The Name of the Horse: "Hard Times", Semiotics, and the Supernatural

Author(s): Robert L. Caserio

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 5-23
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345616
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WhytheNovelMatters.II
The Name of the Horse: Hard Times,
Semiotics, and the Supernatural
ROBERTL. CASERIO

"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four

eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries,
sheds hoofs, too...." This (and much more in the same vein) is Bitzer's
Gradgrindian definition of a horse at the start of Hard Times. We could accept
the definition if Bitzer offered it as one momentary way of looking at the ani-
mal. But Bitzer is offering the definition-to Gradgrind, of course-as the
only one, as the strictly true one, faithful to the factual horse in itself. We
ourselves know that there are other ways of looking at a horse; and, as it un-
folds, Hard Times seems to mime our knowledge. The novel rejects the
Gradgrindian assumption of a non-arbitrary, strictly denotative relation be-
tween names and things or facts. It expands the ways of defining horse until
at the end we come upon a horse who-by dancing!-keeps Bitzer captive in
a horse-carriage for twenty-four hours and thereby allows young Tom Grad-
grind, a bank robber, to escape from the law. We are willing by the novel's
end to add a new meaning to the definition of horse: it is a graminivorous
quadruped that performs antinomian ballets. This definitional possibility
does not violate our ideas about the way meanings work, about the ways
meanings are both fixed and in transit, both single and polysemous.
But do we feel as comfortable with Hard Times' last-expressed view of lan-
guage itself, in Sleary's farewell speech? Gradgrindian definition rigidly
limits meaning; but in spite of the novel's expansion of the limits, the restric-
tive limitation of definition returns at the novel's end. Like the elder Grad-
grind himself, whose rigidity of character is both negated and preserved by
the fable's finale, arguably the Gradgrindian limitation of meaning is negated
and preserved by Dickens in the form of a mysticism that grinds language to
a halt. There is, Sleary's last words suggest, a linguistic supernatural, a
meaning or truth beyond signs and natural languages, analogous to the para-
doxical life and no-life that is beyond death. This beyond is, of course, hard
to characterize; it combines nature and supernature, utterance and ineffabil-
ity. The linguistic supernatural is an Unnameable, an Indeterminacy, whose
expressions are inchoate but nevertheless are powerful enough to limit the
power of ordinary linguistic and semiotic expression. With Sleary's utterance
Dickens closes his book with an admonitory finger that hushes our speech.
The Unnameable may show itself, Sleary thinks, in dancing horses and the
like-in Jupe's canny dog Merrylegs, for example-and the demonstration
may be denominated love, yet all language is inadequate nomination. So
6 NOVEL FALL 1986

Gradgrindians and circus people alike think language is and should be lim-
ited; the opponents turn out to have this common ground, which may well
predetermine the final reconciliation between Gradgrind and Sleary. Their
coming together ends with a shift of attention from the dancing horse to the
wonderful dog. Merrylegs has tracked down Sleary, because the dog wants
to inform the circus manager that old Jupe is dead. Sleary offers this fact to
Gradgrind in terms the latter can appreciate-that is, in a way which com-
bines emphasis on calculation with emphasis on the limited nature of linguis-
tic terms. So in his characteristic lisp Sleary says of Merrylegs' miraculous
doggedness:

"Whateveryou call it-and I'm bletht if I know what to call it ... it ith athton-
ithing...
"Thquire, I can take my oath, from my knowledge of that dog, that that man
[Jupe] wath dead-and buried-afore that dog come back to me. Joth'phine and
Childerth and me talked it over a long time, whether I thould write or not [to
Sissy]. But we agreed, 'No. There'thnothing comfortableto tell; why unthettle her
mind, and make her unhappy?' Tho, whether her father bathely dethertedher; or
whether he brokehith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him;
never will be known, now, Thquire, till-no, not till we know how the dogth findth
uth out! ...
"It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don't it, Thquire ... one, that
there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interethafter all, but thomething very
different; t'other, that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating,
whith thomehowor another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth
of the dogth ith!" (III, viii)

What Sleary says, we realize, is complemented by his speech impediment.

If language is environed by phenomena hard to name, if it is always hard
times for nomination and definition, then language itself is Sleary's speech
impediment. Since language only lisps the truths that matter, we must, as
Sleary would say, take on "trutht" the truths that evade our namings. Dick-
ens' novel progresses from the impediments Gradgrind places on words to
the impediments Sleary suggests are words. Fancy or Imagination in the
novel plays the role of truthtworthy conductor or guide to the realms of artic-
ulation that articulateness obstructs.
Now our own intellectual culture has given too much rational thought to
the nature of language to be kindly disposed toward Sleary's Dickensian last
word about words. We aren't open to the idea that signs grasp feebly at
more important things which are not signs, but to which signs refer. The rec-
onciliation of Gradgrind and Sleary may well strike us as evidence of the
self-contradictory complicity of Sleary's mysticism with Gradgrind's repressive
articulations. Umberto Eco's bestseller, The Name of the Rose, gives us a meas-
ure of our distance from Gradgrind and Sleary alike. And conveniently
enough for comparison's sake, Eco's novel has two moments of crisis which
 ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 7

turn on nominations of horse. These moments translate into fiction Eco's

thoughts in his A Theory of Semiotics about the nature of language. I'll
mention the novel's namings of the horse and extract their theoretical lessons,
to remind us of our own times' thinking about signs and language. At the
novel's start, Eco's hero, a bloodhound of a monk named William of Basker-
ville, is approaching the monastery that is the scene of the novel. William
has never been to the monastery before; yet during his approach he is able to
tell a search party looking for one of the monastery's horses just where the
missing animal, Brunellus, can be found and just what the name of the horse
is. Yet William has never seen the horse, nor so much as heard of it, or of its
name! Is this knowledge the result of an astonishing supernatural clairvoy-
ance? Of course not; language has a purely natural character; it has nothing
to do with magic or supernature. And since thought does not exist apart
from language, no rational hypothesis is inspired by any supposititious non-
linguistic source. William's "clairvoyance" is merely a knowledge of his lan-
guage. He did not know the name of the horse; but he knows his culture's
customary use of names. "Why," he explains, "even the great Buridan, who
is about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his
logical examples, always calls it Brunellus." As Eco would put it in his
theory, William has "caught a glimpse of the paths that [his culture's] seman-
tic organization entitled him to cross." Having risked the crossing, he turns
out to be right about the name. But William crosses the path of linguistic pos-
sibility so quickly that the credulous monks think he has supernatural pow-
ers. The semiotic lesson here is that, mysterious or mystical as it may look,
William's sudden intuition of the semantic organization of what crosses his
path is just a more than usually cunning awareness of a natural and cultural
sign-system.
Beside the monks' belief in a supernatural realm that is beyond signs, there
is another reason why the monks mystify William's quickness with words.
The monks believe in a motivated, proper, non-arbitrary relation between
signs and things, between signifiers and signifieds. They trust that a proper
use of language discriminates what is motivated or what is arbitrary from
what is not, in the process of adequately fitting words to objects, statements
to states of affairs. Hence for them language is the essential mode of arrival
at truth; for them the idea of proper names and the idea of truth underwrite
one another. But of course-in contrast to this assumption-it's by pure acci-
dent that William arrives at the proper name of Brunellus. Notwithstanding
his culture's semantic habits, William could have been mistaken and the
horse could have been named something else. William's semiotic guesswork
illustrates for Eco the haphazard and even negligible role of truth in both the
constitution and the analysis of signs. Eco insists on the accidental character
of the sign, on the mere sheer contingency of the meshing of the sign or of
its meaning with matter. Denomination and signification exist for Eco and for
us (within our post-Saussurean traditions) as the effects of the differences of
names and of signs in relation to each other. These differences are not to be
8 NOVEL FALL 1986

