Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance
446
Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance
446Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691638140 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #482 |
| Pages: | 446 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d) |
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Ariosto's Bitter Harmony
Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance
By Albert Russell Ascoli
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05479-7
CHAPTER 1
THE ORLANDO FURIOSO AND THE POETRY OF CRISIS
The famous "sorriso" of Ariosto; the remote, fantastic settings and events of his narration; the remarkable fluidity of the "ottava d'oro": all of these have seemed to thwart from the beginning any attempt to find in the Orlando Furioso a sense of the problematic in poetry and history, a troubled awareness of the interrelated crises of faith, of politics, and of culture which cry out in the principal documents and events of Italy in the early Cinquecento. The painfully acquired political stability and independence of the Italian peninsula in the 1400s was shaken in 1494 with the invasion of Charles VIII of France, suffered through the Spanish and French interventions in the early years of the new century (to which the Furioso makes such frequent reference), and received an emblematic death blow with the sack of Rome in 1527. As the poem was being written, Italy was also undergoing a "crisi religiosa," alive with mystical, post-Savonarolian currents of reform, while the Reformation itself was just exploding further to the north Finally, the Quattrocento revolution in educational and epistemological methods, as well as the ideology o f man's dignity and infinite possibility with which Eugenio Garin and others have associated it, continued to constitute a crisis in human self-perception which was often as maddening as it was liberating God, man, and corpus politicum were all at risk in the multiple and widening crises of the "High Renaissance" Nonetheless, Benedetto Croce, whose enduring influence on the course of Ariosto criticism is coextensive with his dominance of much of Italian literary study for the last fifty years, describes an Ariosto "not anguished by doubts, not worried about human destiny," the poet laureate o f a cosmic Armonia.
Croce's romantic formulation has since been "secularized" for modern taste. It has also been revised in terms of the musical cosmography of Anosto's own day the vision of a divinely harmonizing One which tunes the spheres, discovering concordant unity in the discordant multiplicity of creation Nor is it my intention to deny that these applications of armoma to the poem, particularly the last, are appropriate There is no doubt, in fact, that the poem's light tone, fluid prosody, and imaginative subject matter are designed specifically to elicit such a response, or that Anosto is openly aware of constructing a festive art of "'l canto e l'armonia" ("song and harmony" XLII 814), one which he likens to the successful blending of disparate sounds by a musician
Stgnor, mi far convien come fa tl buono sonator sopra tl suo instrumento arguto, che spesso muta corda, e vana suono, ricercando ora il grave, ora l'acuto [VIII 29 1–4]
Lord, I must do as the good player does upon his keen instrument, often changing chord and varying sound, seeking now the solemn, now the sharp
On the other hand, perhaps readers of the poem have underestimated the complexity and sophistication which marks Anosto's understanding of the musical cosmology of his day, have failed to note his sense of its limits as a model either for his own artistry or for the grandly tormented world in which he lived
Thus rather than rejecting the critical concept of armoma out of hand, one might pursue Ariosto's treatment of it a little further tofind the moments when the tranquil exhilaration of "'l canto e l'armonia" gives way to "aspro concento, orribile armonia" ("bitter unison, horrible harmony" xiv.134.1). I want to argue that Ariosto does sing his great song, with at least superficial success, as a means of evading, domesticating, and/or dominating impending crises of the self, the city, and the temple. But I also claim that an attentive listener might sense a bitter edge, a disturbing crack, in the singer's voice — one which betrays awareness of a poetic project doomed to failure and to being swallowed by the madness and death it so yearns to transcend. I will do this by a close reading of the poem, its images and metaphors, its narrative and other structures, in terms of texts and events of the time, as well as of the peculiar and contradictory responses the Furioso has evoked in readers over the centuries. As we shall see, even the apparently "modern" theme of crisis has its specific textual (even etymological) equivalent in the opposition between "errore" and "giudizio." In the last chapter I will show how the various thematic and structural crises of the poem are ultimately related to a complex Ariostan poetics (revealed in brief glimpses throughout the Furioso) of concord and discord, one and many, harmony and dissonance: a poetics which continually metamorphoses "discordia concors" into "concordia discors" (and vice versa) and which enters into crisis in the very act of fleeing from it.
