On Literature

ON SYMBOLISM

I know already that whatever I say about the topic of symbolism will be refuted in an erudite essay by my friend Sandro Briosi. Moreover, I have already devoted a number of articles to this subject, in particular the entry on "Symbolism" in the Enciclopedia Einaudi, which later became a chapter in my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Whether it is because of the aging process or the persistence of adolescent hubris, I do not believe I have changed my thinking on this question. To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in—sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.

In order not to repeat what I have already said on symbols, I would like to deal with a particularly topical aspect of this vexed question, namely, the phenomenon of symbolic paranoia. But in order to get to that point I will have to reiterate in part what I have already said on the subject, since omitting it would in the end create an excessive gap.

"Symbol" is a word I advise my students to use very sparingly and to note the contexts in which they find it, in order to decide the meaning it has there and not elsewhere. In fact, I no longer know what a symbol is. I have tried to define the symbolic mode as a particular textual strategy. But leaving aside this textual strategy—which I will return to later—a symbol can be either something very clear (an unambiguous expression with a definable content) or something very obscure (a polyvalent expression, which summons up a whole nebula of content).

The ambiguity of symbols comes from distant roots and is justified not only by the etymology of" symballein" but by the very practice its etymology denotes. For one could say of those two matching pieces of token that they will be seamlessly put together again the day someone places them in the presence of each other and makes them fit together, removing them from the free flow of semiosis and turning each of them once more into a thing in the world of things; and yet what is so fascinating about each of the two separated elements is the very absence of the other, for it is only on absence and in absence that the most overpowering passions thrive.

But let us leave aside etymology. The first quandary facing us is that in certain contexts, mostly scholarly ones, we use the expression "symbol" to indicate semiotic processes that are extremely clear and incontrovertible, objects that are not ambiguous but, rather, aim at being read in the most univocal way possible. The proof of this is the chemical symbol, or certain definitions of symbol that indicate, as opposed to the fluctuating openness of the icon, the conventionality of the linguistic or grammatical sign.

Of course, even symbols in logic have something of the openness of what, from Romanticism onward, we consider to be symbolic in the obscure and polyvalent sense of the term. For they represent variables, and as such they can be linked to highly unpredictable contents. Think, for instance, of an expression of symbolic logic such as "If p, then q." We have the impression that "p" and "q" can stand for anything we like, but that is not the case. Let us imagine that instead of "p" we put the entire Divine Comedy and in place of "q" the assertion that "six times six equals thirty-six." This proposition would appear to be true because of the laws of material implication. However, it is impossible to invert the order of the equation. If, for example, I placed the Divine Comedy in the position of "q," because the totality of assertions constituted by Dante's text is false from the point of view of truth-function (it is not true that a Florentine ascended to Paradise while still alive, or that Charon exists), then by the same laws of material implication the inference would be false, despite having a true premise. Whereas everything would work if in place of "six times six makes thirty-six" we assigned to "p" the entire text of Mein Kampf, in that, according to the famous paradox of material implication, false plus false makes true. Semiotic balancing acts aimed at finding a relationship between symbolic logic and the obscure symbols of Romantic poetics are therefore pointless. They each have different ways of functioning, different syntax, and different natures with regard to truth.

Similarly, the use Cassirer makes of the term in his theory of symbolic forms has nothing to do with the sense that we attribute to it: instead, his is a culturological version of Kantian transcendentalism, and even Euclidean geometry is a symbolic form, where we breathe the sense of the infinite and the undecideable only in the continuation of the parallel lines that his fifth postulate promises us in a way that is itself undecideable in terms of the truth of the statement.

We could stick to a sensible definition, which also applies to a whole series of daily experiences: the symbolic is identified by the existence, in every language, of levels of secondary meaning. This is the route taken by Todorov in his book on symbols. But to identify the symbolic with every instance of secondary meaning would lead us to confuse phenomena that are very different from each other.

