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WhytheNovelMatters.II
The Name of the Horse: Hard Times,
Semiotics, and the Supernatural
ROBERTL. CASERIO
Gradgrindians and circus people alike think language is and should be lim-
ited; the opponents turn out to have this common ground, which may well
predetermine the final reconciliation between Gradgrind and Sleary. Their
coming together ends with a shift of attention from the dancing horse to the
wonderful dog. Merrylegs has tracked down Sleary, because the dog wants
to inform the circus manager that old Jupe is dead. Sleary offers this fact to
Gradgrind in terms the latter can appreciate-that is, in a way which com-
bines emphasis on calculation with emphasis on the limited nature of linguis-
tic terms. So in his characteristic lisp Sleary says of Merrylegs' miraculous
doggedness:
"Whateveryou call it-and I'm bletht if I know what to call it ... it ith athton-
ithing...
"Thquire, I can take my oath, from my knowledge of that dog, that that man
[Jupe] wath dead-and buried-afore that dog come back to me. Joth'phine and
Childerth and me talked it over a long time, whether I thould write or not [to
Sissy]. But we agreed, 'No. There'thnothing comfortableto tell; why unthettle her
mind, and make her unhappy?' Tho, whether her father bathely dethertedher; or
whether he brokehith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him;
never will be known, now, Thquire, till-no, not till we know how the dogth findth
uth out! ...
"It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don't it, Thquire ... one, that
there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interethafter all, but thomething very
different; t'other, that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating,
whith thomehowor another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth
of the dogth ith!" (III, viii)
Is it possible that things so equivocalcan be said in such a univocal way? ... The
more openly [a metaphor] remains a figure of speech, the more it is a dissimilar
similitude and not literal, the more a metaphorreveals its truth. ("Third Day,"
"After Compline")
poor men cannot live without novels-a hobby-horse of an idea which might
not strike poor men as a claim of much value or interest.
By suggesting something politically suspect in Hard Times, semiotics abets
the traditional critical response to the novel. It has been argued repeatedly
that Hard Times' aesthetic virtues are embarrassed by its politics. Judged ad-
versely, Dickens' politics are said to be in effect no different from Bounder-
by's: he uses the novel to express his fear of working-class violence, and to
castigate labor for its rebelliousness. Accordingly, it is claimed, Dickens'
textile worker-hero Stephen is imagined by Dickens to be an idiot, whose idi-
ocy is exemplified by other members of Stephen's class. But as semiotics
abets this judgment, it offers us clearer grounds for why Dickens may have
used his novel to perpetrate reactionary political ideas. Dickens' Slearyism
was not consciously or even unconsciously cynical; according to semiotics,
Dickens was himself mystified by language, and passed on his mystifica-
tion-as William of Baskerville clearly would see-in the form of a repressive
political bias. And being blind to the true nature of signs and of language, of
their structures and operations, Dickens was blind to the nature of language's
effects on what Eco calls aesthetic inventions in general, novels among them.
Semiotics realizes that aesthetic inventions are especially blinding and
mystifying to their makers and audiences. For they always do what William
does when he names Brunellus: with uncanny canniness aesthetic inventions
intertwine the possible readings or paths of a culture's semantic organization.
This canny intertwining creates sudden, hitherto unnoticed, and unpredicta-
ble connections within and across semantic networks. By this facility at corre-
lating pre-existing sets of signs, Eco tells us, works of art powerfully commu-
nicate too much all at once-and hence they seem not to communicate at all,
seem to exist as magic spells which are "radically impermeable to all semiotic
approach." Aesthetic inventions always look as if they spoke of non-semiotic
wonders, of linguistic supernatures. The ways of Hard Times' creatures-both
human and non-human-give the impression of impermeability to semiosis,
but that is because Dickens unconsciously projects the semiotic
impermeability of art onto those creatures. Without knowing it, Sleary is
talking less about the ways of horses and dogs than about the ways of
art-ways supremely hard to give names to, because they are supremely ma-
nipulative of names and signs. Alas, in not seeing the linguistic causes of
verbal art's linguistic supemature-that is, of verbal art's illusory transcen-
dence of language-Dickens moves towards the political repression of the
working class.
