On Literature

ON STYLE

From the way it first appeared at the beginning of the Latin world right down to contemporary stylistics and aesthetics, the term "style" exhibits a history that is anything but uniform. Even though there is an original nucleus that can be identified, which means that from the word "stilus"—the instrument from which it derives by metonymy—style becomes synonymous with "writing" and therefore with the way one expresses oneself in literary terms, it is nevertheless true that this way of writing is understood in different ways and with different intensities over the course of the centuries.

For instance, already in the early years of its usage, the term indicates literary genres that are highly codified (the sublime, middle, low style; the Attic, Asian, or Rhodian style; the tragic, elegiac, or comic style). In this, as in so many other cases, style is a way of writing dictated by rules, usually very prescriptive rules; and it was accompanied by the idea of precepts, imitation, and close adherence to models. Usually we think that it is only with mannerism and the baroque that the idea of originality and genius becomes associated with the notion of style—and not only in the arts, but also in life, since with the Renaissance idea of " sprezzata disinvoltura" (effortless nonchalance) the man of style will be he who has the wit, courage (and social standing) to behave in violation of the rules—or to show that he has the privilege to break them.

Nevertheless, even Buffon's famous saying, "Le style est l'homme même," must be understood not in an individualistic sense at this stage but rather in the sense that style is human virtue.

The idea of a style that goes against the rules appears rather with Cesare Beccaria's Ricerca intorno alia natura dello stile (Inquiry into the Nature of Style), and reappears later in organicist theories of art, so that with Goethe style will emerge when the work acquires an original, complete, inimitable harmony of its own. Finally we arrive at the Romantic notion of genius (Leopardi himself will say that style is the particular manner or facility that is called originality). So much so that by the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the dandy and Decadence, the concept has turned 360 degrees, to the point where style is identical with bizarre originality, the contempt for all models; and it is from this source that the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde movements will emerge.

I would single out two authors for whom style is a distinctly semiotic concept, namely, Flaubert and Proust. For Flaubert style is a way of fashioning ones work, and certainly it is inimitable, but through it a way of thinking of and seeing the world is revealed. For Proust style becomes a sort of intelligence that is transformed or incorporated into the subject matter, so much so that, for Proust, Flaubert's innovative use of the past definite, the perfect, the present participle, and the imperfect renews our vision of things almost as much as Kant.

From these sources derives the idea of style as a "way of giving form," which lies at the heart of Luigi Pareyson's aesthetics. And it is clear that at this stage, if the work of art is form, the way of giving form involves more than just lexis or syntax (as can happen in what is called stylistics), and includes every semiotic strategy deployed both on the surface and in the depths of a text's nervous system. To the realm of style (as a way of giving form) belongs not only the use of language (or of colors, or of sounds, according to the semiotic systems or universes used) but also the way of deploying narrative structures, portraying characters, and articulating points of view.

Let us take a passage from Proust's "Observations on Style," where he claims that Stendhal was less careful about style than Baudelaire. Proust suggests that Stendhal "wrote badly," and this is an obvious point, if by style we mean lexis and syntax:

When he describes a landscape as "those enchanted places," "those delightful spaces," or one of his heroines as "that adorable woman," "that fascinating woman," he did not want to be any more precise. He was even so devoid of precision as to write: "She wrote him an endless letter." However, if one considers the huge, unconscious framework that is covered by the conscious ensemble of ideas to be an integral part of style, there is undoubtedly precision in Stendhal. I would take great pleasure in showing you that every time Julien Sorel and Fabrizio del Dongo forget their vain cares in order to live a life that is disinterested and voluptuous, they are always in some elevated place (whether it be Julien's or Fabrizio's prison or the Abbé Blanès's observatory).^*

By this time speaking of style means discussing how the work of art is made, showing how it gradually emerged (even though sometimes this is only through the purely theoretical progression of a generative process), explaining why it offers itself to a certain type of reception, and how and why it arouses this reception. And, for those who are still interested in pronouncing judgments as to aesthetic value, it is only by identifying, tracking down, and laying bare the supreme workings of style that we are able to say why a given work is beautiful, why it has enjoyed different kinds of reception in the course of time, and why, although it follows models and sometimes even precepts that are scattered far and wide in the sea of intertextuality, it has been able to gather those legacies and make them blossom in such a way as to give life to something original. Only then will we be able to say why, although each of the different works by one artist aspires to an inimitable originality, it is possible to detect the personal style of that artist in each of these works.

