Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

54
PHILIPP ERCHINGER
possible interpretations that was never explicitly taken by the actual
utterance from which it branches off now. He assumes a law of reading
that was not intentionally established in order to have Percival’s
text yield a message not deliberately conveyed. He interprets an ambiguous
remark as if it accorded to a “solid” law of unequivocal signification,
patronisingly (“My good Percival”) brushing off the possibility
that something does not mean what its literal “English sense” most
obviously seems to express.
This is a daring move, though, because it bluntly rejects the invitation
to set up a form of communicative bonding—communally extended
by Percival’s tagged question (“it looks just the place for a
murder, doesn’t it?”)—in favour of open disagreement, likely to provoke
an equally antagonistic response. To Sir Percival, accordingly,
Fosco’s “solid English sense” does not make much sense. More precisely,
it is sheer “‘Humbug!’ as he decides to call it, “cutting away
fiercely at his stick. ‘You know what I mean. The dreary scenery—the
lonely situation. If you choose to understand me you can—if you
don’t choose I am not going to trouble myself to explain my meaning’”
(234). Remarkably, this still does not in the least clarify the issue.
For, instead of simply disclosing the original “meaning” of his remark
about the lake, Percival gestures incoherently at some kind of selfevident
commonsense or no-nonsense (no “Humbug”) logic (“The
dreary scenery—the lonely situation”) that, by virtue of being selfevident,
needs no explaining. Implicitly, therefore, his vague gesture
is firmly tied up with the conclusion that in obvious cases of commonsense
anyone can be relied on to “choose” the right meaning anyway.
But this is an utterly self-defeating conclusion because by refusing to
spell out the supposedly stable law of understanding he refers to (“if
you don’t choose, I am not going to trouble myself to explain my
meaning”), Percival once again leaves it to Fosco to state the supposedly
obvious in his own terms:
“And why not,” asked the Count, “when your meaning can be explained by
anyone in two words? If a fool was going to commit a murder, your lake is
the first place he would choose for it. If a wise man was going to commit a