subordinated in importance or value to identities or likenesses among signs.

Certainly, and above all, these differences are not to be forced into relations
of identity with things or "truths" outside them. Eco calls language
"unlimited semiosis" because words or signs are an infinite regress of seman-
tic possibilities. The infinite regress is infinitely signifying and significant by
virtue of the arbitrary interrelations of its semiotic units. These interrelations
do not refer to phenomena outside language, for there are no things that are
not words. So words do not reveal the truth about this or that-unless we
want to say that they reveal the truth of interrelationship, via difference and
opposition, that structures language and semantics. But this is a truth with-
out content, so to speak; signs are faithfully or properly representative of how
they say rather than of what they say.
The fidelity of signs to the nature of signs brings us back to horse, and the
role it plays in another, much later crisis in The Name of the Rose. After the
advent of William and his young sidekick Adso, who is the novel's narrator,
the monastery is riddled by murders. William's mission to the monastery is
political, but he has to assume the role of private detective. After six days of
investigation, William has discovered a secret code that may lead him to the
murderer, but he cannot decipher the code. Going into the monastery stables
with William, Adso sees Brunellus and two other horses in the stable row,
and he begins to play out loud with the word equus. He comes up with the
grammatically unacceptable phrase tertius equi, which means the third of a
horse, not the third horse. Indulging his word play Adso says tertius equi would
be the u in equi, the third letter in the noun. Now this chance indulgence in
verbal nonsense does nothing less than solve the mystery of the monastery
murders. For, in spite of his "clairvoyance," William has been mystifying
himself about language. He has been unable to use his code to crack the
case, because he keeps trying and failing to find a thing or fact external to the
code, a referent of the signs which is outside the signs. He has forgotten
how language refers to itself; and now Adso's construction of tertius equi re-
minds him. The secret code gives self-referring directions, operations to be
performed on the code's internal components. Hearing Adso's nonsense, Wil-
liam exclaims about the code: "Why, of course, the discourse is presumed de
dicto and not de re!" And with this remarkable verbal turn (all the more re-
markable for its appearance in an American bestseller of 1983-84), the resolu-
tion of the mystery begins.
One way William misleads himself during his investigation is by thinking
that the murderer is staging the murders in an artful pattern derived from St.
John's Apocalypse. The sequence of murders really is not symbolic in this
way; but William unwittingly communicates the idea to the murderer. The
killer then uses St. John's vision to rationalize the crimes as defenses of su-
pernatural truth against assaults by the ungodly. Here we see how transcen-
dent revelations and gothic mysticism can be used to spiritualize signs in a
way that destroys language and life together. To correct such destructive-
ness, The Name of the Rose unfolds as an anti-gothic gothic. The novel reveals
 ROBERT L. CASERIO I NAME OF THE HORSE 9

the awesomeness of "truth" and of supernature to be only an effect of the

perversion of the arbitrariness of signs-of signs at play in the unlimited
fields of semiosis. For Eco names and signs are the great summa of our be-
ing, a happy infinite labyrinth from which we may seek-only at our
peril-an exit to "truth" or transcendence. Eco dramatizes language allegori-
cally in his novel as the abbey's labyrinthine library. The book's central
crimes are committed by monks who want to control the cultural
encyclopedia of signs constituted by the library, and so to be outside
language or above it; or to make language's domain a service to what is
thought to be outside or above language. But there is no escape, Eco's fable
says, from the labyrinth except via madness and bloodshed. We are language
and its labyrinthine, arbitrary windings. This is what is suggested by the title
of the novel, and by the title's echo in the novel's last line, Stat rosa pristina
nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. That is to say, "The rose exists as the name of
the rose; whatever we grasp, whether in our minds or with our hands, the
things we grasp are naked names." Our being is not Being, not a thing hard
to give a name to, but is already available in the names we have (without any
reference to dark or inarticulate sources of revelation), in the mundane maze
of language.
The labyrinth of language is spooky when we feel frightened by the arbi-
trariness of its twists and turns, and when we feel tired by the infinite regress
of signs that is inseparable from signification. In Eco's light, Sleary's lisping of
the Unnameable is at best the effect of Dickens' fear or fatigue-fear at not
being able to resolve his fable, to close or stop the play of language, and fa-
tigue in the face of having to go on-with words, rather than without them.
Sleary's suggestion that we go on without them, trusting in a linguistic super-
natural, is from Eco's point of view just an effect of Sleary's-and Dick-
ens'-obscure and obscurantist sighting of unlimited semiosis. Sleary and
Dickens are misnaming as the Unnameable the limitless nature of names and
signs.
Now Eco wants us to think that an obscurantist approach to language is
dangerous not only for the religious illusions it abets, but for the political
mystification it underwrites. In Eco's monastery the most pathetic albeit indi-
rect victims of the mass murderer are two monks who have been trying to
hide their past ties to communistic, mystical working-class sects. When the
investigation of the murders brings out these past ties, the monks are made
scapegoats for the murderer by the Papal investigator, who is William's politi-
cal and religious opponent. The Papal investigator is seizing this opportunity
to punish the monks for the carnal ecstasy and spiritual-political radicalism of
their youth; in this way he can make an example of the sinful outcome of all
challenges to Papal spiritual authority and Papal worldly power. Yet the
monks invite their own victimization, by identifying their youth's libidinal
freedom with sin. If we conflate Eco's novel with Eco's semiotics, we can see
that this identification rather than lust is the semiotician's version of sin-it is
the sin against semiosis, at least, because it forgets that signs presup-
10 NOVEL FALL 1986