If this is the case, I believe two points must be made here: one, that a semiotics of the arts is nothing other than searching for and laying bare the workings of style; and two, that semiotics represents the most advanced form of stylistics, and the model for all criticism.

Having said this, I do not really need to add anything further. Everyone remembers how much light has been shed on texts (already loved by all, though in an obscure way) by certain pronouncements by the Russian formalists, by Jakobson, by narratologists and analysts of poetic discourse. But we really are living in obscure times, at least in Italy, where one hears with increasing frequency polemical voices accusing semiotic studies (which they sometimes also call, with pejorative connotation, formalist or structuralist studies) of being guilty of a decline in criticism, of being pseudomathematical discourses, full of illegible diagrams, in whose mush the flavor of literature evaporates, and where the ecstasy to which the reader succumbs is plotted out as in double-entry bookkeeping—where the je ne sais quoi and the sublime, which were supposed to be the supreme effects of art, evaporate in an orgy of theories that crudely abuse, insult, humiliate, and crush the text, removing its freshness, magic, and capacity for ecstasy.

We must therefore ask ourselves what is meant by criticism (of art or literature), and for the sake of convenience I will restrict myself to dealing with literary criticism.

I think that first and foremost we must distinguish between discussing literary works and literary criticism. One can have the most varied discussions of literary works, and a work can be taken as a field of sociological inquiry, a document in the history of ideas, a psychological or psychiatric report, or as a pretext for a series of moral considerations. There are cultures, above all the Anglo-Saxon world, where—at least until the advent of the New Criticism—the discussion of literary works was conducted above all in moral terms. Now all these approaches are legitimate in and of themselves, except that as soon as they come into play, they presume, imply, suggest, or refer to a critical or aesthetic judgment that someone else, or perhaps even the author himself in another work, already pronounced.

This kind of discussion is the discourse of criticism in its proper sense, and it can be articulated in three ways—although we must be clear about the fact that these three ways are "critical genres," ideal types of criticism, and it is often the case that, under the aegis of one genre or mode, someone provides illustrious examples of another genre, or mixes, to good or bad effect, the three types together.

Let us call the first type the "review," where one tells readers about a book they have not yet read. A good review can also turn to more complex modes, such as the other two types, which I shall discuss later, but it is inevitably linked to immediacy, to the brief space that intervenes between a work appearing, then being read and subjected to a written verdict. In the best cases, a review can restrict itself to giving its readers a summary idea of a work that they have not yet read, and then imposing on them the critic's judgment (of taste). Its function is clearly to inform (it says that a work has been published that is roughly as described) and to offer a reliable diagnosis; the reader believes the reviewer just as he trusts the doctor who makes him say "Ah," and then immediately identifies the beginnings of bronchitis and prescribes a cough mixture. Such a diagnostic review has nothing to do with the chemical analyses or exploratory probes that nowadays the patient himself can follow on a television screen, and during which he can see and understand what the problem is, and why his body is reacting in that manner. In a review (as in the doctor's home visit) the reader does not see the work, he only hears it spoken of by a third party.

The second critical mode (the history of literature) discusses texts that the reader does know or at least ought to know, since he has previously heard people talk about them. These texts are often only mentioned, or sometimes summarized, maybe with the help of some typical quotation, and are then grouped together, assigned to various schools, and organized in chronological sequence. A history of literature can be just a dreary manual, but occasionally it becomes at the same time a survey of the works and a history of ideas, as in De Sanctis's History of Italian Literature. In the best cases, historical criticism pushes the reader toward a final and comprehensive understanding of the work, establishes the reader's horizon of expectations and his tastes, and opens up infinite panoramas.

