How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

Three Owls on a Chest of Drawers

The literature on the Italian sestina by the anonymous "Autore della Civetta"¹ now fills a not inconsiderable shelf, so anyone essaying a Rezep-tionsgeschichte of this brief but significant poem cannot fail, in taking on the mantle of its doxologist, to come up against a certain amount of touchy expertise.

Still, with all due respect to our illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, it may not be without some interest to repeat here the text that has inspired so many different interpretative readings, the nude simulacrum of the jouissances that are eluded there, writing and graphos, significant passage, imago, and perhaps phantom.²

Let us first consider the text-ture of the definitive version that Segre, ³ with fastidious precision, established as long ago as 1970:

Amharabà ciccì coccò,

tre civette sul comò

che facevano l'amore

con la figlia del dottore.

Ma la mamma le chiamò...

Ambarabà ciccì coccò.

(literal translation:

Ambarabà ciccì coccò

three snow owls on the chest of drawers

that were making love

with the daughter of the doctor.

But the mama called them...

Ambarabà ciccì coccò)

A certain number of versions of this sestina exist in other languages, à savoir the French version produced by the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. It reads as follows:

Ambaraba cici coco,

trois chouettes qui font dodo

en baisant sur la commode

une fille très à la mode.

Mais maman cria aussitôt:

Ambaraba cici coco!

Note the loss of the informative "figlia del dottore" (literally "daughter of the doctor"), restored at the connotative level, however, through the reference to a girl of independent behavior.⁴ Then there is an anonymous German version, not without some influence of Hugo Ball and perhaps, to a keen and sensitive ear, an authoritative hint of Christian Morgenstern.

Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko,

Drei Käuze auf dem Vertiko,

Die legten sich aufs Ohr

Mit der Tochter vom Doktor,

Doch da schrie die Mutter so.

Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko!

More interesting in its poetic achievement, though surely extra moenia as far as the laws of gender and the complex of extratextual references are concerned, is the translation that the distinguished novelist and scholar Erica Jong attributes to a mysterious Count Palmiro Vicarion.⁵

There were three old Owls of Storrs

screwing a Girl on a big Chest of Drawers.

But the Maid was the Daughter

of a Doctor, and their Mother

cried: "Come back, lousy Owls of Storrs!"

Returning to the original, Italian text, we encounter immediately the problem that has so vexed critics: the matter of date. Although the alliteration in the first and last verses prompted Vossler, some time ago, to posit echoes of proto-Latin literature, in particular the Carmen Fratrum Arvalium,⁶ it is beyond doubt that the sestina cannot date from before the foundation of the University of Bologna, since the girl could then not be described as daughter of a "doctor."⁷ It is true, however, as Stanley Fish revealed in his magisterial study⁸ of the variants of the poem, that in an early manuscript the third verse does not read "che facevano l'amore" (who were making love) but rather "che facevano l'errore" (who were doing wrong), implying that, rather than making love, they were committing a sin. Thus the sense of love as crimen is in no way diminished; if anything, it is reinforced by the subtly moralistic allusion—and thus, as anyone can see, in replacing errore by amore only in the successive version, the anonymous Author achieved a remarkable paronomasia with the chiamò of the fifth verse, creating a metaplastic antithesis (rich in meta-semantic results at the level of actantial structures as well) between the anxious, protective love of the mother and the possessive and heedless love of the owls.

Of the owls or, possibly, of the girl: for, as Hobbes and Hobbes⁹ have observed, it is not clear whom the mother is calling. It should be obvious that the mother is concerned for her daughter, but in that case—as Allen ¹⁰ so perceptively notes—why should she call the owls and not her daughter, unless all family ties, as well as the sexual characteristics of the dramatis personae, are a good deal less obvious than they would appear at a hasty first reading?¹¹

In any case, and to return to the problem of date, the poem does not seem to be earlier than the eleventh century A.D., and perhaps it is somewhat later if, as Le Goff suggests, "the chest of drawers appears in the practice and philosophy of interior furnishing with the decline of the feudal economy and with the rise of a peasant class of small landowners, not yet completely free, but in any case liberated from the living conditions of actual serfs. It is toward the seventeenth century, finally, that in the Ardennes there arose the custom of making love on the chest of drawers rather than on straw, not least because the chest of drawers was usually surmounted by a mirror."¹² The virtually primal scene of the owls' love-making, as Marie Bonaparte¹³ has pointed out, can of course take place only in a peasant ambience. This observation is an elementary one, as it would be difficult to explain such a concentration of owls in an urban context.

Having thus arrived at an approximate dating of the sestina, we can examine its strophic and metric structures.

As is obvious at first sight, the poem's opening verse (repeated at the end) consists of two four-syllable units, accented on the first and fourth syllables and on the second and fourth, respectively. This introduces four chiastically arranged lines of catalectic and acatalectic trochaic dimeter; the six verses obey an a b c c b a rhyme scheme. A difficult and "splendid achievement," as Scholes¹⁴ observes, when you consider that in an earlier version (of uncertain provenance) the second verse read "tre civette sulla casset-tiera" (three owls on the cupboard), with obvious loss of metric and accentual vigor.