Very roughly I've set out the reasons why our intellectual moment is not
disposed to accept Sleary's last words about language. Our culture and the
Victorians' are horses of different colors. To differentiate each culture is an
attempt to create an occasion for focusing alternative cultural responses to hu-
man predicaments and possibilities. But the occasion is not intended to serve
either nostalgia or self-congratulation. We might as well-for the interest or
disinterestedness of it-examine our assumptions as well as Dickens'. So,
12 NOVEL | FALL 1986
terms that compose the cultural encyclopedia of meanings. But with Eco's
model of language, we can be sure that the encyclopedia is there; that in spite
of the terms we miss, our hands will always be full of names, definitions,
signs. In Dickens the missing terms have a different character; the terms that
are present are sensed as pressured by something outside terms altogether,
are inadequate before what is felt to be irremediably absent. What is absent
are referents which we will never get into our hands. Eco's semiotics is a
theory of linguistic and semantic plenty, and Dickens' a theory of lack.
Dickens' novel suggests that what our hands lack can be a hopeful political
possibility for industrial Hands. It is of course not good in Hard Times that
hands hold no bread; but, as far as signs and denominations go, it is good
that Hands are empty, and that they can be no more expressive than Sleary.
If Sleary is right, the things that matter beyond bread can't be grasped, even
though Gradgrinds and Bounderbies have reduced everything to this or that
tenure of verbal and material property. Our era has argued that language has
no property in truth, and that the property of signifiers or meanings is to
float rather than to be grasped; but it is remarkable that, in so arguing, our
era has grasped the true properties of language and their proper study. We
have a grip on language and have appropriated it as never before. Since, in
contrast, Dickens thinks he can not have a grip on language, because of a
generic human linguistic handicap, perhaps in Dickens' view of language
there is less retention of property than in Eco's. But to be sure to do Eco no
injustice, I shall return to this point.
Meanwhile I suggest that Dickens looks to mystery as the opening of lan-
guage and of politics-of economics too-to a freedom from grasping. If nei-
ther linguistic currency nor money nor property can seize what "ith hard to
give a name to," why devote masters and men to acquiring the trivia that can
be held on to? "There is no mystery in [the National Debt and its methods of
calculation]," Dickens writes; "there is an unfathomable mystery in any one
of [the National Debt's] quiet servants" in the laboring class. How can we
presume to rule, coerce, or appropriate the unfathomable? But the mystery
to which Dickens appeals here, as I have said earlier, is not supernatural in
an institutionally authorized religious sense. The eighteen religious denomi-
nations that divide up Coketown have a common imperative: "Make these
people religious by main force." But, the narrator says, "the perplexing mys-
tery of the place was, who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Be-
cause, whoever did, the laboring people did not." This perplexing mystery is
a salvation, however, and must be maintained, because violence done to the
grip of denominations is the working class's virtue and the germ of its power.
Hard Times' appeal to mystery is not Dickens' indulgence in the opiate of the
people.
Yet Hard Times is written about as if in effect it were committed to a dopey
piety. The critics-especially the intelligent radical line descending from Ray-
mond Williams-claim this piety to be a result of what they believe is Dick-
ens' presiding fear of workers' violence. This criticism ignores the violence
14 NOVEL | FALL 1986
way (among others, of course), Dickens looks ahead to Sleary's finale, by us-
ing even the narrative to exemplify Sleary's claim that language is a falsifying
organizer of human ways.