Both these modes can be practiced in two different ways, which, according to Croce, can be defined as the "artifex additus artifici" (an artist writing about an artist) approach, or the "philosophus additus artifici" (a philosopher writing about an artist) approach. In the first case, rather than explaining the work to us, the critic provides us with a diary of his emotions in reading it, and unconsciously seeks to outdo in virtuosity the object of his humble devotion. Sometimes he succeeds—we know very well passages on literature that are finer, in a literary sense, than the literature they discuss, just as Proust's pages on bad music are of the highest musicality.

In the second approach the critic tries to show us, in the light of certain critical categories and criteria, why the work is beautiful. But in the case of a review he does not have sufficient space to tell us in depth how the work is made (and therefore to reveal to us the machinations of its style), while a history of literature has to maintain its analysis on a level of enforced generality. Unfortunately, it takes a hundred pages to lay bare the style of one page, and in a history of literature the proportions are inevitably the inverse.

Let us now come to the third mode, textual criticism. In it the critic has to assume that the reader knows nothing about the work, even if it is as well known as The Divine Comedy. He has to make the reader discover it for the first time. If the text is not brief enough to be quoted in its entirety, and subdivided into sections of prose or verse, he has to presume that the reader has access to it in some other way, since the goal of this discourse is to lead him, step by step, in the discovery of how the text has been put together and why it functions as it does. This discourse can be put forward as a confirmation ("now I will show you why everyone considers this to be a brilliant text"), as a revaluation, or as the destruction of a myth. The ways in which one can show how a text is put together (and why it is right that it is put together in this way, and how it could not be composed in any other way, and why it has to be considered as sublime precisely because it is composed in this way) can be countless. No matter how these discourses are articulated, such criticism cannot be anything other than a semiotic analysis of the text.

Consequently, if proper criticism is understanding and making others understand how a text is made, and if the review and the history of literature are unable to do this adequately, the only true form of criticism is a semiotic reading of the text.

Like proper criticism (which must lead to an understanding of the text in all its aspects and potential) the semiotic reading of a text possesses a quality that is usually and indeed inevitably missing in a critical review or history of literature: it does not prescribe the various ways in which the text can be pleasurable, but, rather, it shows us why the text can produce pleasure.

Because it has to make recommendations, a critical review cannot be exempt, except in cases of exceptional cowardice, from pronouncing a verdict on what the text says; historical criticism shows us at most that a work has enjoyed a varied and fluctuating critical fortune, and has aroused different responses. Textual criticism, by contrast, which is always semiotic even when it does not know it is, or even when it denies it is, fulfills that function which was admirably described by Hume in "Of the Standard of Taste," which cites a passage from Don Quixote:

Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it, and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a final taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favor of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.^*

My point is that proper criticism always has the last laugh, because it allows everyone to have his own pleasure, but it also shows the reason for that pleasure.

***

Of course, even textual criticism, carried out by a "philosophus additus artifici," can be aware of its own excesses, which thwart its very function. It will be useful to consider some errors of textual semiotics, which have occasionally caused the rejection syndromes I spoke of just now.

There is often confusion between "the semiotic theory of literature" and "criticism that is semiotically oriented." I refer you to an old debate from the 1960s, which began with the famous catalogue issued by the publisher II Saggiatore dedicated to "Structuralism and Criticism," a debate in which there were roughly two speaking positions, one represented by Segre, the other by Rosiello. To put it briefly, for the first option, linguistic theory was to be used to shed light on the individual work; for the second, the analysis of the individual work was to be used to shed light on the nature of language. Therefore, when the first option was at work, a group of theoretical assumptions would be used to shed light on an author's personal style, whereas in the case of the second option, the personal style was felt to be a deviation from the linguistic norm, which reinforced knowledge of the norm as such.

