Both these modes can be practiced in two different ways, which, according to Croce, can be defined as the “artifex additus artifici” (an artist writing about an artist) approach, or the “philosophus additus artifici” (a philosopher writing about an artist) approach. In the first case, rather than explaining the work to us, the critic provides us with a diary of his emotions in reading it, and unconsciously seeks to outdo in virtuosity the object of his humble devotion. Sometimes he succeeds—we know very well passages on literature that are finer, in a literary sense, than the literature they discuss, just as Proust’s pages on bad music are of the highest musicality.
In the second approach the critic tries to show us, in the light of certain critical categories and criteria, why the work is beautiful. But in the case of a review he does not have sufficient space to tell us in depth how the work is made (and therefore to reveal to us the machinations of its style), while a history of literature has to maintain its analysis on a level of enforced generality. Unfortunately, it takes a hundred pages to lay bare the style of one page, and in a history of literature the proportions are inevitably the inverse.
Let us now come to the third mode, textual criticism. In it the critic has to assume that the reader knows nothing about the work, even if it is as well known as The Divine Comedy. He has to make the reader discover it for the first time. If the text is not brief enough to be quoted in its entirety, and subdivided into sections of prose or verse, he has to presume that the reader has access to it in some other way, since the goal of this discourse is to lead him, step by step, in the discovery of how the text has been put together and why it functions as it does. This discourse can be put forward as a confirmation (“now I will show you why everyone considers this to be a brilliant text”), as a revaluation, or as the destruction of a myth. The ways in which one can show how a text is put together (and why it is right that it is put together in this way, and how it could not be composed in any other way, and why it has to be considered as sublime precisely because it is composed in this way) can be countless. No matter how these discourses are articulated, such criticism cannot be anything other than a semiotic analysis of the text.
Consequently, if proper criticism is understanding and making others understand how a text is made, and if the review and the history of literature are unable to do this adequately, the only true form of criticism is a semiotic reading of the text.
Like proper criticism (which must lead to an understanding of the text in all its aspects and potential) the semiotic reading of a text possesses a quality that is usually and indeed inevitably missing in a critical review or history of literature: it does not prescribe the various ways in which the text can be pleasurable, but, rather, it shows us why the text can produce pleasure.
Because it has to make recommendations, a critical review cannot be exempt, except in cases of exceptional cowardice, from pronouncing a verdict on what the text says; historical criticism shows us at most that a work has enjoyed a varied and fluctuating critical fortune, and has aroused different responses. Textual criticism, by contrast, which is always semiotic even when it does not know it is, or even when it denies it is, fulfills that function which was admirably described by Hume in “Of the Standard of Taste,” which cites a passage from Don Quixote:
Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it, and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a final taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favor of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.*
My point is that proper criticism always has the last laugh, because it allows everyone to have his own pleasure, but it also shows the reason for that pleasure.
Of course, even textual criticism, carried out by a “philosophus additus artifici,” can be aware of its own excesses, which thwart its very function. It will be useful to consider some errors of textual semiotics, which have occasionally caused the rejection syndromes I spoke of just now. There is often confusion between “the semiotic theory of literature” and “criticism that is semiotically oriented.” I refer you to an old debate from the 1960s, which began with the famous catalogue issued by the publisher II Saggiatore dedicated to “Structuralism and Criticism,” a debate in which there were roughly two speaking positions, one represented by Segre, the other by Rosiello. To put it briefly, for the first option, linguistic theory was to be used to shed light on the individual work; for the second, the analysis of the individual work was to be used to shed light on the nature of language. Therefore, when the first option was at work, a group of theoretical assumptions would be used to shed light on an author’s personal style, whereas in the case of the second option, the personal style was felt to be a deviation from the linguistic norm, which reinforced knowledge of the norm as such.
Now these two positions were and are equally legitimate. One can construct a theory of literature, and use individual works as documents, and one can read individual works in the light of a theory of literature, or, rather, in an attempt to make the very principles of a theory of literature emerge from the examination of individual works.
Let us take the example of one area of literary theory such as narratology, which treats texts as examples and not as objects of analysis. If the role of criticism of a narrative text is to understand that text better, what role does narratology have? First and foremost, its role is to create narratology, just as philosophy essentially is used to philosophize. It helps to understand how narrative texts function, whether they are good or bad. Secondly, it is useful to many disciplines (such as artificial intelligence, semantics, and psychology) in helping us understand how the totality of our experience is structured (maybe) always and in every case in the shape of “narrations”: a narratological theory that was useful in understanding only how stories are told would not amount to very much, but if instead it teaches us how we organize our approach to the world in narrative sequences, then it is something more. Finally, it also teaches us to read better, and even (take the case of Calvino) to invent new forms of writing. So long as we know how to make it interact with a “natural” way of reading, that is to say with a critical reading that is not set in stone at the outset by certain narratological prejudices.
Now there are two ambiguities here, one of production and one of reception. The first is when the semiotician is not clear, or does not make clear, whether he is using the text to enrich his theory of narrative, or whether he is working with certain narratological categories in order to understand the particular text better. The second is when the reader (often prejudiced) takes as an exercise in criticism a discourse that was aimed instead at deriving general principles of narrativity from one or more individual texts. This would be like a psychologist who is interested in the motives that make someone kill reading a statistical essay on crime in the last twenty years and complaining that statistics have not provided an explanation of individual motivation.
We could restrict ourselves to saying to these prejudiced readers that narratological theories are of no use either to the reading or to the criticism of a text. We could say that they are simply protocols of multiple readings, and that they serve the same purpose as the theory of physics, which explains how bodies fall according to one single law without telling us whether this is good or bad, nor what the difference is between a stone falling from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and an unhappy lover plummeting from a wuthering height. We could say that their purpose is to understand not texts but the function of storytelling in its totality, and that they therefore seem more like a chapter in psychology or cultural anthropology than like a chapter in literary criticism.
And yet we would have to explain also that they have, in addition, and if nothing else, a pedagogical value. They are an instrument used by those who are teaching others to read, in order to instantly identify the crucial points to which the pupil’s attention has to be drawn. And so, if nothing else, they would be useful for teaching people how to read. But since one has to teach the skill of reading even to those who
