Writing the history of semiotic ideas does not only mean examining the philosophical or linguistic theories that deal explicitly with the sign or with communication. Often ideas that are not altogether irrelevant concerning these phenomena are expressed, however indirectly, in the declarations writers and artists have made about their poetics, or, alternatively, they can be extrapolated from the way in which processes of signification and communication are staged at the level of the narrative.
From this point of view it is legitimate, though by no means common practice, to ask oneself whether there exists a Manzonian semiotics, deducible not so much from Manzoni’s theoretical and critical writings, in which he discusses the genre of the historical novel and other problems we would define today as problems of literary theory, as from his narrative performance itself.
14.1. Action and Word
“By their actions, my dear fellow: all men are known by their actions” (p. 139), says the village innkeeper in chapter 7 of I promessi sposi, no less adept than the host of the Full Moon tavern in distinguishing a law-abiding citizen from an informer by the cut of his clothes, his tone of voice, and his overall bearing. Not so Renzo; a page earlier, when he entered the inn and saw one bravo, who did not stand aside to let him in, standing there on sentry duty, armed with a cudgel, with a red velvet cap over his quiff, his pigtails pinned with a comb at the back of his neck, while his comrades went on playing the game of morra, all of them exchanging eloquent nods among themselves. In this bildungsroman, Renzo is the last one to grow up, to become familiar, that is, with the signs and the way other people interpret them (only at the very end of the story will he have learned not to hold door knockers in his hand for too long and not to tie bells on his ankles). At this stage of the game, Renzo “looked at his two guests [Tonio and Gervaso], uncertain, as if hoping to find an explanation of those signals in their faces” (p. 137), clues he still has trouble deciphering. But he has not lived long enough yet, and, as we will learn later, only “a man’s life is the touchstone of his words” (pp. 403–404).
Suspicious of the notion that the course of human history unfolds in a rational manner, wary of every good intention which does not allow for the heterogenesis of ends, fearful of the evil that lurks in the things of this world, diffident toward the powerful and the arts by which they take advantage of the meek, Alessandro Manzoni appears to have synthesized his Enlightenment common sense and his Jansenistic rigor into a semiotic formula that can be extrapolated from many pages of his novel: (i) there is a natural semiosis, employed almost instinctively by those among the meek who have accumulated experience, according to which the various aspects of reality, when interpreted with prudence and a knowledge of the ways of the world, present themselves as symptoms, clues, signa or semeia in the classic sense of the term; and (ii) there is the artificial semiosis of verbal language which, either turns out be inadequate to give an account of reality or is used explicitly and maliciously to mask it, almost always for the purposes of exercising power. Verbal language, then, is deceptive by its very nature, whereas natural semiosis leads to errors and blunders only when it is polluted by language, which restates it and interprets it, or when its interpretation is clouded by the passions.
Behind this semiotics there lies a metaphysics: reality exists, and can be investigated, so long as people follow “a method which has been recommended to them for long enough—the method of observing, listening, comparing and thinking before they begin to talk” (p. 583). This rule is not as simplistic as it might appear at first sight. It repeats in a popular form a precept of Galileo’s, which the positive and prudent characters in the novel, however, when confronted with everyday reality, put into practice in the light of common sense and not according to the dictates of the Accademia del Cimento. But when it comes to applying it to historical reconstruction, Manzoni shows us nonetheless how it works. Given that words are misleading, and what we know about things that happened in the past we know only through verbal accounts, Manzoni instinctively appeals to a precept already formulated by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana. When confronted with the various versions of the sacred books, all of them translations of translations, while the mystery of the original Hebrew text, by now hopelessly adulterated, remains unknown, all we can do is compare the versions among themselves, set them one against the other, and obtain from the one clarification of what is lacking in the other.
This is what Manzoni does, in dealing with the manuscript of the anonymous author, which has unreliability, so to speak, written all over it, given the verbal excesses with which, with typical baroque emphasis, it is embellished. Since he feels that behind this discourse (which is verbal) there lies “such a good story” (and a story is a fabula, a sequence of events or, as Aristotle would have said, the imitation of an action, something nonverbal), Manzoni decides “to search among the memoirs of the period, to satisfy ourselves whether that was really the way things happened in those days” (p. 21). And his investigation, in the form of a collation of texts, dissipates all doubt: though camouflaged by so much literary artifice, something must indeed have occurred.
The same procedure is followed with regard to the plague. Consider the opening of chapter 31: “The plague … really had arrived,”1 where that word “really,” a verificative intrusion of the narrative voice, liquidates once and for all any doubts to which the conflicting verbal texts might give rise. The thing in itself, the Dynamical Object, is there somewhere or other, or was there; our problem is to interpret the signs and make it reappear. But even here, as long as what we are dealing with are verbal accounts, “Every one of them leaves out essential facts which others record … every one of them contains material errors, which can be recognized and corrected with the help of one of the others, or of the few official documents that have come down to us in published or unpublished form. Often one writer gives us the cause of effects which we have already seen floating unconnectedly in the pages of another” (p. 564).
And therefore, “examining and collating” the various sources we may hope, not only to identify the most salient facts, but also “to arrange them in the order in which they happened” (p. 565).
We are dealing here, not with Manzoni’s idea of historical truth or with his theory of knowledge, which is what it is. What we want to underscore is that, unless philological scrupulousness is exercised to the full, verbal accounts are
