No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and im-possibility of writing, of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity)” (p. 182). And: “. . . in so doing [i.e., by the iterability or the citationality that it permits] it [the sign] can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the con-trary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage]” (pp. 185-6). (Derrida 1977:203-4)
In this ultimate epiphany of the symbolic mode, the text as symbol is no longer read in order to find in it a truth that lies outside: the only truth (that is, the old Kabalistic God) is the very play of deconstruction. The ultimate truth is that the text is a mere play of differences and displace-ments. Rabbi Levi Isaac said that “also the white, the spaces in the scroll of the Torah, consist of letters, only that we are not able to read them as we read black letters. But, in the Messianic Age, God will also reveal to us the white of the Torah, whose letters have become invisible to us, and that is what is meant by the statement about the ‘new Torah'” (Scholem 1960; Eng. tr., p. 82). The Lacanian acknowledgment of the autonomy of the symbolic as the chain of the signifiers, by inspiring the new deconstructionist practices, has now allowed the new and atheistic mystics of the godless drift, to rewrite indefinitely, at every new reading, the new Torah.
4.5. Semiotics of the symbolic mode
Our quest for the specific symbolic mode is seriously challenged by the deconstructive practice. If in a text everything can be read beyond its conventional (and delusory) meaning, then every text is a reserve of sym-bols. Once again, the symbolic mode is equated with the semiotic one: each human discourse always speaks indirectly.
A fascinating but un-satisfactory conclusion. Symbols looked so mysterious, they promised such a privileged way of knowing, and now we are left with two equally irritating alternatives: either every utterance provides for this privileged knowledge (but where everything is privileged, there is no longer a privilege) or language is always symbolic but only a happy few can deal with it as such. It will be then unclear what the others really understand; they probably misunderstand, but why despise them, since misunder-standing is the only way of interpreting? Or is there a difference between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ misunderstanding?
There is, however, a fully secularized way of conceiving of the sym-bolic mode, as limited to specific forms of communication, and it is the one proposed by many modern aesthetic theories springing from the ex-perience of French Symbolism. Even though the cultural roots of artists such as Baudelaire go back to many currents of mystical throught, in the modern aesthetic perspective the artist is a free detonator of a vision that he himself produces: an expression purposefully endowed with vague meanings and that cannot be anchored to a preestablished code (there is no fixed elaboration).
The poetic work remains open. It is still the Romantic ideal, but definitely dominated by the ideal of poetic am-biguity. It is true that when Baudelaire (in “Correspondances”) speaks of Nature as a temple whose living pillars whisper a cryptic speech, so that man wanders among them as in a wood of symbols where colors, perfumes, and sounds echo each other, this picture reminds us of the medieval world as a book written by the hand of God. But Baudelairean symbols (be they albatrosses, cats, or serpents) are private; they do not need a Physiologus to explain their possible meanings. They acquire their full significance only within their poetic context. It is true that Mallarmé’s idea of a context made up by empty and white spaces can recall the rabbinic idea of a scroll where even the white spaces are to be read as letters —but this time there is no God to warrant (and to be named by) the combinatory game: the Book is not conceived by God to speak of Himself; on the contrary, it is the whole world which exists in order to give birth to the Book (Le Livre), and the Book only speaks of its infinite combinatorial possibilities.
More radically, the symbolic mode is poetically secularized in Joyce’s theory of epiphanies and in Eliot’s notion of objective correlative. Here events, gestures, things suddenly appear as a strange, inexplicable, in-trusive evidence within a context which is too weak to justify their pres-ence. So they reveal that they are there to reveal something else; it is up to the reader to decide what else.
In this line of thought, not everything can be a symbol. A symbol has to be textually produced; it requires a specific semiotic strategy. It is exactly such a strategy that should now be in some way outlined —at least under the form of an abstract model. A symbolic strategy can pro-duce aesthetic enjoyment, but it is first of all semiotic machinery.
Let us start from the normal conversational implicatures as described by Grice (1967). They are instances of indirect signification (see 4.2.2 above), but not necessarily of the symbolic mode: the additional mean-ing transmitted by an implicature is not a vague one, at least as far as the intentions of the speaker are concerned (it can become vague only be-cause of a lack of cooperation by the hearer).
In a text, the device of flouting the conversational maxims can be used rhetorically. Metaphors, irony, hyperboles violate the maxim of quality, since they do not tell (literally) the truth. If I say that a hero is a lion, literally speaking I lie; my addressee, by recognizing such a blatant case of lying, must infer that I probably intend to say something else. But, since the correct interpretation of the metaphor is that this hero is a courageous or ferocious man, the metaphorical expression does not nec-essarily convey a content nebula (even though it could). Many meta-phors (and all catachreses) can be disambiguated without vagueness.
More interesting are the violations of the maxims of quantity, relation, and manner. Not every rhetorical violation of these maxims produces the symbolic mode: figures such as periphrasis or laconism violate the maxim of quantity without conveying vague meanings, and certain synecdoches and metonymies violate the maxim of manner without referring to nebulous contents.
Nevertheless, we can say that, even though not all the violations of these maxims result in producing the symbolic mode, the symbolic mode springs from certain violations of them and represents a case of textual implicature.
Naturally, a text can narrate a case of conversational implicature, thus encouraging the interpreter to implement the appropriate inferences. If a narrative text reports a conversation in which the first speaker asks the second one about his love affairs, and the second speaker answers by some meteorological remarks, the reader has to infer that the second speaker was making a conversational implicature, meaning “I am not supposed to tell you about my private life,” and, by means of other co-textual inference, some additional information about this character can be extrapolated. But all these inferences follow rhetorical or psycho-logical laws, more or less coded, and rely on preestablished frames. This will not be considered an instance of textual implicature but, rather, a case of mere reported conversational implicature.
On the contrary, when in a Zen story the Master, asked about the meaning of life, answers by raising his stick, the interpreter smells an abnormal implicature, whose interpretant keys lie outside preexisting frames. This gesture means not only that the Master refuses to answer but also that his (gestural) answer has a still uncoded meaning, and maybe more than one. The textual implicature signaling the appearance of the symbolic mode depends on the presentation of a sentence, of a word, of an object, of an action that, according to the precoded narrative or discursive frames, to the acknowledged rhetorical rules, to the most common linguistic usages, should not have the relevance it acquires within that context.
The standard reaction to the instantiation of the symbolic mode should be a sort of uneasiness felt by the interpreter when witnessing an inexplicable move on the part of the text, the sentiment that a certain word, sentence, fact, or object should not have been introduced in the discourse or at least not have acquired such an importance. The interpre-ter feels a surplus of signification since he guesses that the maxims of relevance, manner, or quantity have not been violated by chance or by mistake. On the contrary, they are not only flouted, but—so to speak —flouted dramatically.
“By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (Stephen Hero). In pro-ducing most of his epiphanies, Joyce puts them within a co-text that explicitly introduces and stresses their strangeness and their revealing intrusiveness.
Other authors see, for example, the objective correla-tives in Eliot—present the irrelevant apparitions without justifying their presence. What signals their role is the fact that they should not be there. Incidentally, the feeling that something should not be there is the one that accompanies, in the early theory of textual symbolism, the interpretation of an event, of an object, of a precept in the Holy Scriptures. See how Augustine, in the Doctrina
