The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso 9781442682160

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The Furioso between Epos and Romance
2. The Quest: Considerations on the Form of the Furioso
3. Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso
4. Tasso versus Ariosto?
5. The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto’s Cinque canti
6. Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity
7. Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict
8. Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE QUEST FOR EPIC: FROM ARIOSTO TO TASSO Sergio Zatti Edited by Dennis Looney

Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti’s The Quest for Epic is a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today. An original and challenging work, The Quest for Epic documents the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the epic literature of the sixteenth century. Zatti focuses on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, but also touches briefly on works by Boiardo, Ariosto’s predecessor at the Estense court in Ferrara, as well as by Pulci, Trissino, and other Italian writers of the period. Among the highlights of the book is Zatti’s analysis of the critical debates over narrative form in the sixteenth century and how they paved the way to literary modernity and the eventual rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction provides important context by examining Zatti’s contribution and situating it within Italian and Anglo-American literary criticism. (Toronto Italian Studies) sergio zatti is a professor in the Department of Italian Literature at the University of Pisa. dennis looney is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and Assistant Dean of Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh.

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SERGIO ZATTI

The Quest for Epic From Ariosto to Tasso Introduction by Albert Russell Ascoli Edited by Dennis Looney Translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-9031-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-9373-6 (paper) Toronto Italian Studies

Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Zatti, Sergio, 1950– The quest for epic : from Ariosto to Tasso / Sergio Zatti ; introduction, Albert Russell Ascoli ; edited by Dennis Looney ; translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-9031-1 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-9373-6 (pbk.) 1. Ariosto, Ludovico, 1474–1533. Orlando Furioso. 2. Tasso, Torquato, 1544–1595. Gerusalemme liberata. 3. Ariosto, Ludovico, 1474–1533 – Criticism and interpretation. 4. Tasso, Torquato, 1544–1595 – Criticism and interpretation. 5. Italian poetry – 16th century – History and criticism. I. Looney, Dennis II. Hill, Sally III. Title. PQ4103.Z37 2006

851’.409353

C2005-906604-0

This book has been published with the assistance of the Center for West European Studies, the Department of French and Italian, the University Center for International Studies, and the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Fund at the University of Pittsburgh; the Dipartimento di Studi Italianistici at the University of Pisa; and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction 1 al b e rt r us s e l l as co l i 1 The Furioso between Epos and Romance

13

2 The Quest: Considerations on the Form of the Furioso 38 3 Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso 4 Tasso versus Ariosto?

60

95

5 The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto’s Cinque canti 114 6 Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity

135

7 Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict 8 Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation Notes 217 Bibliography Index 307

293

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Preface

Chapters 1–3 originally appeared in Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo (1990); chapters 4–5 in L’ombra del Tasso: Epica e romanzo nel cinquecento (1996); chapters 6–7 in L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano: Saggio sulla Gerusalemme liberata (1983); on occasion the author intervened to make slight changes to the original texts during the translation. Chapter 8 is a substantially rewritten version of an essay that first appeared in Valeria Finucci, ed., Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso (1999). Sally Hill, with Dennis Looney, made the initial translation of chapters 1–7. Sergio Zatti, with Dennis Looney, completed chapter 8, and together they revised the entire manuscript. Albert Russell Ascoli and the anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press made numerous corrections and helpful suggestions. Sincere thanks also to Ron Schoeffel, Margaret Allen, and the staff at UTP for the meticulous work in producing the book. The translators have depended on the following English versions of works (altering them on occasion) that are frequently cited by the author. Full citations are provided in the bibliography: Ariosto, Ludovico. Cinque canti. Trans. David Quint and Alexander Sheers. – Orlando furioso. Trans. Allan H. Gilbert. – Satires. Trans. Peter DeSa Wiggins. Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando innamorato. Trans. Charles S. Ross. Pulci, Luigi. Morgante. Trans. Joseph Tusiani. Tasso, Torquato. Gerusalemme liberata. Trans. Ralph Nash. – Discorsi dell’arte poetica. Trans. Lawrence F. Rhu. – Discorsi del poema eroico. Trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. The translators would like to thank Emily Boyle, Natalie Cleaver, and Rosamund Looney for their help in preparing the manuscript for publication.

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Introduction albert russell ascoli

In virtually all histories of the Western narrative tradition, a rupture, opening onto modernity, takes place between the end of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries. In Spain, Cervantes writes ‘the first modern novel,’ Don Quixote, parts one and two (1605 and 1615); in England, Milton writes ‘the last epic,’ Paradise Lost (1667– 1674). The place of Italian literature in this history is notoriously uncertain, even marginal, notwithstanding Erich Auerbach’s claims for the pivotal and complementary roles of Dante and Boccaccio in the emergence of mimetic representation of ‘the secular world.’ And yet, it can be argued, the sixteenth century in Italy, and particularly the publication of two great long poems, one, Orlando furioso, near its beginning and another, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, towards its end, prepare the way for Cervantes and Milton, and trace the tortuous path towards representational modernity, by their very different, yet inextricably intertwined, efforts to transform medieval chivalric romance (‘romanzo’), on the one hand into something like the novel (also, in Italian, ‘romanzo’), and on the other into a Christianized version of classical epic. A straightforwardly teleological version of this literary-historical narrative might make each of the Italians a precursor to one of the later authors. Ariosto’s ironic reproduction and subversion of the chivalric world from the inside, and especially his central focus on madness, delivers us to the threshold of Quixote’s delusional world, while developing a series of formal devices (narratorial intervention; interlacing of multiple plots and inserted stories; citation of the untrustworthy source of narrative material) crucial to the narrative practice of Cervantes, not to mention Sterne and Fielding. Tasso’s epic quest for the tomb of