pose-and are-differences and differentiations. In their flower-child days,

the monks celebrated carnal passion and Incarnation simultaneously, because
they forgot the difference between them; as they now, before their Inquisitor,
forget the difference between innocence and irrational guilt-feelings, between
desire and sin.
We know how much the monkish mind is prone to these identifications,
because Adso the narrator exhibits and castigates his own proneness to them.
Having had the sudden occasion to lose his virginity to a young peasant wo-
man who raids the abbey kitchen, Adso realizes that "to describe my wicked
ecstasy [sexual intercourse] I have used the same words that I used, not
many pages before, to describe [in sympathetic identification] the fire that
burned the martyred body of Fraticello Michael," an heretical, communistic
mystic. "There is a mysterious wisdom," Adso thinks at first, "by which phe-
nomena among themselves disparate can be called by analogous names." Yet
a moment later, he corrects the mystery, although almost unconsciously,
when he muses thus:

Is it possible that things so equivocalcan be said in such a univocal way? ... The
more openly [a metaphor] remains a figure of speech, the more it is a dissimilar
similitude and not literal, the more a metaphorreveals its truth. ("Third Day,"
"After Compline")

This is a way of putting differences and distinctions ahead of identities, and

so Adso is not going to assign to dissimilar things that excess of identity
which traps his brothers in Christ. By the natural bent of his intellect, Adso
belongs to William, who always keeps up distinctions, for of course that is
what language does. And by sharing William's habits of thought and lan-
guage, Adso belongs to the side of political liberty.
Lisping Sleary cannot even articulate distinctly, let alone maintain distinc-
tions; and with Eco as our guide we can look back to Dickens and charge
Hard Times with using Sleary's language-transcending mysticism to repress
Hard Times' workers and to confuse their problems. In Eco's novel mysticism
appeals to a proto-proletarian element of society, yet it also betrays this ele-
ment's desire for the liberation of pleasure and for a better worldly life. For
mysticism hands over the fourteenth-century poor to a crushing dictatorial
authority. Doesn't Sleary's appeal to the Unnameable turn out to be Dickens'
insidious way of crushing his era's proletariat, by perpetuating his working-
class hero Stephen Blackpool's sense of the world as all a muddle? If lan-
guage muddles what it expresses, we might read the novel as saying insidi-
ously that if we all can barely lisp the truth, there is no reason for workers to
unite themselves politically in order to find a voice. The voice will have noth-
ing clear or significant to say. By this construction of Sleary's last words, the
poor will always be with us-as victims of course; and by this construction,
Dickens' Sleary is offering the poor circuses but no bread. Or if Sleary's
horse-riding is Dickens' figure for novel-writing, then Dickens is claiming that
 ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 11

poor men cannot live without novels-a hobby-horse of an idea which might
not strike poor men as a claim of much value or interest.
By suggesting something politically suspect in Hard Times, semiotics abets
the traditional critical response to the novel. It has been argued repeatedly
that Hard Times' aesthetic virtues are embarrassed by its politics. Judged ad-
versely, Dickens' politics are said to be in effect no different from Bounder-
by's: he uses the novel to express his fear of working-class violence, and to
castigate labor for its rebelliousness. Accordingly, it is claimed, Dickens'
textile worker-hero Stephen is imagined by Dickens to be an idiot, whose idi-
ocy is exemplified by other members of Stephen's class. But as semiotics
abets this judgment, it offers us clearer grounds for why Dickens may have
used his novel to perpetrate reactionary political ideas. Dickens' Slearyism
was not consciously or even unconsciously cynical; according to semiotics,
Dickens was himself mystified by language, and passed on his mystifica-
tion-as William of Baskerville clearly would see-in the form of a repressive
political bias. And being blind to the true nature of signs and of language, of
their structures and operations, Dickens was blind to the nature of language's
effects on what Eco calls aesthetic inventions in general, novels among them.
Semiotics realizes that aesthetic inventions are especially blinding and
mystifying to their makers and audiences. For they always do what William
does when he names Brunellus: with uncanny canniness aesthetic inventions
intertwine the possible readings or paths of a culture's semantic organization.
This canny intertwining creates sudden, hitherto unnoticed, and unpredicta-
ble connections within and across semantic networks. By this facility at corre-
lating pre-existing sets of signs, Eco tells us, works of art powerfully commu-
nicate too much all at once-and hence they seem not to communicate at all,
seem to exist as magic spells which are "radically impermeable to all semiotic
approach." Aesthetic inventions always look as if they spoke of non-semiotic
wonders, of linguistic supernatures. The ways of Hard Times' creatures-both
human and non-human-give the impression of impermeability to semiosis,
but that is because Dickens unconsciously projects the semiotic
impermeability of art onto those creatures. Without knowing it, Sleary is
talking less about the ways of horses and dogs than about the ways of
art-ways supremely hard to give names to, because they are supremely ma-
nipulative of names and signs. Alas, in not seeing the linguistic causes of
verbal art's linguistic supemature-that is, of verbal art's illusory transcen-
dence of language-Dickens moves towards the political repression of the
working class.
Very roughly I've set out the reasons why our intellectual moment is not
disposed to accept Sleary's last words about language. Our culture and the
Victorians' are horses of different colors. To differentiate each culture is an
attempt to create an occasion for focusing alternative cultural responses to hu-
man predicaments and possibilities. But the occasion is not intended to serve
either nostalgia or self-congratulation. We might as well-for the interest or
disinterestedness of it-examine our assumptions as well as Dickens'. So,
12 NOVEL | FALL 1986