That the poem's strongest impulse is toward evasion from historical claims of church and state is clear from the first. The poem begins with a thematic swerve from epic "arme" toward romance "amori," from the besieged city of Paris, capital and last outpost of Charlemagne's Christian Empire, into the dark forest of imagination and desire:
[pazzia] è come una gran selva, ove la via conviene a forza, a chi vi va, fallire: chi su, chi giù, chi qua, chi là travia. [xxiv.2.3–5]
[love madness] is like a great forest, where the path deceives whoever goes there: one up, one down, one here, one there — all stray.
And as the heroes of the poem depart from historical "impegno" in their world, the poem takes a distance, both spatial and temporal, on the world of its author. Even the usual strange and desolate haunts of romance wandering are sometimes abandoned for places beyond all charted geographies and all readerly credibility: the fantastic island of Alcina; the splendid lunar surface itself. Purporting to be a Virgilian epic of genealogical and political origins, where past should be prologue to the historical moment of writing, the poem more often than not seems to be ridiculing any such connection — for instance by its insistent reference to the transparently bogus authority of Bishop Turpin — and to be seeking refuge from an unsettled present in a purely mythical past. The famous narrative strategy of deferral and interlacing matches the deferrals by characters, particularly Ruggiero and Orlando, of all definitive choices and commitments: of political and military duty, of religious faith, and of marriage. The incessant interruptions of adventures at their midpoint, the practice of putting off from one canto to the next the conclusion of a narrative sequence, the immediate passage of heroes and heroines from the end of one adventure to the beginning of another, even more threatening, the potentially endless proliferation of events, characters, landscapes, and so on: all these contribute to the sense that no final closure will ever be reached, no decisive contact between poem and reality made.
It is this technique of narrative, thematic, and structural evasions which led Attilio Momigliano to his brillant comparison of the poem to the labyrinthine palaces of Atlante where "donne e cavallieri" wander endlessly after the magical figments of their own fantasy and desire, where they, and especially Ruggiero, Atlante's beloved adopted son, are sheltered from the encroachments of time and from the brutal, treacherous death which inevitably attends the young knight's conversion and marriage to Bradamante. As I will show, however, the poet as an Atlante is early set against another prophet-poet-magician, Merlin: a principle of evasion from history and its threatening crises encounters and is countered by a prophetic celebration of political dynasty and active heroism For most of the poem Anosto seems indeed more closely tied to the former than to the latter, to be a poet of aesthetic delight more than of moral utility, of fantastic departure from, rather than allegorical commentary on or mimetic representation of, "reality" Atlante, however, is a poet somewhat different from the one described by Croce — his retreat is motivated precisely by his anguish, while his evasions are strategies to impede a destined, tragic, reality all too clearly foreseen In other words, he takes his flight in relation to crises already on the horizon If this line were followed, and it will be, we would learn that Anosto is a poet oppressed by an awareness of crisis and moved by an overwhelming desire to stand outside of it, to interpose an aesthetic distance between himself and his age, himself and God, himself and himself, yet frankly aware of the futility of such a project The first focus of this study will be the "crisis of identity," but it will appear soon enough that this crisis cannot be separated or judged apart from the religious beliefs and institutions or from the political commitments and events which both threaten the autonomy of the individual person and yet offer it definition and self-realization
Until recently, if some readers have been willing to find in the Furioso the traces of an historical upheaval, these were always taken to be, as it were, negative and involuntary, never to be mistaken for profound creative engagement with history or a genuinely anguished scrutiny of the self by itself GWF Hegel, in a famous passage from his Aesthetics, links Anosto's name to that of Cervantes as the ironic devastators of the medieval chivalric tradition and its values Francesco DeSanctis refines the brief Hegelian characterization to discover an Anosto who takes refuge in the tranquil domain of "pure art," from which is excluded any reference to politics, ethics, or religion Both Hegel and DeSanctis make Anosto the uncritical reflector of a certain historical crisis of values, the epitome of what they take to be the "Spirit" of his age. The critique which DeSanctis aims at Ariosto is, at the broadest level, indistinguishable from that which he directs at Boccaccio, and at the Renaissance in general. Nonetheless, "Ludovico della tranquillitate," heir apparent of "Johannes tranquillitatis," has, like his genial predecessor, now begun to be spoken of in contemporary criticism as a poet of historical and personal crisis.