Now these two positions were and are equally legitimate. One can construct a theory of literature, and use individual works as documents, and one can read individual works in the light of a theory of literature, or, rather, in an attempt to make the very principles of a theory of literature emerge from the examination of individual works.

Let us take the example of one area of literary theory such as narratology, which treats texts as examples and not as objects of analysis. If the role of criticism of a narrative text is to understand that text better, what role does narratology have? First and foremost, its role is to create narratology, just as philosophy essentially is used to philosophize. It helps to understand how narrative texts function, whether they are good or bad. Secondly, it is useful to many disciplines (such as artificial intelligence, semantics, and psychology) in helping us understand how the totality of our experience is structured (maybe) always and in every case in the shape of "narrations": a narratological theory that was useful in understanding only how stories are told would not amount to very much, but if instead it teaches us how we organize our approach to the world in narrative sequences, then it is something more. Finally, it also teaches us to read better, and even (take the case of Calvino) to invent new forms of writing. So long as we know how to make it interact with a "natural" way of reading, that is to say with a critical reading that is not set in stone at the outset by certain narratological prejudices.

Now there are two ambiguities here, one of production and one of reception. The first is when the semiotician is not clear, or does not make clear, whether he is using the text to enrich his theory of narrative, or whether he is working with certain narratological categories in order to understand the particular text better. The second is when the reader (often prejudiced) takes as an exercise in criticism a discourse that was aimed instead at deriving general principles of narrativity from one or more individual texts. This would be like a psychologist who is interested in the motives that make someone kill reading a statistical essay on crime in the last twenty years and complaining that statistics have not provided an explanation of individual motivation.

We could restrict ourselves to saying to these prejudiced readers that narratological theories are of no use either to the reading or to the criticism of a text. We could say that they are simply protocols of multiple readings, and that they serve the same purpose as the theory of physics, which explains how bodies fall according to one single law without telling us whether this is good or bad, nor what the difference is between a stone falling from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and an unhappy lover plummeting from a wuthering height. We could say that their purpose is to understand not texts but the function of storytelling in its totality, and that they therefore seem more like a chapter in psychology or cultural anthropology than like a chapter in literary criticism.

And yet we would have to explain also that they have, in addition, and if nothing else, a pedagogical value. They are an instrument used by those who are teaching others to read, in order to instantly identify the crucial points to which the pupil's attention has to be drawn. And so, if nothing else, they would be useful for teaching people how to read. But since one has to teach the skill of reading even to those who are no longer illiterate, they are of use also to the mature reader, the critic, and even the writer, in order to generate reliable observation.

In short, we really need to make people understand that although a dictionary is not enough to make a good writer, nevertheless good writers often consult dictionaries. Without claiming thereby that the Zingarelli dictionary and Leopardi's Canti belong to the same kind of discourse.

And yet, perhaps also through the semioticians' own fault, the enemies of textual semiotics cannot distinguish between the two genres of discourse (of textual semiotics and a textual criticism that is semiotically oriented). And in confusing them they lose the sense of the third type of discourse I spoke about, the only one that can help us understand the way a text reveals how it has been given form.

When preconstituted theory precedes the reading of a text, we often mean to lay bare the tools of inquiry, which are already known, in order to show that we are familiar with them, and that we have been ingenious in constructing them, instead of possessing the artistry to conceal the art, and to make what the text finally reveals to us come directly out of the text and not out of the pyrotechnics of theoretical metalanguage. It is obvious that this method of proceeding scares the reader who wants to know something about the text, and not about the metalanguage that establishes codes of reading.

Since a textual theory sketches out the constants, while textual criticism should highlight the variables, it often happens that, having realized that the world of intertextuality is made up of constants and variables of invention, and that a work of literature is a miracle of invention that keeps at bay and conceals the variables on which it nevertheless plays, semiotic inquiry is reduced to the discovery of the same constants in every text, and thus loses sight of the inventions.