having looked back at Dickens through a semiotic eye-glass in order to put

Dickens at a farther distance from us, I should like to use Dickens also as an
optic, to put our own assumptions into a more distant perspective. To do
this means working with a contemporary literary theory in a way that is not
customary. Customarily we either ignore theory altogether (which is unfortu-
nate); or we apply theory to a literary work to unmask a work's or its
author's naivete in relation to a theory we advocate; or we congratulate a
work and its author for having predicted what our advocated theory predicts
of the work. In contrast, there is little current use of theory which draws on
a literary work or set of works-especially a past one-to show how a theory
has its powerful points, but still is not adequate to its occasions. The kind of
inadequacy I am speaking of does not result from the inevitable gap between
reading a particular text and theorizing texts in general. I propose that Hard
Times too be regarded as a theory of semiotics, so that we do more than sub-
mit Dickens' novel to practical criticism (although it will take practical
criticism to be able to do more). As such a theory in its own right, Hard
Times can be re-read not as an object-lesson in what semiotics frees us from,
but as a theoretical novel that is aware already of what Eco's semiotics would
say about it. And Dickens' novel-theory refuses, I propose, in spite of its
pre-Econian awareness, to operate within the assumptions about seman-
tics-and about politics, religion, and art-that make semiotics possible. The
value of the Dickensian theory lies in its suggesting that, like the fourteenth
century, our times may also be spooked-by our science of language, and by
the allegation that mistakes about language lead to grievous human errors. A
cross-cultural dialogue with the Victorians and with ourselves may gain some-
thing if we can read Hard Timesas a stumbling-block for semiosis.
After all, is it true-in spite of the political thrust of Econian semiot-
ics-that a hushing of the powers of language leads invariably to a repressive
silence? Suppose the Unnameable is not reactionary and that Dickens is not
invoking an unspeakable linguistic supernatural in order to leave workers in
their muteness outside the political pale. I suggest Dickens thinks that if a
linguistic supernature exists, and if it leaves language limited and impaired by
an intrinsic illegibility or insignificance, then we must always be aware of and
responsive to what our words are not able to recount or to account for. So if
we are not masters of our language, we can scarcely allow ourselves to be
masters of men. Instead of being masters we will have to be liberators-of
everything illegible and inarticulate that environs us. If language is limited,
the body politic must be expanded, for politics will always have to account
for its body as a missing one, in terms that are acknowledged by their limita-
tion to be always lacking something important. The same situation applies to
culture as to politics: the signs of a culture, if they are understood as limited,
must be humble before possibilities that signs alone cannot express or enfran-
chise. Now in Eco, to be sure, language is also a matter of missing terms, be-
cause every present sign in a speech or text is picked out and set over against
all the signs that for the moment are absent, off in the infinite regress of
 ROBERT L. CASERIO I NAME OF THE HORSE 13

terms that compose the cultural encyclopedia of meanings. But with Eco's
model of language, we can be sure that the encyclopedia is there; that in spite
of the terms we miss, our hands will always be full of names, definitions,
signs. In Dickens the missing terms have a different character; the terms that
are present are sensed as pressured by something outside terms altogether,
are inadequate before what is felt to be irremediably absent. What is absent
are referents which we will never get into our hands. Eco's semiotics is a
theory of linguistic and semantic plenty, and Dickens' a theory of lack.
Dickens' novel suggests that what our hands lack can be a hopeful political
possibility for industrial Hands. It is of course not good in Hard Times that
hands hold no bread; but, as far as signs and denominations go, it is good
that Hands are empty, and that they can be no more expressive than Sleary.
If Sleary is right, the things that matter beyond bread can't be grasped, even
though Gradgrinds and Bounderbies have reduced everything to this or that
tenure of verbal and material property. Our era has argued that language has
no property in truth, and that the property of signifiers or meanings is to
float rather than to be grasped; but it is remarkable that, in so arguing, our
era has grasped the true properties of language and their proper study. We
have a grip on language and have appropriated it as never before. Since, in
contrast, Dickens thinks he can not have a grip on language, because of a
generic human linguistic handicap, perhaps in Dickens' view of language
there is less retention of property than in Eco's. But to be sure to do Eco no
injustice, I shall return to this point.
Meanwhile I suggest that Dickens looks to mystery as the opening of lan-
guage and of politics-of economics too-to a freedom from grasping. If nei-
ther linguistic currency nor money nor property can seize what "ith hard to
give a name to," why devote masters and men to acquiring the trivia that can
be held on to? "There is no mystery in [the National Debt and its methods of
calculation]," Dickens writes; "there is an unfathomable mystery in any one
of [the National Debt's] quiet servants" in the laboring class. How can we
presume to rule, coerce, or appropriate the unfathomable? But the mystery
to which Dickens appeals here, as I have said earlier, is not supernatural in
an institutionally authorized religious sense. The eighteen religious denomi-
nations that divide up Coketown have a common imperative: "Make these
people religious by main force." But, the narrator says, "the perplexing mys-
tery of the place was, who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Be-
cause, whoever did, the laboring people did not." This perplexing mystery is
a salvation, however, and must be maintained, because violence done to the
grip of denominations is the working class's virtue and the germ of its power.
Hard Times' appeal to mystery is not Dickens' indulgence in the opiate of the
people.
Yet Hard Times is written about as if in effect it were committed to a dopey
piety. The critics-especially the intelligent radical line descending from Ray-
mond Williams-claim this piety to be a result of what they believe is Dick-
ens' presiding fear of workers' violence. This criticism ignores the violence
14 NOVEL | FALL 1986

the novel does to propriety of language and property together by subverting

language and our hold on it. The powerful center of this subversion is the
fourth and fifth chapters of Part II, the chapters about union organization and
Stephen's not joining the union-the very chapters which have made libertar-
ian commentators uneasy. To revaluate these chapters we need to keep in
mind three points.
First, Dickens structures the novel to conjoin Sleary and Stephen as
spokesmen for what impedes speech and language. Although the two char-
acters never meet in the narrative-and are never joined in criticism of the
novel-the entire narrative is their meeting or matching as exponents of the
Unnameable, and as doubles in linguistic near-incompetence. (Here I am us-
ing Chomsky's familiar distinction between linguistic performance and com-
petence.) Hence the union scenes are not to be read apart from the circus
scenes, nor the laborers apart from the performers. Each class sec-
tor-workers and entertainers-tells or represents the other's tale, by virtue
of their "spokesmen," Stephen and Sleary.
The second point to keep in mind concerns the dramatic irony that is
one-but only one-aspect of Stephen's choice not to join the union. The
reader will recall that in II, iv, Bounderby's mill workers have decided to un-
ionize. At the instigation of Slackbridge the professional union organizer, an
outsider to Coketown, the workers have also decided to shun any laborer
who does not join. Stephen is the only laborer who does not; and the rea-
sons for his standing out, added to his rebelliousness before this point against
the divorce law's unjust exploitation of the masses, comprise the irony I've
mentioned. For Dickens cannot but be asking his reader to see Stephen's
choice here as caught in tragic self-contradiction, whose solution would be
joining with his brother operatives, and not withdrawing. The reason Stephen
withdraws is Rachael, who has inspired him to promise to do nothing that
may cause him harm-as the union activity may. Yet Rachael is also the rea-
son Stephen knows he has cause to join with his class, since assertive class
solidarity may be the only way for Stephen to be free of his bestial legal wife
and of his merely nominal yet legally all-encompassing marriage. He needs
this freedom to marry Rachael, yet Rachael is the unwitting source of her
suitor's undoing. And the further irony for Rachael is that she has already
lost a dear younger sister to the poisonous industrial environment (in one of
Hard Times' textual variants the sister died because of a horrible mill accident).
Rachael does not want to lose Stephen as she lost her sister; but, to an extent,
just her influence on Stephen sends him to his shunning and his death. One
of the many things critics don't notice about Rachael is that Dickens makes
her a structural analogue to Louisa. Like Louisa, Rachael sacrifices her own
passions to the care of a sibling and to the duty due to the claims of cultural
superego. Like Louisa's, Rachael's sacrifice bears only disastrous fruit. Ste-
phen should join the union, then, to confront and to reverse the conditions
that have inspired Rachael's fears; by giving in to Rachael's fears, Stephen
brings to pass what she is afraid of.
 ROBERT L. CASERIO I NAME OF THE HORSE 15