But between Slackbridge's nomination of Stephen as a traitor and Dickens'
subversion of the narrative rhetoric comes Stephen's moment of awkward elo-
quence, which competes for attention with Sleary's last words. Stephen's fel-
low workers give in to Slackbridge's demand to shun Stephen in an equivocal
way. They outcast Stephen by going silent towards him; yet they allow Ste-
phen to keep his job in the mill. Stephen is thereby not much victimized by
his comrades; and in a novel where speech is an impediment, silence is no
great loss. It is Bounderby who, appropriately enough given his position as
industrial owner, really victimizes Stephen. The master-and master name-
caller-calls in Stephen to demand a report on union activities. Stephen dis-
counts the shunning and shows exemplary class solidarity in his response to
the employer's interrogation. Of course, as a result of the answers he gives
to Bounderby's questions, Stephen is fired on the spot for being a trouble-
maker. It is curious that this firing has not been read as Dickens' suggestion
that the workers are damned if they do not rebel.
Stephen's words in response to Bounderby comprise an oration which is
the novel's purest eloquence, and which is-not surprisingly here-oratory
on the verge of linguistic collapse. Keeping Stephen embedded in his
groping vernacular, Dickens shows the conflict between master and man as a
conflict over the mastery of language-and shows the man who is no master
of meanings to be the more trustworthy for his lack. Bounderby's comments
on Slackbridge are stock response: the organizer is harmful because he's an
outsider. Even though injured by Slackbridge, Stephen won't let this go by:
"Mischeevous strangers!" he exclaims; "When ha we not heern, I am sure, sin
ever we can call to mind, o' th' mischeevous strangers! 'Tis not by them the
trouble's made sir. 'Tis not in them't commences." And Stephen goes on,
with clumsy beauty, to make the speech whose second half is this:
"Sir, I canna, wi' my little learning an' my common way, tell the genelman what
will better aw this-though some working men o' this town could, above my pow-
ers-but I can tell him what I know will never do 't. The strong hand will never
do 't. Vict'ry and triumph will never do 't. Agreeing fur to mak one side unnat'-
rally awlus and for ever right, and toother side unnat'rally awlus and for ever
wrong, will never, never do 't. Nor yet lettin alone will never do 't. Let thou-
sands upon thousands alone, aw leading the like lives and aw faw'en into the like
muddle, and they will be as one, and yo will be as anoother, wi' a blackunpassable
world betwixt yo, just as long or short a time as sitch-like misery can last. Not
drawin nigh to fok, w' kindness and patience an' cheery ways, that so draws nigh
to one another in their monny troubles, and so cherishesone another in their dis-
tresses wi' what they need themsein-like, I humbly believe, as no people the genel-
man ha seen in aw his travels can beat-will never do 't till th' Sun turns t' ice.
Most o' aw, rating 'em as so much Power, and reg'latin 'em as if they was figures
ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 17
"You learnt a great deal, Louisa ... Ologies of all kinds from morning to night.
But there is something-not an Ology at all ... I don't know what it is.... But
your father may ... I want to write to him, to find out for God's sake, what it is."
(II, ix)
She demands a pen, and fancies she gets one; but she has already admitted
"I shall never get [the Ology's] name now." But instead of lamenting this ul-
timate escape of "the name," this further displacement of terms, the narrator
surprises us by suddenly telling us now that terminological accuracy, even
here, is not important: "It matters little what figures of wonderful no-mean-
ing [in her effort to write the name] she began to trace upon her wrappers."
At the moment of death "even Mrs. Gradgrind emerged from the shadow in
which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain." Can we not
add-anticipating Sleary with a further Biblical th-"from the shadow in
which man speaketh in vain"? Mrs. Gradgrind emerges from the shadow
which is both life and language. The dying woman's inability to appropriate
her own pain in language expresses the truth anyway, just because of its lack
of property and propriety: "the pain somewhere in the room" is not
positively hers because it belongs no less positively to her attendants, Louisa
and Sissy. The displaced meaning is wonderfully significant, after all; and so
it is at the point of "wonderful no-meaning" that Mrs. Gradgrind at last
comes into her own. The narrative voice here is looking forward to its de-
cease too, when it will come into its own as Sleary's "no-meaning," the exu-
berant apotheosis of Mrs. Gradgrind's pathos and Stephen's muddle.