As a result of this we find people researching the structure of the Tarot cards in Calvino (as though the author had not already revealed everything on this subject to us), or formulaic exercises on life and death, identified in every text, which as a result reduces Hamlet to "to be / not to be," "not wanting to be / wanting not to be." In these cases, we should note, the procedure may be excellent in didactic terms, and may even succeed in showing how, whereas all of us struggle each day between wanting to be and wanting not to be, Shakespeare presents an eternal dilemma in a new way. But it is precisely from this "novelty" that our discourse should start, and narratological leveling is only a preamble to discovering the "peaks" of art.

If literary theory exists to uncover the constants in different texts, when the critic applies the theory he should not limit himself to finding the same invariables in every text (for doing so goes no further than the work of the theorist), but if anything he should start from the awareness of the constants to see how the text calls them into question, makes them interact, and covers this skeleton with different skin and muscles in each different case. The drama of Oedipus's not wanting to know in Sophocles' play is given not by this modal structure (which can be found even in the most banal scenes where the wife who has been betrayed says to her gossipy female friend: "Please, I don't want to know") but by the strategy through which the revelation is delayed, by what is at stake (parricide and incest, as opposed to a banal example of conjugal betrayal), and by the surface of the discourse.

Finally, semiotic discourse often fails to distinguish between "manner" and "style," which Hegel identifies in the first case as a repetitive obsession in the author who always continually writes the same way, and in the second case as the capacity constantly to outdo himself. And yet it is textual semiotics that is the only critique capable of bringing out such differences.

If numerous different excesses can be imputed to textual semiotics, what should we say about the defects of those who oppose it? It is certainly not our job to complain about the orgasms we are made to witness by the " artifices additi artifici," who invariably provide us with a diary of their moments of languor as readers, so much so that one of their passages dedicated to author A and republished by mistake in a book dedicated to author B would go unnoticed by both editor and reviewer.

In fact, we could leave these orgasmic critics to their own delights, which do not harm anyone, and after a while show how those who are so orgasmic in words are in fact very unlibertine in reality, and abhor alterity, since in every one of their critical embraces they are simply making love to themselves. And we could also leave to their own devices those who want to write social criticism, or the history of literary institutions, or criticism of good and bad behavior, all of which are often useful and praiseworthy.

Except that in Italy, in the last ten years, there has been a kind of competition to see who can cast the fiercest anathemas against what they call "formalist-structural-semiotic" readings, as if the latter—and some people have even claimed this—were responsible for Tangentopolis, the Mafia, the collapse of the whining Left, and the rise of the triumphant Right.

This could become an embarrassing incident, in the sense that these complaints could lead the young, including young teachers, astray, diverting them from a number of directions people had taken in the last twenty years, and to good effect.

If you go into the ground floor of the Presses Universitaires bookstore in Paris and go to the second table on the right, you will find scores of manuals for all kinds of schools and at all levels on how to write an " analyse de texte." Even the very pioneers of structuralism in the 1960s have been forced to rediscover not the Russian formalists or the Prague school but the legions of good old Anglo-Saxon empiricist critics and theorists, who for decades had analyzed in depth the strategies of point of view, of narrative montage, of actants and subjects in action (as in Kenneth Burke).

My generation, which was the first post-Croce generation, delighted in the revelations of Wellek and Warren, in the readings of Dámaso Alonso and Spitzer. We began to understand that reading was not just a picnic where one gathered here and there, almost by chance, the hawthorns and buttercups of "poesia," which were hidden amid the manure of structural fillers. Rather, one looked at the text as a whole, as something animated with life at every level. It seemed that even our culture had learned this.

Why is it now forgetting all this? Why are young people now being taught that to discuss a text they do not need a strong theoretical repertoire, and a capacity to examine all levels? Why are they being taught that the long and lasting labors of a critic like Contini were damaging (just because—and this is true—he overrated Pizzuto), whereas the only ideal critic (now famous again!) is one with a free mind that reacts freely to the occasional solicitations provided by the text?