Now the irony is only one aspect of Dickens' presentation of Stephen's

choice. The most important thing to be noted is that, whatever his troubles
with the union in Hard Times II, iv, Stephen's role in II, v, is in effect to go
straight from the union hall to unqualified-and unparalleled-confrontation
with his employer, Bounderby. And this confrontation will bring especially
into focus Dickens' dramatic equation of modes of linguistic performance or
even of competence with modes of appropriation and ownership. Thus the
third point that must precede revaluation of these chapters is that II, iv, is as
much about the use of language and names as is the rest of the novel. The
vehicle here of Dickens' dramatization of language is Slackbridge. The narra-
tive animus is directed not at the workers or at the union but at Slackbridge's
oratory, considered as a prime example of linguistic grasp. Slackbridge is an-
other Gradgrindian semanticist, who wants the poor workhorse Stephen to be
named and defined as a traitor. The organizer's oratory organizes the people
by its ability to perform namings, by its rhetorical virtuosity. But to give in to
this ability, to be swayed by its articulateness, is a mistake. The crowd was
"unhappily wrong" to listen just then to Slackbridge, comments the narrative
voice. The voice comments here parenthetically; and the parenthesis, on the
one hand, exonerates the crowd for listening, does not make an accusatory
big deal out of the crowd's interest. But on the other hand the parenthesis,
even though minute, is the mark of a typical manipulation in the narrative it-
self that needs to have its hold on things slackened no less than Slack-
bridge's. I think Dickens was aware that the narrative voice of Hard Times is
often as rhetorically opportunistic as Slackbridge's, that even its sympathetic
moments have only too much in common with the Gradgrindian coercive
handling of meaning. For Dickens to give Stephen and Sleary pride of place
as "spokesmen" means Dickens must have to disclose self-critically a vicious
side of his own rhetorical mastery of men.
Throughout the novel the narrative voice is always assuming the character
of one or another of the story's reprehensible organizers. One of these, for
example, is Mrs. Sparsit, a nice match for Slackbridge. Mrs. Sparsit organizes
her hatred of Louisa in terms of a rhetorical figure: she sees Louisa Gradgrind
Bounderby's attraction to the cynical dandy Harthouse as a staircase down
which the young married woman is descending to sexual and social ruin.
The narrator of the novel borrows this metaphor from Mrs. Sparsit to con-
tinue the story of Louisa, so that we come to trust the figure, and to assume
its fidelity to what is happening. But we are surprised to find that the narra-
tor leads us astray with the metaphor, uses the staircase to cover up and to
mis-state what is going on in Louisa's mind and heart. The use of the image
brings us to the ruin not of Louisa but of the image. Thus, having
introduced Slackbridge into Hard Times, Part II, as a figure of misleading rhet-
oric, of an articulateness as untrustworthy as it is masterful, Dickens' narra-
tive voice at the end of Part II becomes a masterful misleading rhetoric, an
untrustworthy articulation. The rhetoric is exposed as a manipulation at the
same time Mrs. Sparsit's rhetoric is exposed as faithless to the truth. In this
16 NOVEL | FALL 1986

way (among others, of course), Dickens looks ahead to Sleary's finale, by us-
ing even the narrative to exemplify Sleary's claim that language is a falsifying
organizer of human ways.
But between Slackbridge's nomination of Stephen as a traitor and Dickens'
subversion of the narrative rhetoric comes Stephen's moment of awkward elo-
quence, which competes for attention with Sleary's last words. Stephen's fel-
low workers give in to Slackbridge's demand to shun Stephen in an equivocal
way. They outcast Stephen by going silent towards him; yet they allow Ste-
phen to keep his job in the mill. Stephen is thereby not much victimized by
his comrades; and in a novel where speech is an impediment, silence is no
great loss. It is Bounderby who, appropriately enough given his position as
industrial owner, really victimizes Stephen. The master-and master name-
caller-calls in Stephen to demand a report on union activities. Stephen dis-
counts the shunning and shows exemplary class solidarity in his response to
the employer's interrogation. Of course, as a result of the answers he gives
to Bounderby's questions, Stephen is fired on the spot for being a trouble-
maker. It is curious that this firing has not been read as Dickens' suggestion
that the workers are damned if they do not rebel.
Stephen's words in response to Bounderby comprise an oration which is
the novel's purest eloquence, and which is-not surprisingly here-oratory
on the verge of linguistic collapse. Keeping Stephen embedded in his
groping vernacular, Dickens shows the conflict between master and man as a
conflict over the mastery of language-and shows the man who is no master
of meanings to be the more trustworthy for his lack. Bounderby's comments
on Slackbridge are stock response: the organizer is harmful because he's an
outsider. Even though injured by Slackbridge, Stephen won't let this go by:
"Mischeevous strangers!" he exclaims; "When ha we not heern, I am sure, sin
ever we can call to mind, o' th' mischeevous strangers! 'Tis not by them the
trouble's made sir. 'Tis not in them't commences." And Stephen goes on,
with clumsy beauty, to make the speech whose second half is this:

"Sir, I canna, wi' my little learning an' my common way, tell the genelman what
will better aw this-though some working men o' this town could, above my pow-
ers-but I can tell him what I know will never do 't. The strong hand will never
do 't. Vict'ry and triumph will never do 't. Agreeing fur to mak one side unnat'-
rally awlus and for ever right, and toother side unnat'rally awlus and for ever
wrong, will never, never do 't. Nor yet lettin alone will never do 't. Let thou-
sands upon thousands alone, aw leading the like lives and aw faw'en into the like
muddle, and they will be as one, and yo will be as anoother, wi' a blackunpassable
world betwixt yo, just as long or short a time as sitch-like misery can last. Not
drawin nigh to fok, w' kindness and patience an' cheery ways, that so draws nigh
to one another in their monny troubles, and so cherishesone another in their dis-
tresses wi' what they need themsein-like, I humbly believe, as no people the genel-
man ha seen in aw his travels can beat-will never do 't till th' Sun turns t' ice.
Most o' aw, rating 'em as so much Power, and reg'latin 'em as if they was figures
 ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 17

in a soom, or machines: wi'out souls to weary and souls to hope-when aw goes

quiet, draggin on wi' 'em as they'd nowt o' th' kind, and when aw goes onquiet,
reproachin'em for their want o' sitch humanly feelings in their dealins wi' yo-this
will never do 't, sir, till God'sworkis onmade."(II, v)

