From the Tree to the Labyrinth

14

Natural Semiosis and the Word in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I promessi sposi)

Writing the history of semiotic ideas does not only mean examining the philosophical or linguistic theories that deal explicitly with the sign or with communication. Often ideas that are not altogether irrelevant concerning these phenomena are expressed, however indirectly, in the declarations writers and artists have made about their poetics, or, alternatively, they can be extrapolated from the way in which processes of signification and communication are staged at the level of the narrative.

From this point of view it is legitimate, though by no means common practice, to ask oneself whether there exists a Manzonian semiotics, deducible not so much from Manzoni’s theoretical and critical writings, in which he discusses the genre of the historical novel and other problems we would define today as problems of literary theory, as from his narrative performance itself.

14.1. Action and Word

“By their actions, my dear fellow: all men are known by their actions” (p. 139), says the village innkeeper in chapter 7 of I promessi sposi, no less adept than the host of the Full Moon tavern in distinguishing a law-abiding citizen from an informer by the cut of his clothes, his tone of voice, and his overall bearing. Not so Renzo; a page earlier, when he entered the inn and saw one bravo, who did not stand aside to let him in, standing there on sentry duty, armed with a cudgel, with a red velvet cap over his quiff, his pigtails pinned with a comb at the back of his neck, while his comrades went on playing the game of morra, all of them exchanging eloquent nods among themselves. In this bildungsroman, Renzo is the last one to grow up, to become familiar, that is, with the signs and the way other people interpret them (only at the very end of the story will he have learned not to hold door knockers in his hand for too long and not to tie bells on his ankles). At this stage of the game, Renzo “looked at his two guests [Tonio and Gervaso], uncertain, as if hoping to find an explanation of those signals in their faces” (p. 137), clues he still has trouble deciphering. But he has not lived long enough yet, and, as we will learn later, only “a man’s life is the touchstone of his words” (pp. 403–404).

Suspicious of the notion that the course of human history unfolds in a rational manner, wary of every good intention which does not allow for the heterogenesis of ends, fearful of the evil that lurks in the things of this world, diffident toward the powerful and the arts by which they take advantage of the meek, Alessandro Manzoni appears to have synthesized his Enlightenment common sense and his Jansenistic rigor into a semiotic formula that can be extrapolated from many pages of his novel: (i) there is a natural semiosis, employed almost instinctively by those among the meek who have accumulated experience, according to which the various aspects of reality, when interpreted with prudence and a knowledge of the ways of the world, present themselves as symptoms, clues, signa or semeia in the classic sense of the term; and (ii) there is the artificial semiosis of verbal language which, either turns out be inadequate to give an account of reality or is used explicitly and maliciously to mask it, almost always for the purposes of exercising power. Verbal language, then, is deceptive by its very nature, whereas natural semiosis leads to errors and blunders only when it is polluted by language, which restates it and interprets it, or when its interpretation is clouded by the passions.

Behind this semiotics there lies a metaphysics: reality exists, and can be investigated, so long as people follow “a method which has been recommended to them for long enough—the method of observing, listening, comparing and thinking before they begin to talk” (p. 583). This rule is not as simplistic as it might appear at first sight. It repeats in a popular form a precept of Galileo’s, which the positive and prudent characters in the novel, however, when confronted with everyday reality, put into practice in the light of common sense and not according to the dictates of the Accademia del Cimento. But when it comes to applying it to historical reconstruction, Manzoni shows us nonetheless how it works. Given that words are misleading, and what we know about things that happened in the past we know only through verbal accounts, Manzoni instinctively appeals to a precept already formulated by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana. When confronted with the various versions of the sacred books, all of them translations of translations, while the mystery of the original Hebrew text, by now hopelessly adulterated, remains unknown, all we can do is compare the versions among themselves, set them one against the other, and obtain from the one clarification of what is lacking in the other.

This is what Manzoni does, in dealing with the manuscript of the anonymous author, which has unreliability, so to speak, written all over it, given the verbal excesses with which, with typical baroque emphasis, it is embellished. Since he feels that behind this discourse (which is verbal) there lies “such a good story” (and a story is a fabula, a sequence of events or, as Aristotle would have said, the imitation of an action, something nonverbal), Manzoni decides “to search among the memoirs of the period, to satisfy ourselves whether that was really the way things happened in those days” (p. 21). And his investigation, in the form of a collation of texts, dissipates all doubt: though camouflaged by so much literary artifice, something must indeed have occurred.