In any case, an impressive structural analysis of the sestina can be found in Les Chouettes, the masterly study by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. The authors take special pains to underline how the first three verses present subhuman entities (the owls and the chest of drawers), while the next three present human beings; and similarly how the second and fourth verses feature subjects while the third and fifth feature actions. This prodigious semantic symmetry is reinforced, with splendid parallelism, by an extraordinary play of phonological oppositions. In the first half of the first (and last) verse the alliteration proceeds via an oral bilabial, lax, grave, voiced, stop, diffuse, whereas in the second half there is an opposition between two pairs of voiceless orsals, in which the first alliterative pair consists of palatalized, strident, compact, diffuse, acute affricates and the second of velar, grave, compact, guttural, tense stops.

This double pseudo-alliteration is paronomastically recalled in the second verse (civette versus comò), whereas the appearance of the mother represents an elaborate play on the quintuple recurrence of the grave labial nasal (m).

At the lexical level, "the owls named in the title of the poem are called by name only once in the text"; further, the labiodental grave constrictive voice fricative (v) of "civette" never recurs in the course of the sestina except in the guise of the labiodental unvoiced grave constrictive fricative (/). Thus the presence of the owls, alluded to but never again openly declared, represents in the sestina a hap ax "that shines like a solitaire." Summoned up also by the anaphoric che (third verse)/le (fifth verse), the owls still dominate the poem. The birds of Minerva, they are unquestionably a travesty of the "savants austères" and, at the same time, as participants in love-making, of Baudelaire's "amoureux fervents": hence the identification of the beloved maiden with a cat, "orgeuil de la maison" since she is exposed on the chest of drawers and "comme eux'sédentaire ... amie de la science [the doctor] et de la volupté [love]." The analysis of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss does not involve (nor could it have, during that unfortunate period of pa-leostructuralist severity) the dialectic of desire, which made its triumphant appearance in the critical history of this poem through the justly famous'Séminaire XXXV of Jacques Lacan. ¹⁵

As every scholar knows, at the beginning of that seminar Doctor Lacan (just whose daughter was the girl on the chest of drawers, anyway?) collected the elephants previously distributed at the end of'Séminaire I and distributed among the participants some little owls, asserting that they were more suited to the chest of drawers than the elephants were.¹⁶ Then he noted how, as a rule, a mirror appears above a chest of drawers: but (and here, certainly, we have the stroke of genius in this seminar), while the disciples were concentrating their attention on this most abused paraphernal, Doctor Lacan, with one of his typical coups de théâtre, recognized in the comò a typical item of furniture supplied with drawers and then broached his brand-new theory of the stade du tiroir.¹⁷

The drawer is in fact the place of repression, and the poem appeared to Lacan as the very allegory of Urverdrängung, whereas the pulsatile action of the owls, only apparently inspired by desire, was revealed as a disguise, not all that implicit, of the Bemächti gungsstreich; or rather, as Lacan himself clarified in his limpid French, as an Überwältigung of the girl-object.

But it now becomes absolutely necessary to move on to a more viable—and more verifiable—Anglo-Saxon corrective for all this transalpine mist. We must bear in mind that as early as the 1960s, Noam Chomsky,¹⁸ in what he at first defined as Standard Theory of the Chest of Drawers (STCD), had attempted to analyze the WP ambarabä ciccì coccö (where WP stands for "What? phrase," from "What?!?" the exclamation of Dwight Bolinger when he was exposed, as native informant, to the utterance of the verse itself). The STCD diagrammed the verse in this fashion:

But in the successive phase (Extended Theory of the Owls, ETO), he decided to employ the usual asterisk, labeling the verse as in (1):

(1) *ambarabà ciccì coccó

Truly an ad hoc solution, confuted perceptively by Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy (1978) with a reference to Frege, for whom, given that the meaning (in the sense of Bedeutung) of every utterance is always a truth-value, and given that all phrases marked by an asterisk are neither true nor false, the meaning of (1) must be considered the equivalent of the meaning of (2):¹⁹

(2) * Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

But this has the paradoxical result that anyone wishing to make an assertion concerning the virtus dormitiva of colorless green ideas should utter (1)—which would in itself be nothing, as Snoopy, Snoopy, and Snoopy observed, were it not for the fact that the owl poem should then be rewritten in these terms:

(3) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

three old owls on a chest of drawers

were screwing

the daughter of the doctor.

But the mother called them,

colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

While this paradoxical conclusion inspired Harold Bloom to write a probing essay²⁰ on poetry as misunderstanding, thus furnishing Jacques Derrida the occasion for some provocatory reflections²¹ on interpretive drift, the attempt was firmly knocked down by Quine.²² The last-named observed that, if the utterance (3) had to be read in terms of post hoc ergo propter hoc (if the green ideas, etc., then three owls, etc.), and if we let

p = Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

q = Three owls on the chest of drawers make love with the doctor's daughter

then p could be negated only through modus tollendo tollens, namely admitting that q is not true. But since q cannot be negated, given the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, it is impossible to negate p; and thus it must be conceded that colorless green ideas may sleep furiously, which is intuitively false, salva veritate.