Personally, I see in this tendency a reflection of other sectors of communication: criticism is being leveled down to the rhythms and rate of investment of other activities that have been proved to guarantee a profit. Why bother with reviewing, which forces one to read the book, if it sells more copies of a paper to have the literary section comment on the interview given by an author to a rival paper? Why put Hamlet on television, as the much-criticized TV of the 1960s used to do, when you can obtain higher ratings by putting on the same talk show, and treating the village idiot and the academic idiot on the same level? And why on earth read a text year after year if you can achieve the ecstasy of the sublime by chewing a few leaves, without wasting your nights and days discovering the sublimity of leaves in the sublime workings of chlorophyll in photosynthesis?

For this is the message that is propagated daily by the high priests of the New Post-Antique Criticism: they repeatedly tell us that whoever knows about chlorophyll and photosynthesis will for the rest of his life be insensitive to the beauty of a leaf, that whoever knows anything about the circulation of the blood will never be able to make his heart palpitate with love. And this is totally wrong, and we must say it and repeat it from the rooftops.

This is a life-or-death battle between those who love texts and those who are simply in a hurry.

But I shall allow an unimpeachable authority on the matter to speak, one so wise and reliable that we do not even know his real name, which should win over to his side the supporters, who are now everywhere, of wisdom that is traditional, unknown, and occult, or those sophisticated publishers who only publish one-book authors or authors who have not even managed that. We know this authority as Pseudo-Longinus, of the first century A.D., and we are inclined to attribute to him the invention of a concept that has always been the standard for those who proclaim that art cannot be discussed because it arouses ineffable emotions; we can record the ecstasy it produces, and at best we can retell the experience in other words, but it cannot be explained.

The concept is that of the Sublime, which in certain epochs of the history of criticism and aesthetics has been identified with the specific effect of art. And indeed, Longinus (or whoever he was) states immediately that "the Sublime does not lead its listeners to persuasion, but drives them to ecstasy." When the Sublime emerges from the act of reading (or listening) "in some sense it scatters everything, like a bolt of lightning."

The only thing is that at this point (the only point that has become famous throughout the centuries, and we are only at the end of the first section) Longinus wonders whether the Sublime can be thought about, and notes immediately that many people in his unfortunate times believe that it is an innate skill, a natural talent. But Longinus believes that natural talent can be preserved and made to bear fruit only by method, in other words by artistry, and thus he proceeds with his enterprise, which, as many people have forgotten or never known, is to define semiotic strategies that produce in the reader or listener the effect of Sublimity.

And there is no Russian formalist, no Prague-school or French structuralist, no Belgian rhetorician or German "Stilkritiker" who has spent as much energy as Longinus (even though only over a dozen pages or so) in exploring the strategies of the Sublime, and showing how they work. I mean showing how they work as they come into being and are then arranged on the linear surface of the text, reflecting the deepest workings of style back toward the readers eyes.

And in fact Longinus, Pseudo or not, lists the five sources of the sublime: the capacity "to conceive noble thoughts," the ability "to display and arouse noble passions," the way "to create appropriate rhetorical figures," ingenuity in nobility of expression through "the choice of lexis and the accurate use of figures," and lastly the "general overall arrangement of the text." These are the sources of a dignified and elevated style. Because above anything else Longinus knew, against those who in his time identified the semiotic passion of the Sublime with the physical experience of excitement, that "there are some passions which are very far from the Sublime, and rather squalid, such as lamentation, dejection and fear, and at the other extreme many examples of a Sublime devoid of emotion."

And we can see Longinus embark on his search for the sublime photosynthesis that produces the feeling of Sublimity: he shows how in order to produce an effect of grandeur in describing the Divine, Homer gives us the sense of a cosmic distance by way of a brilliant hypotyposis, and conveys the sense of this cosmic expanse through a prolonged description of physical distances; elsewhere he sees how Sappho conveys interior pathos just by bringing to the foreground a battle that involves the eyes, tongue, skin, and ears; or he contrasts a shipwreck in Homer with one by Aratus of Soloi, where the latter in a sense anesthetizes the imminence of death with a simple choice of metaphor ("Only a thin bark keeps Hades at bay"), whereas in Homer Hades is not mentioned, and for that very reason looms even larger. We see him studying strategies for amplification and hypotyposis, exploring the whole panoply of figures, asyndeta, sorites, and hyperbata, and noting how conjunctions weaken the discourse, polyptoton reinvigorates it, and shifting tenses dramatize it.

