In short, we really need to make people understand that although a dictionary is not enough to make a good writer, nevertheless good writers often consult dictionaries. Without claiming thereby that the Zingarelli dictionary and Leopardi’s Canti belong to the same kind of discourse.
And yet, perhaps also through the semioticians’ own fault, the enemies of textual semiotics cannot distinguish between the two genres of discourse (of textual semiotics and a textual criticism that is semiotically oriented). And in confusing them they lose the sense of the third type of discourse I spoke about, the only one that can help us understand the way a text reveals how it has been given form.
When preconstituted theory precedes the reading of a text, we often mean to lay bare the tools of inquiry, which are already known, in order to show that we are familiar with them, and that we have been ingenious in constructing them, instead of possessing the artistry to conceal the art, and to make what the text finally reveals to us come directly out of the text and not out of the pyrotechnics of theoretical metalanguage. It is obvious that this method of proceeding scares the reader who wants to know something about the text, and not about the metalanguage that establishes codes of reading.
Since a textual theory sketches out the constants, while textual criticism should highlight the variables, it often happens that, having realized that the world of intertextuality is made up of constants and variables of invention, and that a work of literature is a miracle of invention that keeps at bay and conceals the variables on which it nevertheless plays, semiotic inquiry is reduced to the discovery of the same constants in every text, and thus loses sight of the inventions.
As a result of this we find people researching the structure of the Tarot cards in Calvino (as though the author had not already revealed everything on this subject to us), or formulaic exercises on life and death, identified in every text, which as a result reduces Hamlet to “to be / not to be,” “not wanting to be / wanting not to be.” In these cases, we should note, the procedure may be excellent in didactic terms, and may even succeed in showing how, whereas all of us struggle each day between wanting to be and wanting not to be, Shakespeare presents an eternal dilemma in a new way. But it is precisely from this “novelty” that our discourse should start, and narratological leveling is only a preamble to discovering the “peaks” of art.
If literary theory exists to uncover the constants in different texts, when the critic applies the theory he should not limit himself to finding the same invariables in every text (for doing so goes no further than the work of the theorist), but if anything he should start from the awareness of the constants to see how the text calls them into question, makes them interact, and covers this skeleton with different skin and muscles in each different case. The drama of Oedipus’s not wanting to know in Sophocles’ play is given not by this modal structure (which can be found even in the most banal scenes where the wife who has been betrayed says to her gossipy female friend: “Please, I don’t want to know”) but by the strategy through which the revelation is delayed, by what is at stake (parricide and incest, as opposed to a banal example of conjugal betrayal), and by the surface of the discourse.
Finally, semiotic discourse often fails to distinguish between “manner” and “style,” which Hegel identifies in the first case as a repetitive obsession in the author who always continually writes the same way, and in the second case as the capacity constantly to outdo himself. And yet it is textual semiotics that is the only critique capable of bringing out such differences.
If numerous different excesses can be imputed to textual semiotics, what should we say about the defects of those who oppose it? It is certainly not our job to complain about the orgasms we are made to witness by the ” artifices additi artifici,” who invariably provide us with a diary of their moments of languor as readers, so much so that one of their passages dedicated to author A and republished by mistake in a book dedicated to author B would go unnoticed by both editor and reviewer.
In fact, we could leave these orgasmic critics to their own delights, which do not harm anyone, and after a while show how those who are so orgasmic in words are in fact very unlibertine in reality, and abhor alterity, since in every one of their critical embraces they are simply making love to themselves. And we could also leave to their own devices those who want to write social criticism, or the history of literary institutions, or criticism of good and bad behavior, all of which are often useful and praiseworthy.
Except that in Italy, in the last ten years, there has been a kind of competition to see who can cast the fiercest anathemas against what they call “formalist-structural-semiotic” readings, as if the latter—and some people have even claimed this—were responsible for Tangentopolis, the Mafia, the collapse of the whining Left, and the rise of the triumphant Right.
This could become an embarrassing incident, in the sense that these complaints could lead the young, including young teachers, astray, diverting them from a number of directions people had taken in the last twenty years, and to good effect.
If you go into the ground floor of the Presses Universitaires bookstore in Paris and go to the second table on the right, you will find scores of manuals for all kinds of schools and at all levels on how to write an ” analyse de texte.” Even the very pioneers of structuralism in the 1960s have been forced to rediscover not the Russian formalists or the Prague school but the legions of good old Anglo-Saxon empiricist critics and theorists, who for decades had analyzed in depth the strategies of point of view, of narrative montage, of actants and subjects in action (as in Kenneth Burke).
My generation, which was the first post-Croce generation, delighted in the revelations of Wellek and Warren, in the readings of Dámaso Alonso and Spitzer. We began to understand that reading was not just a picnic where one gathered here and there, almost by chance, the hawthorns and buttercups of “poesia,” which were hidden amid the manure of structural fillers. Rather, one looked at the text as a whole, as something animated with life at every level. It seemed that even our culture had learned this.
Why is it now forgetting all this? Why are young people now being taught that to discuss a text they do not need a strong theoretical repertoire, and a capacity to examine all levels? Why are they being taught that the long and lasting labors of a critic like Contini were damaging (just because—and this is true—he overrated Pizzuto), whereas the only ideal critic (now famous again!) is one with a free mind that reacts freely to the occasional solicitations provided by the text?
Personally, I see in this tendency a reflection of other sectors of communication: criticism is being leveled down to the rhythms and rate of investment of other activities that have been proved to guarantee a profit. Why bother with reviewing, which forces one to read the book, if it sells more copies of a paper to have the literary section comment on the interview given by an author to a rival paper? Why put Hamlet on television, as the much-criticized TV of the 1960s used to do, when you can obtain higher ratings by putting on the same talk show, and treating the village idiot and the academic idiot on the same level? And why on earth read a text year after year if you can achieve the ecstasy of the sublime by chewing a few leaves, without wasting your nights and days discovering the sublimity of leaves in the sublime workings of chlorophyll in photosynthesis?
For this is the message that is propagated daily by the high priests of the New Post-Antique Criticism: they repeatedly tell us that whoever knows about chlorophyll and photosynthesis will for the rest of his life be insensitive to the beauty of a leaf, that whoever knows anything about the circulation of the blood will never be able to make his heart palpitate with love. And this is totally wrong, and we must say it and repeat it from the rooftops.
This is a life-or-death battle between those who love texts and those who are simply in a hurry.
But I shall allow an unimpeachable authority on the matter to speak, one so wise and reliable that we do not even know his real name, which should win over to his side the supporters, who are now everywhere, of wisdom that is traditional, unknown, and occult, or those sophisticated publishers who only publish one-book authors or authors who have not even managed that. We know this authority as Pseudo-Longinus, of the first century A.D., and we are inclined to attribute to him the invention of a concept that has always been the standard for those who proclaim that art cannot be discussed because it arouses ineffable emotions; we can record the ecstasy it produces, and at best we can retell the experience in other words, but it cannot be explained.
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