This double pseudo-alliteration is paronomastically recalled in the second verse (civette versus comò), whereas the appearance of the mother represents an elaborate play on the quintuple recurrence of the grave labial nasal (m).
At the lexical level, «the owls named in the title of the poem are called by name only once in the text»; further, the labiodental grave constrictive voice fricative (v) of «civette» never recurs in the course of the sestina except in the guise of the labiodental unvoiced grave constrictive fricative (/). Thus the presence of the owls, alluded to but never again openly declared, represents in the sestina a hap ax «that shines like a solitaire.» Summoned up also by the anaphoric che (third verse)/le (fifth verse), the owls still dominate the poem.
The birds of Minerva, they are unquestionably a travesty of the «savants austères» and, at the same time, as participants in love-making, of Baudelaire’s «amoureux fervents»: hence the identification of the beloved maiden with a cat, «orgeuil de la maison» since she is exposed on the chest of drawers and «comme eux’sédentaire … amie de la science [the doctor] et de la volupté [love].» The analysis of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss does not involve (nor could it have, during that unfortunate period of pa-leostructuralist severity) the dialectic of desire, which made its triumphant appearance in the critical history of this poem through the justly famous’Séminaire XXXV of Jacques Lacan. 15
As every scholar knows, at the beginning of that seminar Doctor Lacan (just whose daughter was the girl on the chest of drawers, anyway?) collected the elephants previously distributed at the end of’Séminaire I and distributed among the participants some little owls, asserting that they were more suited to the chest of drawers than the elephants were.16 Then he noted how, as a rule, a mirror appears above a chest of drawers: but (and here, certainly, we have the stroke of genius in this seminar), while the disciples were concentrating their attention on this most abused paraphernal, Doctor Lacan, with one of his typical coups de théâtre, recognized in the comò a typical item of furniture supplied with drawers and then broached his brand-new theory of the stade du tiroir.17
The drawer is in fact the place of repression, and the poem appeared to Lacan as the very allegory of Urverdrängung, whereas the pulsatile action of the owls, only apparently inspired by desire, was revealed as a disguise, not all that implicit, of the Bemächti gungsstreich; or rather, as Lacan himself clarified in his limpid French, as an Überwältigung of the girl-object.
But it now becomes absolutely necessary to move on to a more viable—and more verifiable—Anglo-Saxon corrective for all this transalpine mist. We must bear in mind that as early as the 1960s, Noam Chomsky,18 in what he at first defined as Standard Theory of the Chest of Drawers (STCD), had attempted to analyze the WP ambarabä ciccì coccö (where WP stands for «What? phrase,» from «What?!?» the exclamation of Dwight Bolinger when he was exposed, as native informant, to the utterance of the verse itself). The STCD diagrammed the verse in this fashion:
But in the successive phase (Extended Theory of the Owls, ETO), he decided to employ the usual asterisk, labeling the verse as in (1):
(1) *ambarabà ciccì coccó
Truly an ad hoc solution, confuted perceptively by Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy (1978) with a reference to Frege, for whom, given that the meaning (in the sense of Bedeutung) of every utterance is always a truth-value, and given that all phrases marked by an asterisk are neither true nor false, the meaning of (1) must be considered the equivalent of the meaning of (2):19
(2) * Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
But this has the paradoxical result that anyone wishing to make an assertion concerning the virtus dormitiva of colorless green ideas should utter (1)—which would in itself be nothing, as Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy observed, were it not for the fact that the owl poem should then be rewritten in these terms:
(3) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
three old owls on a chest of drawers
were screwing
the daughter of the doctor.