The same procedure is followed with regard to the plague. Consider the opening of chapter 31: “The plague … really had arrived,”¹ where that word “really,” a verificative intrusion of the narrative voice, liquidates once and for all any doubts to which the conflicting verbal texts might give rise. The thing in itself, the Dynamical Object, is there somewhere or other, or was there; our problem is to interpret the signs and make it reappear. But even here, as long as what we are dealing with are verbal accounts, “Every one of them leaves out essential facts which others record … every one of them contains material errors, which can be recognized and corrected with the help of one of the others, or of the few official documents that have come down to us in published or unpublished form. Often one writer gives us the cause of effects which we have already seen floating unconnectedly in the pages of another” (p. 564). And therefore, “examining and collating” the various sources we may hope, not only to identify the most salient facts, but also “to arrange them in the order in which they happened” (p. 565).

We are dealing here, not with Manzoni’s idea of historical truth or with his theory of knowledge, which is what it is. What we want to underscore is that, unless philological scrupulousness is exercised to the full, verbal accounts are deceptive by their very nature. The author Manzoni may well reconstruct the order of events through language, but the characters in the novel are either poor devils or persecutors of poor devils (only the positive characters are gifted with a kind of paraphilological, so to speak, intuition), and as a rule, in the novel, language is a bearer of wind, if not of lies.

Let us take a look at the passage which Manzoni (not Quine) devotes in chapter 27 to the impossibility, not so much of translation between one language and another, but of that daily process of interpretation by which an illiterate person tells the scrivener what he wants to say, the scrivener writes down what he understands to have happened or what he thinks should have happened, the reader recruited by the addressee interprets it for himself, and the illiterate addressee, seeking criteria for interpretation in the facts that he knows, distorts the message in his turn. This is an extremely effective representation of how, through successive interpretations, the message becomes completely garbled and is made to express, not only what the original sender did not mean to say, but also what the same message, as the linear manifestation of a text, set against a code, ought not to say, if a community of interpreters inspired by common sense and respect for the rules were to get together and agree on a publicly acceptable reading. Which is not what happens; and Manzoni’s description comes across as a portrait of a process of interpretive drift. With, in the end, “the two sides … at the same stage of mutual understanding as two medieval scholars might once have been after four hours of argument about the entelechy” (p. 497).

The peasant who cannot write, and needs something written, turns to someone who has learned to use a pen. He chooses him, as far as he can, among those of his own class; for he is either shy of approaching others, or does not trust them sufficiently. He tells the man what has gone before, with such clarity and logical order as he can muster, and then tells him, in the same style, what he wants to say. The literate friend understands part of what he says, and misunderstands another part; he advises him, suggests a couple of changes, and then says ‘Leave it to me!’ He takes up his pen, and puts the first man’s thoughts in literary form, as best he can; corrects them or improves on them, adds emphasis or takes it away, even leaves bits out, as seems best to him. For there is no getting away from it—a man who knows more than his neighbors does not care to be a passive tool in their hands, and once he has become involved in their affairs, wants to give them a little guidance. Moreover, the literate friend may not always succeed in saying what he means. Sometimes he says something quite different. (We professional writers of books have been known to do the same.) When such a letter reaches the other correspondent, who is equally ignorant of his ABC, he takes it to another learned man of the same caliber, who reads it and explains it to him. Then doubts arise over what the letter really means. The interested party, with his knowledge of what has gone before, maintains that certain words must mean one thing; but the man who is doing the reading, from his knowledge of the written language, claims that they must mean something else. In the end the man who cannot write must put himself in the hands of the of the man who can, and must charge him with the task of replying. The answer will be composed in the same fashion as the first letter, and will be submitted to the same sort of interpretation. (p. 497)

And if that wasn’t enough to make us distrustful of language, we have only to see what Don Ferrante, with his extensive library, does with it when it comes to discussing the plague (chapter 37). After two chapters of nonverbal evidence, thanks to which the reader is by now fully informed, the Aristotelian librarian, with a few well-chosen syllogisms (the contagion cannot be a substance) and an equal number of paralogisms (the contagion cannot be an accident), succeeds in covering up reality to such a point that he can recognize it only when he will no longer be conscious of it. And, as just punishment for the arrogance of the word, his famous library “may well be still lying around on the secondhand bookstalls” (p. 700).

That discourses lie, or can never be sufficiently explicit, seems clear enough. If proof were required, we need only recall the fact that many readers, of Manzoni’s novel, with understandable indolence, skip all the examples of those inconclusive, ambiguous, and confused discourses, living parasitically off one other, that are the seventeenth-century edicts against the bravoes.

What is it then that, read correctly, does not lie? I would say, primarily, what is not oral, but visual, and, if it is oral, what belongs to the sphere of the paralinguistic, the suprasegmental, or the tonemic—the inflections, volume, and rhythms of the voice.

