MNEMOSYNE A Journal of Classical Studies

SERIES IV VOL. LI FASC. 5 OCTOBER 1998

BRILL

THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS: READING ’S THE MARRIAGE OF PHILOLOGY AND *)

BY

HAIN-LIANG CHANG Current interest in mediaeval and the revival of have led researchers to re-examine the implications of the liberal arts, as outlined by Martianus Capella (fl. 410-39) and Boethius (ca. 480-524), in relation to contemporary thinking of signs. In his proposals for a history of semiotics1), Umberto Eco identifies three categories of writers who can be said to have contributed to such a his tory. His checklist runs the gamut from explicit theories of signs, such as those of Augustine and Boethius, through repressed theories abstractable from the writings of the Church Fathers who discuss language in general, and finally to the so-called encyclopedic semiotic practices, such as early Christian symbology. Meanwhile, the revival of rhetoric, especially by American neo- pragmatists over the last two decades, has evoked once again a time- honoured debate between rhetoric and logic in the West, which can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. One is reminded, among other things, of the distinction between two crit ical models of demonstration and persuasion which Stanley Fish makes in the tradition of the Sophists2). The debate has been otherwise interpreted as that between the two traditionally hostile disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric. This opposition gets a linguistic turn in Paul de Man’s celebrated essay Semiology and Rhetoric where the author casts new light on the issue by situating it in the mediaeval system and

*) The author wishes to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for supporting his research project on the history of semiotics and The University o£ Manchester’s Department of English and American Studies for an Honorary Research Fellowship in 1997, during which time the paper was written and presented in the Postgraduate Seminar on 22 April 1997. He gratefully acknowledges the learned comments of the journal’s readers regarding the Latin quotations and a reference to the ideas of Ilsebraut Hadot in her Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris 1984), where she argues that the system of the seven arts has its roots in , as it appears in Augustinus de Ordine. 1)Umberto Eco, Proposals for a History of Semiotics, in: Tasso Barbé (ed.), Semiotics Unfolding: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotics I (Berlin 1983), 75-89. 2) Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. 1980).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1998 Mnemosyne, Vol. LI, Fasc. 5 539 by introducing the role of the as-yet-non-existent discipline of semiotics. According to de Man, among the three language-focused disciplines that constitute the trivium, logic is closer than grammar and rhetoric to the that accounts for the mediaeval scholar’s knowledge of the world. He does not bother to dwell on the tension between logic and rhetoric, but moves to discuss the discrepancy between grammar and rhetoric, grammar and logic, which French semiologists such as Todorov and Genette have failed to notice, as revealed by their conflation of the 3 trivium in such titles as Grammar of the Decameron and Figures III ), De Man seems to be suggesting a new spectrum of relationships among the seven arts, based on their truth-claims or their transitivity to the world under investigation, and that rhetoric, with the sig nified truth bracketed, standing at one extreme of the spectrum, is less ‘transitive’ than any other discipline. Notwithstanding the seven arts’ intransitivity, de Man’s attempt at reconstructing semiology in the trivium has opened up a line of inquiry into the disciplinary origin and history of semiotics. As is well-known now, the liberal education of seven arts, though traceable to classical antiquity, is formulated in the late Roman period and the early Middle Ages, in particular, by Martianus Capella in his De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 4) and Boethius in his commentaries on or adaptations of Aristotle, Nicomachus, Porphyry, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Cicero. Although Boethius coins only the term ‘quadrivium’ in his De Institutione Arithmetica, and the term ‘trivium’ is only a mediaeval derivation, it is essentially his structure of the seven arts that is to be followed throughout the Middle Ages5). Boethius makes the distinction between ‘trivium’ and quadrivium already on the basis of the former’s linguistic instrumentality as organika and the latter’s coverage of areas of speculative knowledge. A question can be raised here: Does the trivium’s instrumentality serve the purpose of the quadrivium? Or, is there transitivity between the two, i.e., three paths leading to four paths? The answer seems to be both negative and positive. If one examines the quadrivium, one finds all the four Pythagorean mathematical sciences－arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the order being different in Martianus and Boethius)－have their own distinct representational sys tem which is non-verbally

3) Paul de Man, of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilk e. and Proust (New Haven 1979). De Man has himself conflated two kinds of rhetoric, i.e., as figurative language and as persuasion, in order to accommodate his metahis tory of modern critical discourse since French ‘semiology’. In this metahistory the first kind of rhetoric is equivalent to the semantic (and syntactic) universe of the lit- erary text, or the first semiotic order of signification; and the second kind to pragmatics, or the second semiotic order of communication. Thus the paradigm shift in literary linguistics around the early 1970s can be accounted for by the classical tension between rhetoric and logic. Meanwhile, one could argue that the relationships among the three units of the trivium have never remained stable and therefore call for radical historicization. Then this would be the problem of Charles Sanders Peirce too (see below). The same can be said of rhetoric. Compare its modem variations in Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth, and you will see its wide semantic range.