There are two levels of meaning in any discourse that has two senses: the classic riddle is an example. But the two levels are structured, often on the basis of treacherous homonyms, according to two isotopies that can be traced without difficulty. Just like a message in code, the double sense needs to be deciphered, and once it has been decoded we have two senses that are indisputable, without any room for demurral.

Metaphor does not belong to the order of the symbolic. It can be open to multiple interpretations and can, as it were, be continued along the line of the second or third isotopy that it generates. But there are rules governing interpretation: that our planet is, as Dante says, "the threshing floor that makes us all so fierce" (Par. 22.151) might suggest thousands of poetic inferences, but it will not convince anyone, so long as there are cultural conventions we all agree on, that it is a place where peace and benevolence flourish. Moreover, I remain one of those who believe that the first signal of metaphorical usage consists in the fact that, taken literally, a metaphorical expression would appear false or weird, or nonsensical (the earth is not a threshing floor). This is not the case in the symbolic mode, which, as we shall see, conceals its own potential for meaning behind the deceptive appearance of something inexplicably obvious.

All the more reason, then, that allegory does not belong to the order of the symbolic either, since it is a continuous double sense based not on homonyms but on an almost heraldic codification of certain images.

The modern Western tradition is by now used to distinguishing allegory from symbolism, but the distinction is a rather late one: its articulation begins in Romanticism, and is particularly striking in Goethe's famous aphorisms (Maximen und Reflexionen):

Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept and the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept in the image is always to be considered circumscribed and complete in the image, and has to be given and to express itself through it (1.112).

Symbolism transforms the phenomenon into an idea and the idea into an image, in such a way that the idea in the image remains always infinitely effective and inaccessible and, even if articulated in every language, remains nevertheless inexpressible (1.113).

It makes a considerable difference whether the poet seeks the particular as a function of the universal or whether he sees the universal in the particular. In the first case we have allegory, where the particular is valid only as an example, as an emblem of the universal, whereas in the second case the true nature of poetry is revealed: the particular case is expressed without thinking about the universal or alluding to it. Now whoever catches this living particular seizes at the same time the universal without realizing it, or only realizing it later on (279).

True symbolism is that in which the particular element represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow but as a living, instantaneous revelation of the inscrutable (314).

The classical and medieval world, on the other hand, understood "symbol" and "allegory" to be synonyms. Examples of this abound, from Philo to grammarians such as Demetrius, from Clement of Alexandria to Hippolytus of Rome, from Porphyry to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and from Plotinus to Iamblichus, where the term "symbol" is also used for those didactic and conceptualizing representations that elsewhere would be called allegories.

It is true that scholars have described the world of the High Middle Ages as the "symbolic universe," a universe where, ac-cording to the words of Duns Scotus Eriugena (De Divisione Naturae, V.3), "nihil enim visibilium rerum corporaliumque est, utar-bitror, quod non incorporate quid et intelligibile significet" (there is, I believe, no visible or corporeal thing that does not signify something non-corporeal and intelligible). The world, then, is apparently, as Hugh of St. Victor would say later, "quasi quidam liber scriptus digito Dei" (like some book written by the finger of God). So must it not have been the case that that world where "nostrum statum pingit rosa" (a rose depicts our condition) (Pseudo-Alain of Lille, Rhythmus Alter) was a world populated by symbols?

According to Huizinga (chapter 15 of his Waning of the Middle Ages), the medieval symbolic universe was very close to the universe of Baudelaire's Corréspondences:

The medieval spirit was never so convinced of any great truth as it was of the words of St. Paul: "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem (now we see through a glass darkly, then we will see face to face)." The Middle Ages never forgot that any object would be absurd if its meaning were limited to its immediate function and its place in the world of phenomena, and that all things extend far into the world beyond. This idea is familiar also to us, as an unformulated sensation, when for instance the noise of the rain on the leaves in the trees or the light of the lamp on the table, in a moment of tranquillity, gives us a more profound perception than daily observation, which merely serves practical activity. It can sometimes appear in the form of a morbid oppression, which makes us see things already laden with personal menace or with a mystery that one ought to recognize but cannot. More often, however, it will fill us with the tranquil and reassuring certainty that our existence too participates in that secret sense of the world.