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Christ by Christian crusaders who have renounced traditional canons of the chivalric pursuit of individual glory stands as a somewhat less successful, because internally conflicted, solution than Milton’s simultaneously cosmic and domestic poem to the problem of Christianizing epic. This, however, would be to oversimplify the matter. Ariosto certainly takes notable steps towards ‘epicizing’ the chivalric romanzo; Tasso is notoriously the more attentive to that defining trait of the modern novel, character psychology, and his overt attacks on what he perceives to be the corrupting ethos of chivalry in fact rather closely match the moving premise (however pretextual) of the Quixote. Perhaps more importantly, the Italian cinquecento has its own internal literary history that may tell us something different about the refashioning of classical epos and medieval romanzo into the forms of literary modernity, modifying and complementing the canonical story rather than merely providing ‘background’ for it. Over the last twenty years, Sergio Zatti has written a series of three books that have, in turn, offered comprehensive interpretations of the Gerusalemme liberata (L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano [1983]), the Orlando furioso (Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo [1990]), and the historical passage between the two works, leading from medieval chivalric romance (romanzo) through neoclassical Christian epic to the modern novel (romanzo), (L’ombra del Tasso: Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento [1996]). In the process he has provided seminal readings of each of the texts individually and explored the intertextual bonds that link them, in ways that have already proved widely influential, especially in Tasso criticism, both in Italy and abroad. The summary result, as I began to suggest at the opening of this essay, is a fundamental rereading, in a doubly historical and theoretical key, of the transformations of the long narrative form over the course of the sixteenth century. Just as importantly, Zatti has provided methodological and theoretical tools for other readers, and not only further to interpret the broadly ideological significance(s) of the Furioso and the Liberata, and of the dynamic literary historical moments in which they appear. Beginning with the extraordinary fusion of structuralist and thematic criticism in his first book, with its particular adaptation of the psychoanalytical approach of Francesco Orlando, Zatti has proven to be an extraordinarily innovative, yet tactful, mediator between interpretive practice and theoretical approach, as between Italian literary scholarship and the Anglo-American critical scene (on the latter front making conspicuous, perspicacious use of the work of Harold Bloom, René Girard, Fredric

Introduction

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Jameson, and Patricia Parker, among others). In particular, he has been extraordinarily successful at modelling the negotiations between formal structures and the production of meaning. At the same time he has developed a method that allows for a simultaneous accounting for different registers of significance – psychological, literary historical, religious, gendered, political, ideological – generated by a single formal phenomenon. His reading of the Liberata, for example, identifies an oppositional structure that works on several levels. The founding ‘oneness’ of Christian faith versus the multiplicity of pagan culture corresponds, in the first instance, to the internal tensions within Christendom between the collective enterprise of liberating Jerusalem and the distinct and conflicting desires and interests of individual knights. But it also conforms to the thematic opposition between a rational ‘male’ principle and a passionate ‘female’ one; to the rigid orthodoxy of Counter-Reformation doctrine in the later sixteenth century versus the multiple, heterodox tendencies of early cinquecento humanism; to the unifying drive of epic versus the multiple narrative strands of romance; to the specific differences between the tightly regulated world of the Liberata and the unruly, sprawling universe of the Furioso; to the representation of Tasso’s own psychic division between unifying and controlling author-God and helplessly dependent courtier; and so on. By showing that these oppositions are at once absolute and constantly breached, Zatti effects an operation with close affinities to deconstruction; at the same time, by charting the multiple and interconnected forms that this phenomenon takes within the text, and by coordinating it persuasively with a series of historical and cultural events and discourses, his reading avoids the epistemological stalemate often attributed to poststructuralist critics. The consequences and implications of this method are manifold. From the point of view of traditional Tasso criticism, it reconciles and dissolves without any lingering doubt the perennial opposition between the ‘psychologized’ interpretations of Tasso as tormented soul and the historicized reading of the Liberata as orthodox epic of the CounterReformation (and grounds both in the text). From the perspective of a criticism of cultural alterity, it reveals with real clarity the ways in which religious, racial, ethnic, and/or gendered otherness is deployed as both a ‘sacrificial’ substitute for and an illuminating figure of divisions internal to the normatively Christian, white, male, heterosexual, European self and to the patriarchal culture of which that self hopes to be a seamlessly incorporated part. And from the perspective of literary history, it

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reveals the historical and conceptual tensions between literature conceived of as a domain continuous with society more generally, the vehicle of transmitting, in exemplary fashion, its doxa and its normative practices, and of literature as the scene of special, tendentially illicit pleasures that isolate it as something other from and potentially threatening to those doxa and practices. In his subsequent study of the historically earlier Orlando furioso, Zatti shifted his critical point of departure from the primarily thematic, lexical, characterological focus of L’uniforme cristiano to an initially generic and narratological one, foregrounding the structural changes introduced into the traditional romance devices of quest (the archetypal chivalric story of the pursuit of a desired object) and entrelacement (the interweaving of multiple quest narratives) by the imposition of epic teleology and an ironic self-reflexivity. The relationship to his earlier work on the later text is clear enough, however, even when he himself does not mark the connections (as he frequently does). Tasso’s explicit attempt to subordinate romance error to epic closure, which includes the effort to supersede an earlier cinquecento model, embodied by both Ariosto’s poem and the Amadigi of his own father, Bernardo Tasso, is preceded, and in some sense prepared, by the open and unresolved juxtaposition of the two modes in an Ariostan poetics. On the one hand, in Zatti’s account, the turn to epic allows Ariosto to transform the open romance form, and, in particular, to uncover and explore the epistemological and ideological implications of its structures: the Furioso thus anticipates the theoretical and regulatory turn to epic in the latter cinquecento, and above all in Tasso. At the same time, yet on the other hand, the juxtaposition of romance with epic in the Furioso exposes radical crises of knowledge and desire, and with them of humanist culture and its values, making the Furioso a perfect ‘other’ against and onto which Tasso would then project his own version of epic orthodoxy.1 It is, in fact, on the modalities and significance of the transition between the Ariostan staging of the epic/romance relationship and Tasso’s that Zatti will focus in the third and final volume in his ‘trilogy,’ L’ombra del Tasso, which makes more explicit the doubled historical perspective sketched in Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo. If in ‘Tasso versus Ariosto?’ Zatti stresses the ways in which Tasso structures an intertextual relationship with his precursor that at once appropriates the ‘difference’ of romance for his own work and relegates Ariosto to the world of pagan-chivalric-romance-heterodox otherness, in ‘Shattering the Chival-