540 symbolic, nor does it need re-articulation in a metalanguage, although neither Martianus nor Boethius can afford not to use language as a modelling and interpreting system. Unlike what our authors and their commentators believe, because of the inconvertibility of systems, not only is there an unbridgeable gap between the trivium and the quadrivium, but also there is another gap between the quadrivium as abstract speculations and the absolute knowledge in the incorporeal world to which they aspire. In the enclosed logocentric system, the signifier of quadrivium points nostalgically but futilely towards the ultimate signified that is the harmonious order of divine creation. It is no accident that Charles Sanders Peirce formulates his general semiotic in terms of the trivium. First he explicitly equates semiotic to logic 6); but in his characteristically cryptic argument for triads, semiotic contains three branches: pure grammar, logic proper, and pure rhetoric because every sign (representamen) is connected with three things－ ground, object, and interpretant. Logic as semiotic (or the other way around, semiotic as logic) subsumes the trivium, including logic itself.

4) Minneus Felix Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana), rev. ed., ed. Adolf Dick (Stuttgart 1969); De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. James Willis (Leipzig 1983); The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, vol. 2 of Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 84), 2 vols, ed. William Harris Stahl (New York and Oxford 1977). All the Latin quotations are from the Dick edition and hereinafter cited as De Nuptiis; and all the English quotations are from the Stahl transla tion and hereinafter cited as The Marriage. Unless otherwise indicated, they are cited by verse numbers in the text rather than separately footnoted. 5) Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De Institutione Arithmetica, ed. and trans. Michael Masi, in: Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica (Studies in Classical Antiquity, 6) (Amsterdam 1983), 69-188. For Boethius on the quadrivium, see, for example, Alison White, Boethius in the Medieval Quadrivium, in: Margaret Gibson (ed.), Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford 1981), 162-205; Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford 1981). The word quadrivium (early manuscripts show quadruvium) first appears in the Proemium of Book I of Boethius’s De Institutione Arithmetica where the author observes: ‘Among all the men of ancient authority who, following the lead of Pythagoras, have flourished in the purer reasoning of the mind, it is clearly obvious that hardly anyone has been able to reach the highest perfection of the disciplines of philosophy unless the nobility of such wisdom was investigated by him in a certain four-part study, the quadrivium...’ (71). Credits must also be given to Boethius’s predecessors, such as Varro, , Augustine, and Martianus Capella. 6) Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., vols. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur Burks (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), 2.227. The citation of Peirce here follows the standardized practice by referring to the volume number first and section number next.

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Or perhaps one should say: LOGIC as theory of signs covers the trivium, including logic proper, which is not LOGIC proper. This word- play is not so trivial as it first appears if seen in the light of the fortune of rhetoric in 12th- and 13th-century , where dominates the trivium, and rhe toric is even reduced to a branch of logic 7). At this point we could surmise the Peircian semiotic’s possible links with the trivium, the author’s indebtedness to scholasticism being already well-documented 8). We could further infer that the general semiotic Peirce proposes is derived from the language-focused trivium, but it can be expanded to deal with other representations, such as the mathematical quadrivium, as long as its members fulfill the conditions of ground, object, and interpretant. In fact, it is quite possible to recode the quadrivium in terms of the tripartite icon, index, and symbol9). It seems that in both Martianus Capella and Boethius, the math- ematical quadrivium is taken with higher regard than the ‘trivial’ language organon; but the matter is much more complicated than it seems. A closer look will show their difference, especially regarding the functions of language. In his De Institutione Arithmetica Boethius proposes the quadrivium as speculative knowledge and asserts its mastery is a prerequisite for the philosopher, whose ultimate goal is metaphysical contemplation. In his hierarchy, there is an ascending order towards abstraction, from multitude (or numerical quantity), represented by the twinning arithmetic and music, to magnitude (or spatial quantity), represented by geometry and astronomy. A comprehension of both numerical and spatial quantities helps us to ascend the lofty heights of philosophy. What about the quadrivium’s relationship to the Aristotelian Organon which, and whose commentaries, Boethius is to translate and

