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Semiotics around the World

W
DE

G
Approaches to Semiotics
126

Editorial Committee
Thomas A. Sebeok
Roland Posner
Alain Rey

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin • New York
Semiotics around the World :
Synthesis in Diversity
Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the
International Association for Semiotic Studies,
Berkeley 1994
Volume 1

Edited by
Irmengard Rauch
Gerald F. Carr

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin • New York 1997
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the

ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

International Association for Semiotic Studies. Congress (5th ; 1994 :

University of California, Berkeley)
Semiotics around the world ; synthesis in diversity : proceedings
of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies, Berkeley 1994 / edited by Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr.
p. cm. - (Approaches to semiotics ; 126)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-012223-5
1. Semiotics — Congresses. I. Rauch, Irmengard. II. Carr,
Gerald F. III. Title. IV. Series.
P99.I57 1994
302.2—dc20 96-3093
CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Semiotics around the world : synthesis in diversity ; Berkeley 1994 / ed.

by Irmengard Rauch ; Gerald F. Carr. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton
de Gruyter.
(Approaches to semiotics ; 126)
(Proceedings of the ... congress of the International Association for
Semiotic Studies ; 5)
ISBN 3-11-012223-5
NE: Rauch, Irmengard [Hrsg.]; GT; International Association for Se-
miotic Studies: Proceedings of the ... congress ...
Vol. 1. - 1997

© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin. - Binding: Liideritz & Bauer, Berlin. - Printed in Germany.
Preface
Great intellectual excitement was fomented in the university community and the
San Francisco Bay Area by the preparation for and anticipation of the Fifth
Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies on the University
of California, Berkeley campus. Curiosity as to what semiotics is and does
heightened in the local media and newspapers with the expectation of ever
broader representation of participants from around the globe.
Compared with the history of universities internationally, and indeed on this
continent, the University of California at Berkeley is a newer founding, bom a
mere century and a quarter ago, when the pioneers of the Gold Rush era had the
foresight to require of their infant government "the promotion of intellectual,
scientific, moral and agricultural improvement" of the people in their so-called
Golden State.
The city encasing the University was named in 1866 after the Irish
philosopher George Berkeley, and the site of the Congress, the Clark Ken-
Campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is named after a professor of
Industrial Relations who became Berkeley's first Chancellor and later President
of all nine campuses in the University of California system. Short though the
history of this University may be, Berkeley has always been exciting and
innovative, from the early admission of women students within two years of its
founding, to the establishment of the science research center at the Lawrence
Hall of Science, to the birth of the Free Speech Movement, and beyond.
In his welcoming address to Congress participants on the evening of June 12,
1994, Provost for Research Joseph Cemy stressed how aptly the Congress theme
"Semiotics Around the World: Synthesis in Diversity" interlaced with the
ambiance that is the University of California, Berkeley: "We thus view the
convening of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies on the Berkeley Campus as most appropriate, and as a contribution to
the intellectual and cultural life of this leading public institution of learning in
the United States. Your convening here is fitting and intellectually enriching
because your proclaimed 'Synthesis in Diversity' not only reflects the
interchange of the diverse humane and natural sciences which, by your research
contributions, your inherently open paradigm of semiotics cultivates, but
because 'Synthesis in Diversity' instantiates the co-mingling of 49 diverse
countries and cultures represented in your presence."
A pre-Congress symposium, "Signs and symbols in everyday life,"aimed
specifically at introducing the Bay Area public to the nature of semiotics. This
introduction was aided by factors such as the recall of a headline in the "This
World" section of the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle (February
1987) that read "Semiotics sells" with regard to advertising the picture of a
Volkswagen Beetle displayed with the reverse psychology caption "lemon."
Reference to the word "semiotics" in the May 1993 issue of the popular
Gentlemen's Quarterly, which spoke to the "semiotics" of the dress clothes of
a star athlete such as San Francisco's Joe Montana, and Time magazine's re-
vi Preface

port (1994) which mentioned the "semiotic" display of entertainer Madonna's

visit with TV's "Late Show" David Letterman, viewed throughout the Bay Area,
further elucidated semiotics as a vox populi concept.
Each of these three media scenarios could be shown to be rich in iconicity,
indexicality, and symbolism. Madonna's smoking of a cigar while wearing a
long dress with combat boots and sitting at a right angle to David Letterman
with her eyes cast to the ceiling, could hardly have been more paradigmatic of
Peirce's equation of the human being with the sign. In no dictionary is the
picture of the VW Beetle a definirg feature of the word "lemon," yet the
metaphorical extension between the two could be universally conceptualized
with ease. A similar incongruity was evoked by the sight of Joe Montana in
street clothes rather than in the expected football uniform, suggestive of the
interpretation "California-casual wear" much like the ubiquitous blue-jeans
associated with Americana.
Into this cultural ambiance some 700 semiotics scholars, students, and Bay
Area public convened for a week-long sojourn to present, hear, and exchange
research centering in the sign, "the mother of meaning," so designated by Peirce.
Over 150 sections were required to accommodate the rich array of research
papers. Not a small number of participants organized valuable sessions
concentrating on special topics. The leitmotiv session "Semiotics Around the
World," which featured the state of semiotics in the various countries
represented, opened each morning's presentations, acting like a quasi
international handshake.
Two plenary papers per day punctuated the wealth of presentations. Congress
participants graciously shared in the task of chairing sessions. It was an
impressive, enriching international effort, the first congress of the IASS to
convene since the end of the Cold War.
Indeed, so central was the aim of integrating semiotics scholars from newly
independent nations, from previously non-accessible countries, and from
developing lands that the topic "Signs and Symbols of Emerging Democracies in
Eastern Europe" was singled out for a day-long post-Congress symposium held
on June 19. Speakers from Eastern Europe presented fascinating eye-witness
accounts of the dynamics at work in a medley of signs, e.g., flags, currency,
strategies employed in the ongoing establishment of their nationhood.
Thus it happened that the intractable identity question of semiotics so central
to the first four congresses of the IASS over the past twenty years (1974, 1979,
1984, 1989) yielded to the Fifth Congress embrace ofdiversity instantiated in
the plurality of presenters from 49 countries as well as in the plurality of topics
and approaches. Certainly, Eco's expressed hope that there never exist a single
unified theory of semiotics was proven prophetic by the Berkeley Congress.
We thank all participants and contributors to the Fifth Congress and we thank
the IASS for choosing the University of California, Berkeley campus as the site
 Preface vii

of its first congress on either American continent. Many offices of the University
lent their support in various ways—the Clark Kerr Conference Center,
International and Area Studies, the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the
Provost and the Vice-Chancellor, the Office of the Provost for Research, the
Office of the Dean of Humanities and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Particular appreciation is offered to the several offices of the Dean and Associate
Dean of the University Extension which helped manage the everyday operations
of the Congress before, during, and after it took place. The generosity of
California wineries in providing a bounty of California wines contributed greatly
to the conviviality of the opening reception on June 12. We could not have
wished for a more splendid organizing committee of the Berkeley Congress:
Honorary Congress President Thomas A. Sebeok, Alain J.-J. Cohen, Frank
Johnson, W.G.Kudszus, William Watt, Lihua Zhang. Finally, we thank the
publishing house of Mouton de Gruyter for preparing and disseminating an
exciting Congress poster and for its attractive publishing of the Congress
Proceedings, which assures the Fifth IASS Congress a place in the history of
semiotics and the world of learning.

Irmengard Rauch Berkeley, CA.

Gerald F. Can- December 1995
Contents

Volume 1

I Plenary Addresses

Lisa Block de Behar

Joining different worlds: Symbols and the quest for unity 3

Marcel Danesi
From the fantasia through metaphor to knowledge-.
A Vichian perspective of conceptualization 17

Umberto Eco
Some remarks on perfect languages 45

Vyacheslav V. Ivanov
Fundamentals of diachronic linguistics: Semiotic implications 57

Irmengard Rauch
"Symbols grow" II 87

Rosa Maria Ravera

Sémiotique et herméneutique: Vers une complémentarité possible .. 95

Thomas A. Sebeok
Global semiotics 105

II Semiotics Around the World

Pia Brinzeu
Semiotics in Romania: Political implications 133

Rafael del Villar Munoz

Sémiotique au Chili d'aujourd'hui:
Histoire, ruptures et champ théorique 137
x Contents

Miguel Angel Garrido-Gallardo, José M. Paz-Gago, Luis Albuquerque

Semiotics in Spain 141

Karl Gfesser
The semiosis of cognition 145

André Helbo
Sémiotiques beiges 149

Ernest W. B. Hess-Luttich
Semiotics in Germany 153

A. Ph. Lagopoulos
Semiotics in Greece 157

Pierre Pellegrino
Semiotics in Switzerland 161

Goran Sonesson
Semiotics in the Nordic countries 165

III Linguistics

Werner Abraham
Linguistics and the language of schizophrenics 171

Hans Adler
Is nature a language? J.W. Goethe on scientific knowledge 175

Edna Andrews
The semiotics of catastrophe in linguistic change 179

John Ole Askedal

Johann Gottfried Herder's conception of the origin of language 183

Béla Btiky and Gabor Kiss

The main statements of theories as determined by a semiotic method 187

Paul Ekman
Emotion families 191
 Contents xi

Titus Ensink
The relationship between texts and their location 195

Luminita Frentiu
Some consonant strategies in spoken discourse 199

AmrHelmy Ibrahim

Les supports lexico-syntaxiques du non-fini en français et en arabe .. 203

Alexandre Kimenyi
Zero-derivation or syntagmatic derivation 207

Ronald Landheer
La figuralité: Son actualité en linguistique et en sémiotique 211

Anna Tàthné Litovkina

Perception of proverbs and familiarity with them.