14.2. Popular Semiosis

We referred at the beginning to a natural semiosis as opposed to the semiosis of the word. It would be inexact to say that in Manzoni the classical distinction between motivated, unintentional, natural semiosis and conventional and arbitrary semiosis is clearly discernible. The best I can do, to define the first term of the opposition, is to call it “popular” semiosis. On the one hand we have verbal language, artificial (deceptive), at the beck and call of the powerful, on the other we have various systems of signs, which of course include the so-called natural signs, medical and atmospheric symptoms, physiognomic traits, but also those “languages” that are not natural, and are instead the effect of rules and habits, like dress, bodily posture, pictorial representations, the productions of folklore, liturgy—that somehow appeal to an ancestral and instinctive competence that belongs, not only to the learned, but also to the meek. Because of the natural nature of this competence, of the instinctive popularity of the encyclopedia to which it refers, we could call this type of semiosis, though it may be founded on rules and custom, the natural effect of a long-term deposit in the collective memory, not subject to the same rapid and reserved variations as the exercise of the verbal arts.

It is not that popular semiosis is more “true” that the verbal kind: we will see how and to what extent it too can give rise to misunderstanding and mendacity. But to the meek it seems more comprehensible than verbal language, and they therefore consider it more reliable. So much so that when they make a mistake or are deceived about these forms of signification, they appear more vulnerable, because they do not employ the same systematic diffidence toward them that they employ toward verbal language. Take what happens (and we will have more to say about this later) during Renzo’s visit to Azzeccagarbugli (Dr. Quibbler) or in the entire case of the plague and the anointers (untori).

The meek are suspicious of verbal language because it imposes a logical syntax abolished by natural semiosis, since the latter does not proceed by linear sequences but by “pictures,” or lightning “iconologemes.” Whereas the threads of the linguistic sequences may multiply ad infinitum, while the simple-minded become lost in this dark wood, natural semiosis on the other hand permits, or seems to permit, an easier access to the truth of things, of which it is a spontaneous vehicle: an authentic, instinctive gesture can reveal the intentional falsity of a previous gesture. The notary who arrests Renzo speaks to him encouragingly, Renzo distrusts the words but he could be taken in by the tone; the notary, however, has him handcuffed, and, seeing this sign, Renzo realizes without the shadow of a doubt that he is in trouble.

The object of the narration is this popular semiosis in all its forms, because from it and through it the reader, no less than the characters, learns what is really happening, in other words the story, beneath the veil of the discourse.

We constantly find, throughout the novel, this opposition between “natural” sign and verbal sign, between visual sign and linguistic sign. Manzoni is always so embarrassed by the verbal sign, so anxious to demonstrate his diffidence, that in all the instances of enunciation with which the novel is studded, he makes excuses for the way he is telling the story, whereas, when he assumes a veridictive tone, it is to point out the credit that must be given to a proof, a piece of evidence, a trace, a symptom, a clue, a finding.

His characters act in the same way: either they speak with the deliberate intention of using language to lie, confuse, or conceal the proper relationships between things, or they apologize and complain that they are incapable of saying what they know. Though Renzo wants his children to learn how to read and write, he cannot help calling these verbal and grammatological artifices birberie, “a scoundrelly business” (p. 719). Renzo is suspicious of the language par excellence, Latin, and the only time that he quotes it he makes up a Babelic version (siés baraòs trapolorum, p. 279). Only once, in the final chapter, when by that time he has made his peace with Don Abbondio, does he say that he accepts the Latin of the wedding ceremony and the mass, but that is because it is “an honest, holy sort of Latin … and besides, you clerical gentlemen have to read what’s written in the book” (p. 709). The good Latin of the liturgy is not a spoken language; it is chant, formula, psalmody, plainsong, gesture, but it does not say anything and therefore cannot be false. It is like an article of clothing, a wave of the hand, a facial expression: all signs (and “signs” [segni] is what Manzoni calls them over and over again) that are part of a natural semiosis.

At this point we would be advised to go through the entire novel to see if our hypothesis holds, whether it is true that at every stage there is this clear opposition between natural semiosis and language. It will be sufficient for now, however, to verify it in a few essential episodes.

14.3. The Meeting with the Bravoes

Don Abbondio has lived, and he is able to interpret many signs. He comes on the scene exhibiting the sign par excellence, the index finger, which he places in his breviary (per segno, as a sign, Manzoni naturally remarks). He passes an example of visual communication, a clumsily painted tabernacle, in which there can be no doubt that certain “long, snaky shapes with pointed ends … were meant by the artist and understood by the local inhabitants to be flames” (p. 27), and he sees “something he did not expect or want to see at all” (p. 28). Don Abbondio’s entire life, lived under the sign of tranquility, rests upon his faith in tried and true patterns of action, habitual frames and scenarios; and his tragicomedy begins the moment these expectations are frustrated—from then on he starts to see a number of things that he could never have expected, including a scoundrel who becomes a saint. Don Abbondio immediately recognizes the bravoes by “certain unmistakable signs”—their dress, their attitudes, their appearance—“which left no doubt about what they were” (p. 28). There follows the famous description of the bravoes, on the strength of which the reader will be able to recognize them every time they appear in the novel—except when they are described in words by the edicts, because from that confused set of injunctions, threats, and prescriptions the descriptions that emerge are vague and poorly defined.

