
1.8.23. A conclusive postscript, to take up some already mentioned concepts that deserve to be remembered when we think of cultural mutations: It would be erroneous to believe that system transformations always take place in accordance with a precise, detailed, authorial program, the operative result of which may be in perfect correspondence with that program. It is true that certain transformations of style occur in the wake of manifestos and criticisms of the ruling system, anachronistic holdovers with respect to the contingent existential situation, but it is also true—as I have already said—that the artist, when s/he begins to work, is launched upon a teleologically vague creative adventure which is fluctuating, uncertain, made up of impulses and attempts, blocked by the resistance of the material itself. The actual results of artistic endeavor are unforeseeable, or only vaguely intuited; the execution of the work does not translate mental prefigurations. Its progress is marked by feelings of dissatisfaction, and in some cases only by the incentives of selfaffirmation. In this way do the period styles move, since they too are transformed by the work of individual artists. Literary systems evolve in the same way that other cultural systems are transformed: Man thinks, programs, reacts, but results are unforeseeable both because the over-all complex of interacting systems is uncontrollable and because the decisive forces of history can also come from unconscious zones or, in any case, those zones peripheral to a culture’s rationalized center.
1.9. It is necessary now to add some further observations to complete the phenomenological framework of literary transmission. I have said that in the ordinary communication model, for communication to take place, both sender and addressee must refer to the same code (that is, to the same correlations of signifiers and signifieds). In the literary phenomenon, the problem is not so simple as its scientific formulation, based upon the facts of ordinary communication, would indicate. Undoubtedly, reference to systems also takes place in literature. But the great difference lies in the fact (a) that literature refers to a relevant complexity of systems as opposed to the simple reference that characterizes ordinary communication; (b) that some of these systems are not immediately accessible; and (c) that still others are not given but are nevertheless reconstructible within and by means of the text (perhaps, as more often happens, within the context of an author’s entire oeuvre, considered as a macrotext). This systematic complexity does include literature in the general law of communication; it presupposes, however, a range of competence on the part of the addressee that, in the majority of cases, reaches an extremely high level of expertise. This requires, with only a few exceptions which I shall mention immediately, a norm with respect to otherness, but with a concept of alterity very different from that of ordinary communication.
This means, yet again, that the expressive impulse does not pass directly into the text but arrives there by way of, and shaped by, linguistic systems and fraught with complex presuppositions about the possibility of comprehension by the addressee. The Romantic-Idealistic aesthetic often refers to authors who write only for themselves. This would be, then, in related poetics, the matrix of genuine expression. In reality, the poet never writes for him/herself; or better, s/he does write for her/himself insofar as the self is the ideal constitution of the image of the other. It is a law of language, or better of the subject’s foundation in language—studied with extreme clarity by Emile Benveniste (1966, Chapters V and VIII)—that the subject constitutes itself in language “which calls upon the ‘other’ to verify it.” The message without otherness is—as demonstrated in schizophrenic language—a message without communication. Jacques Lacan has described the infantile process of splitting and identification of the subject during the “mirror stage.” In the literary phenomenon, which repeats practically the same process, the author selects some cultural systems as points of reference, and does so in function of their availability/non-availability to the “other.” One can say that there is an exception only in symbolist and postsymbolist poetry, which represents a voluntary separation from the ordinary reader; but this is, however, a partial exception, because in this limited case too a rare and exceptional reader is postulated, one who, up to a certain level of competence, can reconstruct the sense, and also change the “non-sense” into something that is, ultimately, a “sense.” It is a question, in substance, of a phenomenon that exalts one aspect of all literature, which does not exhaust itself, among other things, in its communicative intentionality.
l. 10. The parabola of my discourse has necessarily been long. I can now return to the point of departure and conclude. Knowledge of cultural complexes constitutes an indispensable element, concrete and objective, in the identification of the physiognomy both of the textual author and of the empirical author, each being structured by the systems in question and each being constrained to manifest itself either within, or in any case with reference to these systems in all its behavior, even the most original and emancipating. I have also shown that identification of the internal subject’s behavior constitutes the primary interest of the addressee of literature, but I have indicated as well the usefulness of a comparison of the image of the textual subject with that of the empirical subject (where the comparison is possible). And finally, I have verified that, by means of the knowledge of systems, one can make a definitely more useful comparison between the textual subject and all the empirical subjects in the social reality of a given culture, who represent the normality against which the values of artistic behavior stand out.
From psychoanalytic inquiries we might also expect an analogous configuration of relationships. It is not the real author’s psychological make-up which should interest the psychoanalytically inclined literary critic but rather the rapport that psychoanalytic models, drawn from the work, establish with a cultural psychoanalytic typology, a kind of period psychoanalysis that offers a picture of the collective psychic state in a given historical period. It seems to me, however, that the idea of this kind of psychoanalysis might have been what Freud had in his mind during the final phase of the development of his thought—the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents.
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