7) Martin Camargo, Rhetoric, in: David Wagner (ed.), The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington 1983), 107-8. 8) Charles Sanders Peirce, Nominalism versus Realism, Early Nominalism and Realism, Ockam, in: Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, 5 vols. to date (Bloomington 1982-1993), vol. 2, ed. Edward C. Moore et al. (1984), 144- 54, 310-36; Alan R. Perreiah, Peirce’s Semeiotic and Scholastic Logic, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 25: 1 (1989), 41-9; James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington and Indianapolis 1996). I have not been able to locate the following article cited by Liszka, David Savan, Peirce and the Trivium, Cruzeiro Semiotico 8 (1988), 50-6. 9) The Boethian quadrivium is based on a metalanguage dealing with the mathematical concepts of multitude and magnitude, which can be adequately recast in Peircian terms. Peirce constantly refers to the sign nature of algebra though he seldom mentions music. However, in the growing interest in semiotics of music and the already substantial body of secondary literature, two major trends can be iden- tified and respectively termed Peircian and Greimasian, with the Peircian on the rise because of the pragmatic aspect of indexicality. See k Vladimir Karbusicky. The Index Sign in Music, trans. Louise Duchesneau and Sid McLauchlan, Semiotics 66:1/3 (1987), 22-35. For a recent review and prolegomena, see, for instance, R. Keith Sawyer, The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal Performance, Semiotics 31:1/2 (1996), 269-306.

543 comment later? One could say his interest in Peripatetic logic lies primarily in its subservient function to truth, i.e., in forming discoveries (topics) and judgements (analytics)10). Pythagorian mathematics and Aristotelian logic are then the two systems which join to lay the foundation of metaphysics. There is no question of one’s modelling the other. It should be noted that, under the general rubric of organika, rhetoric and logic are combined studies, but to Boethius logic is clearly more important than rhetoric. In this sense, de Man’s observation is accurate when he says logic is closer to the quadrivium than the two other sister arts. However, in De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethius expresses his apprehension about logicians’ verbal games (III.12) and rhetoricians’ likelihood of forsaking philosophy’s ‘ordinances’ (II. 1). If we accept de Man’s rather hasty but useful equation of literature to rhetoric － this is exactly what Martianus does in Book V－ we will better appreciate Boethius’s valorization of philosophy at the expense of poetry－ maybe even music as performance. In the famous beginning of De Consolatione, as if echoing Plato, the dying Boethius allows Philosophy to scold the poetical as ‘tragical harlots’ who ‘kill the fruitful crop of reason’ (I,1); and later in Book II he hears her identify Music as ‘a little slave belonging to [her] house’ (II,1)11). With Boethius, music as performance is not accepted as part of speculative philosophy, a point on which we will elaborate when analyzing Martianus’s text. The picture is quite different in Martianus Capella. The whole text of De Nuptiis is a highly embellished and often carnivalesque alle gory, within the frame of which the seven bridesmaids expound the arts they govern. The author utilizes poetic devices and rhetorical figures so profusely that he is even chided by Satura, the genre itself, for tu fingere ludicra praestas / uiliaque astriloquae praefers commenta puellae! (‘fashion[ing] cheap and silly fictions’) (808) without true intellectual nourishment12). There is a fascinating moment in the course of

10) Jonathan Barnes, Boethius and the Study of Logic, in: Margaret Gibson (ed.), Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford 1981), 73-89. 11) Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. I.T. (1609), rev. H.F. Stewart (The Loeb Classical Library) (London 1918), 129, 133. 12) Throughout the text, the poetic function is always foregrounded, even in the books dealing with the seven arts. Towards the end of book II, the narrator says he will nunc ergo mythos terminatur (‘put aside all fable’) (220), but book III opens with his questioning the Muse who insists on using embellishment. Her argument is rather persuasive: although the Arts ‘tell that which is the truth’, they have to be clothed and cannot be given ‘naked to the bridal couple’ (219-222).