But one should not think of this as nothing more than a series of stylistic analyses. Longinus deals with the opposition and interchange of characters, the shift from one verbal tense to another, the way the author addresses the reader, or identifies himself with the character, and examines the grammar of these narrative manipulations. He does not ignore periphrases and circumlocutions, idiomatic phrases, metaphors, similes, and hyperboles. It is all one huge stylistic-rhetorical machine—of narrative structures, of voices, looks, and tenses—which is seen at work, analyzing texts and comparing them, in order to reveal and make us admire the strategy of the Sublime.

It seems that only the simple-minded fall into excitement, while Longinus knows the chemistry of their passions, and for that reason enjoys even greater pleasure.

In section 39 Pseudo-Longinus sets out to deal with "the compositional harmony in the arrangement of words," a harmony that is not only a natural positioning aimed at producing persuasion and pleasure but also an astonishing tool for achieving sublimity and pathos. Longinus knows (because of the ancient Pythagorean tradition) that the flute generates passions in listeners, reducing them to a state of frenzy like so many Corybants, even though they are not musical experts; he knows that the sounds of the lyre, which on their own are devoid of sense, produce an effect of enchantment. But he knows that the flute obtains its effects "by giving a certain movement to the rhythm," and the lyre acts on the soul because of its "varying modulations" and the blending of its harmonies. What he wants to explain is not the effect, which is obvious to everyone, but the grammar of its production.

It is in this context that, when he moves on to verbal harmony, "which captures the soul along with the ear," he finds himself analyzing a phrase of Demosthenes that seems to him not just miraculous but sublime: "This decree made the danger looming over the city move on, like a cloud." And he adds:

Here the concept is as noble as the rhythm. The entire sentence is expressed in dactylic rhythm, the most noble rhythm and the one most suitable for producing grandeur, and it is for this reason that it is typical of the heroic meter, the finest we know. Try to move the words from their present position to anywhere you like: "This decree made, like a cloud, the danger looming over the city move on," or try to get rid of just one syllable, saying "moved it on, like a cloud," and you will understand how much the harmony is consonant with its sublimity. In fact the expression "like a cloud" (hosper nephos) has a long first foot, with four beats; but if you eliminate one syllable and have "like cloud" (hos nephos), you instantly mutilate its grandeur by this reduction. On the other hand, if you add a syllable, saying "made the danger move on, as though it were (hosperei) a cloud," you are saying the same thing but you do not have the same rhythmic cadence, because by lengthening the final syllables the spark of the sublime is weakened and diluted.

Even without checking this against the original Greek, the spirit of this analysis is clear. Pseudo-Longinus is performing textual semiotics. And he is performing an act of criticism—at least according to the canons of his time—and explaining to us why we find something sublime, and what would need to be changed in the body of the text to lose that effect. And so, right from the most distant origins (for if we go back even further, to Aristotle's Poetics, we find the same thing), people knew how to read a text, and how one must not be afraid of close reading, nor of a metalanguage that sometimes seems terroristic (for Longinus's time his was no less terroristic than the metalanguage that terrorizes many people today).

Consequently, we have to remain faithful to our origins, as regards both the concept of style and that of true criticism, as well as the concept of analyses of textual strategies. What the best semiotics of style has achieved and continues to achieve is the same as what our predecessors accomplished. Our only commitment is, by serious and continued work, without giving in to any blackmail, to humiliate those who are our inferiors.

Final address at the Convegno dell'Associazione Italian di Studi Semiotici on Lo stile—Gli stili, held in Feltre, in September 1995.