But this is the interpretation of someone who has already seen Verlaine and Rimbaud wandering, on the borders of his own country, as exiles searching for the absolute, listening to the sound of the same rain on the leaves and letting their hearts fill with languor, or hallucinating about the chromaticism of vowels. Was this really the symbolism of the High Middle Ages, not to mention the late medieval period?

In order to accept the Neoplatonic inheritance it was essential to conceive, as Dionysius the Areopagite does, an idea of the One as unfathomable and contradictory, where the divinity is called the "most luminous obscurity of the silence which arcanely teaches ... the most luminous darkness" (Theologia mystica, passim). It is true that for Dionysius the concepts of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful are applied to God, as though they were on a par with Light, Lightning, and Jealousy; but these concepts will be used to describe him solely in a "hypersubstantial" way: he may be these things, but in a way that is commensurately but also incomprehensibly more intense. What is more, Dionysius reminds us (and this is emphasized by his commentators), precisely in order to make clear that the names we attribute to God are inadequate, that it is important for them to be, as far as possible, different, incredibly unsuitable, almost provocatively offensive, extraordinarily enigmatic, as though the common quality that we are searching for between the symbolizing element and what is symbolized were indeed recognizable but only at the cost of inferential gymnastics and disproportionate proportions: and in order that the faithful, when naming God as Light, should not get the wrong idea that there exist celestial substances that are luminous and surrounded by haloes, it will be much better to name God using the names of monstrous beings, such as the bear or the panther, or through obscure dissimilarities (De Coelesti Hierarchia, 2).

Now this way of speaking, which Dionysius himself calls "symbolic" (e.g., De Coelesti Hierarchia, 2 and 15), has nothing to do with that illumination, that ecstasy, that rapid, lightning vision that all modern theories of symbolism see as peculiar to a symbol. The medieval symbol is a way of approaching the divine, but it is not the epiphany of something numinous, nor does it reveal to us a truth that can be articulated solely in terms of myth and not in terms of rational discourse. Rather, it is the preamble to a rational discourse, and its duty is to make clear, at the point when it seems didactically useful and appropriate to its role as preamble, its own inadequacy, its own (almost Hegelian) destiny to become real by a subsequent rational discourse. In other words, the medieval world was anxious about symbols, medieval man felt dismay, fear, and reverence before the bear and the panther, before the rose and the oak, but these were pagan remnants. Not only theology but medieval bestiaries themselves are firmly intent on deciphering these symbols, on turning them into metaphors or allegories, to stop their fluctuation.

In any case, the same thing happens with what Jung calls archetypes, which I would put under the broader category of what I term, using a metaphor, "totemic objects," which are imperious and stimulating in their very enigmatic nature. Jung was the first to explain how as soon as these archetypal images fascinate the mind of the mystic, dragging him toward an infinite drift of sense, some religious authority immediately intervenes to gloss them, subject them to a code, make them become a parable. And at that point the totemic object becomes a symbol in the more banal sense of the term, the one that makes us call the badges of political parties symbols, on which we mark our (often automatic) X of agreement. Endowed with connotative appeals at various levels (in the sense that one can become attached to or die for a flag, a cross, a crescent moon or a hammer and sickle), they are there to tell us what we have to believe in and what we have to reject. The Sacred Heart of the Vendée was no longer the same Sacred Heart that had dazzled Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. It had changed from being the experience of something numinous to a political flag.