Figurativeness as one of the most powerful markers of proverbiality . 215

M. G. Meile
Sauron's Newspeak: Black Speech, Quenya, and the nature of mind .. 219

Ecaterina Mihaila
The possible worlds of the imaginary 223

Vasily Ogryzko
Digital and nondigital information in genetic language 227

José Maria Ortiz Martinez

Creating signs, building bridges 231

Herbert Penzl f
Lexical and phonetic semiotic in lyrics: Agnes Miegel's Herbst 235

Goran Rossholm
Expression as expression — as 239

Horst Ruthrof
Two kinds of semantics: Six intersemiotic theses 243
xii Contents

Howard A. Smith
Situational effects on the quantification of frequency words 247

Polly Szatrowski
Cooperative organization of Japanese conversation 251

Ladislav Tondl
Some comments on semiotics of graphic communication 255

Joan Turner
Cognitive metaphor and critical rhetoric 259

Joan M. Turner, Masako K. Hiraga, and Yoko Fujii

Cross-cultural pragmatics in Western academic discursive practice ... 263

Ellen van Wolde A bridge between linguistics and literary theory

Textsemantics: 267

Jan-Eric Widell
The social crystallization of language. Coercive traits of the social
characterization in a Saussurean textus receptus tradition 271

IV Culture

Imre Graflk
Material culture in the mirror of archival sources 277

Letizia Grassi
Sacrality, myth, objects: Techniques of fabrication and semiotical,
anthropological interpretation of carpets and jewels from Pakistan ... 281

Alan C. Harris
American "Comics": A semiolinguistic analysis 283

Allan C. Harris
Waco Wackos! The emergence of American social consciousness
in the jokes surrounding the events at Waco, Texas 285

Kim Young-Hae and Michel Costantini

For a transcultural theory of iconic creation 287
 Contents xiii

Andreas Konig
"Heimat" and "mi tierra". Towards a semiotic theory of local
identities from an intercultural perspective 291

Philadelpho Menezes
Verbal and visual intersemiosis in aesthetical experiments —
the case of contemporary Brazilian culture 295

Kevin Moriarty
The meaning of life: Ex tensional semantics in the game go 299

Mariana Net
On cultural stereotypes: A Peircean view 303

Gwendolyn S. O'Neal
African-American aesthetic of dress: Subcultural meaning
and significance 307

Jerry Palmer
Humour and verisimilitude 311

RobertS. Quinn
The sign behind the gate 315

Dagmar Rieger
Noname culture 319

Andrei Roman
Destin et histoire 323

Manfred Russo
Fashion and body images in youth cultures. The semiotics
of Skins, Punks, New Wave and the Preppie 327

Jorge Anthonio da Silva

Arthur Bispo do Rasario: The vertigo art 331

Gerson Tenorio dos Santos

The skin of time — a semiotic approach to death 335
xiv Contents

Seppo T. Vàkevà

Fetishes, props, and protheses - On the ecology of material objects ... 339

Thomas Wàgenbaur
Semiotic ethnocriticism: Tawada's Das Fremde aus der Dose 343

Zdzislaw Wqsik
Verbal means as signs of human needs in the light
of an axiosemiotic theory of culture 347

Patricia Williams
"Glory of Glories . . . She Wears a Hat"
Dress, the immigrant and social equality in America 351

Giovanna M. Winchkler
A triple semiosis for the representation of stone tools in archaeology 355

V Literature: Theory, Text, Narrative, Poetics

Sonia Aguilar Maqueda

The reflected voices: Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" 361

Joseflna Albert-Galera
Literary text semiotics applied to plays by Garcia Lorca 365

Harold D. Baker
Landscape, indirection, and feminine subjectivity in Madame Bovary 369

Marianna
Metaphor D. Birnbaum
as autobiography 373

Elba Bohorquez
Que dit le littéraire au théorique? 377

Therese Budniakiewicz
The value of the notion of contract to literary interpretation:
Greimas, Propp, and West's Miss Lonelyhearts 381

Sergio Cappello
Le caractère fïctionnel de la poésie lyrique 385
 Contents xv

Paul Cobley
The specific regime of verisimilitude in the thriller 389

Jean-François Côté
Le dialogisme de Bakhtine et la sémiotique de Peirce 393

Jerusa Pires Ferreira

Iconic memory and intersemiotical procedures in traditional
oral literatures 397

Fatima Festic
The body of the postmodernist narrator 401

Sabine Groß
Narrative time and the reader 405

David Gullentops
Eléments pour une sémiotique du discours poétique 409

Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich

Maxims of Malice 413

David R. Hiles
Narrative as a sequence of motivated signs 417

Masako K. Hiraga
Vision as meaning: Visual iconicity of Basho's haiku 421

Masako K. Hiraga and Joanna Radwanska-Williams

Nothing in the world is single: Metaphorical network in Shelley's
"Love's Philosophy" 425

J. A. F Hopkins
"Look Ma, the giraffe's on fire!" 429

Rosemary Huisman
The written and the spoken poem: Generic practices in their
social context 433

W. G. Kudszus
On the epistemology of addiction: The case of Josef K 437
xvi Contents

Luisa Inés Moreno and Maria Elisa Zurita

The reality of crisis in Discépolo's Daily Losses 441

Magdolna Orosz
Intertextuality and meaning construction in literary texts:
A semiotic analysis 445

Magdolna Orosz
Text construction and world construction in literary narratives 449

Ellen Peel
Black and white and read all over: The semiotics of difference and
chiaroscuro in Le Guin's Left hand of darkness 453

Caridad Posada
The textual space in the novel 457

Katarzyna Rosner
The uniqueness of ontological hermeneutics among contemporary
semiotic theories of interpretation 461

Jurgen Schmidt-Radefeldt
The semiotics of Paul Valéry 465

Steven Skaggs
Semantic profiles and the typography of concrete poetry 469

Maria Thereza Strongoli

Le monde adulte et enfantin dans un journal pour enfants 473

Karin Svenmo
Money and the mind: Cognitive economic metaphors in
Franz Kafka's Der Prozefi 477

Pekka Tammi
Nabokov's poetics of dates 481

Antoaneta Taneva
"Hen" Literature: Genders in conflict (Bulgarian and Romanian
woman writers in the period between two World Wars) 485
 Contents xvii

André G. E van Hoik

Poetics of painting and pictures in poetry. On the semiotic space
of C. F. Barnas' Vogelsberg landscapes 489

Aart J. A. van Zoest, Jan C.A. van der Lubbe

Inference switching in interpretation of poetry 493

Montgomery José de Vasconcelos

The carnivalized poetics of Augusto dos Anjos 497

Josef Wallmannsberger
The discourse of postmortemism: Signs on postmodern
philosophical wall 501

Mark Weeks
The indifférance in laughter 505

VI Architecture and Space

Geoffrey Broadbent
The semiotics of the void 511

José Luis Caivano and Juan Angel Magariños de Morentín

Semiotics of spatial configurations in architecture 515

Claus Dreyer
Poetics of space — architecture between imagination and reality 519

Imre Gráfik
A semiotic-aesthetic approach to the analysis of the practice of folk
architecture in market towns 523

J. A. F. Hopkins
Modernism, postmodernism, and Eisenman's Nunotani building 525

Emmanuelle Jeanneret
La conceptualisation de l'espace en architecture 529

Tomasz Komendzimski
Icons, mimesis and simulacrum. Percetual contexts 533
xviii Contents

A.Ph. Lagopoulos
Space as the articulation of the material and the semiotic 537

Claudia Laudanno
Pour une sémiotique de l'installation artistique. Trois poétiques
exemplaires: Recagno, Fazzolari et Mèdici 541

Albert Levy
A semiotic modelization of the architectural conception 545

Francisco Monsó de Prat

Project: Knowledge and invention. Comprehension of the
architectural process 549

Pierre Pellegrino
Architectural space and urban culture PRIVE 553

Alain Rénier
L'espace sociétal, sémiotiquement réalisé, comme instance
de connaissance de l'espace physiquement constitué 557

Irena Sakellaridou
The logic of architectural composition 561

Mario Shumacher and Luigi Lentini

Experiences with urban spaces: Semiosis and rupture 565

Vana Tentokali, G. Katsavounidou, P. Kourti and G. Melissourgos

The brothel as the space of "erotic" desire? 569

Josep Muntanola Thornberg

Hermeneutics, semiotics and architecture: Timaeus revisited 573

Robert Tracy
Las Vegas strip facades: The interplay between private identity
and public presence 577
 Contents xix

VII Theater, Film and Music

Junia de Castro Magalhaes A Ives

The intersemiotic language of the theater and the movies:
Regina and The little foxes 583

Mogens Andersen
The Forte Method considered in a semiological perspective 587

Silvia Anastacio and Fernanda Callou

The language of music in Ravel 591

David Blumberg
Suspended moments: The fermata in Luigi Nono's string quartet
"Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima" 595

Warren Buckland
The new film semiology 599

A lain J.-J. Cohen

Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Chess Ecstasy 603

Elena Dagrada
Semiotique de l'"effet sonore'7 Semiotics of "sound effect" 607

Irene Ferreira de Sousa

Cinema and literature: Theoretical studies 611

Thai's Flores Nogueira Diniz

Violating Shakespeare 615

Marcela Fiorillo
Musical notation: The importance of the relative value of its signs
for the interpretation 619

Claudia Gonzales Costanzo

A resignification of the tango 623

Robert S. Hatten
Music and tense 627
xx Contents

Sven Heed
Identité sexuelle et la signification au théâtre 631

Michele Ignelzi and Paolo Rosato

Modeling analysis and signification in music 635

Julio Je ha
Intersemiotic translation: The Peircean basis 639

Michael Kokonis
"Beautiful butterflies trapped down by drawing pins" or, Peter
Greenaway's The belly of an architect: A bagful of signs and designs .. 643

Raymond Monelle
Binary semantic opposition in Debussy 647

Heleen J. Pott
The politics of melancholy 651

Michael Pounds
What's black and white and misread all over?
Race, identity and community in "Judge Priest" 655

Monica Rector
The iconic sign: From narrative prose to performance
(Machado de Assis' The Psychiatrist) 659

Thomas Reiner
Introduction to a semiological model of musical time 663

Daniele de Ruyter-Tognotti
Le récit dans le théâtre contemporain: facteur d'éclatement
de la spécificité dramatique? 667

José Sanjinés
Conscious illusions: The problem of the cinematic frame 671

Dimitri Segal and Ruth Shamir

Overlapping semiotic systems: Paintings in new films 675

Rosana van Langendonck Augusto

Dance in process 679
Volume 2

VIII Visual Semiotics

José Luis Caivano

Color theory as a contribution to visual semiotics 685

Marie Carani
De Panofsky à Schapiro, et après 689

Geneviève Cornu
L'image inscrite: code, indice, schème 693

Rafael del VillarMufioz

Le positionnement pluriel: le travail sur l'ambiguïté du texte 697

Lineide do Lago Salvador Mosca

Le signe journalistique et son esthétisation 701

Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel

Le Sida à la télévision française 705

Martine Joly
Image et indice 709

J. Lennon
Extending work in visual languages using Musli
(a multi-sensory language interface) 713

Ellen McCracken
Toward a comparative text grammar of visual and verbal semiosis:
Material religious culture and Chicana fiction 717

Luis a Peirano
A semiotic approach to Christina's World of Andrew Wyeth 721

Ruth P. Rubenstein
Interpreting visual narratives 725
xxii Contents

Alicia Rubio
The uses of photography 729

Gunnar Sandin and Lars-Henrik Stàhl

Kosmoletto 731

David Scott

Stamp semiotics: Reading ideological messages in philatelic signs ... 735

Goran
The Sonessonfoundations of iconicity
ecological 739

Susann Vihma
How is a design product a sign? 743

IX Semiotics and Science

Magnolia Rejane Andrade dos Santos

The evolutionary mystery: A dialogue between C. S. Peirce
and Edgar Morin 749

Jan Doroszewski
Semiotic reasoning as a problem solving process 753

Guy Everaert and Thierry van Steenberghe

How to handle the meaning in a computer? 757

Udo L. Figge
Semiotic features of human-computer-interaction 761

Janez Justin

The socio-cognitive dimension of interpretation of verbal utterances . 765

Yoshimi Kawade
Molecules as semiotic entities in living systems — reinterpreting
molecular biology 769
Solomon Marcus
Three 773
 Contents xxiii

Ana Marostica
Meaning and truth: A Peircean approach Ill

Ralf Müller
Peirce and Israel / Perry on the conditions of informational flow 781

Winfried Nöth
Semiotic foundations of the cognitive paradigm 785

Vasily Ogryzko
Evolution of symbol conventionality 789

Roland Posner
The self and its presentation in humans and computers 793

Breno Serson
Semiotics of connectionism and classical cognitivism from
a Peircean standpoint 797