Introduction

5

ric World,’ he argues that Ariosto himself, in the so-called Cinque canti, had begun the unmaking of the labyrinthine synthesis of the Furioso in the face of combined political, religious, and social crises to which the Counter-Reformation, and Tasso’s Christian epic would be more fully elaborated responses. Both Ariosto and Tasso, in Zatti’s account, each in his own way, aim at a recuperation of the matter of chivalry through distinct syntheses of medieval romance and classical epic form. Each, in so doing, exposes the fragile and provisional nature of any such synthesis, and in fact moves towards an emptying out of traditional forms that reveals the force of individual desire and imagination beneath an exhausted world view, and the courtly and/or domestic realities that circumscribe and provoke such flights of fantasy. The present volume is, first of all, simply a selection of Sergio Zatti’s critical writings, with a particular emphasis placed on essays that focus on the problem of ‘epic’ and ‘romance/novel.’ These essays, however, when ordered according to the chronology of the texts treated rather than by the time of their composition, become something rather different than they were in their original context, and so, at least it seems to me, reveal the intimate (if not absolute) coherence of Zatti’s critical-historical-theoretical project, while making evident further and important implications of it, some of which I have attempted to sketch above. In other words, if The Quest for Epic can be seen, on the one hand, as simply making available Zatti’s work to a new, anglophone audience, it can also be viewed as a study in its own right, putting his thought in a new light. The collection begins with three essays on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (from the 1990 volume), continues with two essays from the 1996 book that consider in different ways the transition from the Furioso to the Liberata, and concludes with three essays, the first two from 1983, the last from 1996, that focus on the Liberata alone. The first chapter, ‘The Furioso between Epos and Romance,’ as the title suggests, places Ariosto’s poem at a historical turning point between the forms and possibilities of late-medieval romance and the classicizing humanistic (re)turn to Virgilian epic. Synthesizing work by Carlo Dionisotti, Donald S. Carne-Ross, Parker, David Quint, Riccardo Bruscagli, Remo Ceserani, and others on the encounter between genres in the Furioso, Zatti goes on to give an extremely careful and precise description of this fusion of narrative modes, putting into special relief the ways in which the Furioso not only revives and systematizes the romance technique of entrelacement, or interweaving of multiple story lines, along

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with its principal action, the quest, but also undertakes a metacritical reflection on ‘the mechanisms, the forms, and the ideology of the romance genre’ (15). This reflexive activity Zatti rightly understands to correspond to what has traditionally been the signal figure of Ariostan textuality – irony – and its ultimate effect is to reveal the purely fictive nature of romance representations. He further understands, building on the work of Robert Durling, Eduardo Saccone, and others, that there is a continual doubling between the representations of the poem and the action of representation itself, through which the act and the actor of writing become a newly central focus of attention. The chapter goes on to sketch with elegant lucidity the basic narrative system of the Furioso, predicated on the interweaving of multiple, parallel, and almost always failed quests for various objects of desire. The result is twinned forms of ‘error’ – spatial ‘deviation’ (leaving the path) and temporal ‘deferral’ – which again invest both the poem’s characters and the poet-narrator. Zatti reads the poem’s ending, in which deferral and spatial error are replaced ostensibly by the definitive, Virgilian, death of Ariosto’s Turnus, Rodomonte, as a deliberately ambiguous attempt at synthesis of epic and romance whose metaphysically threatening implications will emerge only under Tasso’s horrified gaze. The second chapter is then dedicated to the distinctive form taken by the romance quest (inchiesta) in the Furioso, and specifically to the ways in which it becomes a pivot between structure and meaning at a thematic level, and a figure of the endless, pluralistic pursuit of the truths of human desire by poem and poet. As Zatti puts it, for Ariosto the quest ‘represents the intellectual equivalent of the predatory movement of his knights: an instrument for the appropriation of, and thus mastery over, a shifting and multifaceted reality’ (39). He thus distances himself, in a move for which I feel particular affinity, from a traditional criticism that sees the poem as dedicated to pleasurable evasions and implicated in a complacently harmonious world view. Of special note is his persuasive emphasis on the shift undergone by the poem in its second half away from purely ‘material’ quests (for love-objects, armour, horses) to ‘ethical-epistemological’ inquiries, culminating in different ways in Astolfo’s visit to the lunar landscape of lost objects and Bradamante’s increasingly interiorized quest to realize her desire for Ruggiero. If chapter 1, then, stresses the face-off between romance and epic, chapter 2 investigates how this encounter creates the conditions of possibility for a passage from the externalized wanderings of chivalric romance to the vagaries of subjectivity that will characterize the modern novel.

Introduction

7

The third and last chapter of the book dedicated to Ariosto (‘Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso’) complements the second, as it turns from the representation of the quest for ethical norms and epistemological truth within the narrative to the metacritical pursuits of the poet-narrator, which tend to call into question the ideological underpinnings of the poem’s form and to anticipate the theoretical querelles that it will generate in the latter part of the century. As Zatti says, the chapter sets out to verify ‘whether the phenomena of narrative self-consciousness do not also constitute the scattered fragments of an epistemological apparatus that Ariosto transforms into an exploration of the relationship between literature and reality, mobilizing a series of concepts (truth, fiction, verisimilitude, the marvellous) that in a few generations will become the objects of theoretical speculation and heated polemical debate’ (61). Beginning again from Durling’s seminal treatment of the author in the text, Zatti focuses attention on the traditional figure of Turpin, Ariosto’s avowed, yet always pretextual, authority for the truth of the poem’s most incredible episodes, and thus, simultaneously, on the figure of the Furioso’s reader, challenged at every turn to question the authenticity of its representations. As Zatti notes, this ‘Turpin’ anticipates, whether as source or as simple analogue, the crucial ‘novelistic’ invention of Cide Hamete Benengeli by Cervantes. Turpin, in fact, becomes as well the occasion for linking Ariosto to the new perspective of Galileo (as notoriously addicted to the fictions of the Furioso as he is antagonistic to the anxious orthodoxies of Tasso), in which literature becomes the anti-epistemological other of experimental science: ‘What unites Galileo the reader and Ariosto the writer … is the awareness that literary fiction is exonerated from investigating reality, and that therefore the opposition between truth and falsehood is neutralized in fiction’ (76). Zatti develops David Quint’s argument that in reducing not just his own poem but the entire Western literary tradition to a pack of lies, Ariosto is taking to an extreme the humanistic tendency to historicize language and delimit its strategies and functions (92). The Furioso thus anticipates the specifically modern institution of literature as the non-true domain of ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ existing in dialectical relation to the practices of a ‘new science.’ It is no coincidence that Tasso, in a theoretical work, Discorsi dell’arte poetica, will explicitly relegate literature in its proper essence to the domain of pleasure-giving exempt from the knowledge of truth or the inculcation of moral virtue, thus making explicit the implications of Ari-