Now Bounderby fires Stephen on the spot because he hears Stephen's

speech as uppity. The action is scarcely a fair response, but the speech is
hard to hear. For Stephen's speech slips and slides on a semantic base that
won't stay still long enough for Stephen's meaning to define or delimit itself
in a fixed way, with a fixed articulated sense. And the way all slides to aw,
aw to on, unquiet to onquiet and unmade to onmade gives one the impression of
doubletalk. Unquiet, the absence of quiet, is the same as on quiet, which
sounds like the presence or going on of quiet; and likewise, unmade or de-
stroyed sounds like onmade, which could be Joyce-speak for continued. We
hear double, in other words, so that "till God's work is onmade," sounds like
"until God's work is continued," in contrast to its being "unmade" now.
Since in Stephen's words we hear like meanings and different meanings si-
multaneously, as if there were no fixed boundary between likeness and differ-
ence, no wonder then that Bounderby detects something uppity. He hears
meanings slip their boundaries, and trespass against the differential limits
that are the essence of articulation, indeed of language.
How does this drama about language, whereby Dickens makes linguistic
and semantic structures slip their boundaries, connect with the traditional
Dickensian reading of Hard Times as the story of Louisa and of the effects of
repressed Fancy or imagination? I would say that Dickens dramatizes Fancy
in such a way as to make it connote a derangement of language, a displace-
ment of all expressions into a sphere where they are forever at a loss to find a
proper place. Given our first impressions on reading Hard Times, for Dickens
to do this in the course of the novel is surprising, even shocking. We assume
it is Gradgrind's villainy to displace expressions, as he does from the moment
he forces the schoolchildren to accept Bitzer's improperly strict and proper
definition of horse. Our assumption makes us think that the solution to
Gradgrindian coercion is a finer appropriation of language, a restoration of
meanings to more proper sites of expression. We think this all the more to
be the solution in the scene where Gradgrind presents Bounderby's marriage
proposal to Louisa. Surely the father must feel that he is sacrificing his
daughter to a marriage of convenience between himself and Bounderby's
wealth. As Gradgrind hesitates in the presentation of the proposal to Louisa,
he toys with a paper-knife, "laid it down, took it up again, and even then
had to look along the blade of it, considering how to go on." This marginal
play undoubtedly means that the father knows he is about to sacrifice his
daughter, to stab her in the heart; but he displaces the knowledge onto the
fidget with the knife. And we then find Gradgrind only acknowledging the
displacement by yet another one. When Louisa asks if the proposal has any-
thing to do with love, the father corrects her: "Perhaps the expression itself-I
 NOVEL FALL 1986

merely suggest this to you, my dear-may be a little misplaced." Of course

he responds with "Fact" as the answer to her next question: "What do you
recommend ... that I should substitute for the term I used just now? For the
misplaced expression?"
So-for dear life's sake-it really seems as if the substitution of the wrong
terms for the right terms must stop. When we come to Mrs. Gradgrind's
death-bed, the replacement or the recovery of displaced expressions looks like
the one thing needful. Surely Mrs. Gradgrind's response to Louisa's "Are
you in pain, dear Mother?"-"I think there's a pain somewhere in the room,
but I couldn't positively say that I have got it"-means that Mrs. Gradgrind
ought at last to be able to express properly what is properly hers. But if that
is so, why does Dickens not allow the dying woman to write the all-impor-
tant word or words "that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa," and
that she now desperately wants to write down.

"You learnt a great deal, Louisa ... Ologies of all kinds from morning to night.
But there is something-not an Ology at all ... I don't know what it is.... But
your father may ... I want to write to him, to find out for God's sake, what it is."
(II, ix)

She demands a pen, and fancies she gets one; but she has already admitted
"I shall never get [the Ology's] name now." But instead of lamenting this ul-
timate escape of "the name," this further displacement of terms, the narrator
surprises us by suddenly telling us now that terminological accuracy, even
here, is not important: "It matters little what figures of wonderful no-mean-
ing [in her effort to write the name] she began to trace upon her wrappers."
At the moment of death "even Mrs. Gradgrind emerged from the shadow in
which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain." Can we not
add-anticipating Sleary with a further Biblical th-"from the shadow in
which man speaketh in vain"? Mrs. Gradgrind emerges from the shadow
which is both life and language. The dying woman's inability to appropriate
her own pain in language expresses the truth anyway, just because of its lack
of property and propriety: "the pain somewhere in the room" is not
positively hers because it belongs no less positively to her attendants, Louisa
and Sissy. The displaced meaning is wonderfully significant, after all; and so
it is at the point of "wonderful no-meaning" that Mrs. Gradgrind at last
comes into her own. The narrative voice here is looking forward to its de-
cease too, when it will come into its own as Sleary's "no-meaning," the exu-
berant apotheosis of Mrs. Gradgrind's pathos and Stephen's muddle.
Stephen and Sleary together make us see that language is the human com-
edy. It is funny-in a darkly gleeful way-that there is something outside
language but woven through language, or woven around it, that makes lan-
guage "aw a muddle." We are in a muddle when we are in awe, and Dick-
ens is suggesting that language is muddled by the awesome comedy of its in-
competence to come to terms with supreme referents to which its terms are
 ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE i9

inadequate. The great joke on us is that our languages are always being
called to come to impossible terms with truths that overburden their media of
expression. Mrs. Gradgrind and Stephen give us the comic pathos of this
muddle, and Sleary gives us the comic exuberance. Comic pathos and exu-
berance are the effects of something out there-whether it be power or intelli-
gence or both, Sleary can't say-whose existence is to be taken on trutht.
It is against this truth "out there," no less than against truth, that Eco
draws the semiotic line, in a way that also entails reflections on comedy. For
Eco language is a great systematic caprice of semantic relations, a comical cos-
mos of various and self-contradictory meanings. Such a comic cosmos seems
just what Stephen's speech is illustrating; but Stephen, and Dickens behind
him, insist on the comedy as a way to truth. But Eco thinks we can not have
both together; one must choose between the comedy of language and the no-
tion of truth, and the stakes of the choice are all-encompassing. The heroes,
villains, and ordinary folk in Eco's novel are caught up in the choice, as a
life-and-death matter. Most of the killings in The Name of the Rose result be-
cause of persons who want to repress the comic spirit for its power to endan-
ger truth. Remigio of Varagine, one of the monks with a heretical past,
joined his mystical sect because it appeared to him rather like a circus. The
sect, he says, offered its followers "a feast of fools, a magnificent carnival....
We felt free, we thought that was the truth." Eco's wisdom is that, whether
it looks like a circus or a sect, truth will never make us free. Only if we stay
within the carnival of language, within the infinite circuits of signs and their
relations, indifferentto truth, will we be at liberty. The monastery murders are
being committed in fact to suppress carnival-the comic carnival of semiosis.
For the murderer, Jorge of Burgos, is killing people to keep hands off a lost
theory of comedy (a theory of semiotics, in effect) which is allegedly Aristot-
le's lost treatise on comedy. As William puts it,