Don Abbondio recognizes the bravoes for what they are because he is in possession of a behavioral, vestimentary, and kinesic code. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why he is able to identify them at first sight as “individuals of the species known as bravoes” (p. 28). (It is curious how scholastically rigorous Manzoni is at this point, how, using Aristotelian terms, he is able to suggest the semiotic relationship between type and token.)

We may note in passing that Don Abbondio is fully aware that the habit and not the name make the monk. In the last chapter he will jestingly discuss with Renzo the inanity of the decree that grants to cardinals the title of “eminence” (p. 707). It has come about because at this point everybody was called “monsignor” or “your grace,” but before long everybody will want to be called “eminence,” and the linguistic innovation will have done nothing to bring order to the universe of ecclesiastical dignity and human vanity.

The meeting with the bravoes takes place under the sign of the opposition between word and visual evidence. The bravoes speak, but what Don Abbondio understands always anticipates their words. The priest realizes “by certain unmistakable signs” (p. 32) that he is the one they are waiting for; he puts on a casual attitude, in the vain hope of deceiving the threatening characters who are lying in wait for him, running the first two fingers of his left hand under his collar; he decides that to run for it would have lent itself to an inauspicious interpretation (“it would have been the same as saying, follow me, or worse”); once more he pretends to be relaxed, reciting a verse or two out loud; he composes his face into as calm and carefree an expression as he can muster (because he knows that, since gestures and facial expressions speak, they can be manipulated in order to lie); he prepares a smile; and, to indicate his submission, he comes to a halt.

As for the bravoes, when they speak (and so far they speak saying nonthreatening things), they speak with a menacing attitude, they speak in his ear “in a tone of impressive command” (p. 33), and they know full well that their attitude speaks louder than their words, because “if these things had to be settled by talk, [Don Abbondio with his book learning] would make rings round [them]” (p. 33).

There’s just one thing, at the end of the episode, that seems to challenge our hypothesis, and to this we must now turn our full attention.

14.4. Proper Names

The bravoes mention the name of Don Rodrigo and “The effect of that name on Don Abbondio’s mind was like a flash of lightning in the middle of the storm at night, which illuminates one’s surroundings confusedly for a moment, and makes them more terrifying than before” (p. 34). Confronted with this power of the name, it has to be said that, of all the flatus vocis that we cannot trust, proper names, because of their indexical nature, take on a particular status which makes them cognate with symptoms or visual signs.

The novelist must certainly have faith in proper names, to identify his characters without ambiguity. Now it appears that when he needs these indispensable labels, for Renzo, Lucia, Agnese, Tonio, or Donna Prassede, Manzoni makes the most neutral choices possible, dipping into the liturgical calendar or into the Scriptures,

For the historical characters in the background, he uses the names that history obliges him to use (Federigo, Ambrogio Spinola, Ferrer), but for the most part he could not be more careful about using as few surnames and place names as he can, resulting in the great abundance of asterisks that we are all familiar with, and the unrevealing antonomasias like “the Signora,” arriving finally at that masterpiece of reticence that is the name of the Unnamed, written with a lower case initial in the original no less.

In other words, Manzoni has the same reluctance to divulge names that Renzo demonstrates at the inn in the presence of the pseudo-Ambrogio Fusella. And he does not appear to do so merely in obedience to the rules of the genre. He seems to lack faith in names because he realizes that, even regarding names, the chronicles, which speak of facts, are ambiguous, so much so that we do not even know what the correct name is of the man who was the first bearer of the contagion, and we have to choose between two, both of which are probably false. And when havoc has been wreaked upon real names (as in the case of the name of Giangiacomo Mora), an image that does not correspond to reality has attached itself to the label, connoting in infamous fashion a name that ought by rights to evoke feelings of pity.