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osto’s Turpin and St John, while at the same time insistently attempting to supplement it with moral-epistemological content. This move is yet another form of the radical, yet constantly collapsing, oppositional structure that Zatti has identified in Tasso, and it makes plain one of the many ways in which Ariosto is at once the later poet’s precursor, and his nemesis. This doubled and conflicted historical relationship, as I have already suggested, is the subject of the fourth and fifth chapters. In ‘Tasso versus Ariosto?,’ Zatti uses a modified Bloomian model of agonistic intertextuality to delineate the attitude, ‘at once of reverence and repulsion, of veneration and antagonism’ (96), that Tasso adopts towards his precursor.2 He begins by noting the precision with which the Tassian ‘I’ opens his poem with an echo of the narrator’s final appearance in the Furioso, thus implicitly defining himself as ‘the heir and victim of Ariostan “error” ’ (102). He goes on to show how Tasso understands this ‘error’ in relation to the multiform vagaries of romance form and matter (the ‘repressed’ that his epic seeks to leave behind and to which, nonetheless, it repeatedly, inevitably returns) and thus as ‘a threat to the psychic integrity of the narrating “I” committed to imposing order and rationality on the poetic material’ (102). The chapter closes with a careful examination of another Ariostan intertext, the ‘selva’ or ‘wilderness,’ that haunts the episode of the wood of Sharon (Liberata XVIII). This time, however, the connection is not only to the Furioso (where the ‘selva’ is constituted as the privileged space of romance [cf Donato; Parker]), but also to the ‘wood of Medea’ episode in the Cinque canti (II, 101–25), which constitutes either a discarded addition or a sequel to Ariosto’s poem (Quint, ‘Introduction’ to Cinque canti). The terrifying wood, in which each knight’s worst fears come to life in his imagination, becomes the demonized figure of Ariostan romance – but at the same time, in Zatti’s reading, Ariosto himself, under the spell of the catastrophic historical events of the 1520s (the French-Spanish wars; the sack of Rome; the rise of Protestantism) had already begun this process of reinterpreting and dismantling romance in the Cinque canti. Having begun with Tasso’s apotropaic rereading and rewriting of the romance tradition embodied in Ariosto’s text, in the subsequent chapter Zatti then ‘reads forward’ from the Cinque canti to the Liberata, arguing in far greater detail the concluding point of ‘Tasso versus Ariosto?’ – namely that the formal, thematic, and ideological roots of Tasso’s repression of romance are already to be found in an Ariostan work, if not in the Furioso itself.3 From Zatti’s perspective, the Cinque canti, not-

Introduction

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withstanding their ostensible relation to the Furioso’s world and characters, also enact the loss of its most distinctive adaptations and appropriations of the romance tradition, namely the technique of entrelacement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the masterful, unifying control of the poet-narrator over the plural elements of the world he depicts. Characters and narrator alike are overwhelmed by violent and treacherous forces beyond their control, personified in the mysterious Demogorgon and the council of fairies over whom he rules, who in turn clearly stand in for the multiple historical forces that are transforming beyond recognition the world in which Ariosto and the Furioso first took on their identities. Paradoxically, even as the Cinque canti move ‘forward’ towards both the form of the Liberata and its intrusive anxiety and sense of helplessness, as well as ‘shattering’ the chivalric world in anticipation of Cervantes, they abandon the traits of the Furioso (formal, thematic, metaliterary) that most evidently show the way from medieval romanzo to modernity. The remaining chapters of the book are, of course, dedicated to Tasso and especially the Liberata. Chapter 6, ‘Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity,’ offers a general outline of Zatti’s reading of the Liberata and of the method that stands behind it, which I have briefly summarized above. As noted there, he advances a structural-semiological model of interpretation based on the de-psychologized version of Freud’s ‘formation of compromise’ (136) advanced by Francesco Orlando (Illuminismo e retorica freudiana) to understand ‘the unresolved conflict created between the ideology that structures the text and the emotional identification that it offers the reader’ (136). Within the text he observes three parallel levels on which the founding opposition between multiplicity and unity are played out: the cosmic battle between hell and heaven; the war between opposed religious formations (pagans versus Christians); and the civil strife within the Christian camp between the ‘capitano,’ Goffredo, and his ‘errant companions.’ This conflict, he argues, can be further mapped onto the historical circumstances of the poem’s composition, and especially onto the battle of orthodoxy against heterodoxy in Counter-Reformation Italy. The modernity of the Liberata, then, consists precisely in the consistent and unresolved tension between the explicit rejection of ‘the forces of evil,’ embodied in pagan ‘alterity,’ and particularly in the seductions of the female tempter Armida, and the implicit desire for/identification with those forces (a tension, one might add, not so far from the Blakean reading of Milton as ‘of the devil’s party’).

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Where chapter 6 maps the oppositions and ambivalences of the Liberata onto the actions and characters of the text and suggests a homology with a generalized historical circumstance, chapter 7, ‘Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict,’ illustrates and extends them further in two distinct ways. As its title indicates, first of all, the essay identifies a series of figures, at once metaphors and narrative structures, through which the text plays out over and over again a fundamental, irresolvable tension. Moreover, beginning with an analysis of the stupendous opening octaves of the Liberata, Zatti shows just how thoroughly the text intertwines the conflicts it represents with the conflicted process of representation. The ‘internecine’ version of the conflict between unity and multiplicity in the revolt of the ‘compagni erranti’ against Goffredo, ‘il capitano,’ is verbally mapped both onto the domain of poetics (the poem as ‘medicine’ for moral ‘infirmity’) and into the experience of the poet (figured as a shipwrecked ‘peregrino errante’ rescued by his patron-lord, Alfonso II D’Este). These latter two displacements of the fundamental opposition are then shown to pit Tasso against himself: the masterful ‘poet-doctor’ against the ‘errant stranger/pilgrim’ (again, ‘peregrino’ can and does mean both of these things in Tasso’s Italian). In other words, Tasso’s symptomatic representations of his psyche become the paradigmatic locale for the conflict between ideology and desire, unity and multiplicity, authority and rebellion. The chapter then traces the figurations of this conflict through a number of other Tassian ‘texts’: the ‘autobiographical’ Canzone al Metauro; the biographical moments of Tasso’s ‘madness’ and incarceration, as of his self-submission to the Inquisition on suspicion of heterodoxy; the projection of psychic conflict into the domain of literary theory in the two versions of his treatise on poetic art and the heroic poem. In conclusion, Zatti then turns back to suggest how these same privileged figures of conflict (error; infirmity; conquest) are worked out within the logic of the Liberata’s representations, at once regrounding his reading of Tasso’s psyche and poetics in the text and reaffirming his claim to put a ‘biographical’ interpretation at the service of literary understanding rather than the reverse.4 The final chapter of this volume, ‘Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation,’ represents Zatti’s return to the Liberata several years after the publication of his first book, with yet another ‘turn of the screw’ in teasing out the seemingly endless ramifications of his original interpretive model. This essay emerges as a response to and extension of