"Jorgefeared the second book of Aristotle [which Jorge was trying to sequester in
the labyrinth] because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every
truth, so that we would not becomeslaves of our own ghosts. Perhaps the mission
of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth
laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion
for truth." ("Seventh Day," "Night")

Is Sleary's "trutht" in an unnameable truth a symptom of an insane pas-

sion, or of the brandy he is always dipsomaniacally sipping, or of a Dicken-
sian self-deception that somewhere along the line is killing? I have tried to
argue that an anti-semiosis in Hard Times is not as politically suspect as our
own ideas about language would claim; and before I move back again from
Dickens to Eco and to the power of Eco's theory, I want on Dickensian theo-
ry's behalf to make one more argument concerning a political aspect of Eco's
semiotics. William of Baskerville's address to semiosis is offered by Eco as an
indomitable form of anti-ideological politics. Ideology forces limitation and
20 NOVEL | FALL 1986

closure upon the world's ever-flowing nature, but semiosis resists the forcing.
Infinite Saussurean difference and opposition is the essence of the world; and
William's genius is to transfer Saussurean differences from his knowledge of
language to his analysis of human motives and relations. Accordingly, his
solution of the novel's mystery is derived from his keeping loose threads dis-
tinct and discontinuous-differentiated and untied. In all-significant contrast,
William's murderous enemies want to see worldly and other-worldly puzzles
neatly wound up, on one unifying thread of significance. In whatever the
enemies do or think about, they insist on univocity of meaning. But this in-
sistence on an ideology of sameness makes William's enemies inferior to him
in humaneness, and perversely aggressive. Now this inferiority is what Adso
in the course of the narrative comes horribly to know. His own more liberal
education in resistance to closure and aggression is epitomized in his proto-
semiotic discovery that metaphorical truth is most true when it subordinates
likeness to dissimilitude. Yet just here, in the midst of anti-ideological revela-
tion, Eco's fable exhibits a grossly ideological sexual politics.
I have already mentioned that Adso's revelation comes as a reflex of his
first occasion of heterosexual intercourse. This might be an innocent coincid-
ing of a sexuality and a linguistics focused on differences, if it were not for
the fact that Eco dramatizes the murderous party opposed to William and
Adso as either sexually neuter (blind, ancient Jorge) or as homosexual. (The
tale's heterosexual monks like Remigio are victims of the neuter-homosexual
axis of characters, who are indirectly embodied in the repressive Papal party.)
In fact the chain of murders in the monastery begins with the self-murder of
Adelmo, who commits suicide out of remorse for his homosexuality. And
one of the last murders occurs when Malachi, the monastery's head librarian
and Jorge's front-man and tool, kills the herbalist Severinus in a jealous fit:
Malachi believes that Berengar, another murder victim and Malachi's former
lover, had been unfaithful to Malachi with both Adelmo and the herbalist.
Now Jorge (for purposes of his own) goads Malachi to kill by playing on the
latter's jealousy of two men who are already dead. The stretching of plausible
motivation here points up what the teller's tale seems insistently to want to
tell us: the neuter-homosexual characters are perverse, manipulative, and
murderous because they are committed not to differences but to same-
ness-whether to the privilege given to similitude in "same-sex" love or to
the similitudinal thinking that makes Jorge identify his will and his murders
with God's destruction of Antichrist. Telling us all along that-for dear liber-
ty's sake-we must think of the anti-ideological political potential of
"differential" thought, The Name of the Rose simultaneously tells a vulgarly
univocal ideological story. To put it as bluntly as Eco's fable puts it, Eco iden-
tifies the novel's bloody partisans of similitudinal thought with being blind
and gay, and the novel's peaceful partisans of difference-focused semiotics
with being brainy and straight.
I prefer Dickens' semiotic-sexual politics to Eco's unconscious renewal of
homophobia under a sophisticated linguistic cover. Hard Times is perhaps the
 ROBERT L. CASERIO | NAME OF THE HORSE 21

most sexually charged of Dickens' novels. Coketown's languid, monotonous

smoke derives in part from the fires of repressed libido. We see a universally
spreading anarchy of multiform desire: Gradgrind, not Louisa, weds Bound-
erby; Louisa in effect marries her brother; Stephen yearns for bigamy; Mrs.
Pegler acts like Bounderby's secret paramour instead of like his mother
(which she is); and Harthouse has a hothouse effect on both women and
men, for he not only inflames Mrs. Sparsit and Louisa, but in a scene of ho-
moerotic insinuation (II, 3), he seduces adoring, rapt Tom as a first step to-
wards seducing Louisa. Now, we could read all this odd sexual business as
the perverse effect worked on desire by the Gradgrindian system. We could
assume that Dickens is advising us to transform our Coketowns so that our
displaced desires will return to more normative objects. But why should we
see sexuality in this novel-any more than meaning in this novel-as a dis-
placement in need of correction? If Dickens does not finally endorse a re-situ-
ating of expressions or signs in their proper places, it is also likely he does
not endorse assigning sexuality to a "proper" heterosexually monogamous,
familial place. The Gradgrindian system asks to be read not as the perversion
of a normative sexuality but as the obstruction of a polymorphous, unname-
able sexual force. Harthouse makes trouble in Coketown, but he also makes
Coketown know its anarchic desires in a way it has unhappily refused to
know them so far. Accordingly Dickens does not punish Harthouse;
although he makes us see the character's caddish nature, Dickens also makes
us see that Harthouse stands for the vitality of all passions, whether they be
normative or "perverted." Thus Dickens also does not punish Tom for con-
senting to homoerotic seduction. Even though Tom injures Stephen dread-
fully, it is this fully perverse young man who is saved by the dancing horse.
Here I rest the case for considering Dickensian semiotics as no less politi-
cally liberal than Eco's, and as even more liberal in the area of sexual politics.
But whether or not semiotic politics is as liberating as Eco might hope, the
logic of Eco's theory has the power to transcend its political weak spots, and
to argue down Sleary. "In a sentence mentioning something, that is, referring
to an actual state of the world," Eco writes, "what happens at the source is a
so-called 'referent."' Sleary's and Dickens' semiotics is referential, directing
every linguistic act to a source situated beyond itself. At the same time as
this semiotics points to a referential beyond, however, it claims to represent
what is beyond. How can the claim stand up in a court of logic? If, as in
Hard Times, the representational medium is different from-indeed incom-
mensurate with-its object, the referential beyond can scarcely get a hold, or
a property, in the medium. But the beyond would have to get a hold to be
referred to representationally, especially if Dickensian-Slearyesque speech is
to represent in an iconic way what lies beyond articulation. Much as Dicken-
sian semiotics wants to get rid of linguistic property, it looks as if it can not
fully divest itself of its holdings. In contrast, even while Eco seems to have
all the workings of language in his grasp, he shrewdly yields up any invest-
ment in reference, in order not to be encumbered-in that quarter, at
22 NOVEL FALL 1986

