The Symbolic Element in History

A funny thing happened to me on my way home from the semiotics seminar. As I rounded a corner on C floor of the library, I noticed an advertisement from the New York Times pasted on the door of a student's carrel: "Fiji $499." Primed by a discussion of Charles S. Peirce and the theory of signs, I immediately recognized it as -well, a sign. Its message was clear enough: you could fly to Fiji and back for $499. But its meaning was different. It was a joke, aimed at the university public by a student grinding away at a thesis in the middle of winter, and it seemed to say: "I want to get out of this place. Give me some air! Sun! Mehr Licht!" You could add many glosses. But to get the joke, you would have to know that carrels are cells where students work on theses, that theses require long spells of hard labor, and that winter in Princeton closes around the students like a damp shroud. In a word, you would have to know your way around the campus culture, no great feat if you live in the midst of it, but something that distinguishes the inmates of carrels from the civilian population gamboling about in sunshine and fresh air. To us, "Fiji $499" is funny. To you, it may seem sophomoric. To me, it raised a classic academic question: how do symbols work? The question had been worrying me in connection with some criticism of a book I had published in 1984, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes of French Cultural History. In the book I had tried to show why a ritual slaughter of cats was hilariously funny to a group of journeymen printers in Paris around 1730. By getting the joke, I had hoped to "get" a key element in artisanal culture and to understand the play of symbols in cultural history in general. My critics raised some questions, which clung to "Fiji $499" in my thoughts as I trudged home through the dark. I would like to discuss those questions, not as a rebuttal to the criticism, for I still think my argument stands, but as an informal way of wandering through some general problems concerning the historical interpretation of symbols, rituals, and texts. In a long review of The Great Cat Massacre, Roger Chartier argues that the book is flawed by a faulty notion of symbols. ' According to him, symbolism