Introduction

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much recent work on the early modern obsession with ‘dissimulation,’ or the concealment of truth as against the overt fabrication thereof, whose summa is the early-seventeenth-century treatise of Torquato Accetto, On Honest Dissimulation (1641). In substance, Zatti suggests, Tasso has taken the topic of dissimulation and revealed its capacity to generate new, proto-novelistic modalities in the literary representation of ‘character.’ Dissimulation, as the simultaneous affirmation and effacement of subjectivity (the self affirms itself precisely in deliberately concealing its true nature) in the face of increasingly absolutist political, religious, and other cultural formations, is in obvious ways simply another name for the duplicitous structure identified for us in the preceding chapters on the Liberata. Here it becomes the occasion for Zatti to redirect our attention specifically onto a textual doubling that takes place between Tasso’s explicit declaration of a Lucretian poetics of healing education through seduction in the second and third octaves of the Liberata’s first canto, on the one hand, and, on the other, the characters and actions of the poem, especially through the privileged, occulting figures of the ‘mantle’ and ‘veil.’ From the specifically generic point of view that the present volume takes, this amounts to describing and then enacting the tension between the necessity and the danger of mixing romance pleasures with epic morality and spirituality. Of special importance, however, is the development of an intuition already marginally present in the first book – namely, the crucial role that the female characters, almost all pagan, play not only in representing the temptations of otherness but also in figuring the ambiguously intermediate position of Tasso and his poem at the border between Christian identity and pagan alterity. Zatti’s essay does not specifically undertake a reading of gender, but it does, on the other hand, reveal the pivotal, ambivalent role that gender plays in Tasso’s representations, and it helps to open up for further exploration this dimension of the poem, as his first chapter does that of ethnic, religious, orientalized, and/or racialized alterity.5 Finally, while this book, in closing, does not explicitly revisit the question of Tasso’s curious place in the evolution of the novel out of romance (although the appendix on Manzoni’s I promessi sposi at the end of L’ombra del Tasso does do so), it may be worth briefly pointing to its potential implications in the general ‘quest’ to understand the wandering, yet in the end clear, passage from one narrative paradigm to another. In Zatti’s account, Ariosto, as we have seen, is the obvious precursor of Cervantes and the novel: in formal devices, in authorial

12

The Quest for Epic

stance, and in an understanding of literature as a space ostensibly neutral with respect to truth, and exercising a specifically delimited institutional role. Tasso’s project, from this point of view, seems merely retrograde, an attempt to counter the failure of chivalric romance not with the invention of a new form but with a return to an even older one, and the imposition of a regulatory regime of literary and doctrinal orthodoxy: Milton, but without the heterodoxy, and without the adventurous displacement of epic action by domestic psychology (not to mention the final turn to the ‘romance of history’ as, ‘with wandering steps,’ Eve and Adam make their way out of Eden). Yet as Zatti so clearly shows, Tasso’s representations and poetics are not only congruent with what has become (for the moment) the paradigmatic category of early modern subjectivity – dissimulation – but indeed materialize and dramatize the condition of what will become the norm of novelistic characterization – the individual at once rejecting and mirroring otherness, at once submitting to ideology and resisting it, at once affirming and dividing itself. Tasso, then, figures the curious place of Italy (and perhaps of Italian literary criticism) in the history of Western literature – a deviation that, nonetheless, takes us to the centre of our cultural story.

1 The Furioso between Epos and Romance

1 Recent studies have emphasized how the chivalric romance genre supplied Ariosto with a narrative and thematic code that was at once highly flexible and equipped with well-formulated rules. Ariosto was able to change things within this tradition because of his position as heir to a vast literary corpus that was in crisis by his time. He recapitulates the creative resources and expressive formulas of this corpus in an original way.1 Borrowing a metaphor from Orlando furioso, one could say that Astolfo’s quest on the moon (that great depository of lost objects) mirrors the relationship between the poem itself and chivalric mythology. Astolfo’s quest is representative of Ariosto’s recognition of the wealth inherited from the romance genre. The recognition is not only of the genre’s topoi (the standard repertory of events, the inventory of exemplary characters who derive from a pre-established mythological patrimony)2 but also, as I most want to emphasize, of its modes of storytelling. Nino Borsellino has used the image of the map from Ariosto’s third Satire (3.55–6) to define this relationship critically. Just as the atlas substitutes for direct knowledge of explored lands, ‘so the stories that have already been written, the worlds already described suffice for [Ariosto] to design his new poetic atlas, in which commonplaces, the conventional situations of the literary tradition, topoi, regenerate themselves’ (31–2). I would not, however, agree that this occurs ‘to the point of making us forget the “chain of previous forms”’ (32). Instead, Ariosto brings these forms together in a poetic discourse rich with allusion and exceptionally dense and complex despite its apparent linearity. Orlando furioso represents the synthesis of a whole tradition rather than merely a new link in an age-old cycle. Ariosto’s rewriting reduces this tradition to a gigantic subtext lying just beneath the text’s surface, in which Boiardo

