Jonathan Smith (Prifysgol Abertawe / Swansea University)

Values, literature

All but inaudibly now, histories of 1970s revolutionary hope (whether in Portugal, Italy, or elsewhere) allude to values other than those of the market, as does the very marginality of literature to collective ways of being consolidated since then: what follows examines literary resources surveyed by one Italian – Eco – since 1968, while suggesting they are obscured when his contribution to literary theory is abstracted from his broader semiotic enquiry (often by association with his fiction). [1] Correctives to this are suggested by "Sull'essere" ("On Being") , which orients semiotics (now qua theory of perception and cognition as well as signification and communication) relative to philosophical tradition, locating literary and other aesthetics within its range, and demarcating it from market-friendly postmodernisms (such as might not distinguish between, say, Vattimo, Deleuze, and Derrida): contrary to rumours of their dissolution, and just because they are less constraining for art than elsewhere, artistic practice is an interminable testing of the limits of interpretation (Eco 1997b: 1-42 / 1999: 9-56). At the same time as thus echoing the conception of "epistemological metaphor" established in Opera aperta (1962; 1989), and the tendency of the mature semiotic theory to construe the work of art as an apparatus of cognition (1968b; 1976), "Sull'essere" also proposes a highly selective reading of "The Origin of the Work of Art", continuing a negotiation with Heidegger's legacy opened at the semiotic enquiry's inception (1968b: 323-60). These continuities will assist in contextualizing material dating from the 1990s and since, collected in Sulla letteratura (2002b / 2005): although "Sull'essere" follows Heidegger in substituting poetry synecdochically for art more generally conceived, Eco practices turbulent synecdoches (and disjunctions) on his own account, and throughout.

Some functions of literature

A programmatic piece "Su alcune funzioni della letteratura" ("On Some Functions of Literature") flirts with considering literary tradition an accumulation of texts produced gratia sui rather than for practical purposes, but moves on rapidly to define it, in terms of artful generality, as an immaterial power in and over collective and individual human existence (Eco 2002b: 7-22 / 2005: 1-15). As in the cases of Dante, Homer, Luther, or Pushkin (although the argument is in general less ethnocentric than these examples suggest, and somewhat less focussed on canonical monuments), literature contributes to the formation of languages, and of a sense of community and identity, but correspondingly also to that of the linguistic faculties of individuals, and thus to the practical accessibility of "un mondo di valori che arriva da e rinvia a libri". [2] The more so, Eco partly affirms and partly insinuates, after the social, technical, economic and cultural changes of recent decades which might be considered evidence of his argument's superannuation, and in view of the inequalities of educational and cultural opportunity which might still provoke charges from another direction that it is an élitist one: the right to literature (and to its value or values) is assumed, and in being so, declared.

From this point, a theme of individual and collective libidinal management is central. [3] Despite declining engagement with problems of metaphysics or ontology elsewhere entrusted to Peirce (Eco 1984; 1997b / 1999), Eco makes it a criterion of truth:

certi personaggi sono diventati in qualche modo collettivamente veri perché la comunità ha fatto su di essi […] degli investimenti passionali. Noi facciamo investimenti passionali individuali su tante fantasie che possiamo elaborare a occhi aperti o nel dormiveglia. Noi possiamo realmente commuoverci pensando alla morte di una persona che amiamo, o risentire reazioni fisiche immaginandoci mentre abbiamo con essa un rapporto erotico, e parimenti, per processi di identificazione o di proiezione, possiamo commuoverci sulla sorte di Emma Bovary o, come è avvenuto ad alcune generazioni, essere trascinati al suicidio dalle sventure di Werther o di Jacopo Ortis […] e la fantasia di cui parliamo non è più privata, è una realtà culturale su cui l'intera comunità dei lettori conviene. [4]