But the mother called them,
colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
While this paradoxical conclusion inspired Harold Bloom to write a probing essay20 on poetry as misunderstanding, thus furnishing Jacques Derrida the occasion for some provocatory reflections21 on interpretive drift, the attempt was firmly knocked down by Quine.22 The last-named observed that, if the utterance (3) had to be read in terms of post hoc ergo propter hoc (if the green ideas, etc., then three owls, etc.), and if we let
p = Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
q = Three owls on the chest of drawers make love with the doctor’s daughter
then p could be negated only through modus tollendo tollens, namely admitting that q is not true. But since q cannot be negated, given the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, it is impossible to negate p; and thus it must be conceded that colorless green ideas may sleep furiously, which is intuitively false, salva veritate.
It is worth remembering the attempt of Chafe, Chafe, and Chafe (1978) whereby coccò would be a verb form (third person singular of the preterit of cocare) and Ambaraba Ciccì, a proper noun. In this case the sestina should be read as the story of one Ambaraba Ciccì who «coked» three owls on the chest of drawers (the authors did not face the problem of the meaning of cocare, as they sustained the legitimacy of a purely distributional analysis). But this hypothesis was famously disproved by Kripke in the light of a causal theory of meaning; it is impossible to identify the expression Ambaraba Ciccì as rigid designator, for want of evidence of an initial baptism.23
In response to Searle’s objection,24 namely that Ambaraba Ciccì could be replaced by a definite description, like (4):
(4) The only man who cochoed the owls in Como
Kripke pointed out the problems that would derive from replacing a proper name with a definite description in opaque contexts, as in (5):
(5) John thinks that Nancy hoped that Mary believed that Noam suspected that Ambaraba was not a proper name
For to assert (6)
(6) John thinks that … the only man who cochoed the owls in Como was not a proper name
is not only without meaning, but patently false, since as everyone knows,
(7) John is eager to please
and hence John would never venture to invite general reproach, by making such silly assertions.
A vigorous change of direction was imposed on the whole debate by the generative semanticists (see in particular Fillcawley; Mcjackendoff; Klima-Toshiba and Gulp, 1979). Working with the English version of the poem, they decided to abandon the inconclusive analysis of the first verse to concentrate their attention on the verses that follow, simplified as in (8), for which they devised the accompanying diagram.
(8) Three owls are screwing the girl on the chest of drawers
The stern polemic among transformationalists, generativists, and philosophers of language was finally settled thanks to the intervention of Montague (1977)25. In an exemplary essay on the poem of the owls, he posited a predicate P
P = being three owls on the chest of drawers who make love with the daughter of the doctor until the mother calls them
whereby the whole poem can be formalized (indexing a possible world wl):
P x w1
Note that, if we assume that in another possible world, w2, the predicate P can be stated as:
P = being the sole individual for whom life is a tale told by an idiot
King Lear can properly be represented as:
P x w2
—which demonstrates almost iconically the profound affinity among all works of art worthy of the name.
But, reacting against the hypersimplification of the Anglo-Saxon schools, Greimas and the Ecole de Paris, after having identified in the poem, as the fundamental level, four actants (Subject, Object, Sender, and Receiver) and having stressed the actorialization implicit in the anthroponyms owl, girl, chest of drawers, and mother, went on to identify two narrative programs: the first F [S1 → (S1 ∩ Ov)°] in which the owls fornicate with the value-object girl, and the second F [S2 → (S1 ∪ Ov] in which the mother separates the owls from their object of value. In the course of the first program, given a semiotic square on the order of the girl (who does not know what the owls are doing to her) seems to play and not play (and is the victim of the owls’ lie), while the owls find themselves as the addressees (destinataires) of a secret (they make love but do not «seem,» and pretend to play doctor with the girl). In the course of the second narrative program the mother discovers the truth and identifies the seeming with the being of the owls. To skip over the intermediary passages of the gripping Greimasian analysis, at its conclusion the author discovers that the profound oppositions of the poem can be depicted on the square as follows:
But—and here lies the punctum dolens of this otherwise extremely acute study—Greimas in the end no longer knows what to do with the chest of drawers and decides to donate it to the Salvation Army.
The limits of this essay prevent us from considering countless other critical contributions to the fascinating problem of the owls. For the moment we will end by citing the recent essay of Emanuele Severino
