And now I come to the second part of my paper. This may seem contrary to our most cherished ideas, but all the centuries that have spoken to us about symbols knew little of the symbolic mode. Perhaps that was what the pilgrims at the temple of the god at Delphi were seeking, where the oracle neither says nor hides things but only vaguely alludes. But after that point, in order to find a notion of symbol like the one we have been outlining over the millennia, to find the symbolic mode asserting itself as a conscious strategy, we have to come to the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps it was modernity that invented the notion of poetry, seeing that those who read Homer at the time or shortly afterward saw him as an encyclopedia of universal knowledge, and medieval readers used Virgil the way Nostradamus would be used later. Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of a truth we no longer seek in religion.
Can this be enough? It will satisfy only those who have a cold awareness of the insignificance of the universe, a fervent will for redemption through the question, not through the supine acceptance of the answer.
Is this the attitude that distinguishes our times? No, and please allow me this moralistic conclusion. As soon as our age discovered the symbolic mode, it accepted only two refinements of its legacy.
The first, a learned and refined version, is that there is a deep sense concealed everywhere, that every discourse uses the symbolic mode, that every utterance is constructed along the isotopy of the unsaid, even when it is as simple as, “It’s raining today.” This is today’s deconstructionist heresy, which seems to assume that a divinity or malign subconscious made us talk always and only with a second meaning, and that everything we say is inessential because the essence of our discourse lies elsewhere, in a symbolic realm we are often unaware of. Thus the symbolic diamond, which was meant to flash in the dark and dazzle us at sudden but ideally very rare moments, has become a neon strip that pervades the texture of every discourse. This is too much of a good thing.
It is not a bad interpretative strategy if interpreting means accumulating qualifications for university positions. But if everyone always says what he did not mean to say, we are all always saying the same thing. The symbolic mode no longer exists as a supreme linguistic strategy; we all speak indirectly, imprecisely, constantly using symbols because we are sick with language. Where there is no recognizable rule there cannot even be deviation from the norm. We all speak in poetry, we all reveal something, even when we are just saying that we will pay the insurance bill on Tuesday. What a curse, living in a world so damnably orphic, where there is no room for the language of the man in the street. In a world where the man in the street cannot speak, even the poet has to remain silent.
The second heresy is to be found in the information world, which, accustomed as it is now to conspiracies, coded phrases, half-spoken words, alliances promised then canceled, and whispers of divorce that are immediately denied, seeks a secret meaning in every event and in every expression. This is the curse of the contemporary writer, something I don’t want to speak about since I do not want to talk about my own personal experiences; but I will construct a model of him based on the experience of a writer from the past who I imagine facing todays critics or journalists.
Let us say this writer is Leopardi, and let us invent his Dialogo tra il Poeta e un Facitore di Rotocalchi (Dialogue between the Poet and a Magazine Editor)…
“Signor Leopardi, the fact that you very briefly (for about fifteen lines) conducted a certain discourse on a hill where you reflected on the infinite is very stimulating and intriguing. Why did you call the hill ‘ermo'(deserted)? Allow me to say that you were obviously alluding to the mutilation of the Herms, the incident which placed Alcibiades in conflict with the Athenian government, as though you were clearly, or at least up to a point, talking about the conflict which has seen left-wing politicians lining up against Forza Italia…”
“Not at all, I called the hill ‘ermo because I indulged in the taste for archaism, and I admit that this is the worst line of that idyll; but the hill was certainly dear to me, because I was born near there.”
“And why do you imagine ‘the most profound rest’? Do not try to tell me that this is not a clear and explicit allusion to the current political situation, the anxiety of the markets, and the uncertain fate of the budget bill.”
“Look, I wrote ‘L’infinito’ between the spring and autumn of 1819, so I could not have alluded to your political situation. Allow a poet to dream, on top of a hill, deserted almost by accident, but in a totally literal way: there is no allegory, and just four rather modest metaphors: the profound rest (but even your own Lakoff would say that spatialization is an everyday way of making metaphors), the dead seasons (which is almost a mixed metaphor), the drowning of my thoughts, and the shipwreck in a sea that is not a sea … But as for the rest of it, there is no symbol and no allegory. Poetry does not fade into rhetoric, nor rhetoric into a legal speech … I was there that day, and I suddenly said to myself: ‘Mamma mia, the infinite…’ Perhaps the only symbolic element lies in the very fact that I did this even though there was no need to. But do not try to decode this. Let my moment of weakness be, just as it is, read the poem again, and then follow any line you like in your reply.”
“Oh come on, my little Count, you can’t pull the wool over our eyes. Three years, just three years after the Congress of Vienna, you are going on about timeless abandons, while Europe is in the process of becoming what it is … Will you at least allow us to read your text for what it really says?”
That is the end of my little game. Incapable as we are of finding or identifying a symbol where it actually exists, infected by the culture of suspicion and conspiracy, we look for it even where it does not exist as a textual mode. Or where, at best, not every single feature but rather the text taken as a whole, its unavoidable and open unintentionality, which makes it appear when nobody would have expected it, becomes a symbol, if you like, of the human condition.
In actual fact the world of the mass media does not go looking for symbols, because it has lost the capacity and talent for doing so. Deprived of a God to allude to, we seek allegories everywhere, mysterious connections between the stabbing of two girls (when statistics tell us that to find two murders with similarities in the space of ten years is absolutely normal), short circuits flashing in the dull texture of everyday life. And as a result we are losing the gift for identifying the symbolic mode where it does lurk.
Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull. The lust for a second sense ruins our ability to see second or even one thousand senses where they actually exist, or have been placed.
We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: “a rose is a rose is a rose.”
The symbolic mode exists at that point where we finally will have lost the desire to decode at any cost.
Revised version of a paper given at a conference on Symbolism, held in Siena in 1994 (published in Sandro Briosi, ed., “Symbolism,” special issue of L’immagine riflessa, n.s. IV, 1,). This revised version is dedicated to Sandro Briosi, who was still with us at the time.
ON STYLE
From the way it first appeared at the beginning of the Latin world right down to contemporary stylistics and aesthetics, the term “style” exhibits a history that is anything but uniform. Even though there is an original nucleus that can be identified, which means that from the word “stilus”—the instrument from which it derives by metonymy—style becomes synonymous with “writing” and therefore with the way one expresses oneself in literary terms, it is nevertheless true that this way of writing is understood in different ways and with different intensities over the course of the centuries.
For instance, already in the early years of its usage, the term indicates literary genres that are highly codified (the sublime, middle, low style; the Attic, Asian, or Rhodian style; the tragic, elegiac, or comic style). In this, as in so many other cases, style is a way of writing dictated by rules, usually very prescriptive rules; and it was accompanied by the idea of precepts, imitation, and close adherence to models. Usually we think that it