Proper names, then, embarrassing signs, are not reliable as words, and are in danger of being even less so as “rigid designators.” The fewer of them mentioned the better. But, as labels, they serve their purpose: little by little the reader hangs on the name Lucia everything that the actions of the young woman have done to define her, and the characters in the novel do likewise. Obviously, the name is all the more effective the more it provides a label for a series of characteristics already defined from the outset, as is the case with Don Rodrigo, and for characters already fully defined by a hagiography that is never called into question, as is the case with Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. Don Rodrigo and Federigo are both clichés—the first damned from the opening chapters (so much so that we will never learn whether or not he was touched by grace at the point of death), the second wearing a halo of holiness before he even comes onstage. This is why their names have an almost magical power, hearing them one either shudders or is reassured.

But, both in the case of already defined characters like Federigo, and those in the process of being defined like the Unnamed, Manzoni can name names—sidestepping his distrust of the verbal—because as a good storyteller he knows that proper names are merely hooks on which to hang precise descriptions, and the descriptions come from a playbook of behaviors and actions that manifest themselves in terms of natural semiotics.

In any case, we cannot say that Manzoni exploits names to suggest connotations of character. The case of the defamatory nicknames of the bravoes does not count, because the bravoes appear onstage already characterized for what they are and what they have no option but to be. Let us consider instead a borderline case, that of the aforementioned pettifogging lawyer Azzeccagarbugli (Dr Quibbler).

He seems to be defined from the start by his nickname, but this is not altogether true. The theater of visual appearances that he deploys around himself seduces Renzo in the beginning: the actions of the pettifogger are marked by humanity, his rooms are a guarantee of his learning and respect for the law (the portraits of the twelve Caesars, the bookshelf full of dusty old volumes, the table littered with statements, pleas, applications, and edicts). Nor should we forget that the dressing gown he is draped in is a legal robe, however threadbare. Renzo is taken in by a seductive mise-en-scène, and he concludes that a quibbler can quibble for a just cause as well as an evil one. The name has not yet condemned the character, indeed the mise-en-scène exalts him, at least in the eyes of someone without experience of the world. All the doctor’s gestures are reassuring to Renzo, showing him the edicts, letting him see with his own eyes that the laws exist, and so on. Azzeccagabugli only becomes odious when Renzo realizes that all this talk about the rule of law hides his desire to get around it, and the good doctor reveals his true self when he talks like Don Abbondio, using language, that is, to duck the request that is being made. At that point his gestures are unequivocal, shooing Renzo out and especially (the exercise of the symbolic has a material cost) giving him back his brace of capons.

14.5. The Pardon of Father Cristoforo

The solemn scene of the pardon in Chapter 4 is symbolic and liturgical in its staging. Given the solemn comportment of the actors, the time and place of the meeting, and the elaborately theatrical orchestration of the action, as well as the costumes and poses of the figures who are to decide upon the life or death of the penitent, words become irrelevant.

The duel itself had already occurred because there were rules of behavior and precedence to be observed, in which left and right, frowns and tones of voice counted. Ludovico/Cristoforo’s repentance and his conversion were a consequence of his revulsion from the offense he had committed. “Though murder was so common in those days that everyone was used to the news of violent death and the sight of blood, the impression made on him by the spectacle of the man who had died for him, and the man who had died at his hands, was something novel and indescribable—a revelation of feelings he had never known before. To see his enemy fall to the ground, to see the change in his face, as it passed in a moment from fury and menace to the vanquished, solemn peace of death, was an experience which transformed the soul of the killer” (p. 83). But let us come to the scene of the pardon.

Blood will have blood: the fact that Cristoforo has repented, that he is seeking forgiveness, that he has gone so far as to renounce the world and take the habit of a Franciscan friar, cannot wash away the offense. It is washed away by a magnificently mounted scenario that articulates, in terms of a strict code of etiquette, what words cannot say—a seventeenth-century idea if ever there was one, which Manzoni captures with a fine pictorial sense. Hence the gathering of all the deceased’s relatives in the great reception hall, with capes, plumes, ceremonial swords, starched and pleated ruffs, flowing simars—a secular aristocratic liturgy.

The two friars process ritually between the two wings of the crowd, and already at that point “Brother Cristoforo’s face and manner proclaimed unmistakably to the assembled company” (p. 88) that he had truly repented. Whether Cristoforo is sincere or not is unimportant: he behaves in a sincere way, with the tone of a sincere man, which he somehow instinctively theatricalizes, true son of his century that he is, and cannot help theatricalizing, since he must stay within the parameters that have been carefully preordained. After which Cristoforo sticks to his script. He kneels, crosses his hands over his chest, bows his shaved head. At that point he speaks and pronounces words of forgiveness, but it is clear from the narrative that it is not those words that convince the dead man’s brother and the crowd of nobles. Their conviction has already taken place. The dead man’s brother’s “stance was meant to suggest strained condescension and suppressed wrath” (he strikes a pose, like a character in an opera), but the gestures of the penitent (his ritual posturings) make it clear that the bearing of the offended party may now be modified. This is the context, liturgical and clearly ecclesiastical in nature, for the embrace and the kiss of peace, the petition for and the bestowing of the bread of forgiveness.