‘atquin prioris ille ‘et uestiantur Artes. titulus monet libelli an tu gregem sororum mythos ab ore pulsos nudum dabis iugandis, Artesque uera fantes et sic petent Tonantis uoluminum sequentum et caelitum senatum? praecepta comparare.’ aut si tacere cultum … placet, ordo quis probatur?’ ‘nil mentiamur’ inquit

narration, which takes place after the three Latin arts of language have been exposed and before the four Greek arts of mathematics are introduced. The narrator Martianus, though well versed in lyrics13) and mythical fabulization, should fail to recognize Philosophia (philosophy) and Paedia (learning) despite his enkyklopaedeia (all-round education). There are several occasions on which the narrator teases himself for his ignorance, including punning on his own name as a capella14) Menippean satire and literary embellishments put aside, it would be more interesting to compare Martianus’s and Boethius’s ordering of the seven arts15). We would like to comment, in particular, on their representations of music, because we believe the topic will usher in the confrontation of opposing camps of semiotic thinkers of our time, regarding the functions of language in representing other semiotic systems. Earlier we mentioned Boethius’s relegation of performing music to the servile division of footmen. Let us elaborate on this. With Boethius, music comes after arithmetic as representing the more intelligible multitude, and as such is more basic if not lower than geome try and astronomy, both representing magnitude or spatial quantity. Boethius distinguishes among three types of music: cosmic music (musica mundana) which is natural though imperceptible to human senses, human music (musica humana) which deals with the microcosm of human body and its correspondence to soul, and, finally, instrumental music (musica

13) Fanny LeMoine has identified fifteen different meters used by Martianus Capella. See Fanny LeMoine, Martianus Capella: A Literary Re-evaluation (Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik and Renaissance-Forschung, 10) (München 1972), 7. 14) LeMoine (1972: 132; see n. 13). 15) In style, De Nuptiis follows the tradition of Menippean satire attributed to Varno in mixing prose and poetry; where subject matter is concerned, it is a pro thalamion followed by convivial treatises on the seven arts, thus fully displaying the generic trait of encyclopedic erudition. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton 1957), 311. It would be an example dear to Frye, although in his discussion of the encyclopedic genre Martianus’s work is strangely absent. The work, as Martianus tells his son in the frame, is ‘a story which Satire [Satura] invented in the long winter nights’ (2); ‘an old man’s tale [senilem fabulam], a mélange sportively composed by Satire under lamplight ... in nine books ... [where she has] heaped learned doctrines upon unlearned,.... crammed sacred matters into secular;...commingled gods and the Muses, and ... had uncouth figures prating in a rustic fiction about the encyclopedic arts [disciplinas cyclicas] ’ (997-999). Frye observes, “The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon. A species, or rather sub-species, of the form is the kind of encyclopedic farrago represented by Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists and Macrobius’ Saturnalia, where people sit at a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might conceivably come up in a conversation. The display of eru dition had probably been associated with the Menippean tradition by Varro, who was enough of a polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp, at any rate call him vir Romanorum eruditissimus” (ibid.).

544 instrumentalis). He mentions the first two types rather sketchily and is never to return to them as he promises. The last one, which amounts to what we mean by music today, is, how ever, denounced by Boethius because it has recourse to the human body only and thus fails to be speculative16). This ‘militantly theoretical’17) position in favor of musica theorica has very little concern with performance, or with what Roland Barthes has reinstated as musica practica, a type not mentioned by Boethius but worth our inquiry 18.). In fact, Boethius looks down upon composers and performers because of the servile nature of their work. A true musician is ‘one who has gained knowledge of making music by weighing (i.e., forming judgement) with the reason, not through the servitude of work, but through the sovereignty of speculation’19). In short, the true musician is what we know today as the music critic, who is curiously denounced by Barthes for his linguistic mediation. Boethius’s concept is widely accepted throughout the Middle Ages. A Carolingian exegete Remigius of Auxerre, who has com- mented on both Boethius and Martianus Capella, even applies it to glossing Martianus’s allusion to Orpheus and Eurydice in Book IX of De Nuptiis, the last book which deals with Harmony, in Martianus Capella’s order, the last and also the supreme one among the seven arts. According to Remigius, Eurydice represents musical theory while Orpheus performance, and the musician’s loss of his wife symbolizes the loss of his true art20). This is among half a dozen of scholia in which Remigius uses Boethius on music, anachronistically, to gloss Martianus’s ‘Harmony’ (ibid. 334-357). With this instance, we can now turn to Martianus Capella. Why does Martianus put music at the end of a literary text? And how is Harmony represented? We must look into the narrator’s invocation to Hymen in the very beginning of Book I.

