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As for Mary Magdalen, the facts that her eyes are suns and that her hair is a river do not help us at all to a better understanding of this woman's personality; thus the expressive artifice that led us to discover metaphoric relations at the semantic level seems wasted to us, or deceptive. From this moment on our possibility of using the code no longer seems enriched, because we will rarely find ourselves in a situation that will allow us to reuse a metaphor of this genre. The poetic effect is recognized as null, since in this case poetry seems 'to serve no purpose'. Dante's 'selva oscura', on the other hand, refers us to an open chain of semantic associations whose roots run deep in a symbolic and theologic tradition and which allows us to speak of life, sin, and man's situation on earth. Here is what some have intuitively called 'the universality of poetry': its capacity to provoke, in the order of content, alterations that become operative even beyond the concrete occasion which generated the seman-example of 'defaulting' metaphor (from the point of view of content) tic substitution. |
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Achillini, another eighteenth-century author, provides a different example of 'defaulting' metaphor (from the point of view of content) which, this time, finds no support on the level of expression. But Achillini does not fail because of a too 'distant' connection; on the contrary, he is matching something that our common knowledge has long since matched, and without exciting results. 'Sudate, o fochi, a preparar metalli' (sweat, O fires, to prepare metals), imposes no expressive necessity that justifies the use of the verb 'sudare' (to sweat). One might very well have said, without detracting from the rhyme or the meter, 'bruciate o fochi' (burn, O fires). The whole discourse then displaces itself to the level of content. And here again, even if the subjacent metonymic chain exists and is visible (fire-heat-sweat, the fire which receives as its own seme the effect that it has on whoever is subjected to its action, and so on), it appears as rather contorted, demanding a pathway, a tiresome short circuit that does not pay sufficiently well, so much exertion in order to learn what was already knownthat fire causes sweat. The reader refuses the invitation to an adventure without worthwhile results, to a linguistic operation that, with the pretense of making language function in a creative direction, actually creates nothing and succeeds only in the realization of a wearisome tautology. |
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A different series of judgments might be of the sort, 'The chemical composition of hair is similar to that of water; fire secretes, through glands similar to the sweat glands of humans, a sort of liquid with homeostatic functions . . .'. Here we confront a series of factual judgments. As has already been said, it is not up to semiotics to establish whether they are true or false, but it is up to semiotics to establish whether or not they are socially acceptable. Many factual judgments seem unac- |
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