31. In this labyrinth, by the way, there has to be a Minotaur, just to make the experience interesting, seeing that the pathway through it (setting aside the initial disorientation of Theseus, who doesn’t know where it will lead) always leads where it has to lead and can’t lead anywhere else.
32. In this case there is no need for a Minotaur; the Minotaur is the visitor himself, misled as to the nature of the tree.
33. The first proposals for switching to encyclopedic representations are to be found in Wilson (1967). There followed Eco (1975), Haiman (1980), Eco (1984a), Marconi (1992, 1999), and Violi (1997).
34. This was the topic of the seminar in which Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume had their origin. Its purpose was to attempt to establish how and to what extent Aristotle’s proposal had been accepted throughout history. For a complete overview reaching down to the present day, see the miscellany edited by Lorusso (2005), in which, for the analysis of the Aristotelian texts, we refer the reader to the contributions of Manetti (2005), Calboli Montefusco (2005), and Calboli (2005).
35. On the fact that metaphor constructs rather than discovering a similarity and is a source of fresh knowledge, not so much because it makes us know a given thing better but above all because it makes us discover a new way of organizing things, see, in addition to Black, Ricoeur (1975: 246) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 215).
36. It will be observed how this reconstruction of a fragment of encyclopedia within Joyce’s text was reminiscent of the model in Quillian (1968), adopted in Eco (1975).
37. Pavel (1986: 64–70).
38. On the Metrôon as a warehouse of memory, see Esposito (2001: 107–110).
39. It has been suggested that the concept of a semiotic encyclopedia corresponds to Lotman’s idea of the semiosphere: “Imagine a room in a museum, where exhibits from different eras are laid out in different windows, with texts in known and unknown languages, and instructions for deciphering them, together with explanatory texts for the exhibitions created by guides who map the necessary routes and rules of behaviour for visitors. If we place into that room still more visitors, with their own semiotic worlds, then we will begin to obtain some thing resembling a picture of the semiosphere” (Lotman 2005: 213–214). In point of fact Lotman’s semiosphere would appear on the one hand to be still vaster than a Maximal Encyclopedia because it also contains the private and idiosyncratic notions of the individual visitors; on the other hand, it is, so to speak, regulated by someone (the organizers) and therefore appears rather to be the territory of a culture that has set up rules to distinguish a Median Encyclopedia from the Specialized Encyclopedias.
40. [Translator’s note: On Gesualdo, among others, see Barbara Keller-Dall’Asta, Heilsplan und Gedächtnis: zur Mnemologie des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2001).]
41. The work of Johannes Spangenberg appeared under this title in 1570, but another version with the title Libellus de comparatione artificiosae memoriae had appeared in 1539. It would be subsequently published as Artis memoriae seu potius reminiscentiae in 1603, Ars memoriae in 1614, etc.
42. To these causes we might add the mystics’ techniques for detachment from the world and from one’s own memories. These are certainly techniques that aim at voluntary forgetfulness, but what is to be forgotten is so global as to coincide with the annihilation of one’s own self-awareness. This being the case, I would prefer to speak of spiritual ablation, not of a technique for canceling local portions of our memory.
43. [Translator’s note: A fundamental strategy in the art of memory consisted in collocating mnemonic images or figures in a series of designated “places” along a familiar route that the orator would follow with his mind’s eye observing the images to be remembered. The art of forgetting consists, then, in eliminating these “places” or reminders. See, for example, Yates (1966) and Eco and Migiel (1988).]
44. [Translator’s note: My translation from Eco’s text (AO)].
45. Note that we cannot make an exception either for the most blatant cases of political censure—such as the photographs of the Stalinist period in which the images of the former leaders declared to be heretics and shot have been removed—precisely because that act of violence kept the memory of those eliminated alive in the collective memory. Similarly, the various attempts at revisionism, such as the theory that Kennedy’s death did not occur as the official records have it, because—as we will see later—in cases that involve the (presumed) correction of an error or a debate over two possible solutions to a problem, the tendency is to retain, not just the solution assumed to be correct, but both horns of the dilemma.
46. When, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (III, xx, 33), to remember the idea of witnesses (testes), the orator is urged to imagine a goat’s testicles (testes), what we have is an etymological association. When, in the same work (III, xxi, 33), to recall the line of verse, “Iam domum itionem reges Atridae parant” (“And now the kings, sons of Atreus, prepare their return home”), a complex image is conjured up to evoke the families of the Domitii and the Reges (a purely phonetic association), as well as a still more complex image of actors preparing for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus, which plays on the one hand on genealogical memories and on the other on semantic analogies—we do not have the impression that any systematic criterion is involved, indeed we are even entitled to wonder whether what we are presented with is really a useful mnemotechnical device, seeing that in any case the author also advises his reader to learn the line by heart.
47. “Ne mireris, quod quae pro locis supra posuimus, pro figuris nunc apta esse dicamus. Loca enim praedicta pro figuris (secundum diversos respectos) servire poterunt” (“You should not be surprised if we now say that what earlier we posited for the loci is also true for the figures. For the loci previously described could serve [according to various aspects] as figures,” Thesaurus, p. 78).
48. This is why the logical discussions concerning existential presuppositions, or on the truth value to be assigned to the assertion Yesterday Piero met his sister if we could truthfully assert that Piero has no sisters, appear ingenuous and lacking in common sense. It is in fact unlikely that someone will respond to the first assertion with Your assertion does not make sense because Piero has no sisters. It is highly likely that the answers will be: (i) Whose sister? (presumption of error in the identification of the individual); (ii) You must have been dreaming (reference to existence in a possible world); (iii) Just what do you mean by sister? (presumption of lexical error); I didn’t know Piero had any sisters (correction of one’s previous conviction). This occurs because every assertion, rather than presupposing, posits, makes present in the universe of discourse, by its semiotic power, the entities it names, albeit as entities in a possible world (cf. Eco and Violi 1987).
49. In Canetti’s Auto-da-fé Professor Kien, endowed with a prodigious memory, records in a notebook all the idiocies he is trying to forget—an ironical narrative invention if ever there was one.
50. There exist casual mechanisms by which an idea or expression is not forgotten but confused instead with other ideas or expressions. In such cases confusion can occur both between expressions (confusion by pseudo-synomymity, such as mixing up the terms paronomasia and antonomasia), or between an expression and two different meanings, say, or notions or definitional contents (like not remembering whether fragola in Italian means “strawberry” or “raspberry”). Both of these phenomena never occur by subtraction (something is there that subsequently disappears), but by addition (two notions or terms become superimposed in your memory and you no longer know which one is correct). The phenomenon usually occurs the first time we make a mistake; someone gives us the correct information; and from then on we remember the error and the correction together, without recalling which is which. The dilemma left a more lasting impression than its solution, and it is the former and not the latter that stayed in our mind. The same thing often happens with the pronunciation of a word in a foreign language. There are no voluntary devices for forgetting, but they do exist for not remembering properly: you must multiply the semiosis. We may try to forget the medieval mnemonic rhyme invented to remember the moods of the first syllogistic figure (Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio) by training ourselves to repeat over and over for several days a corrupted version “Birbiri, Celirant, Doria, Fario,” until we are no longer able to recall which of the two formulas is the correct one. We do not forget by cancelation but by superposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying the presences.