***

This idea of the symbol as an apparition that refers to a reality that cannot be expressed in words, a reality that is contradictory and ungraspable, becomes established in the West only with the spread of hermetic writings, and requires a very "strong" Neoplatonism. But as soon as the excitement caused by the flashes of the divine in Hermes Trismegistus's obscure discourse becomes a fashion, a style, a "koine," here too there suddenly emerges the desire, previously medieval, now Hermetic, to capture the symbol and give it a socializable sense.

It is curious how the baroque age was the most fertile in the production or, rather, invention of totemic objects, namely, its blazons, devices, and emblems; and it is curious how the baroque world spoke of them as symbols every time it could. Syntagma de Symbolis would be the title of one of the most famous commentaries on Alciati, Bocchi would write of Symbolicarum Quaestionum, Picinelli of Mundus Symbolicus, and Scarlatino of Homo Figuratus et Symbolicus. Emanuele Tesauro explains what these symbols are in his Cannocchiale aristotelico: "A symbol is a metaphor signifying a concept through some Figure which is visible."

In this celebration of symbols there always clearly emerges a dogmatic desire to write commentaries, in other words, to decipher. Venerable volumes astonish us with their iconological baggage made up of apparently oneiric images: these are real illustrious corpses of icons, a paradise for a psychoanalyst who does not want to read the gigantic accompanying commentary. But if we do turn to the commentary, it leads us step by step, and with considerable redundance, toward the most exact (though also the most clever) deciphering of every figure, in order to draw out a single moral lesson.

In this context the enterprise of Athanasius Kircher is quite ridiculous, aiming as it does to rediscover the mysteries of ancient Egyptian writing. It has a privileged position, since it sits opposite something that resembles a device or emblem, but one for which no Alciati, Valeriano, or Ferro has supplied the interpretation. These are old and well-known images, and once they are handed down no longer by a Christian (or pagan) tradition but by Egypt's own divinities, they acquire a sense that is different from the one they had in moralizing bestiaries. References to scripture, now absent, are replaced by allusions to a vaguer religiosity, one dense with mysterious promises. The hieroglyphics are seen as initiatic symbols.

These are for Kircher "symbols," and therefore expressions of a hidden, unknown content, one that has many meanings and is rich in mystery. Unlike a conjecture, which allows us to move from a visible symptom to some definite cause, "a symbol is a mark signifying some more arcane mystery, which is to say that the nature of a symbol is to lead us mentally, through some similarity, to the understanding of something very different from things that are offered to our external senses; something whose nature is to be concealed or hidden beneath the veil of an obscure expression [...]. It is not formed bywords, but is expressed only through marks, characters, figures" (Obeliscus Pamphilius, II, 5, [>]).

These are "initiatic" symbols because the fascination of Egyptian culture is based on the fact that the knowledge it promises is enclosed within the unfathomable and indecipherable circle of an enigma in order to remove it from the profane curiosity of the vulgar crowd. Furthermore, Kircher reminds us that a hieroglyph is a symbol of something sacred (and in that sense all hieroglyphs are symbols, but not vice versa), and its power is due to the fact it is not accessible to the uninitiated.

If it were accessible, the baroque age would have had to invent its own writing of the unfathomable. That is what Kircher wants, and he delights in this with delirious enthusiasm in the letter to the emperor that opens his Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