The consequences are remarkable:

questi personaggi vivono e determinano i nostri comportamenti, così che li eleggiamo a modello di vita, nostra e altrui, e ci comprendiamo benissimo quando diciamo che qualcuno ha il complesso di Edipo, un appetito gargantuesco, un comportamento donchisciottesco, la gelosia di un Otello, un dubbio amletico, è un dongiovanni inguaribile, una perpetua. E questo, in letteratura, non accade solo coi personaggi, ma anche con le situazioni, e gli oggetti […] le donne che vanno e vengono per la stanza parlando di Michelangelo, i cocci aguzzi di bottiglia infissi nella muraglia, nel sole che abbaglia, le buone cose di pessimo gusto, la paura che ci viene mostrata in un pugno di polvere, la siepe, le chiare, fresche e dolci acque, il fiero pasto, diventano metafore ossessive, pronte a ripeterci a ogni istante chi siamo, cosa vogliamo, dove andiamo, oppure ciò che non siamo e ciò che non vogliamo. [5]

Despite the closing proviso (itself a quotation from one of Montale's poems), this anthology of canonical quotations veers disconcertingly toward telling us who to be and what to want. Insofar as the literary canon is cast as a focus of identification, aspiration, and existential interpretation of self and others, it has usurped a role it shared, in Eco's pre-semiotic studies in cultural politics, [6] with visual and musical arts and contemporary popular culture (film, radio and television, popular music and fiction, comics, advertising), but also with the material products of consumer capitalism. Whatever its theoretical achievements (and whatever the earlier work's shortcomings when viewed in historical perspective), the semiotic project has seldom if ever equalled the nuanced complexity of these earlier studies of the social negotiation of meaning and identity. Yet insofar as one of their prototypes of mass communication is the didactic use of mediaeval Christian iconography and ecclesiastical architecture, as Biblia pauperum, the function now illustrated by literature was there described as being enacted through channels predicated on their audiences' illiteracy: "Su alcune funzioni" is enmeshed in terms of argument previously anchored to the investigation of visual communication and architecture (as well as religion). This an index of the semiotic project's engagement in philosophical tradition, since the synecdoche of poetry for art more broadly conceived was authorized in "Sull'essere" by reference to Heidegger (although the intricacies of his exposition were scarcely acknowledged); but it is no less open for that to being read as marking or masking a theoretical deficit, or regression.

Whereas "Sull'essere" interprets art as alternating between indulgence towards the infinity of desire, and admonishment, "Su alcune funzioni" improvises around a theme of freedom and fidelity in literary interpretation, construed as an interplay of blind drives and social regulation, before closing on a motif of refusal: "Questo ci dicono tutte le grandi storie […] contro ogni nostro desiderio di cambiare il destino, ci fanno toccar con mano l'impossibilità di cambiarlo […] ci insegnano anche a morire" . [7] This conclusion might appear finely balanced between literal and figurative interpretations of mortality: "se si potesse decidere del destino dei personaggi, sarebbe come andare al banco di una agenzia di viaggi: 'Allora dove vuole trovare la Balena, alle Samoa o alle Aleutine? E quando? E vuole ucciderla lei, o lascia fare a Quiqueg?' La vera lezione di Moby Dick è che la Balena va dove vuole". [8] Yet it also echoes an endorsement of Heidegger on mortality in "Sull'essere", linked in turn to a broader argument that the fundamental and universal components of meaning are primitive perceptions of human embodiment in relation to its environment (1997b: 37, 121-38 et passim / 1999: 50, 144-63 et passim; compare 1997a / 2002a): mortality would then be the limit of all interpretation, and (rather than being conditioned by them) the condition of all meanings, figurative or literal. Literature's privilege results from synecdochic reduction, not simply of a broader spectrum of artistic practices (however defined), but of all human meaning.