Jan C.A. van der Lübbe and Aart J. A. van Zoest

Semiotics and the question of time in artificial intelligence 801

Jan C. A. van der Lübbe and Aart J. A. van Zoest

Subtypes of inference and their relevance for artificial intelligence ... 805

Josef Wallmannsberger
First steps towards a semiotics of cyberspace 809

Josef Wallmannsberger and Elisabeth Schönauer

Whorfians in the information age: Semiotics and AI 813

Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska
Logic in view of imprecision information 817

Shea Zellweger
On a deep correspondence between sign-creation and symmetry
in crystallography 821
xxiv Contents

X Philosophy, Aesthetics and Religion

Jorge de Albuquerque Vieira

Observation, semiosis and objective law 827

Has him bin Musa

Ethics and civilization: Inquiring into the meaning of man,
his existence and civilization 831

Patrick Chatelion Counet

The last word and the first Logos. John, a deconstructive gospel 835

Nicole Everaert-Desmedt
Le monochrome et la pensée iconique 839

Kathleen M. Irwin
Semiotic analysis and the interface between bible texts and visual art 843

Igor E. Klyukanov
The paradox of semiotic freedom: Between the rock
and the hard place 847

Eisuke Komatsu
Saussure and Husserl 851

Esko Marjomaa
Peirce and Kant on non-physical representations 855

Célyne Poisson
De l'objet au sujet; pour une sémiotique du projet en design.
Charles Morris et le New Bauhaus 859

Thomas EN. Puckett

Communicology and memoria in St. Augustine 863

Andrew Quinn
Kantian proto-semiotics and Peircian semiotics 867

W.T. Scott
The literary fake—An intractable problem for aesthetics and semiotics 871
 Contents xxv

Su Yang
A pragmatic and semantic analysis of the semiotic signs 875

Keyan G. Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson

Phaneroscopy and indeterminacy of translation 879

Kazimierz Trzesicki
Logical and methodological presumptions of Ajdukiewicz's
and Kripke-Putnam's conceptions of meaning 883

Marga van Mechelen

How warm should semiotic art history be served? 887

Astrid M. Vicas
Taine, connexions et analogies 891

Uwe Wirth
Abduction and comic in the sign of the three: Peirce, Freud, Eco 895

You-Zheng Li
Interdisciplinary/de-philosophizing orientation in semiotic theory
today 899

XI Bio-semiotics, Psychoanalysis, the Body

Myrdene Anderson
Body as nexus — natural, factual, artifactual, evocative 905

Jackson Barry
Signs of life 909

Soren Brier
Cyber-semiotics: On autopoiesis, code-duality and signgames
as vital aspects of bio-semiotics 913

Jody Bruner
Narrative analysis of the romantic ballet Giselle 917

Kathleen L. Doty
Performing gender: The semiotics of the body in three recent films .. 921
xxvi Contents

Udo L. Figge
The natural bases of semiotic behavior 925

Andrée Grau
Dancers' bodies as the repository of conceptualisations of the body,
with special reference to the Tiwi of Northern Australia 929

Jesper Hoffmeyer
The global semiosphere 933

Jesper Hoffmeyer
The swarming body 937

Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
Subject(s) and everyday life discourse: Women speaking 941

Frank A. Johnson
Semiotics of psychoanalytic discourse: Some developmental aspects
of narrativity 945

Birthe Loa Knizek

Semiotics as the psychosomatic hope 949

Manfred D. Laubichler
The semiotics of biological functions 953

Manfred D. Laubichler
Wittgensteinian biology 957

Horst M. Millier
The relation between interaction, semiosis, and language 961

Vasily Ogryzko
Physics and biosemiotics 965

Phyllis Passariello
Wish I was here: The body as performance 969

Alexei A. Sharov
Meaning and value of information in biological systems 973
 Contents xxvii

Giinther Witzany
Semiosis and evolution 977

XII Semiotics and Metatheory

Thomas F. Broden
Semiotics and time: Event and history, structure and action 983

Peter Cassirer
On the lack of stylistic information in dictionaries: Style value 987

Dominique Ducard
Actualité de la sémanalyse 991

Frank Hartmann
Information as a fetish 995

David R. Hiles
The division of signs: A four-fold symmetry 999

Tuomo Jàmsà
Semiotics of relations 1003

Sungdo Kim
Réflexions narratives chez Saussure 1007

Xiankun Li
The features of semiotics in ancient China 1011

Katya Mandoki
Between signs and symbols: An economic distinction? 1015

Thaddeus D. Martin
A general theory of semiotics in Jaspers'critical hermeneutics 1019

Stanislaw Pietraszko
Le symbole comme objet axiosémiotique 1023

Thomas FN. Puckett

Toward a general taxinomia of modernity 1027
xxviii Contents

Giulio Raio
The function of signification and the symbolic function 1031

Françoise Ravaux-Kirkpatrick
Pour une sémiotique de l'esthétique: l'apport proustien 1035

Cecilia Almeida Salles

Signs of firstness: A journey into brightest semiotica 1039

Holger Siever
Peirce, Foucault, Saussure — or: The age of interpretativity 1043

Celso Almaury Erineu Simâo Guerra

Signcentrism: A new concept 1047

Vivian Sobchack
The lived body and the emergence of language 1051

Christina Vogel
Dire le sujet: signifier le plusieurs-en-un 1055

James Anthony Whitson

From the signs of motivation to motivations of the sign 1059

XIII Peirce

Vincent Colapietro
Notes for a sketch of a Peircean theory of the unconscious 1065

André De Tienne
Peirce's revolution: Semiotic vs. transcendental unity 1069

Nathan Houser
The semiotics of critical editing: Is there a future
for critical editions? 1073

Anthony Jappy
Diagram, metaphor and the avoidance of chiasmus 1077
 Contents xxix

W. H. Kaluga
The nebular text 1081

Helena Katz
Firstness quines qualia: Dance is not an elusive art 1085

Roberta Kevelson
Peirce's semiotics viewed in the penumbra of current theories
of complex systems 1089

Ivan Mladenov
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia
(C. S. Peirce and M. M. Bakhtin) 1093

Aria José Palo

Art as a living process 1097

Alejandro Rûssovich
La pensée de Peirce considérée comme un interprétant
de la pensée de Kant 1101

Elisabeth Walther
Contributions of the Stuttgart School to Peircean semiotics 1105

XIV Legal Semiotics, Socio-Semiotics, Political Discourse,

and Didactics

Fernando Andacht
The social imaginary: A sociosemiotic approach 1111

Gabriel Argentin et PeterS. Kirkpatrick

Les effets du contexte sur la gestuelle dans le discours politique 1115

John Brigham
Signs in the attic: Courts in material life 1119

Graciela B. de Busaniche and Adriana Gonzalo

Political ways in Argentina: An approach through
Peircean categories 1123
xxx Contents

Joanne Golden and Kathryn A. Davis

A semiotic perspective on a cultural deficit explanation
for school failure 1127

Titus Ensink
Collective misunderstandings due to misframings: The cases of
Orson Welles (1938) and Philipp Jenninger (1988) 1131

Ingo J. Hueck
The Treaty of Maastricht - A signal for a new state? 1135

Gordana Jovanovic
Intimacy: From an optic to a semiotic paradigm 1139

Roberta Kevelson
Law at the border 1143

Anna Tóthné Litovkina

How do sex, age, settlement type, education and parental
background influence the knowledge of proverbs in Hungary? 1147

Marie J. Myers
Semiotics to facilitate interaction 1151

Vyara Nicolova
Political semantics 1155

Wendy T. Olmstead
Seeking a semantic synthesis across cultures with public
information symbols 1157

Linda Rogers and Linda McDonald

Signs of gender: Building symbols of self 1161

Christoph Sauer
Semi-orality and semi-literacy in legal institutions as "super-signs":
Analyzing Dutch trial courtroom interaction 1165

José Sazbón
Sémiotique et symbolique dans Facundo, de Sarmiento 1169
 Contents xxxi

Francisco Soto
A semiotic approach to the public 1173

Artur Szentgy òrgy vàri and Artûr Szentgy òrgy vàri jr.
Fluency in speech as a measurable sign of language proficiency 1177

Sanda Monica Tataram

Cohesion, competition, and critical groupsize in social groups 1181

Josef Wallmannsb erger and Brigitte Huter

Semiotic hegemonies: Gramsci's project of a socio-semiotics 1185

XV Advertising, Temporality, and Writing

Lucio Agra
Semiotics and temporality facing the art works of El Lissitsky
and Helio Oiticica 1191

Heloisa de Araûjo Duarte Valente

Les chants de la voix: entre le bruit et le silence 1195

Adam Briggs
Genre, verisimilitude, and advertising 1199

Michael K. Buckland and Ron Day

The semiotics of "document" and the antelope of Suzanne Briet 1203

Monica Rebecca Ferrari Nunes

Le mythe dans la radio 1207

Roland Harweg
Cultural specificity and internationalism in present day
Far Eastern writing 1211

Patrick Hetzel
La contribution de la sémiotique aux processus de prise de décision
marketing: Esquisse d'un renouveau paradigmatique 1215

Helena Katz
Dance and temporality: Possibilities of meaning 1219
xxxii Contents

Eva Kineses Kovdcs

Hungarian advertisement is on the move 1223

Manuel Frias Martins

Dark matter: Towards a semiotics of the unsayable 1227

Winfried Noth
The sign nature of goods and commodities 1231

Il-Woo Park
Toward a semiotic reading of modern calligraphy 1235

Arden R. Smith
The semiotics of the writing systems of Tolkien's Middle earth 1239

Lia Tomás
The mythical time in Scriabin 1243

Wenfu Wang
Observing the structures of symbols from Chinese Yijing 1247

Denise Warren
Advertising analysis: Cold war versus big thaw vodka advertising 1251

W.C. Watt
Writing as a sense of sound 1255

Ute Werner
Multicultural marketing of risk—The meaning of communication
policy for insurance companies 1259

Lihua Zhang
The charm and seduction of brand names 1263

XVI Workshop

Andreas König, Beate Pückler, Klaus Peter Walcher, Ingrid Lempp

Multicultural society: Identity, participation and prevention
of conflicts 1269
I Plenary Addresses
Joining different worlds; symbols and the quest for unity

Lisa Block de Behar

...for all the things [that is,the Sefirot], and all the attributes, which seem as if
they are separate, are not separated [at all] since all [of them] are one, as the[ir]
beginning is, which unites everything "in one word.
Moshé Idei Commentary on Sefer Yezirah

To fix our ideas suppose players playing with dice...