Cristoforo is fully aware that this bread is something more than part of the paraphernalia of the ceremony, that, rather than being mere evidence of his forgiveness, it has performatively created that forgiveness and will continue to keep it alive as long as the bread itself lasts. He will carry a morsel of that bread with him for the rest of his life. In the plague hospital, after reminding Renzo that in thirty years he has still not found peace for what he did, he entrusts the bread to the two betrothed as inheritance, warning, pledge, and viaticum. Cristoforo does not feel blasphemous using that bread as a relic, because he knows that it has been consecrated in the course of a ritual.

14.6. Further Examples

We could continue, and heaven help us if we couldn’t. In the meeting between Don Rodrigo and Father Cristoforo, the courteous words Don Rodrigo pronounces at the start of their conversation are belied by “his way of uttering them” (p. 108). Don Rodrigo asks in what way can he be of service, but his tone plainly says: remember whom you are speaking to. And Cristoforo indulges in a little stage business himself when, in order to strike terror into the heart of the villain, given the patent inadequacy of verbal threats of divine retribution, he has recourse (or Manzoni has recourse for him, which amounts to the same thing) to striking another theatrical pose, this time more nineteenth-century than baroque: “stepping back a couple of paces, poised boldly on his right foot, with his right hand on his hip, he raised the other hand with his forefinger outstretched towards Don Rodrigo and looked him straight in the eye with a furious glare” (pp. 110–111).

Before the reader has learned about her terrible life, the Signora of Monza is introduced, in a passage that owes much to the Gothic novel, behind the convent grille, condemned by her physiognomic ambiguities, by her gaze, by the not unworldly way her waist is laced and a curl of black hair allowed to emerge from the band on her forehead, against every rule of the cloister (p. 171). As yet we know nothing about Gertrude, and already we can guess a great deal. The only ones who cannot guess are Lucia, she too as yet a novice when it comes to the codes of natural semiosis, and the Father Superior, who has given up trying to read behavior for political reasons.

Moreover, Gertrude’s entire education consists of visual signs more than words, from the religious dolls given to her as a child down to her segregation as a consequence of her rebellion, a segregation that takes the form of a play of absences, evasive glances, silences, reticence: “The days went by, without her father or anyone else talking to her about her application, or her change of mind, and without any course of action whatever being urged upon her, either with caresses or with threats. Her parents’ behavior to her was unsmiling, gloomy and harsh, but they never told her why” (p. 182). The opportunity to speak, and at some length, is restored to her only after she has surrendered, because by now what she was expected to understand she has understood without words.

On the other hand Gertrude, in the end, sentences herself to burial in the cloister precisely because words are extorted from her that she would have preferred not to utter, that do not express what she feels, but, since they are ritual gestures with a performative value, no sooner have they been said than they can no longer be taken back.

In the course of his visit to the Unnamed in chapter 20, the way Don Rodrigo offers his respects is through a complex liturgy of greetings and gifts to the bravoes of his host, while the latter—whose profession is announced by room after room whose walls are covered with muskets, sabers, and halberds—at once, even before speaking, scrutinizes Don Rodrigo’s hands and his face.

In chapter 33, when Don Rodrigo experiences the first signs of the plague, he becomes aware of unequivocal internal symptoms, about which he cannot be deceived, and Griso immediately grasps his master’s state by observing his face. In a universe in which, as Manzoni has told us in the foregoing pages, the whole of society has vied with one another in ignoring or not comprehending the symptoms of the sickness—and was able to do so by translating the visual evidence into verbal reports—Don Rodrigo’s symptoms can only be interpreted in the correct way, because they cannot be verbally mediated. We are faced with the natural evidence of “a filthy bubonic swelling, of a livid purplish color” (p. 608). Language, however, immediately steps in to cover up the reality. Don Rodrigo lies, saying he feels well. Griso lies, encouraging him, with words, and professing his obedience, and all the while he is preparing to hand him over to the scavenging monatti. Don Rodrigo and Griso understand each other with looks and deceive each other with words.

14.7. Public Madness and Public Folly

But if so far we have tried to extrapolate from various episodes an implicit semiotics, Manzoni is far more explicit in the chapters on the plague (31 and 32).

When he recounts how the contagion spread, while the whole of society repressed the idea, and how, when the reality of the disease became undeniable, a human agent was invented and the figure of the “anointer” (untore) was constructed (in the sense in which the press constructs a monster or a conspiracy), Manzoni speaks of “public madness” (p. 581) and “a confused and terrifying accumulation of public folly” (p. 601). A delirium of reason, to be sure, but the way in which the author explains it is a description of a process of semiosic teratology, a chronicle of falsification of signifiers and of substitution of signifieds.