Tu quem psallentem thalamis, quem matre Camena progenitum perhibent, copula sacra deum, (1) ‘Sacred principle of unity amongst the gods, on you I call; you are said to grace weddings with your song;’

Here Hymen is addressed as copula sacra deum (‘sacred principle of unity among the gods’). Now this abstract Homeric epithet can certainly generate a long process of semiosis. For our purpose, three major semantic areas can be identified from the word copula: (1) marital, (2)

l6) See Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin Bower (New Haven and London 1989), 9; Manfred F. Bukofzer, Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music, Speculum 12:2 (1942), 165-80; Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford 1992), 133-4. 17) Chadwick (1981: 85; see n. 5). 18) Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York 1977). 19) Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, 51. 20) Remigius Autissiodorensis, Remigii Autissiodorensis Commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. Cora E. Lutz, 2 vols. (Leiden 1962), 2: 310.

545 rhetorical, (3) musical. The first meaning of marital copula is heavily invested with semantic value, especially within the context of Roman Law, for it is marital because it is legal, or the other way round. Here the linguistic function is purely denotative. But the second and the third meanings are rather formal concepts than semantic concepts. What we have just provisionally termed rhetorical copula refers to the link in both grammar (cf. 286, Copulatiuae... coniunctiones) and logic, viz. syntax and proposition; and the musical copula refers to the link between two musical feet, as Harmony defines it in Book IX: etenim syzygia, id est copula, duorum pedum in unum est ascripta conexio, qui [in] dissimiles sibi positi esse uidentur (‘A syzygy or copula is the joining of two feet that are seen to be dissimilar, into one’) (979)21). Thus, in both language and music, the term copula is at once denotative and metalingual, perhaps more metalingual than denotative. The same signifier of copula, in both its phonic and graphemic aspects, closes on three signifieds, sharing one distinctive semantic feature of ‘link’. The structural and metalingual functions of copula enable the rhetorical and musical signifieds to serve, in turn, as other signifiers on the higher sentential and global discur sive levels, and across semiotic systems. This semiosis is in fact based on the sign function of copula. What is a copula if it is not a sign which makes possible aliquid stat pro aliquo, i.e., a third sign which establishes the relation of renvoi or referral between two signs, a classical definition provided by Roman Jakobson and followed by Eco and others22)? There is no exaggeration in saying that Peirce has built his whole semiotic on that single element of copula, who has extensively discussed the sign functions of copula, such as equality, attribution, predication and subsumption, not only in language, but also in logic and algebra. Earlier we said Peirce has equated semiotic to logic. What he refers to is actually our faculty of reasoning from a single sign to other signs through the dynamic triangular relationship among ground, object, and interpretant23).

21) See LeMoine (1972: 22-5; see n. 13). 22) Roman Jakobson, A Glance at the Development of Semiotics, Opening report at the First International Congress of Semiotics, Milan, June 2, 1974, in: Selected Writings, 8 vols., vol. 7, ed. Stephen Rudy (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam 1985), 7: 199-218; Eco, Proposal for a History of Semiotics, 77. The French term ‘renvoi’ has been rendered as ‘referral’. Although Jakobson casually alludes to aliquid stat pro aliquo, his definition is rather based on linguistic opposition and equivalence. Therefore the semiotic function of referral should be operated infra-systemically rather than intersystemically. A better translation, then, would be ‘reciprocity’ or ‘double presupposition’. 23) when we say De Nuptiis is a Menippean satire, we are copulating (i.e., using a sign to link) a subject to a predicate, a substance to a quality (or ground), a text to a genre, in short, one sign to another, and to still another, thus ad infinitum. When we say, as Peirce already did in November1866, “There is no griffin” and “A griffin is a winged quadruped”, we are using a copula to inquire into the actuality and possibility of being, into knowledge and fiction. Isn’t this exactly what Martianus does with his copula sacra deum? See Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 1, 517.