I parade before your eyes, most sacred Caesar, the polymorphous reign of Hieroglyphic Morpheus: by this I mean a theater decked out with an immense variety of monsters, and these not naked monsters of nature, but so adorned with enigmatic Chimeras of a most ancient knowledge that here I am confident that sagacious minds can trace the boundless treasures of science, which is not without benefit for literature. Here the Dog of Bubastis, the Saitic Lion, the Mendesian Goat, the terrifying Crocodile with the horrendous opening of its jaws, all reveal the occult meanings of the divinity, of nature, of the spirit of Ancient Wisdom, beneath the shadowy play of images. Here the thirsty Dipsodes, the poisonous Asps, the wily Ichneumons, the cruel Hippopotami, the monstrous Dragons, the swollen-bellied toad, the snail with its spiral shell, the hairy caterpillar, and countless specters parade the miraculous, ordered chain that is revealed in the tabernacles of nature. Here are presented a thousand exotic species of things transformed into one image and then another by metamorphosis, turned into human figures and then restored again to their former shape in a mutual intertwining, the feral with the human, the human with the craft of the divine; and finally the divinity who, as Porphyry says, flows throughout the universe, and engineers a monstrous marriage with all beings; where now, sublime in their variety of faces, raising their canine necks, are displayed the Cynocephalus, and the foul Ibis, and the Sparrowhawk covered with its beaked mask [...] and where also, luring us with its virginal looks, under the covering of the Scarab, the sting of the Scorpion is concealed [...all this and more in a list that goes on for four pages] we can meditate in this all-changing theater of Nature, spread out as it is before our gaze, under the allegorical veil of an occult meaning.

It is precisely because of the fascination of the secret meanings in the ancient Egyptian language that Kircher celebrates it as opposed to the bland and highly codified iconic language of the Chinese, where every ideogram corresponds to a precise idea; something that might have fascinated Bacon but not him. Egyptian symbols " integros conceptos ideales involvebant" (enclosed complete ideal concepts), and by "involvebant" Kircher did not mean "collected," or "offered," but "concealed," "enclosed"...Egyptian icons had to be like flirtatious women, constantly luring their admirers into the vortex of an unsatisfied cognitive passion but never yielding themselves up to them.

But what does Kircher do after this preamble, for thousands of pages and throughout at least three entire works? He tries to decipher it all, makes his victory as an Egyptologist consist in revealing to us the secret meaning of these signs; he translates them, convinced that he is translating them in the only correct way possible. He makes an enormous mistake, we know, but what we object to now are not his results but his intentions. Champollion would carry out the same operation as Kircher in a more secular spirit, and without making a mistake; he would tell us that those were conventional signs, endowed with phonetic values, and would try to rid every symbol of any ambiguity. Yet Kircher had already begun the process. Those who, in a less Catholic and theological spirit than Kircher, try to preserve a charge of unresolved mystery in these hieroglyphics would turn them into party badges for down-market occultism, and in fact would be fascinated not by their unfathomable qualities but by the sense of confidence they give, these rigid emblems that they have now become. But somewhere a mystery exists, a mystery that will never be revealed, not because it is unfathomable, but because those who administer it will have decided not to fathom it so as to be able to sell it as a kind of trademark, or promise of an elixir, to collectors of the absolute or those who frequent Masonry's Grand Guignol.

Our notion of the symbolic is rooted in a universe that is by now secular, where a symbol no longer has to reveal or hide the absolutes of religion, but the absolute of poetry. Our approach to symbols is profoundly affected by French symbolism, for which Baudelaire's Les Corréspondences serves nicely as a manifesto: the living columns of nature allow only confused words to emerge, "comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent I dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité I vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté" (like distant echoes that dwindle in the distance / in a deep, dark unity, / vast as the night and brightness).

Only then can one say with Mallarmé "une fleur" and not decide on what the word should summon up for us, because that will be only the very absence, a pregnant absence, of all "flowerness," and therefore everything and nothing, and we will sit in a daze asking ourselves endlessly what is meant by "le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui. "

But at this point objects no longer exist, whether they are emblems, mysterious figures, or isolated words that have symbolic value in themselves. Not even Mallarmé's flower would be that were it not inserted into his strategy of the blank page. The symbolic becomes an effect of meaning produced by the text, and as such any image, word, or object can assume the status of a symbol.

What semiotic key can be offered, not for interpreting, but for identifying the textual strategy that I have decided to call the symbolic mode?

