In Racine’s Phaedra, Hippolytus decides to leave his homeland to look for Theseus, but Theramene knows that is not the real reason for his departure and tries to guess the secret that troubles him. What can prompt Hippolytus to leave the sites of his childhood?
Those places, Hippolytus answers, have lost their original sweetness because they have been contaminated by the presence of his stepmother, Phaedra. Phaedra is evil, full of hatred, but her nastiness is more than a mere aspect of her personality. Something else makes her a hateful being, an enemy—something Hippolytus can sense. This something is precisely what makes her the essential tragic heroine, and what Racine must convey to his audience so that the «character» is fixed from the start and all that follows occurs as if by fatal necessity. Phaedra is evil because her race is damned. A hint at her genealogy is enough to fill the audience with horror: her father is Minos, her mother Pasiphae. Uttered in front of a civil servant, this sentence would have a strictly referential value; but uttered in front of a theater audience, its effect will be much more powerful if undefined. Minos and Pasiphae are two awful beings: their very names are enough to conjure up the reasons for their repulsiveness.
Minos is terrible because of his infernal character, and Pasiphae because of the bestial act that made her famous. At the beginning of the tragedy, Phaedra is just a cipher, but the names of her parents are already enough to evoke the myth and create a halo of odiousness around her. Hippolytus and Theramene speak in the elegant alexandrines of the seventeenth century; but the mere mention of the two mythical characters opens up a whole new field of suggestions for the imagination. With just two names Racine is able to achieve the suggestive effect he seeks, but he wants more: he wants to create a form, produce an aesthetic effect. The two names cannot be introduced as a casual communication, merely trusting to the haphazard emotions that their suggestive power will evoke in the audience.
If this genealogical reference is to constitute the tragic premises for everything that follows, then the communication must have a definite impact on the spectator so that the suggestion, once made, will not exhaust itself in the game of references to which the spectator has been invited to participate. Indeed, it is important that the spectator be able to return to the proposed expression as often as he wishes, and that he always find in it a stimulus for new suggestions. The proposition «That man conies from Basra» may have an effect the first time it is heard; but after the first surprise and the first diversion, it loses much of its suggestive power and the listener no longer feels invited to participate in an imaginary journey.
On the other hand, if every time I go back to the proposition I feel pleased and satisfied, if what invites me to a mental journey is a material structure with an agreeable appearance, if the formula of the invitation is so successful that its effectiveness surprises me every time I hear it, if, in it, I discover a miracle of balance and economy such that from now on I will be unable to separate its conceptual reference from the stimulus that has invoked it, then the surprise of this union will inevitably give way to the complex play of the imagination. Then I will be able to appreciate not just the indefinite reference but also the way in which this indefiniteness is produced, the very clear and calculated way in which it is suggested to me, the very precision of the mechanism that charms me with imprecision.
Racine entrusts Phaedra’s genealogy to one verse, one alexandrine whose incisiveness and symmetry are a real feat of virtuosity: both halves of the verse terminate on the names of the two parents, that of the mother, more resonant with horror, coming last:
Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoye La file de Minos et de PasiphaE.
Since to these shores the gods have sent The daughter of Minos and of PasiphaE.
At this point the ensemble of signifiers, along with their heavy baggage of connotations, no longer belongs to itself or to the spectator, ready as he might feel to pursue yet undefined fantasies (from the most morbid and moralizing considerations of bestiality, to the power of uncontrolled passion, the barbarism of classical mythopocia, or its archetypal wisdom). Now the word belongs to the verse, to its unquestionable measure and the context of sounds in which it is steeped, to the irrepressible rhythm of the theatrical discourse, to the dialectic of tragic action.
The suggestions are intentional, provoked, and explicitly reiterated, but always within the limits fixed by the author, or, better, by the aesthetic machine that he has set in motion. This aesthetic machine does not ignore the audience’s capacities for response; on the contrary, it brings them into play and turns them into the necessary condition for its subsistence and its success, while directing them and controlling them. The emotion (the simple pragmatic reaction that the sheer power of the two names would have provoked) now increases and defines itself, assumes a certain order and identifies with the form that has generated it and in which it rests, but it does not limit itself to it; rather, it increases thanks to it (and becomes one of its connotations). Neither is the form limited to one emotion; rather, it includes all the individual emotions it produces and directs as possible connotations of the line—here understood as the articulated form of signifiers signifying, above all, their structural articulation.
The Aesthetic Stimulus
At this point we can conclude that the distinction between referential language and emotive language, however useful to a study of the aesthetic use of language, does not solve any problem. As shown, the difference between the terms «referential» and «emotive» does not concern the structure of the proposition as much as its use (and therefore the context within which it is uttered). It is possible to find a series of referential sentences that, under certain circumstances (mostly concerning the listener), will acquire an emotive value, just as it is possible to find a number of emotive propositions that, under certain circumstances, will acquire a referential value. Some road signs, such as a STOP sign, unambiguously prescribing a course of action while preparing us for the approach of an intersection, are a perfect example of this double linguistic function.
As a rule, all linguistic expressions, whatever their specific purpose, entail both modes of communication. This is particularly obvious in the case of suggestive communications whose emotive aura depends on both the intentional ambiguity of the given sign and its precise referential value. The sign «Minos» involves at once a precise culturalmythological signifier and the stream of connotations that the very memory of the character discloses, along with an instinctive reaction to its phonic suggestiveness (itself fraught with confused and halfforgotten connotations, hypotheses concerning its possible meanings, and other arbitrary significations).»
Clearly the aesthetic value of an artistic expression is no more dependent on the emotive use of language than on its referential function. Metaphors, for instance, rely greatly on references. Poetic language involves at once the emotive use of references and the referential use of emotions, since all emotive reaction is the realization of a field of connoted meanings. All this is attained by means of an identification between signifier and signified. «vehicle» and «tenor.» In other words, the aesthetic sign is what Morris defines as the «iconic sign,» a sign whose semantic import is not confined to a given denotatum, but rather expands every time the structure within which it is inevitably embodied is duly appreciated—a sign whose signified, resounding relentlessly against its signifier. keeps acquiring new echoes.»‘ All this is not the result of some inexplicable miracle.
Transactional psychology explains it quite clearly when it defines the linguistic sign as a «field of stimuli.» The structure of the aesthetic stimulus is such that its addressee cannot decode it the way he would any other purely referential sort of communication—that is to say, by separating every component of the proposition so as to distinguish the referent of each. In an aesthetic stimulus, it is not possible to isolate a particular sign and connect it univocally to its denotative meaning: what matters is the global denotatum. Each sign, depending as it does on all the other signs of the proposition for its complete physiognomy, can signify only vaguely, just as each denotatum, being inextricably connected to ocher denotata, can only appear as ambiguous when taken singly.°
In the field of aesthetic stimuli, signs are bound by a necessity that is rooted in the perceptual habits of the addressee (otherwise known as his taste): rhyme, meter, a more or less conventional sense of proportion, the need for verisimilitude, other stylistic concerns. Form is perceived as a necessary, justified whole that cannot be broken. Unable to isolate referents, the addressee must then rely on his capacity to apprehend the complex signification which the entire expression imposes on him.
The result is a multiform, plurivocal signified that leaves us at once satisfied and disappointed with this first phase of comprehension precisely because of its variety, its indefiniteness. Charged with a complex scheme of references mostly drawn from our memories of previous experiences, we then refer back to the initial message, which will