Even before the recent attempts to represent Ariosto's "seriousness," most critics recognized one work in his canon as the reflection of a violent crisis, even as they denied that the Furioso was in any sense contaminated by this moment in Ariostan poetics. The Cinque Canti, written for inclusion in the Furioso and yet finally omitted by the poet, even from the third and last edition of the poem (1532), have often been cited as evidence that Ariosto recognized how alien their bleak and desperate spirit was to the dominant tones and themes of the Furioso. The "dark" elements of Ariosto's poetic consciousness were thus consistently relegated to a lesser work, thereby, as one hoped, dialectically excluding or exorcising them from the poet's most famous text. But the critical winds have shifted dramatically of late. In an early essay, Lanfranco Caretti defines the Cinque Canti as "different and more serious than the first, more authentic, inspiration of the poem," precisely because they foreshadow the "profound crisis" which was about to destroy an already fragile political equilibrium. In a recent, palinodic "Codicillo," however, he concedes that in the 1532 edition the Orlando Furioso too is marked by the uneasy awareness of political turmoil and by a series of disillusioning personal experiences, notably the brutal period passed by the poet as governor of Garfagnana. Caretti still rescues the picture of a sunny, untroubled, affirmative Ariosto, wholehearted celebrator of the Estense court and author of an "unified image of life," although only by narrowing its existence to the first edition, published in 1516. It may eventually be shown, though if this study does so it will be only incidentally, that even this further retrenching cannot be sustained and that the Ariostan sense of crisis goes stubbornly beyond the various historical and autobiographical schemes which have been imposed on it.
As early as 1952, Giorgio DeBlasi published a brilliant though uneven essay which focused on the poem's dramatizations and thematizations of the psychological limitations of man — his blindness and irrationality — even though he then went on to argue that those perceptions of mental and moral crisis were recontained and overcome in the very act of recognizing their existence. Giorgio Padoan and Vittore Branca confirm that today the image of Ariosto as a poet caught up in a far-reaching political and cultural crisis, and, to a lesser extent, a crisis of the self and its identity, is gradually winning favor. Branca attacks in particular the view of the Furioso as "a masterpiece apparently sunny and apollonian, unproblematic and disengaged" and wishes to place it in the context of a Renaissance "troubled and anxious, on the edge of infernal or apocalyptic abysses, obsessed by irrationality and folly" although he still sees Ariosto as a (besieged) defender of the values of the Renaissance as they and it have been traditionally understood. Eduardo Saccone, who himself draws a sharp line between the Furioso and the Cinque Canti, nonetheless accurately describes how a crisis of the poet's sense of himself may be reflected in a crisis of poetics: "the greatest novelty in the Cinque Cartti ... is the crisis of a poetics understood as demiurgic ordering, building out of chaos, and a consequent ... transformation [of poetry] into humble and resigned witness, a difficult and risky writing."