One suggestion was given to us some time ago, by a passionate and necessarily determined seeker after second meanings: Saint Augustine. When something in scripture appears semantically understandable but seems to us out of place, excessive, inexplicably emphatic, that is where we have to seek a hidden second meaning. Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there. This something is not a metaphor, because otherwise it would have gone against common sense, it would have polluted the stark purity of the degree zero of writing. It is not allegory, because it does not refer to any heraldic code. It exists, it is there, it does not disturb us that it is there, at most it might slow down our reading, but it is the surplus that it represents, its blameless incongruity, its presence looming so large in the economy of the text, that makes us suppose that its placement means it may be saying something else as well.

It is this figure's superfluity, its gratuity, that makes it totemic. It is the question it inspires in us ("Why are you here, and at this particular point?") that forces us to this interrogation that will elicit no answer. This is one of the rare cases when it is not our deconstructive hubris but the very will of the text that invites us to drift this way.

Why does Montale have to spend a good sixty "Old Lines" to tell us in the poem of that name how a horrible moth with its sharp beak ate through the thin fibers of a lampshade, insanely fluttering its wings over the papers on the table? It is the very irrelevance of the experience that makes it totemic, " efu per sempre / con le cose che chiudono in un giro / sicuro come il giorno, e la memoria / in se le cresce" (and it was forever / one with those things that close in a circle / as certain as the day, and are enhanced by memory).

Why, after warning us that he intends to show us something different from our shadow at morning striding behind us, or our shadow at evening rising to meet us, does Eliot tell us in The Waste Land (and it is up to us to determine whether the sense of these lines is literal or metaphorical): "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"? In this example the symbol exceeds the very powers of the metaphor. This handful of dust could certainly be a metaphor for many things, but traditionally, through association, it is for failure. How many times in our life have we ended up with nothing but a handful of dust, and we have said so using this very idiom? But is it the fear announced and produced by this that Eliot wants to evoke? Failure disappoints, hurts, and diminishes us, but it does not frighten us, since it no longer contains anything unexpected. That handful of dust stands for something else there; perhaps it has been there since the big bang, and if it is someone's failure it is that of the Demiurge. Or perhaps not; perhaps it is the epiphany of a universe without a big bang and without a Demiurge, the proof of our living-for-death (but then The Waste Land was written five years before Heidegger's Being and Time).

Epiphany: there, I've said it. Basically the Joycean concept of epiphany is the most secular, or most religious (when with Barilli it becomes "materialistic ecstasy"), version of the symbolic mode. Something appears, and we know that it is an apparition, otherwise it would not be so out of place, and yet we do not know what it is revealing to us. A symbol is an epiphany with Magi whose origins and destination we do not know, nor whom they have come to adore. The stable at Bethlehem is empty, or occupied by, let's say, an enigmatic object, a dagger, a black box, a glass ball with snow falling inside on the Madonna of Oropa, or a fragment of a railway timetable. And yet it flashes, at least for those of us who accept its invitation to the superfluous.

Returning to The Waste Land: Why does it say at a certain point, "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!'"? Because Eliot and Stetson had been together at Mylae? Because last year Stetson planted a corpse in his garden, and now it has started to sprout? Why does he have to keep the dog "far hence"?

Roberto Cotroneo, in his book Se una mattina d'estate un bambino (Milan: Frassinelli, 1994), attempts an explanation: of course, who else wore a Stetson but Pound? Why not Mylae when, after this first defense of the West, in order to exorcize Carthaginian power Rome introduced the cult of the Phrygian goddess, which was followed by the coming together of the two worlds, and fertility rites? Certainly, this reading is legitimate, and authorized by Eliot himself, since he begins his notes with a refer enee to Miss Weston. But is that the end of the story? Certainly not. The unwanted appearance of Stetson continues to disturb us, and in any case a few lines before this Eliot gives us the sign that he is fully entering the symbolic mode. He has just mentioned the fact that Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours "with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine," and at this point he inserts one of the few hermetic notes to his poem. Commenting on this line 68, he says: "A phenomenon which I have often noticed."