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Regarding the text of Martianus Capella, the question can be now boiled down to: “How does the copula function, not only within one system, but across several systems, such as marriage, rhetoric, and music, or even among all the seven siblings?” The word copula, with its variants and derivatives, like cum ita expers totius copulae censeatur, ne... copulis interesset (40), copulam nuptialem (109), copulatiuae coniunctione (286), recurs throughout the text, and most conspicuously in the last book of Harmony. Harmony is the last bridesmaid to address the bride Philology and the convivial Olympian company. She is charged with a more difficult task than the other six maids, and is faced with a dilemma which they are not: Whether to perform music or to talk about music? Or, how not to perform music when her art and only her art entails performance? As says, haec quippe et superum curas prae cunctis poterit permulcere aethera cantibus numerisque laetificans... (‘She indeed, above all others, will be able to soothe the cares of the gods, gladdening the heavens with her song and rhythms...’) (899). Following Boethius’s argument, if she is to perform music, then she knows no music which she is supposed to master. If she talks about music, then she has to use language to interpret a system which is non-verbal. As Harmony says: in quibus artis praecepta edissertare prohibitum ('[In] the star-studded spheres, ...I am forbidden to discourse on the precepts of my art’) (921). Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, has already forestalled this when she admonished Grammar in Book III not to usurp Music’s office by talking about rhythm and meter or she will be torn apart (326). In short, Harmony’s mission impossible is to copulate language and music. In a sense, her task is easy, because a solution has been already provided. Harmony, together with the six others who have already lectured, is a handmaid whom Mercury presents to his human bride Philology, and Mercury or Henries is noted, among other things, for his miraculous language competence and thus is linked to the mythic origin of hermeneutics. Their marriage, as glossed by the aforementioned Remigius of Auxerre, signifies the union of speech (sermo) and reason (ratio): Philologia ergo ponitur in persona sapientiae et rationis, Mercurius in similitudine facundiae et sermonis (66). How Mercury, while symbolizing the three language arts of trivium, can present seven arts to Philology who is supposed to be already in possession of the four mathematical arts of quadrivium, does not need to bother us here although it is a tantalizing topic for logical and narratologic al (i.e., in terms of time sequence) inquiries. It follows － and this is more intriguing－that before their marital copulation, there should be no connection whatsoever between trivium and quadrivium. It will be interesting to see how Harmony is presented to the audi- ence before giving her speech. There is no way to get around musica practica, albeit embedded in the semantic universe of the narrative, and that only. First there is a performance of instrumental music (organikon), followed by vocal music (odikon) and then recitation (hypokritikon), none of which is speculative. Such an order of perfor- mance, according to Harmony in her subsequent lecture, corresponds to the order of curriculum known as Exangeltikon or hermeneutikon

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(exposition) of a certain Lasus, who has been identified as Pindar’s teacher in the sixth century B.C. (939).

dextra autem quoddam gyris multiplicibus circulatum et miris ductibus intertextum uelut clupeum gestitabat, quod quidem suis inuicem complexibus modulatum ex illis fidibus circulatis omnium modorum concinentiam personabat.... uerum ille orbis non chelys nec barbiton nec tetrachordon apparebat, sed ignota rotunditas omnium melodias transcenderat organorum. denique mox ingressa atque eiusdem orbis sonuere concentus (909)

In her right hand Harmony bore what appeared to be a shield, circu- lar overall, with many inner circle, the whole interwoven with remarkable configurations. The encompassing circles of this shield were attuned to each other, and from the circular chords there poured forth a concord of all the modes.... No lyre or lute or tetrachord appeared on that circular shield, yet the strains coming from that strange rounded form surpassed those of all musical instruments. As soon as she entered the hall, a symphony swelled from the shield.

After her appearance with instrumental music, Harmony sings a hymn, tunc egersimon inffabile uirgo concludens ad Iouem reuersa aliis modulis numerisque uoce etiam associata sic coepit (‘Concluding this stirring symphony, impossible to describe [by the story-teller], Harmony turned to Jove and lending her voice to a new melody and meter, began the following hymn...’) (911). Her songs are accompanied by the barbiton (and probably other instruments) because when the narrator resumes his report, he says: talibus Harmoniae carminibus oblectati omnes permulsique diui, nec minor quippe ex fidibus suauitas quam uocis modulamine resultabat (‘Harmony’s songs delighted and soothed the spirits of all the gods; and the strains that poured forth from her stringed instruments were no less sweet than the melody of her voice...’) (920). On both occasions, Martianus lets Harmony forestall and displace Boethius’s value hierarchy by performing her art. After singing, Harmony changes her communication by giving in completely to language:

denique qua industria comparatum quibusue assequendum ediscendumque opibus uigil cura repromittat, ut in tam dulcem eblanditamque mollitiem intima mentium liquescat affectio, Ioue admirante disquiritur. ac tunc uirgo, cum artis praecepta a se expeti examinandae eruditionis intentione conspiceret, paulum melicis temperans exhortante quoque Delio Palladeque sic coepit: (920)

