This transaction between the memory of previous experiences, the system of meanings that has surfaced during the first contact (and will again reappear as a «harmonic background» in the second approach), and the new system of meanings that is emerging out of a second contact automatically enriches the meaning of the original message—which, far from being exhausted by this process, appears all the more fertile (in its own material constitution) and open to new readings as our understanding of it gets more and more complex. This is just the beginning of the chain reaction that characterizes every conscious organization of stimuli, commonly known as «form.»
Theoretically, this reaction is endless, ceasing only when the form ceases to stimulate the aesthetic sensibility of the addressee; but this is generally the result of a slackening in attention. As we get used to the stimulus, the signs that constitute it and on which we have repeatedly focused our attention—not unlike an object that we have gazed at too long, or a word whose meaning we have lingered on too obsessively—reach a sort of saturation point, after which they begin to lose their edge, to look dull, whereas in fact it is our sensibility that has been temporarily dulled. Similarly, the memories we have integrated into our new perception, instead of remaining the spontaneous products of a stimulated mind, are eventually turned by habit into readymade schemes, endlessly rehashed summaries. The process of aesthetic pleasure is thus blocked and the contemplated form is reduced to a conventional formula on which our overexercised sensibility can now rest.
This is what happens after years of listening to the same musical piece. There is a moment when the work is beautiful to us only because we have long considered it such; and the enjoyment we now draw out of it is merely the memory of the pleasure we once felt while listening to it. In fact, it no longer stirs any emotion in us and is thus unable to entice either our imagination or our intelligence into new perceptual adventures. Its form is temporarily exhausted.
Often, to rejuvenate our dulled sensibility, we need to put it in quarantine. Then, we might again feel pleasantly surprised at the way the work reverberates in us. and not just because our ear, having grown unaccustomed to the effect produced by that particular organization of stimuli, can again respond to it with freshness, but also because, in the interim, our intelligence has ripened, our memory has expanded. and our culture has deepened, and this is all the original form needs to stimulate certain zones of our sensibility that previously remained untouched.
But time might not be enough to reawaken pleasure and surprise and to resurrect a particular form for us, which means either that our intellectual development has atrophied or that the work, as organization of stimuli. was addressed to an ideal addressee who does not correspond to what we have become. This might in turn mean that that particular form, aimed at a particular cultural context, is no longer effective for us, though it might yet rind some resonance in the future. If this is the case, we are participating in the collective adventure of taste and culture and are experiencing the loss of congeniality between a work and its intended addressee that often characterizes a cultural period, and that generally ends up as the subject of a chapter of some literary history under the title «The Fortunes of SuchandSuch a Work.»
But it would be wrong to assume that the work itself is dead, or that the children of our time are insensitive to real beauty. Such naive beliefs are based on the presumption that all aesthetic value is at once objective and immutable, and thus quite immune to any transactional process. Whereas, in fact, all it in our that for a period of time, whether in the history of humanity or n our own personal history, certain transactional possibilities have been blocked.
This sort of blockage is easy to explain when it concerns relatively simple phenomena, such as the understanding of an alphabet: if, today, we cannot understand the Etruscan language, it is because we have lost its code, the comparative table that gave us the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs. But when it concerns more complex phenomena, such as the understanding of a particular aesthetic form—depending on the interaction of material factors, semantic conventions, linguistic and cultural references, the conditions of a particular sensitivity, and the decisions of a particular intelligence—it is not as easy to explain. Generally speaking, we accept this sudden lack of congeniality as a mysterious occurrence, or we deny it by means of captious critical analyses that try to prove the absolute and eternal validity of incomprehension. The truth of the matter is that aesthetics is unable to give an exhaustive explanation of certain aesthetic phenomena, even when it can allow for their plausibility. The task, then, falls to psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all those other sciences concerned with cultural changes.
The foregoing argument has, I hope, demonstrated that the impression of endless depth, of allinclusive totality—in short, of openness—that we receive from every work of art is based on both the double nature of the communicative organization of the aesthetic form and the transactional nature of the process of comprehension. Neither openness nor totality is inherent in the objective stimulus, which is in itself materially determined, or in the subject, who is himself available to all sorts of openness and none; rather, they lie in the cognitive relationship that binds them, and in the course of which the object, consisting of stimuli organized according to a precise aesthetic intention, generates and directs various kinds of openness.
Aesthetic Value and Two Kinds of Openness
If, as I have shown, the openness of a work of art is the very condition of aesthetic pleasure, then each form whose aesthetic value is capable of producing such pleasure is, by definition, open—even though its author may have aimed at a univocal, unambiguous communication.
A study of contemporary open works nevertheless reveals that, in most cases, their openness is intentional, explicit, and extreme— that is, based not merely on the nature of the aesthetic object and on its composition but on the very elements that are combined in it. In other words, the variety of meanings that can be drawn out of a sentence from Finnegans Mk( does not depend on the same kind of aesthetic achievement as the line from Racine we have examined above. Joyce was aiming at something else, something different, which demanded the aesthetic organization of a complex of signifiers that were already, in themselves, open and ambiguous. On the other hand, the ambiguity of the signs cannot be separated from their aesthetic organization: rather, the two are mutually supportive and motivating.
To give a more concrete example of all this, let us compare two passages, one from the Divine Comedy and the other from Finnegans Wake. In the first passage, Dante wants to explain the nature of the Trinity, the highest and most difficult concept in his entire poem. Already univocally clarified by theological speculation, this concept is no longer open to interpretation, since it can have only one meaning, the orthodox one. The poet, therefore, uses only words with very precise referents:
O Luce eterna, the cola in Te sidi,
Sola eintendi, e, da te intelletta
Ed intendente te, ami c arridi!
O Light Eternal, who alone abidest in Thyself,
alone knowest Thyself, and known to Thyself
and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself! 3)
As I have already mentioned, according to Catholic theology the concept of the Trinity can have only one explanation. Being a Catholic, Dante, therefore, accepts one and only one interpretation, the same one he proposes in his poem; but the way he does this is unique. His is an absolutely original reformulation in which the ideas are so integrated into the rhythm and phonic material of the lines that they manage to express not just the concept they are supposed to convey, but also the feeling of blissful contemplation that accompanies its comprehension thus fusing referential and emotive value into an indissociable formal whole. Indeed, the theological notion so coheres to the manner in which it is expressed that, from now on, it will be impossible to find a more effectively pregnant formulation for it. Conversely, at every new reading of the tercet, the idea of the Trinity expands with new emotion and new suggestions, and its meaning, though univocal, gets deeper and richer.
In the second passage, drawn from the fifth chapter of Finnegans Wake, Joyce is trying to describe a mysterious letter found in a heap of manure, whose meaning is undecipherable and obscure because it is multiform. The letter is a reflection of the Wake itself, or, rather, the linguistic mirror of its universe. To define it amounts to defining the very nature of the cosmos, as important to Joyce as the Trinity was to Dante.
But whereas the Trinity of the Divine Comedy has only one possible meaning, the cosmosFinnegans Wakeletter is a chaosmos that can be defined only in terms of its substantial ambiguity. The author must therefore speak of a nonunivocal object, by using nonunivocal signs and combining them in a nonunivocal fashion. The