Stephen and Sleary together make us see that language is the human com-
edy. It is funny-in a darkly gleeful way-that there is something outside
language but woven through language, or woven around it, that makes lan-
guage "aw a muddle." We are in a muddle when we are in awe, and Dick-
ens is suggesting that language is muddled by the awesome comedy of its in-
competence to come to terms with supreme referents to which its terms are
ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE i9
inadequate. The great joke on us is that our languages are always being
called to come to impossible terms with truths that overburden their media of
expression. Mrs. Gradgrind and Stephen give us the comic pathos of this
muddle, and Sleary gives us the comic exuberance. Comic pathos and exu-
berance are the effects of something out there-whether it be power or intelli-
gence or both, Sleary can't say-whose existence is to be taken on trutht.
It is against this truth "out there," no less than against truth, that Eco
draws the semiotic line, in a way that also entails reflections on comedy. For
Eco language is a great systematic caprice of semantic relations, a comical cos-
mos of various and self-contradictory meanings. Such a comic cosmos seems
just what Stephen's speech is illustrating; but Stephen, and Dickens behind
him, insist on the comedy as a way to truth. But Eco thinks we can not have
both together; one must choose between the comedy of language and the no-
tion of truth, and the stakes of the choice are all-encompassing. The heroes,
villains, and ordinary folk in Eco's novel are caught up in the choice, as a
life-and-death matter. Most of the killings in The Name of the Rose result be-
cause of persons who want to repress the comic spirit for its power to endan-
ger truth. Remigio of Varagine, one of the monks with a heretical past,
joined his mystical sect because it appeared to him rather like a circus. The
sect, he says, offered its followers "a feast of fools, a magnificent carnival....
We felt free, we thought that was the truth." Eco's wisdom is that, whether
it looks like a circus or a sect, truth will never make us free. Only if we stay
within the carnival of language, within the infinite circuits of signs and their
relations, indifferentto truth, will we be at liberty. The monastery murders are
being committed in fact to suppress carnival-the comic carnival of semiosis.
For the murderer, Jorge of Burgos, is killing people to keep hands off a lost
theory of comedy (a theory of semiotics, in effect) which is allegedly Aristot-
le's lost treatise on comedy. As William puts it,
"Jorgefeared the second book of Aristotle [which Jorge was trying to sequester in
the labyrinth] because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every
truth, so that we would not becomeslaves of our own ghosts. Perhaps the mission
of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth
laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion
for truth." ("Seventh Day," "Night")
closure upon the world's ever-flowing nature, but semiosis resists the forcing.
Infinite Saussurean difference and opposition is the essence of the world; and
William's genius is to transfer Saussurean differences from his knowledge of
language to his analysis of human motives and relations. Accordingly, his
solution of the novel's mystery is derived from his keeping loose threads dis-
tinct and discontinuous-differentiated and untied. In all-significant contrast,
William's murderous enemies want to see worldly and other-worldly puzzles
neatly wound up, on one unifying thread of significance. In whatever the
enemies do or think about, they insist on univocity of meaning. But this in-
sistence on an ideology of sameness makes William's enemies inferior to him
in humaneness, and perversely aggressive. Now this inferiority is what Adso
in the course of the narrative comes horribly to know. His own more liberal
education in resistance to closure and aggression is epitomized in his proto-
semiotic discovery that metaphorical truth is most true when it subordinates
likeness to dissimilitude. Yet just here, in the midst of anti-ideological revela-
tion, Eco's fable exhibits a grossly ideological sexual politics.
I have already mentioned that Adso's revelation comes as a reflex of his
first occasion of heterosexual intercourse. This might be an innocent coincid-
ing of a sexuality and a linguistics focused on differences, if it were not for
the fact that Eco dramatizes the murderous party opposed to William and
Adso as either sexually neuter (blind, ancient Jorge) or as homosexual. (The
tale's heterosexual monks like Remigio are victims of the neuter-homosexual
axis of characters, who are indirectly embodied in the repressive Papal party.)