14

The Quest for Epic

plays the role usually reserved for the legendary chronicler Turpin. While in his correspondence Ariosto openly declares his debt as a continuator of Boiardo, the Furioso itself never names its founding ancestor.3 Ariosto thus positions his Furioso as the summary or the ‘gloss’ not merely of a single work but of an entire literary genre. Numerous formal and thematic details in the Furioso, especially in its narrative, can be easily attributed to its status as an epigone. Ariosto’s method of following previous texts and the narrative procedures that derive from it, lead to a literary self-consciousness that has attracted modern and postmodern readers, first and foremost Italo Calvino. It is unnecessary to restate here the significance of Ariosto’s various ironic investments in his material and the ways he narrates it. Nor is it necessary to comment on the different procedures of structural consolidation and thematic rebalancing designed to strengthen the unity of the tale and its structure through the poetics of variety and interlacing or entrelacement, to use the more common term from French criticism.4 Ariosto transformed the open-ended and multifaceted literary form that he inherited into the Furioso. He balanced the genre’s generous capacity for incorporating other literary forms against the negative weight of its undisciplined exuberance. Consequently, Ariosto’s approach emphasizes clarity of the structural design to compensate for the loosened threads of the plot. The poet constructs a system of compensatory symmetries through which he controls the expansion of his material, bringing his principles of stylistic and narrative organization to the foreground. The literary techniques of parallelism and chiasmus make the diffuse structure of the traditional octave more compact. Similarly, stylized descriptions (of battles, duels, etc.) and the processes of analogy and juxtaposition in the syntagmatic connection of narrative segments also work to make the potentially diffuse genre more concentrated. The most persuasive results of the recent wave of criticism on Ariosto have come from analysing these sorts of specific processes.5 Macrotextual analyses have been less impressive, in my view. The field has been dominated by applications of narratological theory that often seem reductive because of the loss of the complexity in Ariosto’s combinatorial game when the intertwined threads of the narration are separated, however well such a study is carried out.6 On the other hand, the formula of ‘irony’ (a recurrent substitute for the Crocean formula of ‘harmony’)7 has often impeded a specific analysis of the ‘ironic’ contents and modes of Ariosto’s narrative method.8 In my view, we should emphasize that Ariosto’s artistic approach resolutely aims to check and test the tools

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 15

provided by the chivalric code. He forges a narrative system out of literary techniques that Boiardo and his predecessors had already tried unsystematically (preambles, authorial interventions, glosses, and various comments). In Ariosto, these literary procedures become a significant referent of the text itself, as it exhibits its own devices of narrative production. As I understand it, Ariostan irony consists neither in the poet’s amusement nor in his notorious smile; nor does it serve only as an indicator of the distance between ideal and real, between fiction and world. Rather, it is an instrument for understanding, specifically, the mechanisms, the forms, and the ideology of the romance genre.9 2 Precisely on the basis of this reflection on the genre ‘from the inside,’ a greater need to control its narrative structures becomes evident. Thus arises the use of formal canons and narrative models that differ from the romance model in order to rein in the tendency towards limitless expansion and chaotic accumulation that characterized earlier chivalric writing. Such writing followed a compositional technique ‘founded on the capricious chain of adventures that sprout one out of the other without any concern whatsoever for coherence or a unitary narrative design,’ with the reader witnessing the ‘continual regeneration of the narrative through additive and repetitive modules.’10 Carlo Dionisotti has shown that Ariosto’s choices could not avoid being influenced by the widespread tendency of his era towards the epic poem (‘Fortuna’ 235). In the second half of the century, the epic form would find its theoretical legitimation in the neo-Aristotelian canon, culminating in Tasso’s fully epic endeavour. But the classical model represented a path that had always been viewed as alternative, the protagonist of another story and recognizable within the romance fabric only through intermittent traces and occasional interferences. Yet it was the only model (both for early-sixteenth-century writers generally and for Ariosto) that could provide the appropriate narrative measures to control the effusive nature of the romance ‘mode’ while conferring upon it unprecedented literary dignity. A lucid interpreter of this search for models of control and closure, Ariosto simply brought the tension that had traversed the long history of the chivalric genre to the surface. In Arthurian literature a conception of adventure as mere ‘chance’ is progressively contradicted by the impulse to understand chance as ‘destiny,’ resolving itself explicitly in a providential conception, as in the mystic search for the Grail.11 With increasing self-awareness, the aventure or rambling chivalric tale begins to be fitted into the framework of the unitary and ideologically

16

The Quest for Epic

oriented quête, or quest. Even the varied fortunes of the chivalric genre in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries begin to demonstrate this structural dynamic caused by the intermingling of the Carolingian and Breton cycles, with the Carolingian scheme imposing an epic order upon the Breton digressions. Within the discursive linearity of Boiardo’s text there are already large though still rare nuclei of narrative clusters (e.g., the siege of Albracca in the East, the battle of Paris) in which these two constitutive structures of the romance are visible. In fact, it is worth remembering that, while the varied adventures of the Breton knights contained undoubtedly charming elements for readers, they also had long given rise to reactions of displeasure: for example, already in the mid-fourteenth century Petrarch preferred to leave the ambages pulcerrimae (exceedingly beautiful wanderings) of the errant knights to the entertainment of the masses.12 It is not surprising, then, that the need for moderation and the drive towards narrative closure feel particularly urgent just as the process of recodifying the genres begins in the sixteenth century. Nor is it surprising that the epic models of Homer and Virgil, consecrated by Aristotle’s authority, should increasingly seem like the appropriate way to correct the ‘errors’ of the romance code. For orthodox classicists, the choice of the pluralistic and digressive romance would come to represent an illicit deviance from the epic norm. They condemned its unbiased mixing of codes and styles as not only an aesthetic but also a moral error, since the concept of the hierarchy of the genres presupposed not only literary but also ethical and social hierarchies. If it is justifiable to interpret Ariosto’s approach with an eye to what happened afterwards, I believe it would be instructive to read the list of the Aristotelians’ accusations against the Furioso (multiple actions, suspension and entrelacement, the mixing of heterogeneous materials, dependence on a preceding text for subject matter)13 as the story of a singular misunderstanding. In fact, many critics focus on Ariosto’s metanarrative moments, on those places in the narration where he ‘ironically’ exhibits the anatomy of romance: its deviations, digressions, and interruptions. It is curious that even his most strenuous defenders, such as Giraldi Cinzio and Pigna (courageous in claiming for the Furioso the authority of a model no less worthy than the sublime examples of the past), are occasionally constrained to admit that Ariosto ultimately could have maintained the romance structure without certain excesses.14 This represents a failure to recognize one of the novelties of Ariosto’s approach: his way of making explicit the narrative mechanisms of romance in his programmatic search for con-