Charles S. Peirce Design and Chance

Don Alejandro aspiró alguna vez a ser diputado, pero los jefes políticos le
cerraron las puertas del Congreso del Uruguay. El hombre se enconó y resolvió
fundar otro Congreso de más vastos alcances. ...concibió el propósito de
organizar un Congreso del mundo que representaría a todos los hombres de
todas las naciones.
Jorge Luis Borges: El Congreso

What I am interested in approaching tonight is a sort of language mutation that is

growing nowadays, words that are not only said, heard, written or read but are also
shown and seen, a blending of symbolic representation with deixis in an exercise of
synthesis where I shall try to play with symbols as it is still possible to play with
dice, trying to crisscross different languages by a single word. From this point of
view I shall refer to one story by Borges whose title is The Congress, and also to a
well known poem by Mallarmé articulated by readings of Plato, Peirce, Sebeok and
Eco.
For the past few years, many times I have invoked the genii loci, the tutelary
divinities of houses, streets and cities. Near Hollywood, near Los Angeles, I thought
it might have been appropriate to talk about angels whom reflection 1 and
imagination have paid such recurrent attention nowadays. I do not know whether
this increasing interest is due to networks of satellites (Gr. satellites were guardians
also) or to the ubiquitous messages of an explosive mediatic communication or to
the readings of Walter Benjamin or the angelic proliferation of Paul Klee or if it is
due, mainly, to a cinema-effect, an " e f f e t de cinéma", that this new advent of angels
has provoked; but I would dare conjecture that none of these reasons, closely
related to one another, are alien to it.
One's attention is drawn by the bibliographic and cinematographic frequency of
these holy guardians, by the remarkable works in which angels abound and
although few would wonder, as Peirce did, "whether ten thousand of them could
dance on a needle's point" or "why they (are) not more interesting than the
bewildering varieties of insects which naturalists study" (Peirce 1984, 2:465), it is
interesting to consider the precedent of their statute of intermediation between two
worlds, the transmission of messages in silence which is attributed to them, their
4 Lisa Block de Behar

movement between the visible and the invisible, the announcement which bears
witness of other kingdoms, by a constant fugacity. These ambivalences of the
angelological condition are valid when the aim is to look into some aspects of
cinematographic language and the properties of the word in the electronic image:
uttered or written, mute and in movement, the word is seen. In other words, silence
and voice, word and thought coincide in the same vision, a disturbing passing which
erases the boundaries between seeing and dreaming, saying and wishing: to show
and to tell, all at once.
The word put into images synthesizes differences, crosses senses and limits: the
eye which sees, hears; the image in movement contracts voices and figures; in
cinema, to show and to tell are not required as opposed or rival actions. The
animation in movies, which is emotion and movement, motivates the word at least
twice. Everything at sight. The image shows and tells, shows what it says, it
contributes to the miracle of sight, a praise of sight, ad miranda: it is said, it is
heard, it is read, everything is seen and there is nothing behind or outside that
vision. What would Bishop Berkeley have argued in view of this impression of the
senses? To him, they would also be "such clear truths that all we need to see them is
to open our eyes". 3 In an Augenblick the correspondences which the angels
establish also a glimpse, an instant of eternity; cinema breathes that neoangelic air
which gives light to another "vaste clarté", as if the stars of a seventh heaven
vaguely illuminated an art which turns images into time.
Beyond figures animated by light and movement, cinema divulged new hybrids of
verbal and visual images, it promoted different aesthetic tensions, giving place to
visions, recording, not long ago, the metamorphosis of written words which became
the things they represent, masterful images show the magic of a movement, a
sleight of hand which the nature of language ignores. Suddenly the image is no
longer an illustration of diction but it becomes the impossible vision of its idea. In
cinema the appearance of "the invisible man" was not strange.
Like the evangelic annunciation of the gestation, a new gesture of deixis
announces a sort of language of angels; a communication by messengers who also
commit themselves to the procedures of a passage, they require passwords in order
to cross frontiers, between the inside and the outside, on the limits of fiction, on the
edge of beyond, between the earth and the sky. Suspended, they suspend the
schematic dualism which reduces to a sharp opposition gender, biological,
grammatical, literary; they talk in an inner language which cinema makes visible. In
cinema, angels also pass in silence, meditating, half gods half human, mediating
between spaces and species, they cross them. Some legends said angels were so
numerous that they became separated from God, they became separated from the
divinity and they fell, turned into demons. The falls from the divine space into a
human space multiplied legends, theories and doctrines which coincide in
recognizing a similar fracture: either the separation caused the fall or the fall caused
the separation. In both cases, the catastrophe is consecutive: the separation is the
origin of the diabolical (in Greek diabolos:4 he who separates) and the symbol re-
establishes the re-union. For Peirce, this is precisely the aim of the semiotic
universe, the Third Universe, which "comprises everything whose being consists in
active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between
 Symbols and the quest for unity 5

objects in different Universes". 5 His Third Universe could be this Orbis Tertius
inscribed in antique cartography where airy nothings cross with Brute Actuality.
In this day and age of synthesis or without thesis, it might be interesting to look
into the convocation of this Fifth Congress as the appropriate topic— subject and
common place—to observe the diversities of an actuality which, without ignoring
these diversities, tends to contract them. However tautological this may sound, we
are in a reunion which aims to study a re-union, the right place to notice both the
diversity of its elements and a movement of returning, the return to a unity, a sort of
a secular institutionalized apocatastasis which takes us back to an initial and former
instance, ("...for all things [that is, the Sefirot], and all the attributes, which seem as
if they are separate, are not separated [at all] since all [of them] are one, as the[ir]
beginning is, which unites everything 'in one word'".) (Idei 1988:137)
Word and thing at once, the commonplace (topoi koinoi) attenuates differences, it
assimilates them in one and the same ajfinitas: prójimo proximo; proche prochain,
because they are close they are similar. The same limits, shared, reduce the
differences between word and image, between the referred object and the object
which refers, between performative and constative discourses, between language
and metalanguage, between theory and fiction; it does not involve only one
language: a process of synthesis fades the limits between different languages by
means of a semantic crossing hidden behind syntactically close words. Although it
is not a recent process, this blending anticipates—poetically—the outlandish
suppressions that this end of a millennium is taking for granted. Among so many
endings repeatedly foreseen—of oppositions, of referents, of poetry, of theory, of
history, of wars (Baudrillard 1993:15)—also reality disappears under the weight of
the spectres of its own representation; daily, the technological image confuses
reality with nothing. Since this confusion remains unnoticed, the disappearance is
twofold and it encourages two ancient quarrels (about images, about universals) in
only one single question. Everything appears or disappears in that square black hole
of the screen which shows or which does not show, and where "the microcosm of a
collapsing universe" (Penrose 1991:329) collapses, "au bord du néant (qui) nous
donne le néant en nantissement' (Breton 1966:222), that strange endorsement with
which André Breton keeps black humor on the edge of the abyss.
It is only fair that semioticians should deal with this job of reunion and synthesis
of diversities in a congress, 6 since no-one can forget that from its very origins, in
Latin, congressus has named as it still does, the action of meeting in one place, even
though later it was adopted with a rather more equivocal meaning than the one with
which we are dealing here. Only when it loses its erotic sense of an unaccomplished
union, does congress begin to designate, rather more austerely, a reunion of
specialists. This one has been convoked to study synthesis, which comprises
diversity, a logical or anthropological operation of long history and remote myths,
confirming "the antagonistic character of the world" as revelation of the symbolic
vocation. In this paper "congress" refers to a fact, a story, a name, and an event; like
Peirce's I think it denotes "the unity of thought", underscoring the fact that "the
unity of thought is nothing but the unity of symbohzation—consistency—in a word
(the implication of being) and belongs to every word whatever" (Peirce 1982,
2:240). Although Thomas Sebeok had said that "symbol is the most abused term
(that) it has either tended to be grotesquely overburdened or, to the contrary,
6 Lisa Block de Behar

reduced...even to absurd nullity" (Sebeok 1985:44) we know that this oscillation

between replenishment and exhaustion, apart from being the prevailing aesthetic
trend, is our disturbing daily practice. It goes without saying that we have no
intention of adding new meaning to symbol. Furthermore, in order to suspend the
excesses of its semantic profusion we are trying here to rescue one of the meanings
that symbolon had in its origins and which the numerous and varied contexts,
interpretations and theories have mitigated.
Neither similarity nor contiguity: for Peirce, "the symbol is a sign which refers to
the Object and denotes by virtue of a Law." In this legal, conventional aspect which
Peirce points out, the symbol denies the notion of "chance (which) is
indeterminacy, is freedom. But the action of freedom issues in the strictest rule of
law" (Peirce 1986,4:552 ).
"Chance changes everything, and chance will change that", says Peirce in the
same essay. Therefore the thesis that chance is really operative in the universe, the
phenomenon Peirce calls tychism is a way of falling, a fall that other languages still
keep close to chance (Fr. choir, It. codere, Sp. caer)\it is a fortune, a fate, a fall, a
part of its evolutive cosmology, but the fall is also the fate of the symbol; in several
senses it is its fortune: a CHANCE and a CAIDA, a C A S U A L T Y , another syllepsis
which reunites in one voice two contradictory meanings which in this reunion
cannot be avoided and cannot surprise either. For instance "the verb to cleave
means both to divide and to adhere", a manifold example, since "it names and
illustrates segmentation and union at the same time". Borges underlines that single
voice in a series of examples where he talks about congresses, and carnal union,
without mentioning that during the 16th and 17th centuries congressus did not
distinguish between the two.8
W e are still affected by the consequences of these falls, and dramatic or repeated
as the different versions of the laws of innocence may be, it is useful to remember
that in Latin, this chance-caida referred initially to the game of kubos or throwing
dice at random. The oldest gaining instruments known to man, these cubes were
Knucklebones (the anklebones of sheep) in English, osselets in French and taba a
Spanish word of Arabic origins, a game played with little bones, also found in
prehistoric caves, which remit us to an ancient and universal rite. On this ancestral
game we bet in this paper which alludes to symbols, to falls, fragments, fractures,
breaking of the vessels, tumbling down of towers, to provocation and idiomatic
differences, and carnal or intellectual reunions, of congresses, a ludic and
theoretical series which, according to Peirce, traverses stages of tychism (falls),
synechism (continuity) ending in agapism, that "thesis that love or sympathy has
real influence in the world and, in fact, is 'the great evolutionary agency of the
universe'" (Houser and Kloesel 1992:XXII).
Myths coincide in imagining similar falls: angels, inhabitants of Paradise, Plato's
androgynous hybrids, vessels and towers breaking down, and in all cases a cause
which blames casualties on the pride and rivalry of knowledge. Just like in ancient
times, boundless, universal communications of today would take place in heaven; in
satellites, no need to go Beyond (with a capital B). A common, previous language,
without fissures, firsdy. The divisions into languages or sexes, as punishment, later.
In "Symposium", Aristophanes speaks about the pride of the androgynous, who,
being our ancestors, sharing our human nature and conditions were not like us. In
 Symbols and the quest for unity 7

this past, either there were no sexes, or there were three, but never two. As if
foreseeing the rigidness of opposite paradigms, philosophy had already resorted to a
third order of discourse, suitable for overcoming the binary logic of the contraries,
of yes and no.
Their shape was different. Aristophanes says that "the form of each human being
as a whole was round, with back and sides forming a circle, but it had four arms and
an equal number of legs, and two faces...they rolled in a swift circle"..."they were
terrible in strength and force and they had high thoughts and conspired against the
gods" (Plato 1991, 2:190b), so much so, that Zeus and the other gods "cut each of
them in two." A sacrifice of unity or of thirdness, the sentence consists of a division
into two. For this reason "Each of us then is but the token of a human being, sliced
like a flatfish, two from one; each then seeks its matching token" (Plato 1991,
2:191e). Also for this reason, perhaps Peirce, "an American Plato",9 without further
explanations, stated that "the general answer to the question 'What is man?' is that
he is a symbol" (Peirce 1982, 1:491). (The word in Greek for tessera, for token, is
symbolon; corresponding pieces of a knucklebone or other object which contracting
parts broke between them, each part keeping one piece to match in order to have
proof of the identity of the presenter of the other.)
Words are symbols which postulate a shared memory, says Borges in The
Congress: 'The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird which is all birds, a sun which
is all the stars and the sun, a pitcher of wine, a garden, or the sexual act" (Borges
1984:61). These words of the narrator announce the end of The Congress, a story
which has the same name of this event but which takes place in Montevideo, in
Uruguay, a little country, and which secretly embraces the whole universe. The
fidelity of the quotation reveals the dualities which contract the word in Spanish:
cita is the sentimental or intellectual, transsexual or transtextual, text or sex, the
secret of La secta del fénix (Borges 1944) or of the Plaisir du texte (Barthes 1973).
Who would wonder whether angels speak? Sex and verb, from the beginning joined
as diversity and unity, in the same knowledge,10 immediately after the fall, when in
Hebrew yada meant both 'to know' and 'to lie down' together.
Type or token, the universe shattered by knowledge, the separations of fields and
disciplines, the ambitions of the androgynous, like the divine emanations which
make the vessels break, like the tempest which drowned a utopia, the boat, and
Prospero's books, breaking "a brave vessel/.../Dashed all to pieces", no gods who
could bear the challenge of prepotence or of potency and the symbols break perhaps
to be reunited one day. Faithful to his Muse, Aristophanes, among jokes and
interludes, before inviting Socrates and Agathon to speak, repeats that "Before we
were one... ; there is a fear that if we should not be well ordered towards the gods we
shall be split in two again and go around like the people molded in profile on
tombstones, sawed in half through the nose, born like split dice" (Plato 1991,
2:193a). Dice and symbola together again (the French translation is quite curious. It
translates anthropos symbolon for tessère d'homme. The note adds:

La traduction n'est pas littérale. Le mot grec est symbole mais son sens propre
s'est perdu en français, tandis que pour nous la tessera latine évoque une image
plus concrète. Essentiellement il s'agit d'une tablette, d'un cube, d'un osselet,
dont deux hôtes gardaient chacun la moitié transmise ensuite aux descendants;
8 Lisa Block de Behar

en rapprochant l'une de l'autre (c'est l'étymologie) ces deux fractions

complémentaires de l'entier, on établissait l'existence de liens antérieurs
d'hospitalité.) (Plato 1929:191d)

If the relationship between symbol and trinity appears recurrently, this is not only
due to the "driving compulsion" to go "back to the funhouse of rampant triplicities"
of which Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok speak in their preface to The Sign of
Three (1983) nor is it due to their suffering from "triadomany", a malady against
which Peirce warns when he confesses that "I have no marked predilection for
trichotomies in general" although he admits that "there is a not uncommon craze for
trichotomies" (Sebeok and Eco 1983:568-569).
However, as he says in A Guess at the Riddle, "Nobody will suppose that I wish
to claim any originality in reckoning the triad important in philosophy. Since Hegel,
almost every fanciful thinker has done the same. Originality is the last of
recommendations for the fundamental conceptions. On the contrary, the fact that the
minds of men have ever been inclined to threefold divisions is one of the
considerations in favour of them" (Houser and Kloesel 1992:255).
Like most of us, I also insist on this trinitary economy of Peirce's thought not just
for having disowned or overcome the paradigmatic binarisms of Sausseaurian
structural articulations, but because I am trying to return to the unity from thirdness
by means of hybrids and divisions, through the recognition of the "intermediate
thirds", of the intermediation which actuality with unusual extension and frequency
facilitates. "A centaur is a mixture of a man and a horse. Philadelphia lies between
New York and Washington. Such thirds may be called intermediate thirds or Thirds
of comparison" says Peirce in the same text and this mention of the hybrids as a
"tiers arbitre" or the third in question, an alien to the dilemma, a third person
sheltered under the "figures of alterity" or by geographical illusion, the place which
gives place to the fiction we are interested in highlighting.
One could have foreseen that after overcoming the rigorous limitations and
systematic abstractions imposed by sharp theoretical statements, current research
about the present would articulate disciplines, would contextualize knowledge,
conciliating a cultural quest which does not take place in an isolated environment
but between different media or milieu. For this reason, apart from distinguishing
each medium in particular, we are also interested in a new medium: that one which
is in the middle. A gap is opened, which is form and figure between two things:
between natural and cultural, inside and outside, secular and sacred, showing and
saying, visual and verbal, oral and written, journalistic and literary, scientific and
poetic, massive and academic, doctrines and fictions, a space in the middle, mediate
and mediatic, where historical, theoretical and aesthetic imagination contracts,
trying to combine those fragments, to repair fractures, to solve fractions. The
massification of media is understood in another sense: media is in everything and
everything is in the media. But also the division in medios, two fractions; dos
medios entre dos medios, two into two, simplifying, one into one is one, that is to
say, three times one. In all cases it is a question of dividing, of media, a mi-lieu, a
place between two, en el breve vértigo del entre as Octavio Paz said.
Despite the need to know, to analyse, which is to separate, to apply doctrines and
disciplines, contemporary realizations tend towards that search of a unity—initial,
 Symbols and the quest for unity 9

rather than unique—which aspires to recuperate, starting from that diversity of

knowledge and languages, some coincidences which are legitimised by the
epistemologica! and aesthetic conditions of the present situation. Current reflection
struggles between diverse media, it falls in the middle, it slips at the crossroads, the
place of intersection where differences become confounded, a place where it is not
surprising that chance, itself a sort of coincidence, be routine.
With the image of a Babel tumbling down on the cover of his book La Ricerca
della Lingua Perfetta, at the beginning of the introduction, Umberto warns us—and
rightly so—that "L'utopia di una lingua perfetta non ha ossesionato solo la cultura
europea. Il tema della confusione delle lingue, e il tentativo di porvi rimedio grazie
al ritrovamento o all'invenzione di una lingua comune a tutto il genere umano,
attraversa la storia di tutte le culture" (Eco 1993:6). This obsession coincides with
the search that Borges' narrator evokes in El Congreso:

I stayed in a humble dwelling at the back of the British Museum, where I visited
the library in the morning and in the afternoon, in search for a language worthy
of the Congress of the World. I did not overlook universal languages; I
considered Esperanto (—which the Lunario Sentimental calls "fair, simple and
economical"—) and the Volapiick, which aspires to exploring all the linguistic
possibilities, declining verbs and conjugating nouns. I considered the arguments
for and against resuscitating Latin, whose nostalgia has not failed to remain with
the centuries. I insisted also on examining the analytic language of John Wilkins,
where the definition of each word lies in the letters that form it. It was below the
high dome of the room that I met Beatriz. (Borges 1984:54).

Ten years ago, very close to the Research Center for Language and Semiotic
Studies created by Thomas A. Sebeok, Douglas Hofstadter dedicated a voluminous
book to Bloomington where he formulated a "Magic Cubology"—cubes, bricks and
rubrics are still around — recovering (Hofstadter 1985:301), in his own metamagical
way, the polysemic possibilities of fragile tessera or symbol. He describes
(1985:260-2%) an alphabet in which letters failed to fulfill their distinctive graphic
function in order to represent one phoneme or another. "A Total unification of All
Typefaces" (1985:272) "the trick being to achieve completeness: to fill the space" 11
as he says, a synthesis that would have aggravated Saussure's bold criticism against
writing if he had foreseen letters obliterating letters. This sort of unification is not
totally alien to the "spirit" considered by Paul Valéry as the author of all writings
and also the spirit as the aleph, that literal aspiration required for the articulation of
all the letters; and also Borges' aleph, the place where diversities coincide.
According to Hofstadter, "the 'A' spirit" (1985:279) vindicates a singular "platonic
essence" which recognizes that "the shape of a letterform is a surface manifestation
of deep mental abstractions". With the arrival of computers, to have an "A" making
machine "with infinite variety of potential output is not in itself difficult"
(1985:264) and it is no longer impossible "to approach the vision of a unification of
all typefaces" (1985:261).
Some days ago, a congress in the Spanish Royal Academy imposed on us, against
our will, the elimination of letters which belonged to our Spanish alphabet. The
reason was the urgency to gain access to the universal Latin alphabet but, unlike a
10 Lisa Block de Behar

"lingua perfetta" on which humanity keeps spending effort, this academic attempt
was considered important to facilitate the connections between computers and
databases. Umberto Eco wonders: "Ma sarebbe possibile a una entità
sovranazionale (come l'ONU o il parlamento europeo) imporre una Lingua
Internazionale Ausiliar come lingua franca...Non esistono precedenti storici" (Eco
1993:358). As a character of Borges' story said, "Every few centuries the Library
of Alexandria has to be burnt down" and we should fear that sometimes such a fire
starts because of one letter.
In Phaedro, Thamus, the Egyptian King, was right to doubt the invention of Thot
or Hermes. Writing, the first technology devoted to recording and conserving
fugacity, aimed at representing, at making present what is absent. Efficient, occult,
suspicious. Being a medicine, it has that dangerous quality of the pharmakon; being
an instrument, it has the dangerous ambivalences of the servant. The golem is
animated by a letter and it is by the obliteration of the letter that it falls down, made
of earth, on the earth.
As the century goes on, we believe more and more that we believe less and less;
however, that increasing disbelief which despises representation might reinforce a
belief in circumstances, immediate or unmediated circumstances, which, are
present, appearing to ignore representation, without attempting to foresee the
uncertainties of a Beyond more or less distant or of utopias more or less isolated or
fantastic. The concurrence of circumstances coincides in settling down in one place,
celebrating old arguments as those of the common places, in the present—as a
present—the place in which we are. "El Congreso del Mundo comenzó con el
primer instante del mundo y proseguirá cuando seamos polvo. No hay un lugar en
que no esté" (Borges 1975:60).
It is not a question of encouraging "il furore etimologico" nor of consecrating a
perfect language in which names, so Cratilo wished, were in a natural or necessary
correspondence with things, nor of devoting oneself "a una forsennata caccia alle
etimologia" as Eco warns, to demonstrate remote kinship or philological
coincidences of roots with which the 19th century fed plentifully its historical,
philological or biological searches. It is interesting to trace some common lines in
contemporary thought, to propose a synthesis of diversities which might reach unity
beyond theological consecrations, overcoming easy binary oppositions or the
limitations of a numeration which, being triadic, adds but one term to the series. It
is not a question of speaking of unity to reduce three to two or two to one but of
recovering "one" as a principle, as the beginning of an open series, rather than as a
quantitative limitation of a monothesist unity. Even I say paraphrasing Peirce13 that
"I will not, however, carry this speculation any further, as it may be offensive to the
prejudices of some who are present", it is possible to understand unity as a ludic
principle, a playground where words may play, a place where they match and bet on
those combinations, as if they were playing again to engage symbols to
knucklebones or to dice. Un coup de dés jamais n 'abolira le hasard summarizes in
one verse a poem, these symbols and two languages, chance and casualty, their
sudden fragmentation and the need of restitution (a key word) through
transidiomatic ways, re-vealing by means of a few cubes rolled at random a
profound coincidence beyond the differential surface of languages. The symbol is at
the intersection of two spheres of existence (combining exterior, interior, physical
 Symbols and the quest for unity 11

and not physical worlds, the visible and the invisible). It might allude to the
androgynous, to the fall and the fate of symbols, to the suspicious laws of fortune,
to the roll of dice, of two dice or of only one die duplicated by different languages
in the same verse and these attempts of restitution by poetical intranslation,
introducción, a sort of rhetoric figure with which I name the impossibility of
translating and at the same time a very deep translation beyond meanings which
names segment or simplify. In this roll of dice, the difference between languages is
at stake.
Alien to the deplored positivist efforts to find an Ursprache to explain
genealogically a common origin, the figure of intranslation stands in Borges, in
every great poetry, as an example of synthesis in diversity. A quest for the remnants
of a single language, unique, initial, anterior, interior, indivisible, the assumption of
a nominal prebabelic unity which appears recurrently in his essays, which is the
starting point of this fiction.
Borges discovers God's magnificent irony through a language of iron, of his
armoured language—enguaje blindado — which is the language of a blind man, he
talks about Red Adam, of other, deeper reds juxtaposed on their proper names: Red
Scharlach. These crisscrossed voices call for an edenic or adamic language, where
Ma Vipère de Lettre (Laforgue 1979:119), biphid and seductive, a parted language
from which one departs and to which one arrives, a password which, by means of a
symbolic key, crosses frontiers. It will tempt the poet who tries, beyond idiomatic
boundaries, to recover the com-prehension through a language which may not be
unique but which at least tends to be universal. By means of an extravagant
onomasio-semasiological device, the poet or the philosopher defies boundaries,
questions the rigor of a story, parodies basic linguistic properties (arbitrariness,
linearity); he neither transgresses nor observes syntactic rules due to an almost
perverse semantics, extending consecutiveness neither as a consequence nor in time
but as a place (place, not space, Ort not Raum).
From this place we can return to the present circumstances, where we started and
underscore the place14 which makes this encounter possible, orientating us west, the
point where points are defined, and secondly, West of America, close to Los
Angeles. This is why I have not rejected the temptation to honor the genii loci and I
invoke them, quoting Walt Whitman, thanks to an epigraph of Sebeok's (1991:1):