Some readers of Kant: Pareyson and Peirce, Eco and Lyotard

Nonetheless, Sulla letteratura returns to modes of argument and authorities antedating Eco's direct negotiations with Heidegger. Salient in this regard is "Sullo stile" ("On Style") (2002b: 172-90 / 2005: 161-79), less directly concerned with the value or functions of literature than to defend the technical means of access to them against obscurantisms both residual and emergent: "ritengo si debbano affermare due cose: una, che una semiotica delle arti altro non sia che una ricerca e messa a nudo delle macchinazioni dello stile; due, che la semiotica rappresenti la forma superiore della stilistica, e il modello di ogni critica d'arte". [9] The relevant conception of style (which is a capacious one, covering every aspect of the work) is that of the modo di formare established by Eco's mentor Pareyson (Pareyson 1954), while the historical prototypes of the semiotics envisaged are the treatise On the sublime of Pseudo-Longinus, and Aristotle's Poetics. The first and third of these authorities are explored in dedicated essays (2002b: 215-26 and 253-73 / 2005: 201-111 and 236-54), and Eco's reading of all three has developed substantially since he first identified them as prime resources of resistance to Croce's legacy (1968a: 9-31, 62-78, 171-73, 288-95); yet his review-essay on Pareyson's Estetica, completed in 1958, underscores the extent to which the latter's philosophy is a Christian existentialism, transformed into an aesthetics and a hermeneutics by adopting art as a general model of human cognition and practice (1968a: 9-31; for a preliminary version unreliably translated, 1989: 158-66). More often acknowledged than recognized by Eco's commentators, this is key to the genealogy of his synecdoches, whether or not it is central among them.

The review ventures an interpretation of Pareyson's aesthetics which exploits its emphasis on interpretation to erase its religious and metaphysical requirements that meaningful form be given before it can be open to human manipulation or elaboration, and this anxiety informs all Eco's subsequent negotiations with transactional psychology and phenomenology as well as with structuralism (1962; 1989; 1968b; 1976; 1984), and indeed with Peirce. Only in the 1990s, in conjunction with the thematic prominence of human embodiment entailed by a developing semiotics of perception and cognition, does it subside. Especially in conjunction with repeated appeals to classical authority, repeated invocation of the Estetica in Sulla letteratura resonates strongly with the extensive use made of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the qualified endorsement of Pareyson's Ontologia della libertà (1995), [10] in "Sull'essere": these texts take a turn which demands careful definition, whether or not as a humanist one.

In the early 1960s, aspiring to re-conceptualize aesthetics against the received tradition and for an industrializing democracy, Eco called on Hume's "Of the standard of taste" to argue the relativity of judgement: [11] whereas the range of valid responses to European artworks from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was relatively easily delimited (because a closed community had drawn its criteria from a closed canon normative both for its own reception and for further production), contemporary economies of communication and culture circa 1964 deal in a more extended and dynamic range of objects and genres, and in economic and political principle with a universal audience, its diversity figured both as that of ethnic difference (after Hume), and of species mutation relative to the community of taste established by such canonical instances as Raphael's painting and Mozart's symphonies. On these grounds, Eco combatively declares it illegitimate to assume the meanings or effects of mass communication without empirical fieldwork, and impossible, without reference to the relevant spectrum of expectations, for analysts even to identify the textual features or structures open to interpretative response. The ensuing semiotic enquiry is directly addressed to this ethnographic and futuristic conundrum, conceptualizing message or text as empty form open to multiple decodings (1968b: 361-80; 1976: 196-200): this requirement, together with the need to conceptualize communication without submitting to the tradition's bias towards verbal language, prompts Eco's re-interpretation of Peirce's semiotic logic of enquiry, contra Saussure, as a logic of culture (Eco 1976).

Whether subsequent work regresses from this point is a key interpretative and evaluative question canonically posed by de Lauretis (1980; 1984), with reference to Lector in fabula (1979): certainly Eco's attempt to account for the possibility of successful communication, working chiefly with examples of literary narrative on the grounds that they pose the most complex theoretical problems, begins here to flex toward proposing normative criteria of literary interpretation (Eco 1990 / 1994b; 1992), enacting a synecdoche now driven by terms of international debate informed or deformed by the turbulence of the (primarily North American) market in literary theory. Yet insofar as each establishes its own rule only in practice, Eco subsequently identifies both Pareyson's conception of formatività, and Peirce's of abduction, as re-interpretations of the reflective judgement of Kant's third Critique (Eco 1997b: 74, 106, 396 / 1999: 92, 127, 402; compare 2002b: 223-4 / 2005: 209), while extending his definition of aesthetics by construing both as modes of perception and cognition as well as textual production and interpretation. If his thought's salient contemporary affinity were for this among other reasons with Lyotard's, [12] stark differences would nonetheless arise from Eco's seeking criteria of interpretative and cognitive protocol, after Peirce, in the consensus of a community of experts (Eco 1990: 325-38 / 1994b: 23-43; 1997b: 71-81 / 1999: 89-98); but precisely his conception of the work of art or literature disrupts the symmetry of the undoubted difference with Lyotard, as well as the appeals to consensus and tradition audible in Sulla letteratura, about which the following concluding observations may be made.