A sublime and totally superfluous observation. Why of all the events of that particular London, of that unreal city where a crowd flowed, so many that he did not think death had undone so many, where each man fixed his eyes before his feet, does Eliot have to tell us that he frequently observed that particular phenomenon, as though it were a Kantian noumenon?

And we readers, what are we meant to do? Eliot tells us immediately, borrowing an insult that lies at the origin of symbolism's poetics: "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!" By translating the vocative from French to English, he has decontextualized the address. Now it means something else. We have to ask why Stetson has appeared so suddenly, whether he is just a hat, and why we are hypocritically guilty of his arrival.

Note that once more the name Stetson is not a symbol in and of itself. It becomes one because of the context. There is an unjustified focus on it.

Nor must we think that incongruity equals lack of internal logic, or that gratuitousness means frivolity. Sometimes the symbolic mode exhibits its own rigid, though perhaps paranoid, logic, and the symbol is solid, geometric, and heavy, like the galactic obelisk that appears at the beginning of2001: A Space Odyssey.

Nor must we think that a symbol has to be something fleeting, an image barely alluded to, appearing in the text like a brief glimpse. If for Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit— "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!"), nothing is merely suggested in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"; on the contrary, everything is described in extraordinary detail. Almost like an engineering treatise, or a legal exchange with a Talmudic flavor, the story constructs its "celibate machine," and it is the entire description taken as a whole, extending page after page, that drives us to ask the reason for that presence. Not why it is there—for it is there, and that is enough—but rather what is the overall sense of this theater of cruelty. And we will continue to ask ourselves until the end of our lives, because any allegorization of the symbol would only lead us to an obvious truth, would only tell us what we already wanted to know.

And now I come to the second part of my paper. This may seem contrary to our most cherished ideas, but all the centuries that have spoken to us about symbols knew little of the symbolic mode. Perhaps that was what the pilgrims at the temple of the god at Delphi were seeking, where the oracle neither says nor hides things but only vaguely alludes. But after that point, in order to find a notion of symbol like the one we have been outlining over the millennia, to find the symbolic mode asserting itself as a conscious strategy, we have to come to the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps it was modernity that invented the notion of poetry, seeing that those who read Homer at the time or shortly afterward saw him as an encyclopedia of universal knowledge, and medieval readers used Virgil the way Nostradamus would be used later. Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of a truth we no longer seek in religion.

Can this be enough? It will satisfy only those who have a cold awareness of the insignificance of the universe, a fervent will for redemption through the question, not through the supine acceptance of the answer.

Is this the attitude that distinguishes our times? No, and please allow me this moralistic conclusion. As soon as our age discovered the symbolic mode, it accepted only two refinements of its legacy.

The first, a learned and refined version, is that there is a deep sense concealed everywhere, that every discourse uses the symbolic mode, that every utterance is constructed along the isotopy of the unsaid, even when it is as simple as, "It's raining today." This is today's deconstructionist heresy, which seems to assume that a divinity or malign subconscious made us talk always and only with a second meaning, and that everything we say is inessential because the essence of our discourse lies elsewhere, in a symbolic realm we are often unaware of. Thus the symbolic diamond, which was meant to flash in the dark and dazzle us at sudden but ideally very rare moments, has become a neon strip that pervades the texture of every discourse. This is too much of a good thing.

It is not a bad interpretative strategy if interpreting means accumulating qualifications for university positions. But if everyone always says what he did not mean to say, we are all always saying the same thing. The symbolic mode no longer exists as a supreme linguistic strategy; we all speak indirectly, imprecisely, constantly using symbols because we are sick with language. Where there is no recognizable rule there cannot even be deviation from the norm. We all speak in poetry, we all reveal something, even when we are just saying that we will pay the insurance bill on Tuesday. What a curse, living in a world so damnably orphic, where there is no room for the language of the man in the street. In a world where the man in the street cannot speak, even the poet has to remain silent.