least-by property. The "so-called referent" is not the domain of semiotics.

Semiotics is located "between conditions of signification and ... of truth, ...
between an intensionaland an extensionalsemantics." But while allowing the
possibility of an extensional, referentialrealm to whose facticityor truth signs
may point, Eco also denominates the possibility as "the extensional fallacy."
The analysis of signs can only be intensional, for signs "refer"only to other
signs; and so semiotics dismantles "the metaphysics of the referent." In
doing this, of course, it plays its part in an intellectual project that surely de-
fines our era. Whereas the nineteenth century announced God's death, and
made culture an attendance at His wake, our century has been announcing
reference's demise, and has made language and the arts especially a celebra-
tion of this latest funeral.
Yet one can not help but notice the liveliness of the corpse, not just in
stubbornly enduring works from the past, like Hard Times,but in Eco's own
work. Eco may be said to have "read"his theory as if it were a novel called
The Name of the Rose (a procedure that has led me inversely to read Dickens'
novel as a theory). Following Eco's initiative once more, I propose another
reading of his theory as if it were a novel. As with any novel, this reading
must follow the form of Eco's story about the death of reference and the in-
stallation of semiotics in its stead. The story of A Theoryof Semioticsis taken
up largely by the second and third of its four chapters. After the first ten
pages of Chapter Two ("Theory of Codes"), Eco stops to confront what he
there calls the "malignantinfluence" of the referentialfallacy, which he seems
to dispatch within the space of ten additional pages. But in the next chapter,
"Theory of Sign Production," the dispatched corpse of reference shows itself
to be vitally malignant, an obstacle powerfully diverting Eco's exposition.
The first 67 pages of this 150-page chapter are compelled once more to dis-
patch reference-and to eliminate as well the idea that representations can
have an iconic relation to their objects. Laying the corpse back to rest takes
so long because Eco must come to terms with the way the iconic body of ref-
erence is alive in the thought of C. S. Pierce, Eco's intellectual patron.
Pierce's semiotics would seem to justify the illogic of Dickens' representa-
tional reference, for in Pierce's light Dickensian art could be presented as an
icon of the unnameable thing it claims to express. Compelled to show that
Pierce went astray with iconicity, Eco taxes himself to correct Pierce. The cor-
rection is summed up in a chapter sub-heading which conflates a cheerful
and a homicidal turn of speech: "Getting rid of 'iconic signs."' But what has
been gotten rid of at taxing length comes back, thirty pages later. Once
more, and this time with a focus entirely on aesthetic inventions, Eco must
try to bind down the corpse of reference and iconicity, and it takes him the
rest of the third chapter. Thus, only fifty pages before the end of the book,
at a point described as "criticalfor the argument," we are being told that "the
main problem for semiotics" is "to determine how it is possible [for artists es-
pecially] to map onto an expression continuum the properties of something
which ... is not yet culturallyknown"-as, say, the wayth of the dogth are
 ROBERT L. CASERIO [ NAME OF THE HORSE 23

not. Eco settles the argument with a forecast of William of Baskerville. The
artist may look like he's expressing a cultural unknown-an antinomian
horse, for example-but he is just crossing, with abnormal rapidity, the paths
of already-existing cultural sign-units. And so, at last, Eco lays referential
representation to rest. And at the same time he brings his exposition to an
end. But this is to note that Eco's book ends barely beyond where it begins,
with the attempt to get rid of a beyond of signs. The form of Eco's
expository story is the form of a haunting, of an obsessional return of what
the story seeks to suppress and to surmount.
The Name of the Rose is a similar story, with a similar form. As death fol-
lows death, we feel the sequence of bodies to be the uncannily repeated, not
to be surmounted, return of the same corpse. The bodies incarnate Jorge's
morbid mode of thought, which, univocally referring things to the war be-
tween God and Satan, turns an obsessive referential fallacy into enemies and
victims. In response, the semiotic hero must think of a way to get rid of
these uncanny returns of what his own mode of thought wants to suppress.
But in spite of the way William stands for Eco, the author of the theory, and
Jorge for the malignant referent, in his novel Eco is unable to resist merging
the identities of hero and villain. Even as the fable works hard to differentiate
the two, coincidentally the fable suggests that William and Jorge are unac-
knowledged doubles, a pair equal in both cunning and blindness. They are
paired because neither can succeed at serving or at vanquishing the referen-
tial fallacy. Jorge's service can not make his murders mean what he wants
them to stand for; but William's vanquishing of Jorge can not stop William's
world from reproducing Jorge's referential habits of mind. Can Eco escape an
internal doubling which unites him with Jorge no less than with William? I
suggest that the doubling of the two characters in their frustration is the pro-
jection-the representation!-of Eco's own anxiety about the success of his
theory. As my sketch of the form of A Theory of Semiotics suggests, Eco will
not serve the referent, but he also can not vanquish it. The referent's return
solders Eco-William and Eco-Jorge both to stubborn resistance and to frustrat-
ing service. Now, is it possible that this incompleteness of the referent's sup-
pression in Eco derives from the rooting of the alleged malignancy in some-
thing trustworthy after all? Approaching the century's end we are sitting
happily still at reference's wake. But in The Name of the Rose and in its atten-
dant theory, where reference is proclaimed to have passed away, the body of
reference also bestirs itself, with supernatural vigor-with perhaps a wink of
complicity, too, at Dickens and Sleary.