Hereupon a discussion ensued, to which Jupiter listened with admira- tion, regarding the pains and labor involved in the production of that music... Then, when Harmony perceived that those present were seeking the precepts of her art by way of putting her learning to test,

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refraining somewhat from songs... she thus began her discourse.

First she takes note, in quibus artis praecepta edissertare prohibitum (‘[ In heaven] I am forbidden to discourse on the precepts of my art...’) (921). What follows is a detailed exposition of the discipline she re- presents, which concludes the wedding pageantry within the frame. One could say there are two roles played by Harmony, which are indicated by two discursive registers, first as a performer, a cantor, dramatized by the narrator Martianus, and then as a theorist, a musicus., whose speech is reported. In the first case, she is the subject of the enunciated; in the second, the subject of enunciation. Whether enunciated or enunciating, she and her music are encoded in the Latin language of Martianus Capella. Harmony’s experience raises the problematics of language’s legit- imacy, power and limits in representing music. This can be glimpsed by Grammar’s and Harmony’s rivalry for the right to interpreting rhythm and tempus (326, 971). The dispute can be settled only by a trans- systemic tertium which is a semiotics in itself, like the aforementioned semiotics of copula provided that it does not reduce and conflate all systems to symbolic logic at the expense of their textuality. However, what we have here is a textual construct to be dealt with not by semiotics of music, but by semiotics of language on music. I shall briefly discuss the first before dwelling on the second. Even in semiotics of music, linguistic models are most commonly used; at any event, only language can be used in describing music, to some musicologists no small resentment24). No doubt, this will impose on the interpreter some limits; but given the fact that interpreters are homo loquens, or in Martianus' words, homo grammaticus, whose interpretations are always model-bound, there seems very lit tle one can do otherwise. The later Barthes, after his association with the Tel Quel group in the late sixties, has challenged the consuming tradition of Western music criticism, where the regular mode of signification is the attribution of a rhetorical ethos to a piece of performed music (1977: 181). That ethos is often expressed by an adjective, and the discourse based on predication 25). Barthes calls for the liquidation of this type of music criticism because

24) See, for example. Nicholas Ruwet, Language. Musique, Poésie (Paris 1972); Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Fondaments d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris 1975); Eero Tarasti, Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially That of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky (Approaches to Semiotics, 51) (The Hague 1979); Reinhard Schneider, Semiotik der Musik: Darstellung and Kritik (München 1980); Harold S. Powers, Language Models and Musical Analysis, Ethnomusicology 24 (1980), 1-60. 25) Note that the word ethos is Aristotelian, a quality or character attributed to a tragedy or a work of art. And note further the act of attributing a quality to some thing or the act of predicating a subject is a logical procedure, thanks to the function of copula, which amounts to Peircian semiotic. On the sign function of music, it seems there is much negotiation to do between Peirce and the Tel Quel members like Barthes and Julia Kristeva.

551 the music which one hears, which the critic writes about, is never the music which one plays. The latter, musica practica, depending on the way it is performed, is manual, muscular, and bodily, and not inscribed in the symbolic order of language. (Compare this with Julia Kristeva’s chora, “an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases [and]... analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm”26).) To displace the adjectival predicatory discourse of music criticism, Barthes coins the expression ‘grain of the voice’ for songs, as the ‘space’ where language and mus ic encounter (1977: 181)27). Ironically, this materialistic view ethos an idealistic, phonocentric statement of Harmony: tonus est spatii magnitudo, qui ideo tonus dictus, quia per hoc spatium ante omnes prima uox quae fuerit extenditur (‘A tone is a magnitude of space. It is called a tone because the voice was the first of all sounds to be ‘stretched’ over this space’) (960). In general, Barthes’s critique is well taken; but one may question whether this mortal coil is a sufficiently materialistic space as signifier where language and music encounter, and whether, as a recent study suggests, they evolved out of a proto-faculty which was primarily musical but ceased to be so when language discovered its double articulation28.). Emile Benveniste has rightly pointed out the two principles regarding the relationships between semiotic systems29). The first one is the principle of nonredundancy. Nonredundancy because any sign is system-specific and semiotic systems are therefore noninterchangeable. “Two systems can have the same sign in common without being, as a result, synonymous or redundant” (Benveniste 1981: 12). We take this to be a response to the Peircian copula and even the Jakobsonian referral. The second principle, which follows from the first, more concerns our discussion here: The semiotic relationship between systems is expressed as the relationship between interpreting system and interpreted system. There is only one semiotic system available, which can interpret itself by itself, and interpret other systems. That system is language. One of the reasons is: it is a system of signifying units whereas other systems, such as music, are based on non-signifying units. The relationship between language and the other systems in a specific society, say, in Martianus and Boethius’s world, is nonreversible. That is, every nonlinguistic system must use language as the interpreting system, not the other way around. It is not a perfect model and maybe a shaky link for the seven arts, but it is sufficient to undermine the disciplinary

26) Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York 1984), 25-7. 27) See also Michael Chanan, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London 1994). 28) Bryant G. Levman, The Genesis of Music and Language, Ethnomusicology 36:2 (1992), 147-70. 29) Emile Benveniste, The Semiology of Language, trans. Genette Ashby and Adelaide Russo, Semiotica, Special Supplement (1981), 5-23.

553 hierarchy and to interfere with the quadrivium’s aspiration to transcendence. Going back to the representation of Harmony quoted above, we see that as in all literary texts, the instrumental music from her multi-layered shield is doubly encoded, first in the primary signifying system of language, and then, specifically, in the secondary signifying system of genre, in this case, an ekphrasis alluding perhaps to the shields of Achilles and Aeneas. If anything, the muted music cannot have an existence except in the semantic universe of the second signifying system. The same is true with Harmony’s song that immediately follows. It is to be sure encoded both in lyrics and melody, but only the semantic aspect of the former can be decoded to inform the audience of the stories of, say, Endymion and Phoebe, or Orpheus and Eurydice because there is no semantic value in melody to transmit the story. If there were, it would be a different kind, not known to us 30). Finally, Harmony complies with Jupiter’s request to give her precepts which she was forbidden to do. What are precepts if not language? In a sense, Martianus Capella’s text is both difficult and easy, but certainly more interesting, to read than Boethius. As Harmony’s re- presentation demonstrates, the author has reinstated language’s central position in the seven arts by using it to model and interpret all of them, including itself. This is true of his account of all the mathematical quadrivium. What we have is a singularly encoded text: exclusively in language except the semiotic square, which is very different from Boethius on music and arithmetic where lots of number bases and patterns, shapes and solids, and even matrices are inserted into his language exposition, thus resulting in a multiply encoded mixed text, whose function, though, is purely referential. But on the other hand, Martianus Capella’s singularly encoded text is not so easy as it seems as far as the functions of language are concerned. The text is in a different sense doubly encoded: First in the primary signifying system of language and then in the secondary system of literature. This makes his text difficult because he is said to have mobilized almost all known generic conventions and stylistic registers － whose appreciation will take the collaboration of a Latinist’s linguistic competence and a semiotician’s analytical rigor. Let us conclude. Like all the other Latin encyclopedists, Martianus Capella has at his disposal a huge classical repertoire and therefore cannot claim originality in his knowledge of the seven arts. One of his sources of music is Aristides Quintilianus, probably the same as Boethius. But here as elsewhere, his treatment is different from both3l), mainly because of the literariness of his language expression. With reference to Eco’s proposals for a world history of semiotics, Martianus Capella should have a place in two categories, first as a practitioner of literary semiotics, and then as a conscious thinker of signs. He may not have an explicit theory of language, but he is keenly aware of language’s interference

30) Powers (1980; see n.24). 31) Chadwick (1981: 83-4; see n. 5).

545 with other systems. Since all historians constantly invent ancestors, might we do so by giving two examples to see his possible influence on later semioticians. His discussion of propositional logic can be negotiated with Peirce (who incidentally acknowledges Martianus Capella in his 1867 Dictionary of Logic － a very rare reference indeed32), and his formalization of Aristotelian categories of contradictories and contrarieties is the prototype of Algirdas-Julien Greimas’s semiotic square － a topic yet unstudied but worthy our further inquiry.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, National Taiwan University

32) Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 2, 108.