It is worth remembering the attempt of Chafe, Chafe, and Chafe (1978) whereby coccò would be a verb form (third person singular of the preterit of cocare) and Ambaraba Ciccì, a proper noun. In this case the sestina should be read as the story of one Ambaraba Ciccì who "coked" three owls on the chest of drawers (the authors did not face the problem of the meaning of cocare, as they sustained the legitimacy of a purely distributional analysis). But this hypothesis was famously disproved by Kripke in the light of a causal theory of meaning; it is impossible to identify the expression Ambaraba Ciccì as rigid designator, for want of evidence of an initial baptism.²³

In response to Searle's objection,²⁴ namely that Ambaraba Ciccì could be replaced by a definite description, like (4):

(4) The only man who cochoed the owls in Como

Kripke pointed out the problems that would derive from replacing a proper name with a definite description in opaque contexts, as in (5):

(5) John thinks that Nancy hoped that Mary believed that Noam suspected that Ambaraba was not a proper name

For to assert (6)

(6) John thinks that ... the only man who cochoed the owls in Como was not a proper name

is not only without meaning, but patently false, since as everyone knows,

(7) John is eager to please

and hence John would never venture to invite general reproach, by making such silly assertions.

A vigorous change of direction was imposed on the whole debate by the generative semanticists (see in particular Fillcawley; Mcjackendoff; Klima-Toshiba and Gulp, 1979). Working with the English version of the poem, they decided to abandon the inconclusive analysis of the first verse to concentrate their attention on the verses that follow, simplified as in (8), for which they devised the accompanying diagram.

(8) Three owls are screwing the girl on the chest of drawers

The stern polemic among transformationalists, generativists, and philosophers of language was finally settled thanks to the intervention of Montague (1977)²⁵. In an exemplary essay on the poem of the owls, he posited a predicate P

***

P = being three owls on the chest of drawers who make love with the daughter of the doctor until the mother calls them

whereby the whole poem can be formalized (indexing a possible world wl):

P x ^w1

Note that, if we assume that in another possible world, w2, the predicate P can be stated as:

P = being the sole individual for whom life is a tale told by an idiot

King Lear can properly be represented as:

P x ^w2

—which demonstrates almost iconically the profound affinity among all works of art worthy of the name.

But, reacting against the hypersimplification of the Anglo-Saxon schools, Greimas and the Ecole de Paris, after having identified in the poem, as the fundamental level, four actants (Subject, Object, Sender, and Receiver) and having stressed the actorialization implicit in the anthroponyms owl, girl, chest of drawers, and mother, went on to identify two narrative programs: the first F [S₁ → (S₁ ∩ O_v)°] in which the owls fornicate with the value-object girl, and the second F [S₂ → (S₁ ∪ O_v] in which the mother separates the owls from their object of value. In the course of the first program, given a semiotic square on the order of

the girl (who does not know what the owls are doing to her) seems to play and not play (and is the victim of the owls' lie), while the owls find themselves as the addressees (destinataires) of a secret (they make love but do not "seem," and pretend to play doctor with the girl). In the course of the second narrative program the mother discovers the truth and identifies the seeming with the being of the owls. To skip over the intermediary passages of the gripping Greimasian analysis, at its conclusion the author discovers that the profound oppositions of the poem can be depicted on the square as follows:

***

But—and here lies the punctum dolens of this otherwise extremely acute study—Greimas in the end no longer knows what to do with the chest of drawers and decides to donate it to the Salvation Army.

The limits of this essay prevent us from considering countless other critical contributions to the fascinating problem of the owls. For the moment we will end by citing the recent essay of Emanuele Severino in which, with a luicid sense of Destiny and with far greater pregnancy and depth than are usually found in the application of the weary methods of every structuralism or formalism, the owls exercising their dominion over the doctor's daughter are seen as the very essence and the vocation of the West.

Only the arrival of the mother thwarts the owls' will to power; so she can be seen as a negation of the nihilism of the essence of the West, a reference to the "second corsair" and the "will of Destiny." But to accept this the owls must necessarily understand that only by renouncing dominion over the world can they comprehend the falsehood of the second utterance, according to which it cannot be true that it is not true that being is nothingness. What is willed is impossible, and the sense of truth is eternally what cannot now or ever succeed in being. Thus the initial Ambaraba and the final Ambaraba confirm, as scansion of an eternal return, the nothingness of becoming as the irruption of the unheard-of. And the mother only makes evident how predictable the unpredictable was for those who had and cherished a desire to anticipate, ante-capere, pre-capture the owls and their defeat. Whence, as at the beginning, always and again Ambaraba. The whole is unchangeable.

The chronicler of this critical adventure would like, if he might, to stop at this point, for chronicle is not tautology of the factual, but interrogation and drift; the supreme condition (interrogative arrest) remains that of going forward, and proceeding to return to the origin, and saying not to say, and not saying to be and to remain in the identity of the different. To the point where (the owls have spoken for us, or we for them, and/or the language for all, or silence for the word) no voice will be able to remain silent in the full ef-fability of its own void.

This, and only this, is what Poetry demands of us.

1982