Solitary, singing in the West,

I strike up for a New World

From this west, twice occidental, west on west, doubled double u, a u-turn returns
us to the beginning, when we were talking about the dualities of that chance caída.
One cannot help remembering that the Latin occidens is the present participle of
occidere, a verb formed by ob- and cadere, 'to fall', to which we refer at the
beginning, a fall which, without disowning the others, refers to the fall of the sun,
the sunset, in the occident. However, neither is it this time a question of Der
Untergang des Abendlandes, although here also the fall is twofold.
Congresses, trips, meetings, metaphorical and effective transportations, planetary
broadcast via satellite helps transidiomatic coincidences in which it does not seem
too farfetched that someone could remain attentive to an image which is heard in
12 Lisa Block de Behar

English, read in French, and understood in Spanish. The poet makes of this
deceitful variety an attempt at originality, engaging words from their origin, an
unthinkable access, suitable to recover, by means of different poetic procedures, a
principle which can be assumed, a principle which is a reserve of resonances,
sounds and senses multiplied by returns to different words and several silences.
In the frontiers of a world which does not hide the global astonishment of its
technological abilities, it seems an increasingly pressing matter to sound the latent
bottom of words, to aspire the depth which discreetly keeps the meanings of other
times, to glimpse different times cloaked in one same actuality, encouraging the
preview of the present. This rescue of hinted meanings is, at least, twofold:
someone, a poet or a philosopher, discovers in one word another way of signifying,
a sort of anagram which, without altering the combination of letters, allows for
another direction of reading/revealing the contradictory novelty which interprets, as
a discovery, a previous semantic instance.
Sometimes it surprises us only as a fire of words, a short circuit of discourse
which amazes playing at several senses at the same time, risking a verbal bet which
quickly goes from one stage of the succession to the next, saving senses of a word
which is a startling display—with no abuse of philology—because it keeps,
simultaneously, senses that its own history has mitigated, denunciating a "truth"
which counts from the origin. This is that "pleasure of discovering an etymology"
which Borges felt and mentioned, the pleasure of actualizing in one voice, at once,
the history which still "trembles in the body of its plurivocity". One word reflects
itself and without repeating, it doubles—in more than one sense—as if to let voices
of the past be heard. So intranslation becomes a sort of retroduction, "an act of
insight", in Peirce's words, "the abductive suggestion" coming to us "like a flash".
According to Sebeok, its elements "are in our minds before we are conscious of
entertaining it, but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before
dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our
contemplation" (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1983:18). That "element of freedom
and originality (which) will persist in a universe that has reached a state of
equilibrium between chance and law" (Houser and Kloesel 1992:XXXIII), the
rolling of dice, the reunion of the symbol, the reunion in a Congress, the Congress
which, in a story, is identified with the world, the story that tells about the
indisociability of the word and the world; a blending of theory and fiction that
current imagination multiplies.

Notes

1 Serres 1993, Cacciari 1986, Bussagli 1991, Godwin 1991.

2 W. Wenders, J. L. Godard follow a way which is not too different from a
century which was cinematographically generous: J. von Sternberg,
Bunuel, coloured angels and assorted exterminators.
3 I translate into English the text in which Borges quotes Berkeley's "New
refutation of time" (1952:237).
4 Diaballein is composed of dia 'through' and of ballein from Ballo-
'throw', 'drop'.
Another random document with
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Carency, where I became attached for quarters and rations to the
Sixteenth Canadian Scottish, which was one of the battalions of the
Third Canadian Infantry Brigade of which I was now R. C. chaplain.
My other battalions were the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth.
All, with the exception of the Fourteenth, were kilted battalions, and
each one had its own band of bag-pipes.
I was somewhat disappointed to find myself attached to the
Sixteenth as the Catholic chaplain who had proceeded me had been
quartered with the Fourteenth in which was an average of four
hundred Catholics; in the Sixteenth the average was about eighty.
There was some military reason for my appointment, so all I could do
was to obey orders.
We left Camblain L’Abbey and the motor went quickly over the well-
kept road. Soon the town, with all the houses still intact, was left far
behind, and presently, not far ahead, I saw a large sign-board
attached to two posts about fifteen feet high. At the top, in large
black block letters, were the words “Gas Alert,” and beneath were
words to the effect that from now on all troops must wear their gas
masks “at the alert.” This meant that instead of carrying the mask at
the side, with the bag closed, it must be tied about the chest, with the
bag open, so that in a moment the mask might be raised to the face.
A little nervousness came over me, for now on all sides were signs
of great devastation—broken and torn buildings, crumbled walls,
fields deeply marked with shell-holes; and the road became rough,
for it had been mended in many places after being rent by shells.
Less traffic appeared along our way; everything seemed quiet. On
our right, in the distance, I noticed what seemed to be a square
forest of miniature trees, which, as we drew nearer, became regular
in shape and equidistant from one another. As we came still nearer I
noticed low mounds, “row on row.” What had seemed to be trees
were crosses—a great forest of little low crosses—and between the
rows and rows of crosses were the long lines of “the little green tents
where the soldiers sleep.” We passed two or three other military
cemeteries, then the ruins of a small village or two, where many
soldiers looked out from cellar windows or low huts built of pieces of
broken stone and scraps of corrugated iron, with a piece of burlap
hanging and weighted at the end for a door. Dugouts were built into
the hill that sloped up from the roadside. The silence of the whole
countryside seemed uncanny. We came up a little hill where, on our
right a few hundred feet back from the road, were perhaps a dozen
corrugated iron stables, open at the sides, but with a partition the
whole length of the hut running through the middle. In the foreground
was the basement of what had once been a long, narrow dwelling-
house. Here we stopped, for we had come to headquarters of the
Sixteenth Battalion, or, to give them their full name, the Sixteenth
Canadian Scottish. They were a kilted battalion, hailing from British
Columbia.
The colonel told me to remain in the motor till he returned from the
orderly room, which I did. In a few minutes he came back with the
adjutant and two soldiers. The adjutant welcomed me kindly; the two
soldiers picked up my bed-roll and began to carry it towards
headquarters. I shook hands with the colonel as he said good-bye.
Then I accompanied the adjutant to headquarters. I had arrived at
the Western Front.
 Chapter XXXIX
A Strafe and a Quartet

My room was a partitioned off portion at the end of the cellar in which
was headquarters: there was no fire in it and the month was
December. Through cracks in the portion of the building that was
above ground, blew the cold, wintry wind.
That night at dinner in “the mess,” which was in the portion of the
cellar adjoining my billet, I met a number of the officers—though the
majority were still in the line—and they were among the finest men I
had ever met. The commanding officer, Colonel Peck, one of the
best-loved men on the Western Front, was a huge man with a black
drooping mustache which gave him a rather fierce appearance, but
there was a look of real kindness in his eyes. He possessed the
Distinguished Service Order Medal, and later he won the highest
decoration of the British army, the Victoria Cross. At that time,
although we did not know it till later, he had been elected a member
of the Canadian parliament.
When I returned to my billet I found a lighted candle sticking to the
bottom of an upturned condensed milk tin; some one had been
showing me an act of kindness. I had no sooner entered than there
was a knock on the door. A young soldier opened it and came in. He
said he had come to open my bed-roll and prepare my bed. I looked
at the berth, which was a piece of scantling about seven feet long
running the width of the room, to which was attached two
thicknesses of burlap about a yard wide that were fixed to the wall. I
wondered how I was going to sleep, for I was shivering then.
Suddenly the young soldier ceased tugging at the straps, listened
quietly for a second or two, then not looking at me, but keeping his
eye fixed on the bed-roll, he said slowly and solemnly, as if
addressing some imaginary person in the bed-roll: “All is quiet on the
Western Front.”
He neither smiled nor looked at me, but continued his work.
For months I had read those words in the daily papers of England;
but now there was something so comical in the lad’s manner of
saying them that I could not help laughing as he went on with his
unpacking.
But it was not for long that “all was quiet on the Western Front.”
Suddenly I heard a far-distant rumble which had the rhythmic roll of
snare-drums, yet the sound was much stronger and it was increasing
quickly in intensity and volume. Soon it was a great thundering roar
with a minor rattle. The earth seemed to be trembling.
I looked at the soldier. “A bombardment?” I questioned.
“No, sir,” he said quietly, “that’s just a strafe over on the LaBassée
front. Those are our guns. Fritzy’ll open up after they stop. You
should go outside and see it, sir.”
I stepped out, almost falling into a trench that was just outside my
door. Away to the northeast for about a mile flitted short, sharp
yellow flashes of light. Although the rumbling of the guns was so
loud, I judged them to be five or six miles distant. Everything was
quiet about where I stood. It was a moonlight night and along the
white road, as far as I could see, was a line of broken trees, with
here and there the irregular walls of a ruined village.
Presently there was a lull, then complete silence; in the clear
moonlight, the devastated countryside gave one a weird impression.
Then “old Fritzy opened up,” and although the rumble of his guns
was not so distinct, I judged that he was giving us about as much as
we had given him. I wondered how much harm would be done, and
whether many of our lads would be killed. Then slowly the firing
ceased and presently again “all was quiet on the Western Front.”
I was just about to reënter my quarters when I received another
surprise. From a hut just a few yards away came sounds of singing. I
listened: it was a low, sweet song that I had never heard before—a
quartet, and the harmony seemed perfect. I had never before heard
such sweet singing. An officer came out of the mess and stood near
me, listening in silence. Then he said: “That’s pretty good, Padre.” I
agreed with him, but I confessed I had never heard the song before.
“Why, Padre,” he said, “the name of that song is ‘Sweet Genevieve’.
Strange you never heard it! Wherever men are congregated one will
hear that song. It’s an old song, Padre. Strange you never heard it!”
So I had heard two sounds that I had never before heard: one was
the sound of a “strafe” on the Western Front; the other was the
singing of “Sweet Genevieve.”
 Chapter XL
The Valley of the Dead