Coordinate with this substantial reduction of the quasi-divine powers claimed by the poet-narrator for himself from the Furioso to the Cinque Canti, Saccone discovers in the latter work alone a pointed attack on the Renaissance vision of integral and autonomous human selfhood. In particular, the insidious metamorphoses of the demon Vertunno are taken to represent a crisis of human identity itself. This reading shifts attention from the question of objective conditions of political turmoil to the question of the subjective self in crisis. In a later essay the same critic begins to suggest how the same concern is addressed in the greater work, though in a far more affirmative key. Nor should this seem like such a surprising discovery in a poem which in its title and throughout focuses on the related themes of madness and the loss or acquisition of identity.
In the last fifteen years, the imaginative barrier between the Cinque Canti and the Furioso has been repeatedly breached. The poem has been seen as a reflector of the great epistemological crisis of its age and as the site of a complex crisis in the language which mediates between psyche and society. Above all, Eugenio Donato has most cogently and effectively illuminated the darker side of the Furioso with a brilliant demonstration of the "centrality" to the poem of the self caught and dispersed in the errors of decentering desire and of the deceptive language which expresses it. Donato draws heavily on René Girard's analysis of novelistic treatments of deceit and desire, although he believes that Ariosto subverts the optimistic Girardian model of an "autobiographical" narrative which begins by expressing its own entrapment in desire's illusions but ends with a liberating perspective outside of passion. In stark contrast then is the inconclusive Ariostan narrative which never claims to emerge from the toils of error, never constitutes its author as a coherent and masterful "io." In Donato's version of the Furioso, the representation of political crisis is all but forgotten it is a "self-referential" narrative, and not one which successfully refers to the author's self or to the "real world"
In spite of the fundamental value of this analysis, a number of objections may be raised against it. Since, in fact, the poem does finally, at least superficially, appear to predict an escape from narrative error (XLVII) and does clearly attempt to shape a masterful "figure of the poet," it might be better to speak not of its refusals to make these claims, but rather of its resistance to and reversal of its own claims. At the same time, in order to avoid anachronism, and to reveal more fully the intertextual play of the Furioso, one might wish to refer the Ariostan perspective on language and desire not only to Derrida and Girard but also, more persuasively, to the traditions available to the author rhetorical humanism, neo-Platonism, and even the Augustinian discourse on language as agent of absence and desire — which, as we shall see, are extraordinarily problematic in their own right. Most important, although the discovery of a crisis within Ariosto's language may appear to be relatively, if not radically, new, the formulation of "self-referential narration" remains within the DeSanctian tradition of "art for art's sake," even when it ostensibly serves a frontal attack on Croce's vision of the divine totality of the poet's perspective. DeSanctis furnishes the hint that Croce develops into the image of Ariosto as omniscient God, while Donato says that the Furioso subverts any "theological concept of the book." DeSanctis, however, closes on a seemingly opposite note with which Donato would be likely to agree "the creator has disappeared into the creature" And one is even tempted to refer both of them back to perhaps the earliest of Ariosto's critics, G.B, Giraldi-Cinzio, who wrote that "like the chameleon, which takes its color from whatever it leans against, so Ariosto adapts his style to each thing he wishes to treat." The image of the chameleon in turn reminds us that Pico della Mirandola, thirty years before Ariosto first published his poem, had imagined man as chameleon, a creature whose very ability to lose himself in an infinite series of identities is precisely that which offered him the possibility of approaching the comprehensiveness and oneness of God himself. Thus the Renaissance was certainly able to set side by side, as part of a single dialectic, the dispersal and constitution of the self. And the Furioso was therefore in a position to sustain both theological and anti-theological interpretations, while calling both into question — making affirmative reference to its "divine" author and subverting both his identity and its own power to refer to him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ariosto's Bitter Harmony by Albert Russell Ascoli. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Note on Translations, pg. xi
- 1. The Orlando Furioso and the Poetry of Crisis, pg. 3
- 2. Critical Readings of the Orlando Furioso, pg. 43
- 3. Allegory and Education at the Antipodes, pg. 121
- 4. Cassandra's Veil and the Poet's Folly, pg. 258
- Bibliography, pg. 395
- Index, pg. 411