Let us take a look at the passage which Manzoni (not Quine) devotes in chapter 27 to the impossibility, not so much of translation between one language and another, but of that daily process of interpretation by which an illiterate person tells the scrivener what he wants to say, the scrivener writes down what he understands to have happened or what he thinks should have happened, the reader recruited by the addressee interprets it for himself, and the illiterate addressee, seeking criteria for interpretation in the facts that he knows, distorts the message in his turn. This is an extremely effective representation of how, through successive interpretations, the message becomes completely garbled and is made to express, not only what the original sender did not mean to say, but also what the same message, as the linear manifestation of a text, set against a code, ought not to say, if a community of interpreters inspired by common sense and respect for the rules were to get together and agree on a publicly acceptable reading. Which is not what happens; and Manzoni’s description comes across as a portrait of a process of interpretive drift. With, in the end, “the two sides … at the same stage of mutual understanding as two medieval scholars might once have been after four hours of argument about the entelechy” (p. 497).
The peasant who cannot write, and needs something written, turns to someone who has learned to use a pen. He chooses him, as far as he can, among those of his own class; for he is either shy of approaching others, or does not trust them sufficiently. He tells the man what has gone before, with such clarity and logical order as he can muster, and then tells him, in the same style, what he wants to say. The literate friend understands part of what he says, and misunderstands another part; he advises him, suggests a couple of changes, and then says ‘Leave it to me!’ He takes up his pen, and puts the first man’s thoughts in literary form, as best he can; corrects them or improves on them, adds emphasis or takes it away, even leaves bits out, as seems best to him.
For there is no getting away from it—a man who knows more than his neighbors does not care to be a passive tool in their hands, and once he has become involved in their affairs, wants to give them a little guidance. Moreover, the literate friend may not always succeed in saying what he means. Sometimes he says something quite different. (We professional writers of books have been known to do the same.) When such a letter reaches the other correspondent, who is equally ignorant of his ABC, he takes it to another learned man of the same caliber, who reads it and explains it to him. Then doubts arise over what the letter really means. The interested party, with his knowledge of what has gone before, maintains that certain words must mean one thing; but the man who is doing the reading, from his knowledge of the written language, claims that they must mean something else. In the end the man who cannot write must put himself in the hands of the of the man who can, and must charge him with the task of replying. The answer will be composed in the same fashion as the first letter, and will be submitted to the same sort of interpretation. (p. 497)
And if that wasn’t enough to make us distrustful of language, we have only to see what Don Ferrante, with his extensive library, does with it when it comes to discussing the plague (chapter 37). After two chapters of nonverbal evidence, thanks to which the reader is by now fully informed, the Aristotelian librarian, with a few well-chosen syllogisms (the contagion cannot be a substance) and an equal number of paralogisms (the contagion cannot be an accident), succeeds in covering up reality to such a point that he can recognize it only when he will no longer be conscious of it. And, as just punishment for the arrogance of the word, his famous library “may well be still lying around on the secondhand bookstalls” (p. 700).
That discourses lie, or can never be sufficiently explicit, seems clear enough. If proof were required, we need only recall the fact that many readers, of Manzoni’s novel, with understandable indolence, skip all the examples of those inconclusive, ambiguous, and confused discourses, living parasitically off one other, that are the seventeenth-century edicts against the bravoes.
What is it then that, read correctly, does not lie? I would say, primarily, what is not oral, but visual, and, if it is oral, what belongs to the sphere of the paralinguistic, the suprasegmental, or the tonemic—the inflections, volume, and rhythms of the voice.
14.2. Popular Semiosis
We referred at the beginning to a natural semiosis as opposed to the semiosis of the word. It would be inexact to say that in Manzoni the classical distinction between motivated, unintentional, natural semiosis and conventional and arbitrary semiosis is clearly discernible. The best I can do, to define the first term of the opposition, is to call it “popular” semiosis. On the one hand we have verbal language, artificial (deceptive), at the beck and call of the powerful, on the other we have various systems of signs, which of course include the so-called natural signs, medical and atmospheric symptoms, physiognomic traits, but also those “languages” that are not natural, and are instead the effect of rules and habits, like dress, bodily posture, pictorial representations, the productions of folklore, liturgy—that somehow appeal to an ancestral and instinctive competence that belongs, not only to the learned, but also to the meek. Because of the natural nature of this competence, of the instinctive popularity of the encyclopedia to which it refers, we could call this type of semiosis, though it may be founded on rules and custom, the natural effect of a long-term deposit in the collective memory, not subject to the same rapid and reserved variations as the exercise of the verbal arts.
It is not that popular semiosis is more “true” that the verbal kind: we will see how and to what extent it too can give rise to misunderstanding and mendacity. But to the meek it seems more comprehensible than verbal language, and they therefore consider it more reliable. So much so that when they make a mistake or are deceived about these forms of signification, they appear more vulnerable, because they do not employ the same systematic diffidence toward them that they employ toward verbal language. Take what happens (and we will have more to say about this later) during Renzo’s visit to Azzeccagarbugli (Dr. Quibbler) or in the entire case of the plague and the anointers (untori).
The meek are suspicious of verbal language because it imposes a logical syntax abolished by natural semiosis, since the latter does not proceed by linear sequences but by “pictures,” or lightning “iconologemes.” Whereas the threads of the linguistic sequences may multiply ad infinitum, while the simple-minded become lost in this dark wood, natural semiosis on the other hand permits, or seems to permit, an easier access to the truth of things, of which it is a spontaneous vehicle: an authentic, instinctive gesture can reveal the intentional falsity of a previous gesture. The notary who arrests Renzo speaks to him encouragingly, Renzo distrusts the words but he could be taken in by the tone; the notary, however, has him handcuffed, and, seeing this sign, Renzo realizes without the shadow of a doubt that he is in trouble.
The object of the narration is this popular semiosis in all its forms, because from it and through it the reader, no less than the characters, learns what is really happening, in other words the story, beneath the veil of the discourse.
We constantly find, throughout the novel, this opposition between “natural” sign and verbal sign, between visual sign and linguistic sign. Manzoni is always so embarrassed by the verbal sign, so anxious to demonstrate his diffidence, that in all the instances of enunciation with which the novel is studded, he makes excuses for the way he is telling the story, whereas, when he assumes a veridictive tone, it is to point out the credit that must be given to a proof, a piece of evidence, a trace, a symptom, a clue, a finding.
His characters act in the same way: either they speak with the deliberate intention of using language to lie, confuse, or conceal the proper relationships between things, or they apologize and complain that they are incapable of saying what they know. Though Renzo wants his children to learn how to read and write, he cannot help calling these verbal and grammatological artifices birberie, “a scoundrelly business” (p. 719). Renzo is suspicious of the language par excellence, Latin, and the only time that he quotes it he makes up a Babelic version (siés baraòs trapolorum, p. 279). Only once, in the final chapter, when by that time he has made his peace with Don Abbondio, does he say that he accepts the Latin of the wedding ceremony and the mass, but that is because it is “an honest,