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 17

trasts and encounters between different modes of writing. This play on the codes of a text constantly suspended at the limits of a genre’s traditions ultimately represents the first questioning of their legitimacy (‘quasi animal d’incerta natura e mezzo fra l’uno e l’altro,’ as Tasso will later define it in his ‘Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme liberata’).15 Ariosto will find himself condemned to bear the burden, as well as the honour, of his avant-garde sensibility. 3 The ease with which Ariosto masters the romance technique allows him to exploit fully all the resources of the narrative code, laying bare its nature as a work of pure fictio, fiction and invention. The form of the narration (but also one of the themes it refers to) becomes the potentially infinite digression of ‘error,’ which the unity of epic action struggles to contain and control. Even the various settings for the narration are, taken at face value, topoi, commonplaces of fiction. The environment where the action of the Furioso emblematically begins is the wood, the ancient symbolic territory of disorientation and error – the wood of adventure and of the labyrinth (the ‘boscherecci labirinti’ [shady mazes] of XIII, 42). Rinaldo’s adventure in the Caledonian wood of Scotland, the canonical site of the Arthurian wanderings, is the first digression from the paths of France (IV, 51ff). It is a joyful act of homage and an affectionate reclamation of a literary world par excellence. Within this institutional space Ariosto situates the two supporting structures of the traditional romance narration, the technique of entrelacement and the theme of the quête. The narrative technique of entrelacement involves the multiplication of narrative threads through the interweaving of encounters and conflicts among the various characters, and the effects of variety and suspense from the unpredictable abandonment and resumption of different narrative threads, all of which creates the poem’s ‘varia tela’ (varied web, [II, 30]).16 The theme of the quest has all of its traditional meanings (test, adventure, liberation, or conquest) as well as that of the search for a lost object of desire in the specifically Ariostan sense of inchiesta (both quest and investigation).17 These quests are identified by a recurrent expressive formula that focuses on the knight’s desire, which remains substantially unchanged through its various historic-linguistic transformations, persisting even in the Furioso:18 mener a chief l’aventure (Chrétien’s courtly romance of the second half of the twelfth century); trarre a fine la ventura (Tavola ritonda, a translation into Tuscan vernacular prose of the thirteenth century); venir a bon issue (Entrée d’Espagne, a Franco-Veneto poem of the mid-four-

18

The Quest for Epic

teenth century); fornir suo gran desio (Spagna, an Italian chivalric poem of the fifteenth century);19 al suo desio pervenire (Morgante); trarre a fine l’avventura (Orlando innamorato); trar al fine la ventura, adempir il desio (the continuation of the Innamorato, by Nicolò degli Agostini); trarre a fine la ventura, fornire il suo desire (Mambriano, by Cieco da Ferrara). Yet there are significant transformations. In these romances, each time an individual adventure is completed (with a happy ending almost every time), everything begins again from scratch, because new objectives constantly arise for the inexhaustible pursuits of the knights errant, who constantly go around looking for them. Among the proliferation of infinitely protracted plots there is never a true conclusion, despite innumerable partial outcomes, but rather what Eduardo Saccone felicitously calls an ‘uninterrupted recommencement ’ (101). In the Arthurian romance the knight’s adventure is always partial because it takes on the initiatory value of a ‘test,’ a progressive stage for the individual, who must perpetually undertake new tests to complete the search for identity and perfection. When the adventures end (that is, the global adventure of the courtly-chivalric world), so do the story and the cycle as a whole, as the attainment of the Grail demonstrates (Koehler, chapter 3). With Boiardo at the opposite extreme of the romance parabola, the narrative technique of entrelacement still works perfectly for his poetics of variety, because it is purely additive and digressive. It also seems to be his compositional method: an accumulation of episodes of different nature, tone, and characters, regulated by apparently arbitrary connections. Without clearly recognizable structural and thematic links, the Boiardesque romance continues to multiply itself with an adaptability of form to which only tragic external events (the French invasion of Charles VIII and the death of the author) could bring a definitive, and yet purely arbitrary, end. Death and history represent an external world that, though it can block the physical act of writing, does not condition the narrative process in any real way. 4 The Furioso’s fidelity to the chivalric genre can be measured in its acceptance (but also in its decisive transformation) of the two elements that characterize it in narrative form and thematic content. Instead of repudiating a technique like entrelacement, by his time degraded and worn out, Ariosto makes it his own. He applies it with more frequency and intensity than did his immediate predecessors (e.g., Pulci and Boiardo, who made comparatively scarce use of it) to such a degree that he undermines the linearity and fluidity of the story. Similarly, he car-

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 19

ries certain already familiar thematic infractions to an extreme, such as Orlando’s love transformed and degenerated into folly, or the excess of courtliness, and of villainy, in certain situations and characters (e.g., Isabella, Zerbino, and Gabrina). In short, Ariosto exploits the resources of a specific technique (entrelacement) and gives new value to specific thematic devices (the quest). Even more importantly, Ariosto questions the two elements by putting them in a reciprocal relationship. One of the historically substantial innovations of the Furioso lies in the exemplarity of this interdependent relationship established between entrelacement and the quest. Reused by Ariosto, these devices assume a sort of reciprocal remotivation or overdetermination. In my view, the famous ‘ironic self-consciousness’ arises in large part from the play between the mode of telling and its semantic referent, which sometimes is one of complicity, at other times one of friction. The originality of what Ariosto does is to be found in the radical entrelacement of the quêtes. In the Furioso, almost all of the protagonists have their own quests. They are committed to a search and thus are bearers of a desire. As a result, all of them are competitors and rivals, and each is an obstacle for the others, since in large part they share common objects of desire. We are far removed from the single quête of the courtly hero whose adventures arise in overcoming pre-established obstacles (the various ‘tests’) that have a purely ennobling function for the individual and a delaying function for the tale. Their presence is passive – they are present merely to be eliminated with varying degrees of dexterity and effort by the knights. Ariosto’s quests, which are favoured, perhaps even caused, by the labyrinthine configuration of the wood, intersect with one another, since every character carves out a trajectory that cannot but interfere and conflict with that of the others. Significantly, it follows that Ariosto’s poem is a representation of quêtes manquées: of actions where failure is the rule and success merely an exception. This not only determines a particular thematic situation (I allude to the motifs of disenchantment, frustration, the overturning of expectations, etc., which have been discussed by critics) but also presupposes a different conception of narrative technique. The narrative technique of Ariosto is founded on deferral and duration, exploiting effects of suspension and narrative non-fulfilment for thematic ends. The traditional form of the interlaced story assumes a different mode of enactment (discussed earlier) almost as if the content gave new purpose to and overdetermined the use of that particular descriptive technique. In

