At this point we would be advised to go through the entire novel to see if our hypothesis holds, whether it is true that at every stage there is this clear opposition between natural semiosis and language. It will be sufficient for now, however, to verify it in a few essential episodes.
14.3. The Meeting with the Bravoes
Don Abbondio has lived, and he is able to interpret many signs. He comes on the scene exhibiting the sign par excellence, the index finger, which he places in his breviary (per segno, as a sign, Manzoni naturally remarks). He passes an example of visual communication, a clumsily painted tabernacle, in which there can be no doubt that certain “long, snaky shapes with pointed ends … were meant by the artist and understood by the local inhabitants to be flames” (p. 27), and he sees “something he did not expect or want to see at all” (p. 28). Don Abbondio’s entire life, lived under the sign of tranquility, rests upon his faith in tried and true patterns of action, habitual frames and scenarios; and his tragicomedy begins the moment these expectations are frustrated—from then on he starts to see a number of things that he could never have expected, including a scoundrel who becomes a saint. Don Abbondio immediately recognizes the bravoes by “certain unmistakable signs”—their dress, their attitudes, their appearance—“which left no doubt about what they were” (p. 28). There follows the famous description of the bravoes, on the strength of which the reader will be able to recognize them every time they appear in the novel—except when they are described in words by the edicts, because from that confused set of injunctions, threats, and prescriptions the descriptions that emerge are vague and poorly defined.
Don Abbondio recognizes the bravoes for what they are because he is in possession of a behavioral, vestimentary, and kinesic code. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why he is able to identify them at first sight as “individuals of the species known as bravoes” (p. 28). (It is curious how scholastically rigorous Manzoni is at this point, how, using Aristotelian terms, he is able to suggest the semiotic relationship between type and token.)
We may note in passing that Don Abbondio is fully aware that the habit and not the name make the monk. In the last chapter he will jestingly discuss with Renzo the inanity of the decree that grants to cardinals the title of “eminence” (p. 707). It has come about because at this point everybody was called “monsignor” or “your grace,” but before long everybody will want to be called “eminence,” and the linguistic innovation will have done nothing to bring order to the universe of ecclesiastical dignity and human vanity.
The meeting with the bravoes takes place under the sign of the opposition between word and visual evidence. The bravoes speak, but what Don Abbondio understands always anticipates their words. The priest realizes “by certain unmistakable signs” (p. 32) that he is the one they are waiting for; he puts on a casual attitude, in the vain hope of deceiving the threatening characters who are lying in wait for him, running the first two fingers of his left hand under his collar; he decides that to run for it would have lent itself to an inauspicious interpretation (“it would have been the same as saying, follow me, or worse”); once more he pretends to be relaxed, reciting a verse or two out loud; he composes his face into as calm and carefree an expression as he can muster (because he knows that, since gestures and facial expressions speak, they can be manipulated in order to lie); he prepares a smile; and, to indicate his submission, he comes to a halt.
As for the bravoes, when they speak (and so far they speak saying nonthreatening things), they speak with a menacing attitude, they speak in his ear “in a tone of impressive command” (p. 33), and they know full well that their attitude speaks louder than their words, because “if these things had to be settled by talk, [Don Abbondio with his book learning] would make rings round [them]” (p. 33).
There’s just one thing, at the end of the episode, that seems to challenge our hypothesis, and to this we must now turn our full attention.
14.4. Proper Names
The bravoes mention the name of Don Rodrigo and “The effect of that name on Don Abbondio’s mind was like a flash of lightning in the middle of the storm at night, which illuminates one’s surroundings confusedly for a moment, and makes them more terrifying than before” (p. 34). Confronted with this power of the name, it has to be said that, of all the flatus vocis that we cannot trust, proper names, because of their indexical nature, take on a particular status which makes them cognate with symptoms or visual signs.
The novelist must certainly have faith in proper names, to identify his characters without ambiguity. Now it appears that when he needs these indispensable labels, for Renzo, Lucia, Agnese, Tonio, or Donna Prassede, Manzoni makes the most neutral choices possible, dipping into the liturgical calendar or into the Scriptures,
For the historical characters in the background, he uses the names that history obliges him to use (Federigo, Ambrogio Spinola, Ferrer), but for the most part he could not be more careful about using as few surnames and place names as he can, resulting in the great abundance of asterisks that we are all familiar with, and the unrevealing antonomasias like “the Signora,” arriving finally at that masterpiece of reticence that is the name of the Unnamed, written with a lower case initial in the original no less.
In other words, Manzoni has the same reluctance to divulge names that Renzo demonstrates at the inn in the presence of the pseudo-Ambrogio Fusella. And he does not appear to do so merely in obedience to the rules of the genre. He seems to lack faith in names because he realizes that, even regarding names, the chronicles, which speak of facts, are ambiguous, so much so that we do not even know what the correct name is of the man who was the first bearer of the contagion, and we have to choose between two, both of which are probably false. And when havoc has been wreaked upon real names (as in the case of the name of Giangiacomo Mora), an image that does not correspond to reality has attached itself to the label, connoting in infamous fashion a name that ought by rights to evoke feelings of pity.
Proper names, then, embarrassing signs, are not reliable as words, and are in danger of being even less so as “rigid designators.” The fewer of them mentioned the better. But, as labels, they serve their purpose: little by little the reader hangs on the name Lucia everything that the actions of the young woman have done to define her, and the characters in the novel do likewise. Obviously, the name is all the more effective the more it provides a label for a series of characteristics already defined from the outset, as is the case with Don Rodrigo, and for characters already fully defined by a hagiography that is never called into question, as is the case with Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. Don Rodrigo and Federigo are both clichés—the first damned from the opening chapters (so much so that we will never learn whether or not he was touched by grace at the point of death), the second wearing a halo of holiness before he even comes onstage. This is why their names have an almost magical power, hearing them one either shudders or is reassured.
But, both in the case of already defined characters like Federigo, and those in the process of being defined like the Unnamed, Manzoni can name names—sidestepping his distrust of the verbal—because as a good storyteller he knows that proper names are merely hooks on which to hang precise descriptions, and the descriptions come from a playbook of behaviors and actions that manifest themselves in terms of natural semiotics.
In any case, we cannot say that Manzoni exploits names to suggest connotations of character. The case of the defamatory nicknames of the bravoes does not count, because the bravoes appear onstage already characterized for what they are and what they have no option but to be. Let us consider instead a borderline case, that of the aforementioned pettifogging lawyer Azzeccagarbugli (Dr Quibbler).
He seems to be defined from the start by his nickname, but this is not altogether true. The theater of visual appearances that he deploys around himself seduces Renzo in the beginning: the actions of the pettifogger are marked by humanity, his rooms are a guarantee of his learning and respect for the law (the portraits of the twelve Caesars, the bookshelf full of dusty old volumes, the table littered with statements, pleas, applications, and edicts). Nor should we forget that the dressing gown he is draped in is a legal robe, however threadbare. Renzo is taken in by a seductive mise-en-scène, and he concludes that a quibbler can