The second heresy is to be found in the information world, which, accustomed as it is now to conspiracies, coded phrases, half-spoken words, alliances promised then canceled, and whispers of divorce that are immediately denied, seeks a secret meaning in every event and in every expression. This is the curse of the contemporary writer, something I don't want to speak about since I do not want to talk about my own personal experiences; but I will construct a model of him based on the experience of a writer from the past who I imagine facing todays critics or journalists.

Let us say this writer is Leopardi, and let us invent his Dialogo tra il Poeta e un Facitore di Rotocalchi (Dialogue between the Poet and a Magazine Editor)...

"Signor Leopardi, the fact that you very briefly (for about fifteen lines) conducted a certain discourse on a hill where you reflected on the infinite is very stimulating and intriguing. Why did you call the hill 'ermo'(deserted)? Allow me to say that you were obviously alluding to the mutilation of the Herms, the incident which placed Alcibiades in conflict with the Athenian government, as though you were clearly, or at least up to a point, talking about the conflict which has seen left-wing politicians lining up against Forza Italia..."

"Not at all, I called the hill 'ermo because I indulged in the taste for archaism, and I admit that this is the worst line of that idyll; but the hill was certainly dear to me, because I was born near there."

"And why do you imagine 'the most profound rest'? Do not try to tell me that this is not a clear and explicit allusion to the current political situation, the anxiety of the markets, and the uncertain fate of the budget bill."

"Look, I wrote 'L'infinito' between the spring and autumn of 1819, so I could not have alluded to your political situation. Allow a poet to dream, on top of a hill, deserted almost by accident, but in a totally literal way: there is no allegory, and just four rather modest metaphors: the profound rest (but even your own Lakoff would say that spatialization is an everyday way of making metaphors), the dead seasons (which is almost a mixed metaphor), the drowning of my thoughts, and the shipwreck in a sea that is not a sea ... But as for the rest of it, there is no symbol and no allegory. Poetry does not fade into rhetoric, nor rhetoric into a legal speech ... I was there that day, and I suddenly said to myself: 'Mamma mia, the infinite...' Perhaps the only symbolic element lies in the very fact that I did this even though there was no need to. But do not try to decode this. Let my moment of weakness be, just as it is, read the poem again, and then follow any line you like in your reply."

"Oh come on, my little Count, you can't pull the wool over our eyes. Three years, just three years after the Congress of Vienna, you are going on about timeless abandons, while Europe is in the process of becoming what it is ... Will you at least allow us to read your text for what it really says?"

That is the end of my little game. Incapable as we are of finding or identifying a symbol where it actually exists, infected by the culture of suspicion and conspiracy, we look for it even where it does not exist as a textual mode. Or where, at best, not every single feature but rather the text taken as a whole, its unavoidable and open unintentionality, which makes it appear when nobody would have expected it, becomes a symbol, if you like, of the human condition.

In actual fact the world of the mass media does not go looking for symbols, because it has lost the capacity and talent for doing so. Deprived of a God to allude to, we seek allegories everywhere, mysterious connections between the stabbing of two girls (when statistics tell us that to find two murders with similarities in the space of ten years is absolutely normal), short circuits flashing in the dull texture of everyday life. And as a result we are losing the gift for identifying the symbolic mode where it does lurk.

Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull. The lust for a second sense ruins our ability to see second or even one thousand senses where they actually exist, or have been placed.

We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: "a rose is a rose is a rose."

The symbolic mode exists at that point where we finally will have lost the desire to decode at any cost.

Revised version of a paper given at a conference on Symbolism, held in Siena in 1994 (published in Sandro Briosi, ed., "Symbolism," special issue of L'immagine riflessa, n.s. IV, 1, [>]). This revised version is dedicated to Sandro Briosi, who was still with us at the time.