Re-reading Marx and Freud

One is that the canon proposed by "Su alcune funzioni" (Sophocles, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Byron, Manzoni, T.S. Eliot, Montale, Gozzano, Leopardi, Petrarch, Dante) appears perilously closed to ethnic, sexual, and generational difference (and thus to much empirical literary history since 1964), especially when combined with the same text's statements of interpretative protocol. Yet secondly, literature gains in value to the extent that its relation to theory (or scholarship) is not allowed to petrify into that of object to subject: in Sulla letteratura, a series of three essays focussing primarily on Joyce and Borges underline the part played by the reading of these authors as well as Peirce in the genesis of Eco's key semiotic concept of the global semantic universe, or "encyclopaedia" (2002b: 91-146 / 2005: 84-135; compare 1976; 1979; 1984; 1990 / 1994b; 1994c: 90). Moreover, Sulla letteratura's penultimate essay closes with a maxim that "il primo dovere dell'uomo di cultura è quello di tenersi all'erta per riscrivere ogni giorno l'enciclopedia": [13] literature's service to theory leads theory's to a broader intellectual practice which assumes an interrogative role akin to the poet's as underwritten by reference to Heidegger in "Sull'essere". The synecdochic reduction is here thrown into reverse.

Thirdly, if all this were insufficient evidence for a conception of literature as something other than an insulated or autonomous domain of verbal artistry, or canon of dramatic, narrative, and poetic monuments, "Sullo stile del Manifesto" ("On the Style of The Communist Manifesto") might assist (2002b: 30-34 / 2005: 23-27). Its own style and brevity make this a remarkable complement to Specters (Derrida 1994); but not – from any point of view, unless one of somnolence – for easy digestibility, since Eco recommends the Manifesto as a model of rhetoric for trainee advertising copywriters (as well as for study in schools alongside Cicero and Shakespeare), while also identifying a problem too thorny for even Marx and Engels to grasp: religion. It remains for commentators and successors to develop a tantalizingly discontinuous strand of Eco's semiotic enquiry encapsulated in the imperative to "rewrite the encyclopaedia", linking a densely impacted theory of rhetoric and ideology (1968b: 83-104 and 165-88; 1976: 359-71; 1984 passim), fractured suggestions of a return from Lacan (and Kristeva) to Freud, assisted by Peirce (and Aristotle) in dismantling the semiotics foisted upon him (1984), and the conception of culture informing "Su alcune funzioni" but first adumbrated in the 1960s, as an ensemble of more or less consciously administered apparatuses of collective and individual libidinal management. This is rewarding for its strong sense of mystery's contemporary reincarnations in secular garb, if less so, for becoming enmeshed in insoluble questions of literary interpretation better and worse, albeit partly to protect the results of earlier engagements in the field.