When I reëntered my hut I found that the young soldier had opened
my bed-roll and removed the few little articles that were in it. The
bed-roll was arranged for the night on the burlap berth.
“You haven’t enough blankets, sir,” he said. Then he was gone; but
in about five minutes he was back again with two thick brown army
blankets. After I had thanked him, he looked around to see if he
could improve anything before leaving for the night. Not seeing
anything, he was just about to open the door when he turned and
said: “If old Fritz comes over to bomb us tonight, sir, the safest place
for you will be down in the trench. It’s a moonlight night and Fritzy
likes to be out in the moonlight.”
There was no bombing that night, but it was so extremely cold that I
could not sleep. I spent the night changing from one position to
another in the hope of getting warm, but I remained awake till
daylight.
About seven o’clock the following morning I heard a fumbling at the
latch of my door. I had just finished my prayers. I waited, for I knew
the door was not locked; then as the latch was raised the door
opened, assisted by the foot of the one entering. First there
appeared a large granite iron plate of steaming porridge and a
smoky hand holding it, then a granite iron mug of something
steaming, and another smoky hand holding it. Then appeared the
kindly soldier of the night before, his pleasant face a little begrimed,
but smiling, the arm of the hand which held the mug hugging to his
side a small earthen jar of sugar with a spoon in it. I went to his
assistance and soon we had the things spread out on an upturned
ration box which had been the seat. Now it was the table, and the
bed was my seat.
“How did you sleep, sir?” asked the soldier. I told him. Then he said
he must try to find something to make a stove. He went on to tell me
that he and the cook had built one, but that it was not working well.
He held up his hands as evidence, and I looked at his face. “The
cook is out there now,” he said, “trying to cook the breakfast, and
swearing, for there’s more smoke coming out around the stove than
there is going up the chimney.”
I poured from the earthen mug a little of the hot diluted condensed
milk over the steaming porridge, and the soldier told me to take all
the sugar I wanted as there was plenty. He stood beside me for a
while waiting to see if I would make any comment on the porridge. I
had never been in the habit of eating any cereal at breakfast, but this
morning I was very cold and also very hungry. I tasted the porridge; it
was hot, piping hot. It tasted slightly of smoke, but that didn’t matter.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Not smoky?” he asked.
I assured him that if it was a little bit smoky it made no difference. He
went out again; but I had not quite finished the porridge before I
heard another fumbling at the latch, and in a moment he appeared
again with another granite iron plate on which were two rashers of
bacon and a large slice of toast; in the other hand was a large mug
of hot tea.
“Is this dinner?” I asked.
The lad smilingly told me to eat all I could, that when a man loses
sleep the best way to make up for it is by a good meal. He picked up
the empty porridge plate and the empty mug, leaving the sugar-bowl,
and went out again; but in about three minutes he was back with a
jar of compound jam, strawberry and gooseberry.
“Has the cook stopped swearing yet?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied the lad, “I told him you said the porridge was good. He
knew it wasn’t, and when he saw your empty plate he smiled. He’ll
be all right now for awhile.”
“What is the name of this place?” I asked.
“Carency,” he replied, “in the Souchez Valley. Just across the road,
on the other side of the valley, is where the sixty thousand French
soldiers and civilians were gassed. Their own turpinide gas that they
had sent over against the Germans came back on them. The wind
had changed. There are some of the victims in the wood that have
never been buried. The valley is called Valley of the Dead.”
He went on to tell me of the great battles that had already been
fought in the area where we now were. I learned that we were almost
at the base of Vimy Ridge.
“What is the difference between a ‘strafe’ and a ‘bombardment?’” I
asked him.
“Well,” he said, “a bombardment is usually all thought out
beforehand and a lot of preparations are made for it and it usually
lasts a long time. A ‘strafe’ is just a firing that might start up any time,
and it generally lasts only a few minutes. Sometimes a green hand in
the line brings off a ‘strafe’ that might last half an hour with the loss
of many lives and the cost of thousands of dollars. The first night in
the line every minute or two some fellow thinks he sees some one
coming across ‘No Man’s Land’ and sometimes he ‘gets the wind up’
pretty bad and fires. Then old Fritz thinks some one is coming
towards him and he fires back; then two or three of our fellows
answer, and immediately old Fritz comes back stronger. Then the
whole line opens up and the machine-guns begin to rat-tat-tat, and
an S. O. S. flare goes up for the artillery, and presently the earth is
rocking under a ‘strafe’ and everybody except one wonders who
started it all.”
As the lad then began to gather up the empty dishes, I made
apologies for having eaten so much; always my breakfast had been
just a little bread and jam. His only comment was, “Sorry, sir, I didn’t
have a couple of eggs for you.”
Long after he went out I kept thinking of the horrors of war; what
catastrophes might transpire through the changing of the wind or
through “getting the wind up.”
After I had returned home from the war I was giving a series of
lectures in a little town. In one of them I happened to mention the
terrible tragedy of the turpinide gas. Many among my audience found
it hard to believe that there had been so many victims. The following
day the priest with whom I was staying asked me many questions
about the Valley of the Dead. A day or two later, as we were sitting in
his office, one of his parishioners came in on some business. I was
about to leave the room when the priest motioned me to stay.
When the man had finished his business, he looked at me and said:
“So you have been to the war, Father?”
I said I had been there.
“Well,” continued the man, who had come a long distance, “I met a
lad who was through it all, and he told me he found the gas worse
than anything. He said he was in a place, one time, where thousands
and thousands had been froze stiff by a strange kind of gas. He said
that there was a church there, filled with people sitting in the pews,
and the windows were all up, and this gas came right in through the
windows and froze all the people in the pews. They’re all there yet,
and if you pay a quarter you can see them.”
The man was most serious. I did not dare look at the priest till he had
gone. For a moment the priest shook with laughter, then he said to
me: “Father, send for that returned man and make him your
assistant. He can tell the story much better than you.”
“Well,” I said, “considering that it was France, they might have made
the admission fee one franc instead of a quarter.”
However, my story had not been exaggerated.
 Chapter XLI
New Friends

Shortly after the young soldier left there was another knock on my
door, and as I stood up to go to open it I heard outside the voice of a
man speaking as if to a child. When I opened the door, there stood a
kilted officer over six feet in height, with the pleasant face of a boy.
He was accompanied by a billy-goat, the mascot of the battalion.
The officer greeted me warmly and then looked at the goat, saying:
“Shake hands, Billy, shake hands with the new Padre.” So Billy and I
shook hands, or rather, I shook Billy’s raised hoof.
In the afternoon I took a walk along the Valley of the Dead. Away in
the distance I noticed a large balloon far up in the air and, seemingly,
two men standing in the large basket attached to it. It was the first
time I had ever seen a balloon and I was a little surprised to find that
it was not round, but shaped like a sausage. It was a greyish-khaki
color.
The sun was just setting far away behind the broken trees when I
walked back from Neuville St. Vaast; the sky was pink with here and
there a pencil of red clouds. Along the skyline flew three homing
airplanes. As I turned to see if any more planes were coming, I
noticed the large balloon being hauled slowly down towards the
earth.
When I entered my little billet, I found the young soldier at work
putting up a stove that he had found and patched with a piece of tin.
I asked him what the great balloon was doing up in the air. He told
me that it was an observation balloon, and that the two men in the
aerial car were observing with field-glasses what was going on
behind Fritz’s line. The airplanes that I had seen wending their way
against the winter skyline were scout planes that had been patrolling
the sky for hours. “Now,” he said, “they are going home to roost.”
Before the stove was finished the Third Brigade interpreter—the men
always called the interpreter “the interrupter”—came to visit me. He
was the first Catholic I had met since coming to the Sixteenth. He
seemed very friendly and kind. The badge of his office was a sphinx.
It was Napoleon who designed this badge for interpreters—I
suppose to remind them that although they would learn much that
was occurring, it was part of their office not to divulge it. The
interpreter’s work was made very hard at times by the good
peasants of France. Sometimes, while marching through a rich
farmland, a soldier lad would “annex” a hen, or a head of cabbage,
or some grapes, or apples, etc.; then the irate owner would seek the
interpreter and oblige him to conduct him or her before the proper
military authorities, where compensation would be demanded from
the government.
The cook also came in to see me; he, too, was a Catholic and
seemed to be a lad full of energy. I was surprised to learn that in
private life he was a tailor. Before he left, he made arrangements for
going to confession. Then, by some strange association of ideas, I
asked him if his stove still smoked. It was going much better now, he
said.
That evening after dinner as I sat wiping my eyes with my
handkerchief, when it was not being applied to my nose—for besides
giving real warmth, the new stove emitted a quantity of smoke—an
officer knocked and came in, followed by two soldiers carrying his
bed-roll. I had been expecting him, for in the mess just before dinner
I had heard the officers planning the allotment of sleeping space for
the night. A number had been sleeping in their bed-rolls on the floor
of the mess; and now two or three other officers were coming back
from leave. I had heard an officer say: “We’ll put ‘Wild Bill’ with the
Padre.” The others had agreed to this.
I had been wondering who “Wild Bill” was. I did not think the officers
were playing a practical joke on me, for I had always found officers
most respectful to the priesthood. But now “Wild Bill” had entered,
and as I looked through the slight smoke-screen, my eyes rested on
one of the gentlest-mannered men I have ever met. Without being in
the least effeminate, he came quietly over and shook hands. I
understood now why they called him “Wild Bill” for I recalled that at
college one of the slowest moving lads I had ever met, had been
rechristened “Lightning.” I felt grateful to the other officers who had
billeted “Wild Bill” with me.
He slept in his bed-roll on the floor, after he had spread a rubber
ground sheet over it. Gradually the room became sufficiently warm to
sleep in. The soldier had found some coal. And as the smoke died
away I fell asleep and did not awake until morning.
 Chapter XLII
A Little Burlap Room