The first signs that appear (a number of corpses) are without a code—“symptoms [segni] quite unfamiliar to most of the survivors” (p. 566). It is Ludovico Settala, a doctor who has lived through the previous plague, who provides the code to interpret them. But when similar symptoms occur in Lecco, the commissioners send representatives who gather evidence—verbal evidence—from an ignorant barber, who provides a different, mendacious code: autumnal vapors from the marshes, the privations and torments caused by German troops.

Fresh proofs arrive: the “marks” (p. 567) of the pestilence are found in various localities. The usual reports are sent, in writing, to the Governor, who takes them for what they are worth and protests that he is too busy with the weightier affairs of war. For its part the population, passionately concerned to suppress its fears, compete among themselves in giving credit to the most bizarre codes, attributing the symptoms to the most unheard-of causes.

Finally somebody sees a bubo for the first time. In this case the signifier ought to be referred, according to a tried and true symptomatological tradition, to its proper signified. But the majority have only heard talk about the bubo, seen only by a few. On the other hand the edicts, which proliferate in an inane manner in the hope of forestalling contagion, add to the verbal confusion, and are as usual ignored. Furthermore, it seems that the news that arrives is insufficient, and “the rarity of the cases itself diverted most minds from the truth” (p. 572). Here begins a process that an epistemologist would attribute to the intrinsic weakness of any inductive method (how many cases are needed to justify the formulation of a law?) but which in fact brings into play a rhetorical insecurity, a perplexity over how consistent a part must be before it can represent the whole by synecdoche, or how evident an effect must be to be a good metonymy for the cause. However that may be, confronted with the uncertainty with regard to the symptoms, the doctors have an effective verbal stratagem to fall back on. They attribute to the imprecise symptoms “various names of ordinary diseases [which they had] ready to describe all the instances of plague that they were called on to treat, whatever signs or symptoms they might exhibit” (p. 572).

The opposition between symptoms and signs and names is clear. The natural visual signifier is hidden by a verbal signifier that prevents it from being recognized.

Still, there are persons who, in spite of everything, are able to “see” the approaching catastrophe. And they are branded with the “name” of enemies of their country. The case of Ludovico Settala, who risks lynching for insisting on saying what he had seen, is typical. Against him there arise the negligent doctors, who, faced with “those sinister livid patches and bubonic swellings,” take refuge in “a mere fraudulent play on words” and speak of “pestilent fever” (p. 574).

At this point a kind of new rhetorical figure comes into play, which articulates the universe of natural semiosis. The deaths of personages who are well-known (by antonomasia) become more convincing than the deaths already known. Somehow or other what had so far been said now becomes of necessity seen, in the form, if nothing else, of a conspicuous absence.

In this tangle of visual signs confused by verbal definitions, it finally occurs to someone that only public visual proof can combat the manipulations of the word. “At the time of day when the crowd was at its thickest, in the midst of the throng of carriages, riders and people on foot, the corpses of that family were carried, by order of the commission of health, to the same cemetery. They were borne naked on a cart, so that the crowd could see the manifest signs of the plague on their bodies.… There was more belief in the existence of the plague after that” (p. 582).

At this point it would seem that the plague should become self-evident and its symptoms begin to be interpreted correctly. But the manipulations of a false conscience are reproduced on another level. No longer able to deny the existence of the evil, the deniers try to hide the causes of the contagion (so successfully that the Cardinal will be obliged to hold a solemn public propitiatory procession, thereby increasing, of course, the opportunities for infection). The promotion of the myth of the anointers has begun.

At the end of chapter 31, Manzoni himself sums up what has taken place in this process of semiosic pestilence as an action performed by the spoken language (which defines and names) upon the natural expressivity of natural signs, already abundantly misunderstood on account of the preceding encrustations of passion that had obfuscated right reason.

(i) “In the beginning, then, there had been no plague, no pestilence, none at all, not on any account. The very words had been forbidden.”

(ii) “Next came the talk of ‘pestilent fever’—the idea being admitted indirectly, in adjectival form”: the signifier is modified to avoid evoking its proper signified.

(iii) “Then it was ‘not a real pestilence’—that is to say, it was a pestilence, but only in a certain sense.” And now the content has begun to be modified.

(iv) “Last of all, it became a pestilence without any doubt or argument—but now a new idea was attached to it, the idea of poisoning and witchcraft, and this corrupted and confused the sense conveyed by the dreaded word” (pp. 582–583). And here, as can be seen, a radical transformation has taken place, whereby the word, which has as its content a symptom that refers to a cause p, is made to correspond to a symptom which ought to have as its content a cause q. A total alteration of the meaning, using the possibility language offers of modifying the natural expressivity of visual signs and natural symptoms.