In fact the chain of murders in the monastery begins with the self-murder of
Adelmo, who commits suicide out of remorse for his homosexuality. And
one of the last murders occurs when Malachi, the monastery's head librarian
and Jorge's front-man and tool, kills the herbalist Severinus in a jealous fit:
Malachi believes that Berengar, another murder victim and Malachi's former
lover, had been unfaithful to Malachi with both Adelmo and the herbalist.
Now Jorge (for purposes of his own) goads Malachi to kill by playing on the
latter's jealousy of two men who are already dead. The stretching of plausible
motivation here points up what the teller's tale seems insistently to want to
tell us: the neuter-homosexual characters are perverse, manipulative, and
murderous because they are committed not to differences but to same-
ness-whether to the privilege given to similitude in "same-sex" love or to
the similitudinal thinking that makes Jorge identify his will and his murders
with God's destruction of Antichrist. Telling us all along that-for dear liber-
ty's sake-we must think of the anti-ideological political potential of
"differential" thought, The Name of the Rose simultaneously tells a vulgarly
univocal ideological story. To put it as bluntly as Eco's fable puts it, Eco iden-
tifies the novel's bloody partisans of similitudinal thought with being blind
and gay, and the novel's peaceful partisans of difference-focused semiotics
with being brainy and straight.
I prefer Dickens' semiotic-sexual politics to Eco's unconscious renewal of
homophobia under a sophisticated linguistic cover. Hard Times is perhaps the
ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 21
not. Eco settles the argument with a forecast of William of Baskerville. The
artist may look like he's expressing a cultural unknown-an antinomian
horse, for example-but he is just crossing, with abnormal rapidity, the paths
of already-existing cultural sign-units. And so, at last, Eco lays referential
representation to rest. And at the same time he brings his exposition to an
end. But this is to note that Eco's book ends barely beyond where it begins,
with the attempt to get rid of a beyond of signs. The form of Eco's
expository story is the form of a haunting, of an obsessional return of what
the story seeks to suppress and to surmount.
The Name of the Rose is a similar story, with a similar form. As death fol-
lows death, we feel the sequence of bodies to be the uncannily repeated, not
to be surmounted, return of the same corpse. The bodies incarnate Jorge's
morbid mode of thought, which, univocally referring things to the war be-
tween God and Satan, turns an obsessive referential fallacy into enemies and
victims. In response, the semiotic hero must think of a way to get rid of
these uncanny returns of what his own mode of thought wants to suppress.
But in spite of the way William stands for Eco, the author of the theory, and
Jorge for the malignant referent, in his novel Eco is unable to resist merging
the identities of hero and villain. Even as the fable works hard to differentiate
the two, coincidentally the fable suggests that William and Jorge are unac-
knowledged doubles, a pair equal in both cunning and blindness. They are
paired because neither can succeed at serving or at vanquishing the referen-
tial fallacy. Jorge's service can not make his murders mean what he wants
them to stand for; but William's vanquishing of Jorge can not stop William's
world from reproducing Jorge's referential habits of mind. Can Eco escape an
internal doubling which unites him with Jorge no less than with William? I
suggest that the doubling of the two characters in their frustration is the pro-
jection-the representation!-of Eco's own anxiety about the success of his
theory. As my sketch of the form of A Theory of Semiotics suggests, Eco will
not serve the referent, but he also can not vanquish it. The referent's return
solders Eco-William and Eco-Jorge both to stubborn resistance and to frustrat-
ing service. Now, is it possible that this incompleteness of the referent's sup-
pression in Eco derives from the rooting of the alleged malignancy in some-
thing trustworthy after all? Approaching the century's end we are sitting
happily still at reference's wake. But in The Name of the Rose and in its atten-
dant theory, where reference is proclaimed to have passed away, the body of
reference also bestirs itself, with supernatural vigor-with perhaps a wink of
complicity, too, at Dickens and Sleary.