|
|
By
Domenico Pacitti I
segni latenti: Scrittura come virtualità scenica in King Lear
[Latent Signs: Writing as Scenic Virtuality in King Lear]
by Paola Gullì Pugliatti. Published in 1976 by G. D'Anna, Messina
& Florence, Italy, 280 pages. Shakespeare
the Historian by Paola Gullì Pugliatti. Published in 1996 by St.
Martin's Press, New York, USA, $39.95, 265 pages, ISBN 0 312 12840
1. Each of Paola Pugliatti’s two books on Shakespeare
is set within a semiotic framework, the first more firmly than the
second. Together they provide Italian students of English
literature with two excellent alternative ways of perverting
Shakespeare. Divided by a span of twenty years, they also help
illustrate Mrs Pugliatti’s own intellectual development, or
regression, over the same period. The first of Mrs Pugliatti’s books is, as the title
indicates, concerned with latent signs. Before proceeding any
further, we should first point out to our non-Italian readers that
Italians’ constant preoccupation with latent signs and the
concomitant shady, underhand aspects of everyday life in Italy is
an unfortunate national ailment. Particularly marked in Sicily –
perhaps significantly Mrs Pugliatti’s place of origin (she is
the daughter of a former rector of the University of Messina) –
the phenomenon is known as dietrologia. However, while it no doubt pays to occupy oneself
with such extra-theatrical Machiavellian plots and sub-plots in
Italy and especially within Italian academia, elsewhere and in
more “normal” countries the search for such ulterior or latent
motives in a person’s words or actions is usually quite
unwarranted. Readers should know that semiotics is basically
concerned with the nature and role of signs and with the
hypothetical laws governing such signs and that the subject is
seen by its supporters as deriving from the work of the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the US logician C.S.
Peirce (1839-1914) and the US philosopher Charles Morris
(1901-1979). Semiotic theory was more recently developed in France
by Roland Barthes before being imported to Italy by Umberto Eco. Within this framework Mrs Pugliatti takes it upon
herself to act as a sort of interpreter for Shakespeare – the bard
being evidently unable to communicate directly – by decodifying
the disabled master’s words for the benefit of those readers and
spectators who do not possess the same abilities of decodification
as Mrs Pugliatti. The book thus falls squarely into the sausage factory
category, which is popular among academics who have nothing
substantive to say but who for some reason require to amass
pseudo-scientific publications. The idea is as follows: take a
semiotic framework, feed in the mincemeat or ill-fated text, in
this case King Lear, and boast credit for the sausages that
are automatically produced. Mrs Pugliatti’s wild goose chase begins with her
construal of latent signs as what she terms “scenic
virtuality”. She defines this dubious undertaking “semiotic
analysis”. The text of King Lear that has been handed
down to us is, according to Mrs Pugliatti, defective in that it is
“merely verbal”. In due course Mrs Pugliatti makes the momentous
discovery that this play and others exist both as written texts
and as theatrical performances. Words, says Mrs Pugliatti, may be
written or spoken and the theatre may be used for the purposes of
persuasion. Semiotics, Mrs Pugliatti concludes, reveals much
deception and simulation in Shakespeare. In the course of her decodifications, Mrs Pugliatti
refers several times to a certain Mr Alessandro Serpieri, a professore
of English literature at the University of Florence. Mr Serpieri,
who at the time seemed to fulfil the role of a sort of mentor to
Mrs Pugliatti, had himself previously subjected Shakespeare to
similar semiotic mutilation. In fact, his 1973 book on “deep
structures” in T.S. Eliot perhaps marks the start of the Italian
wild goose chase for “deep structures” in the wake of Noam
Chomsky. Unfortunately this and other runaway trains on a
hiding to nothing had crucially misconstrued Chomsky’s “deep
structure”, failing to understand that the term was a technical
one in context and therefore irrelevant to Mrs Pugliatti and the
Italian bandwagon. Such irresponsible Italian wild goose chases
were correctly noted and denounced by Umberto Eco in his 1991 The
Limits of Interpretation, the title being fairly
self-explanatory. The second of Mrs Pugliatti’s two publications is
less semiotically dictated than the first but shares the same
grotesque, baroque-style language
– the tell-tale customary Italian academic camouflage for
unclear thinking and lack of substantive points. Mrs Pugliatti’s unabashed thesis here is that
Shakespeare was in his historical plays rewriting history, lo and
behold precisely along the same sort of leftwing progressive lines
that Mrs Pugliatti herself happens to advocate. Support for her hypothesis comes in the form of a
number of erroneous factual assumptions presented without adequate
support or grounding. Mrs Pugliatti’s indigestible and
undigested flood of confused writing also reveals her acutely
inadequate knowledge of the relevant contemporary scholarship. Mrs Pugliatti adduces Shakespeare’s perspectival
method of presentation as the key to understanding his subversive
history-writing tendencies. But this argument is easily seen to be
fallacious since the perspectival method might just as easily have
been employed to demonstrate the very opposite. Moreover, large
slices of material that Mrs Pugliatti seems to want to present as
original actually appear rather familiar. Although there are points where Mrs Pugliatti seems
to revert to semiotics as a sort of safety net, the general
direction appears to be away from semiotics. Unfortunately this
process occurs in inverse proportion to Mrs Pugliatti’s
intellectual development and maturity. For the distinct impression
is that Mrs Pugliatti foists her own subversive and progressive
tendencies upon Shakespeare, thereby revealing her regression to a
state of adolescent narcissism. It is not clear whether this means that we should now
reconstrue Shakespeare as having been subversive in a Sicilian
manner and, if so, whether this would have made him pro- or
anti-Mafia. That would presumably depend on whether one viewed the
Sicilian Mafia as (latently or overtly) subversive of state
authority or as the island's status quo. The best medicine for Mrs Pugliatti is perhaps that
prescribed by D.H. Lawrence, a man who, like Shakespeare but
unlike Mrs Pugliatti, both had something worthwhile to say and
knew how to say it: “Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the
feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much
too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that
science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a
work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotions, and
nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and
form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of
books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and
mostly dull jargon. A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its
complexity and force. To do so, he must be a man of force and
complexity himself, which few critics are. A man with a paltry,
impudent nature will never write anything but paltry, impudent
criticism. And a man who is emotionally educated is rare as a
phoenix. The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the
more he is an emotional boor.” [From Reading and Response by
Domenico Pacitti, ETS, Pisa, 1986.] A celebrated champion of female equality, Lawrence
would no doubt have been happy to see his comments applied equally
well to women, including Sicilian women and Mrs Pugliatti. Paola Pugliatti currently holds a senior post in
English literature at the University of Florence's faculty of
letters. Note: This
review
was first
published by JUST
Book Reviews
on August 16 2004. |
