referential, emotive, conative (or imperative), phatic, aesthetic, and metalingual.» Such a division, however, already presumes a certain awareness of the structure of the message as well as a knowledge of what distinguishes the aesthetic function from the others. It is precisely this distinction that I would now like to verify in the light of my previous discussions. If we accept the division I have just sketched as the result of a completed investigation, then we can turn to a particular dichotomy that was in vogue a few decades ago among scholars of semantics: the distinction between messages with a referential function (pointing at something well defined and, if necessary, verifiable) and those with an emotive function (aiming at provoking certain reactions in the recipient, stimulating associations, and promoting response behaviors that go well beyond the mere recognition of a referent).
- Propositions with a Referential Function
Confronted with a proposition such as «That man comes from Milan,» our mind will immediately establish a univocal relationship between signifier and signified: adjective, noun, verb, and complement of place (here represented by the preposition «from» followed by the name of a city), each referring to a very specific reality and a welldefined action. Which does not mean that the expression itself possesses all the requirements necessary to signify abstractly the situation it in fact defines once it is understood. The expression itself is merely a juxtaposition of conventional terms that need my collaboration in order to be understood: in other words, I must invest every new term with a certain number of previous experiences in order to be able to understand its current meaning.
If I have never heard the term «Milan» before and do not know that it refers to a city, then the amount of communication that is likely to reach me will not be very high. On the other hand, even an addressee who is perfectly aware of the meaning of each term may not receive as much information as another, equally wellinformed addressee. Obviously, if I am waiting for some important communication from Milan, the sentence will tell me more and elicit a much stronger reaction from me than it would from someone without similar expectations.» Similarly, if, in my mind, Milan is connected to a series of memories, desires, same sentence will provoke in me an array of complex emotions that few other people will be able to share.
A sentence such as «Thar man conies from Paris.» uttered in front of Napoleon during his exile on Saint Helena, must have awakened in him a variety of emotions such as we could not even imagine. In other words, each addressee will automatically complicate—that is to say, personalize—his or her understanding of a strictly referential proposition with a variety of conceptual or emotive references culled from his or her previous experience. On the other hand, whatever the number of «pragmatic» reactions that such a plurality of understandings can entail, it is still possible to keep a referential proposition under control by reducing the understanding of different receivers to a single pattern.
In other words, if the proposition «The train for Rome leaves from Central Station at 5:45 P.m., Platform 7 (which has the same referential univocality as the previous one) can also produce different reactions in ten different people—depending on whether the addressee is headed for Rome to conduct business, or to rush to the side of a dying relative, or to collect an inheritance, or to follow an unfaithful spouse—it still relies on a single. basic, and pragmatically verifiable pattern of understanding whereby all ten passengers will be on the same train at the same hour. This collective reaction proves the existence of a common frame of reference that could also be accessible to a properly programmed computer. The computer, however, would not have access to the halo of openness that radiates out of every proposition. no matter how strictly referential, and that accompanies all human communication.
- Propositions with a Suggestive Function
Let us now look at a sentence such as «That man comes from Basra.» Addressed to an Iraqi, this sentence should produce an effect similar to the one produced by the sentence concerning Milan on an Italian. Addressed to someone with no geographic knowledge, it will either produce total indifference or some curiosity as to this unknown place of origin, whose name, lacking a frame of reference, finds absolutely no resonance in him. In yet another person, the mention of Basra might evoke images not of a precise geographic location but of a «fantastic» place described in the
Thousand and One Nights. In this case, the term «Basra» would cease to be a stimulus directly connected to a specific reality, a precise signified, and would become the center of an associative network of memories and emotions, all exuding the same exotic blend of mystery, languor, and magic: Ali Baba, hashish, flying carpets, odalisques, sultry aromas and spices, the wisdom of caliphs, the sounds of oriental instruments, wily Levantine merchants, Baghdad.
The less precise the receiver’s culture and the more fervent his imagination, the more undefined and fluid his reaction will be, and the more frayed and smudged its contours. Let’s not forget the effect that the sign displaying the words «Agendath Netaim» has on Leopold Bloom (Ulysses, chapter 4); the «stream of consciousness» it provokes constitutes a precious psychological document. The divagations of a mind prodded by a vague stimulus can cause the suggestiveness of one word (such as «Basra») to permeate the rest of the text: the subject of the sentence ceases to be an insignificant traveler and becomes an individual charged with mystery and intrigue, and the verb «comes,» no longer a mere indication of movement from one place to another, begins to evoke images of a fabulous journey, a journey along the paths of fairy tales, the archetypal Journey. In short, the message (the sentence) opens up to a series of connotations that go far beyond its most immediate denotations.
What differences are there between the sentence addressed to an Iraqi and the very same sentence addressed to an imaginary European listener? Formally, none. The referential diversity of the proposition (and, therefore, of its conceptual value) resides not in the proposition itself but in the addressee. And yet the capacity to vary is not totally extraneous to the proposition itself. Uttered by a railroad employee sitting at an information desk, this sentence will be quite different from an identical sentence uttered by someone who is trying to draw our attention to a particular character; indeed, they are two different sentences.
The second speaker will use the term «Basra» with a specific suggestive intention, aiming to elicit a strong if undefined reaction from his listener. Unlike the railroad employee, when he says «Basra» he does not want to denote a specific town; rather, he is trying to connote (and evoke) an entire world of memories that he attributes to his listener, a world of memories that, as he also knows, will inevitably differ from one listener to the next.
On the other hand, if the same, or a similar, cultural (and psychological) context, the speaker will succeed in constructing a communication whose effect is at once undefined and yet limited to a particular «field of suggestivity»—the time and place of his utterance, as well as the audience to which he addresses it. arc enough to guarantee a fairly unified range of interpretation. Presumably, the same proposition uttered with the same intentions but in the office of an oil magnate will not produce the same echoes. To avoid unnecessary semantic dispersion, the more allusive speaker will have to give his audience a particular direction. This would be quite easy if his proposition had a strictly denotative value: but when it is meant to provoke a response that is at once undefined and yet circumscribed within a particular frame of reference, he will have to put more emphasis on a certain kind of suggestion, so as to reiterate the desired stimulus by means of analogous references.
- The Emphatic Suggestion, or the Double
Organization of the Aesthetic Object
«That man comes from Basra, via Bisha and Dam, Shibam, Tarib and Hofuf. Anaiza and Buraida, Medina and Khaibar; he has followed the course of the Euphrates to Aleppo.» This form of reiteration is rather primitive but nonetheless quite adequate to lend phonic suggestiveness to the vagueness of the references, and to provide auditory substance to the imagination.
This way of enhancing both the vagueness of the reference and its mnemonic appeal by means of a phonetic artifice is characteristic of a particular mode of communication that I shall define as «aesthetic,» in the broadest sense of the term. What changes have occurred to transform the initial referential proposition into an aesthetic one? Material data has been deliberately added to the already present conceptual data, sound to sense; deliberately though quite naively in this particular case, since all the terms could be replaced by other, similarly suggestive ones, and since the coupling of sound and sense remains fairly casual, and quite conventional, resting as it does on the assumption that most listeners would automatically associate such names with Arabia and Mesopotamia. Confronted with a message of this type, the addressee will not only attribute a signified to every signifier, but will also linger on the ensemble of the signifiers—which, at this rather elementary stage, means that he will savor them as sonorous events, and read them as «pleasant material.» The fact that, in the example at hand, most of the signitiers harken back to themselves indicates that the message is fundamentally selfreflexive, and, as such, «poetic.» 16
But if