The following day was Saturday and I began to think of my duties for
the morrow. I had learned that the Thirteenth, Fifteenth and
Sixteenth battalions would remain in the trenches till Monday. I called
at the orderly room of the Fourteenth only to learn that they would be
moving Sunday. When I returned to my billet I found a letter from
Father MacDonnell, telling me to call to see him at the Transport
Section of the Seventy-second Battalion. I did, and found a little
man, dressed in Scotch military costume—tartan riding breeches,
round-cornered khaki tunic and glengarry cap. The Seventy-second
was a Scotch battalion from Canada, but its chaplain was a
Canadian from Scotland. He had been a member of the Benedictine
Monastery, at Fort Augustus, Scotland. He was then busy
composing a little work on the Holy Name, for he was anxious to
establish the Holy Name Society among not only the Catholic
soldiers, but also all other denominations. This was accomplished
later with the co-operation of the general commanding officer of the
Canadian Corps, Sir Arthur Currie. He was not a young man: his hair
was beginning to turn grey. I took him to be about fifty years old. He
wished me to work with him on Sunday. This I did, saying Mass in a
large Y. M. C. A. tent, while he said Mass some distance farther
down the valley. I did not have many at Mass, but a good number
came to Communion. Most of the men were in the trenches.
In the afternoon, towards three o’clock, I heard the inspiring strains
of a military march coming up the Valley of Death. I knew the march
well. It was “The Great Little Army,” one of the most popular marches
on the Western Front. I stepped outside and looked down the valley.
A battalion of infantry was marching back from the line.
“It’s the Fourteenth,” said a young soldier standing nearby.
I watched them carefully. The Fourteenth was one of my battalions. I
had heard of it before; it had been the sacrificed battalion in one of
the big battles. The men had advanced without support in order to
give the enemy the impression that we were stronger than we really
were. They had suffered terrible casualties, but their manoeuvre had
met with great success. I watched them till they disappeared round a
turn in the road—Hospital Corner, I think it was called—and still I
stood listening to the band. Very likely I would meet these lads on
Christmas Day—which meant within the week.
I had no sooner returned to my “room” when the young soldier who
had been so thoughtful of my interests came in. “Sir,” he said, “the
colonel and all the headquarters’ officers have gone to Chateau de la
Haie; the battalion is going there tomorrow. I think you should take
the colonel’s room before any one else gets it.”
In ten minutes all my belongings were in the room just vacated by
the colonel. It was a warm room completely lined with burlap: ceiling,
walls and floor were covered with it. There was a small burlap-
covered table and a low bench, about three feet long, also with a
covering of burlap, but above all else, there was a tiny stove with two
doors that slid back so that one could see the fire burning in it. Since
then I have been in very much worse quarters on the Western Front.
The following morning I said Mass on the little table, and the cook,
who had now only four officers to provide for, came to Holy
Communion. The next morning the interpreter, with a young soldier
who was being called home to Halifax to care for his wife and child
who had just passed through the terrible disaster, knelt reverently in
the little burlap room to receive their Lord.
 Chapter XLIII
Christmas at the Front

We had planned to have midnight Mass in one of the large moving-

picture huts at Chateau de la Haie, for here in reserve were four full
battalions: one belonging to Father MacDonnell, one to Father
Murray, a young chaplain whom I met just before Christmas, and
two, the Fourteenth and Sixteenth, belonging to me. My other
battalions were only about two miles beyond these, the Thirteenth at
Petit Servans and the Fifteenth at Grand Servans. But First
Divisional Headquarters, which was then at Chateau de la Haie,
reconsidered the matter. They thought the Catholic soldiers coming
in at such an early hour might disturb others who would wish to
sleep; and, also, that there might be too many lights used, so that
some aerial Santa Claus from across the line might wing his way
above the camp, dropping a few Christmas bombs in passing. We
then decided to have two Masses in the large hut at Chateau de la
Haie and one in the church at Petit Servans. Fathers Murray and
MacDonnell were to say the Masses at Chateau de la Haie and I
was to go to Petit Servans.
I found that not only had I to notify the men of my own battalions, but
also all the units in my area. As there were about ten other units—
labor groups, engineers, divisional trains, etc.—this took me quite a
while. In fact, it took all Monday afternoon. But the following morning,
which was Christmas, when I turned around after the gospel to say a
few words to the lads, I felt more than repaid for any inconvenience,
including my four mile walk from Carency to Petit Servans before
Mass, for the church was filled. All the seats were occupied and the
large space in the rear was packed with standing soldiers—kilted
laddies from the Thirteenth and Fifteenth, with their officers; soldiers
from the engineers; members of the labor groups; stretcher-bearers
from the First Field Ambulance. With a full heart I thanked the Christ
Child for bringing together all my Catholic men. It was the first time in
four months that I had been able to assemble such a large number.
At the hospital, naturally, the groups were small. And as I looked at
the sea of faces, so reverently attentive, many bearing marks of the
terrible conflicts through which they had passed, I felt a twitching at
the throat, so that it was a few seconds before I could begin to
speak.
It was a long while that Christmas Day before I finished giving Holy
Communion, for nearly all the men in the church came.
On my way home I learned from Father Murray that the Fourteenth
and Sixteenth had attended Mass in a body in the moving-picture hut
at Chateau de la Haie, and that great numbers had gone to Holy
Communion.
My Christmas dinner was a piece of dry roast beef, almost burnt,
some potatoes, bread and margarine, with a little apricot jam and a
cup of tea; that was all. Yet I think it was the happiest Christmas I
ever spent, for, as I thought of that first wonderful meeting with those
Canadian Catholic soldiers on the Western Front, I felt that in their
midst those words, written so long ago, “There was no room in the
inn,” could not be said that Christmas Day.
 Chapter XLIV
Back to Rest

Every morning for a week or two I was in the little church where I had
said Mass on Christmas Day, and every evening while I was there
men came to confession. Then one morning the young soldier who
had been so attentive to my wants, and whose name I had learned
was George, came into the burlap room in a state of evident
excitement and said: “We’re going back to rest, sir.”
I did not know exactly what “back to rest” really meant, but I judged
from George’s sparkling eyes that it was something very good.
“That’s good news,” I said. But one had to be a soldier of the line to
realize what good news it really was. One must be actually in the
trenches when the word comes to comprehend fully what those
words “back to rest” mean.
“We’re going back to rest, chummy,” somebody says, and the word is
relayed quickly down the front line trench. And tired-faced lads,
many of them with faint, dark rings around their eyes, smile broadly
as they stand half-crouching in the muddy trench. Onward the glad
tidings go, whispered or uttered in low voices: “Out to rest, Bo; the
relief’s coming in tonight at half-past ten. Hooray!” But the “hooray”
does not express adequately the feelings of the speaker. It must do,
however, as a loud cheer is not permitted in the front line trench.
When it is dark, the relief comes in very quietly and takes over the
different posts; then, as quietly, the lads go down the support
trenches till they slope up to the great wide road that seems so
spacious and airy after the deep, narrow trench they have been
standing in for days. On they go, past long rows of broken trees that
once were majestic, full-leafed elms, then through masses of ruined
buildings and broken stone walls, with here and there a small
corrugated iron hut or shack, built just lately. At times, not very far
away, a long yellow flash, followed by a thundering report, tells them
that our heavies are at work.
Somebody begins to whistle, “There’s a long, long trail a-winding,” or
“Over There,” then others catch the lilt, and in a few seconds
hundreds are whistling to the swinging, sweeping thud of marching
feet. When they get a little farther on their way, the whistling ceases
and a song is struck up, though not too loudly. Above them are the
silent stars peacefully shining. Away behind them shrapnel bursts
savagely and sprinkles its death-bearing message. But that is far
behind, and now they are going out—out to rest!
Perhaps they march all through the night, carrying their equipment
and their heavy packs on their backs, and as the dawn comes, they
notice at every cross-road a great cross, and nailed to the cross the
figure of the Crucified—white, blood-streaked, the thorn-crowned
head bent in the agony of suffering, the face livid with pain and
misery. And many a lad under his weight looks up. He understands it
all much better now than when he first came to the front. Some
breathe a little prayer. They are going out to rest—but they will be
coming back again!
They continue their march till the morning sunlight begins to brighten
all the land and the roar of the guns has become but a faint distant
rumble, then, perhaps, they sit on the roadside, or along the edge of
a field, the grass of which looks so fresh and green after the rolling,
shell-torn No Man’s Land they have been looking over for days,
where never a blade of grass could be seen; only the grey shell-
pitted earth, with here and there a line of white chalk which made
one think of a white-capped, angry sea. Birds begin to sing in field
and green wood, and from many field kitchens and little red fires built
on the roadside comes the odor of frying bacon.
Some of the lads take off their packs and go to sleep on the
roadside, their faces grey with the dust from marching feet. Much
traffic goes by—khaki motor lorries, general service wagons,
dispatch riders on motorcycles. Then from the distance come the
strains of a military march played by a brass band that is
approaching; it may be “Colonel Bogey” that they play, or “Sons of
the Brave,” etc. It is the band of the battalion coming to meet the lads
and play them back to rest.
When every one has eaten his bread and bacon and has finished his
pint of hot tea, they fall in, feeling much refreshed. Then there is a
rumble from the big drum and a rattle from the smaller ones and the
inspiring music of a military march breaks on the air. The lads
straighten momentarily under their packs, and there is a new swing
to their tired feet. Perhaps they pass through many fields lined with
tall elms. Perhaps they pass many French peasants, old and young,
going to work in the fields, who smile pleasantly. They may go
through a quiet little village or two till they come to a more flourishing
one in which is a large chateau. Then the band, which for the last
fifteen minutes has given place to a few buglers and drums, strikes
up the battalion’s own march and the order comes ringing down the
line, “March to attention.” Then the tired lads know that they are
coming into rest billets.
The organization in “rest” is done very quickly. One battalion takes
over from another, and in a very short time enamel signs are hung
out of billets which tell where are the different officers and orderly
rooms. If there is a curé in the village, and if it so happens that the
Catholic chaplain of the brigade is quartered with the battalion that
has come to rest here, a little sign hangs from the curé’s gate,
bearing the words “R. C. Chaplain,” for the soldiers’ priest is nearly
always billeted with the parish priest of the village; and on the church
door a paper is tacked giving the hours of Mass, confession, etc.
Sometimes there is no curé in the village; perhaps he has been
called to join the soldiers of France; perhaps at one time the village
has been heavily shelled and he has followed his people. In this
case, often it is necessary to renovate the little shell-torn church, but
this is quickly done. And in the morning, after Mass has been said, a
tiny lamp burns in the church which tells the soldiers that the Master
has come and is calling them.
At twelve o’clock the soldiers’ work for the day, when they are out in
rest, usually finishes, and they receive any papers and magazines
that may have come to them from friends across the sea. These are
very welcome arrivals, and so are the boxes of good things that
sometimes come from home. Then, as the lads sit under trees, or in
front of tents, or in low hay lofts to eat their dinner, papers are
opened and those who have received boxes or parcels from home
pass around candies, cake, etc., to those who have not, and so a
very pleasant hour passes.
The afternoon is usually given over to games and athletic sports. If
different troops happen to be quartered together in the same village
the competition between the two becomes very interesting. Perhaps
a baseball game is arranged between American and Canadian lads,
while English lads look on, it must be admitted, with irritation. They
cannot understand why one side should shout such things at the
other; why they should try to rattle the pitcher. To them it seems quite
abusive, and judging from their talk, they are disgusted. “Call that a
gaime,” one will say, “when one side keeps on ’ollerin’ at the blighter
bowlin’ that ball, so’s ’e caunt throw well?” “Call that sport?” “Call that
fair ply?” “I carn’t see where the fair ply comes hin when they tike
such bloomin’ hunderanded wys o’ tryin’ to win.” His mate agrees
with him, and presently they move off to some other scene of
amusement. Meanwhile, little French boys who have come to watch
the baseball game go racing about the field, imitating some of the
plays in the game which is so strange to them, and as they go sliding
to some imaginary home-plate, one can hear such expressions as
“Safe!” and “Hat a-boy.”
It was early in the morning when we left Chateau de la Haie, for we
were not under observation and it was not necessary to move by
night. We assembled on one of the squares near a long, tree-fringed
avenue which was one of the approaches to the chateau. For some
time before we fell in I heard from all quarters strange, unearthly
noises, and in every direction I turned I saw, at quite a distance from
each other, kilted figures walking up and down bearing their wide-
branched bag-pipes, each one emitting the weirdest wails
imaginable; they were the pipers of the Sixteenth pipe band tuning
up. However, when we started off the sound was quite different, for
the pipes and kettle-drums make merry marching music. I know of
no other music that can make tired men march so briskly and with