Literature, value

Finally, these results are signalled in Sulla letteratura by an extract, summarizing fifty years' work , from Eco's postface to his translation of Nerval's Sylvie (2002b: 35-69 / 2005: 28-61; compare 1994c passim). In Eco's more technical or idiosyncratic sense of the term, "interpretation" attempts to define the work's singularity (initially phrased as "aesthetic idiolect", and later as "textual strategy"), but can do so only by infinite asymptotic approximations, repeatedly theorized as such (1968b: 61-81; 1976: 261-71; 1990: 126-41), [14] and partially re-enacted in the instance of Sylvie. On the one hand, this singularity is the condition of every other type of reading, "use", interpretation less narrowly defined (and however faithful), or indeed experience of the work, while also being condemned to be obscured from view by them, and therefore to demand they be contested. On the other, just these other readings, uses, or interpretations constitute the work's raison d'être (as "Sull'essere" construes it) of interpreting and stimulating further interpretation of the world, and, to that end, of itself. This disjunction of (structural) concept and (hermeneutic) experience is identified as marking an "aporia" at the semiotic enquiry's inception (1968b: 69), and is reiterated with reference to Sylvie as the most concertedly literary phase of Eco's investigation draws to a close (1994c: 43): it does not respond to the claims of "use" against those of "interpretation", however supported by reference to the historical variety of regimes of reading (Van den Bossche), because the work's singularity is the principle of their differences. However formulated, any attempt to assess the value of the work's cognitive effects must therefore be contradicted by its incalculable singularity: the value of literature can never, on these terms, be a matter of consensus, and criteria of interpretative propriety guaranteed by a community of experts are no more practicable than the pure dissensus of Lyotard's aspiration.

Insofar as it bears on works of art and literature, Eco's semiotic theory has an essentially prescriptive dimension, since the postulate of the work's singularity, once expounded (Eco 1968b: 66-81 and 270-84; 1976: 261-75), imposes a requirement to explain how it can be understood at all (1979), and then to defend the terms of this inevitably reductive explanation against disruption by other interests (1990 / 1994b; 1992), however oriented and expressed in theory or practice. Yet the initial prescription can neither be fully realized, nor for that reason fully recognized, even to itself: it is condemned to fail to coincide with itself, unless limited to a single peremptory declaration (which would be very far from Eco's characteristic style). Neither in Eco's work nor a fortiori elsewhere, however, is the disjunction of concept and experience restricted to works of art, or literature. Much of its promise in Eco's formulations arises from its repeated mutations through a series of synecdochic reductions and expansions: not only is the literary work exemplary of works of art in general; its functioning, theirs, and the definition of their singularity (and thus of their functioning) also model other textual, cognitive, or otherwise semiotic processes.

From Opera aperta to Sulla letteratura, literature assists Eco in a project which attests intermittently from the outset to being led by embodied experiences of perception and cognition, moving via Piaget's introduction as Pareyson's primary competitor in articulating the nature of meaningful form (1962; 1989; 1968b), and the exploration of abduction and reflective judgement (1976; 1979; 1984; 1990 / 1994b; 1997b / 1999), to the reading of Sylvie as staging the temporal flux of experience, and the mutual subversions of successive objects of desire (2002b / 2005). Yet embodiment meets art or artifice more directly, and in a broader sense of either term, where "Sull'essere" follows Heidegger in noting the encounter, in architecture: by contrast with the mysticism Eco finds in his interpretation of van Gogh's painting, Heidegger's Greek temple solicits the hermeneutic attention Eco follows him in turning, synecdochically, towards poetry, and into it. A comparable movement already resonated through Eco's entire semiotic enquiry, having been introduced simultaneously with the disjunction of concept and experience: initially, the work of art is conceptualized in literary and pictorial terms, but the experience reported, to which conceptualization is unequal, is the tactile as well as visual one of the structure and stonework of a Renaissance palazzo (1968b: 70; compare 1976: 265).

That architecture may be a displaced but fundamental term of reference is suggested by the brevity of Eco's attempt to conceptualize it directly (1968b: 189-249), and by a moment or moments of failure or refusal to employ it as a metaphor for the encyclopaedia, metamorphosing via description of different types of labyrinth into the anamorphosis of an impossible architectural object (1983: 76-77; 1984b: 81). Whatever else might be at issue in this displacement, it undoubtedly plays its part in narrowing the definition of art relative to what either Pareyson or Heidegger could authorize, and in deflecting attention away from its market value (as qua real estate), no less than in bringing to light forms and senses in which it eludes that or any criterion of value or valuation.

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