Here it appears that, instead of arranging words to mask the visual evidence, the bad conscience of society begins to operate through the staging of visual evidence. Some people “thought they saw” someone anointing a partition in the cathedral; the partition was brought, along with several pews, outside the church, where it was decided to give them a wash. But “the sight of that mass of woodwork had a very frightening effect on the crowd” and “it was generally said and believed that all the benches in the cathedral had been anointed” (p. 579). A curious process of amplification: if previously many deaths had not provided a sufficient synecdoche for the disease, now a few planks of wood provide a more than sufficient synecdoche for the entire temple, and for the general pollution. The following morning “another sight, stranger still and more significant” appeared. If the pews outside the church door had been an accidental mise-en-scène, now this “strange sort of yellowish or whitish filth,” daubed over doors and walls, whether a practical joke or an act of terrorism, is quite clearly an intentional mise-en-scène.

This is where the folly or madness really gets going. Manzoni knows, or suspects, that the history of this delirium is not just a psychiatric history, but the history of a machination, or at least the history of a metastasis of demented semiosis, since he declares that “the most interesting and instructive aspect that we can study, when considering human errors—especially those of the crowd—is their mode of progression, the shapes they take on and the methods they adopt to obtain entry into the minds of men and dominate them” (p. 580). It seems to me that there is no better way to indicate a process of formation of public opinion through a distorted interpretation of signs, whether it occur for casual and instinctive reasons, or as the result of a project or “wicked plot” (p. 579).

Prepared for by the protracted deceit of the experts, who under various pretexts had denied the contagion, and by the simple fear of the uninformed, who out of natural passion had attempted to suppress the evidence, the popular semiosic ability, which throughout the course of the novel has combated the word of the schemers, has become definitively corrupted. The story of the anointers is a story of collective dementia, in which a distorted meaning is attributed to every symptom, or in which every fact, every gesture, forcibly isolated from its everyday context, from the customary scenarios, is transformed into a symptom of a single obsessive signified. People recognized as strangers by their dress are seen as anointers, an elderly man is lynched because he has dusted a pew, Renzo is practically lynched because he knocks on a door. Someone asks directions, removing his hat, and people immediately suspect that he has the powder he plans to throw at his victim in the brim of his hat; someone else touches the facade of the cathedral to see what the stone feels like, and the crowd charges at him like a wild beast …

The system of normal expectations collapses. Don Abbondio, seeing the bravoes, had seen something unexpected, because he knew what he was supposed to see and what, if he saw it, would be a harbinger of bad news. Now no one can see anything anymore, no one expects anything; or rather, they see and they expect, they expect and therefore they see, always the same sign. A single signifier for a single signified. That is what obsession is like; that is public madness.

14.8. In Conclusion

Verbal language versus popular semiosis? To invalidate this conjecture all we have to do is to observe how Manzoni, in his novel, celebrates the defeat of the word and the triumph of popular semiosis, precisely by means of the narrative word. But this objection strikes at the implicit semiotics of Manzoni, who is not celebrating the limits of language, but demonstrating how an author can set forth (in words, of course) his pessimistic conception of the power of the word. A happy contradiction, that becomes somewhat less contradictory when we realize that every novel presents itself as a machine (necessarily linguistic) which strives to bring to life, linguistically, signs that are not themselves linguistic, signs which accompany, precede, or follow language, with their own instinctive and violent autonomy.

This ability that verbal language has to evoke that which is not verbal has a name in rhetorical terminology: hypotyposis.

Since we cannot avoid using words (“talking—just talking, by itself—is so much more easy than any of the other activities mentioned, or all of them put together, that we human beings in general deserve a little indulgence in this matter” [p. 583]), we will say that Manzoni’s I promessi sposi succeeds in elaborating and exemplifying its own implicit semiotics, and presenting itself as a verbal celebration of popular semiosis, only thanks to an uninterrupted chain of examples of hypotyposis.

A linguistic machine that celebrates itself by negating itself, the novel tells us something about other ways of signifying, and it suggests that, as a verbal object, it is at the service of these other ways, because it is a narration not of words but of actions, and even when it narrates words it narrates them to the extent to which they have assumed the function of actions.

This essay originally appeared in Manetti (1989) and was republished in Eco (1998c).

1. [Translator’s note: This is a literal translation of Manzoni’s Italian. Bruce Penman’s English translation (Manzoni 1972), which we have otherwise followed and to which subsequent page numbers in the text refer, does not follow Manzoni’s precise wording at this point and omits the adverb “really” (davvero).]