20

The Quest for Epic

his dual role of narrator and character, at once inside and outside the text, Ariosto establishes a fundamental link between the narrative act and the action itself, creating effects of parallelism and control. This play between the internal and external allows him to comment ‘ironically’ (which, I repeat, means to reflect critically) as much on the meaning of the romance action as on the modes of the narration, on its techniques and representational strategies. If the specific contents of the romance are the error of its characters, the endlessly protracted deferral of a conclusion of the adventure, and the mutual interference of the different and multiple quests, then it is clear that the use of the romance mode in the Furioso points to an ironic reflection on digression, deviation, the deferral of outcomes, and the mutual interference and tangling of the narrative threads.20 5 An embarrassment of riches exists for documenting these effects of overdetermination. The interference of various desires and the crossing of paths are the first consequence of the tangle of actions that presuppose the failure of almost all the quests. The text makes available a semantic field of interference rich with variants that read like synonyms: crossing, interrupting, upsetting, forbidding, impeding, prohibiting, ruining and breaking the narrative order, intercepting, removing, deviating, and so on. But putting aside this dry list, let me move on to some of the many possible examples: – Sacripante laments that Bradamante ‘con l’importuno suo sentiero / gli abbia interrotto il gran piacer ch’avea’ (with his [he thinks she is a man] vexatious passing has blocked the great pleasure he would have had [I, 60]); – Rinaldo fails to possess Angelica despite the horse Baiardo’s help: ‘Per lui trovò Rinaldo la donzella / una e due volte, e mai non gli successe; / che fu da Ferraù prima impedito, / poi dal Circasso, come avete udito’ (Through him Rinaldo found the maiden once and a second time but never was successful, because first he was hindered by Ferrau, then by the Circassian, as you have heard [II, 22]); – Charlemagne obliges Rinaldo to interrupt his search for Angelica to look for military reinforcements in England: ‘Rinaldo mai di ciò non fece meno / volentier cosa; poi che fu distolto / di gir cercando il bel viso sereno’ (Rinaldo never did anything less willingly than this, because he was prevented from going in search of the beautiful shining face [II, 27]);

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 21

– The sorcerer Atlante complains that Bradamante has frustrated his plan to protect Ruggiero from his destiny of death: ‘Ben seminato avea, ben cogliea il frutto; / ma tu sei giunto a disturbarmi il tutto’ (I had sowed well and I was harvesting well; but you have come to upset it all [IV, 32]); – Aquilante and Grifone are jealous of Astolfo, who has robbed them of victory over the monster Orrilo: ‘che la intercetta lor vittoria forse / d’invidia ai duo germani il petto morse’ (because the victory that had been taken from them perhaps gnawed with envy the breasts of the two brothers [XV, 88]); – The confusion of battle prevents Ariodante from avenging himself upon Dardinello, who killed his brother: ‘ma la gran moltitudine contende / con questo ancora, e i suoi disegni guasta’ (but the great multitude opposes him too and spoils his plans [XVIII, 57]); – Ruggiero tries to kill ‘questo Leone Augusto / venuto a disturbar tanta mia gioia’ (this Leon Augustus ... who has come to upset all my happiness [XLIV, 56]). These themes were obviously not unknown to Ariosto’s predecessors.21 What is immediately striking, though, is their quantitative and qualitative shift in the Furioso. On the one hand, the themes are intensified, raised to the status of a structural framework for the action. On the other, they are linguistically integrated and connected to the technique of entrelacement. We see in the following lines how Ariosto dissimulates his authorial agency by using one of his characters to bring about a narrative transition:22 Soviemmi che cantare io vi dovea (già lo promisi, e poi m’uscì di mente) d’una sospizion che fatto avea la bella donna di Ruggier dolente, de l’altra più spiacevole e più rea, e di più acuto e velenoso dente, che, per quel ch’ella udì da Ricciardetto, a devorar il cor l’entrò nel petto. Dovea cantarne, et altro incominciai, perché Rinaldo in mezzo sopravenne; e poi Guidon mi diè che fare assai, che tra camino a bada un pezzo il tenne. D’una cosa in un’altra in modo entrai,

22

The Quest for Epic che mal di Bradamante mi sovenne; sovienmene ora, e vo’ narrarne inanti che di Rinaldo e di Gradasso io canti.

(XXXII, 1–2)

I remember I must sing to you – I promised it once and then it went out of my mind – about a suspicion the fair lady sorrowing for Rinaldo had formed, more displeasing and more cruel and with a sharper and more poisonous tooth than the other which entered into her breast to devour her heart because of what she heard from Ricciardetto. I was going to sing of it and began something else, because Rinaldo happened to come into the middle of it; and then Guidon, who delayed him awhile by the way, gave me enough to do. I went from one thing to another in such fashion that I did not remember about Bradamant; now I remember and intend to tell you about it before I sing of Rinaldo and Gradasso.

Ariosto makes his character a competitor with his own desire to tell the tale, a character who intervenes and upsets the narrator’s plan, exactly as happens within the narration, where each character interferes with the choices, the desires, and the objectives of the others. Transferring the action of disturbance to the level of the narrator, Ariosto justifies the interruptions of his sinuous narrative line, the fundamental deviations from the romance story. The ironic and radical use of this device takes him to the extremes of a sort of avant-lettre Pirandellian artistry, as when an overlooked character remonstrates with the narrator: Di questo altrove io vo’ rendervi conto; ch’ad un gran duca è forza ch’io riguardi, il qual mi grida, e di lontano accenna, e priega ch’io nol lasci nella penna.

(XV, 9)

Of this I intend to render you the account elsewhere; for I must attend to a great duke who calls to me and signals from a distance and prays that I will not leave him in my pen.

The crossing, intersection, and meeting of narrative paths expand the material along digressive, lateral lines that continually postpone its completion as a closed, linear, unitary form. The techniques of Ariosto’s narrative choices are simply the formal consequence of the thematic tangle of desires:

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 23 Chi fosse dirò poi; ch’or me ne svia tal, di chi udir non vi sarà men caro ...

(XIII, 44)

Who he was I shall tell later; because now she whom you will not be less glad to hear of takes me way from him ...

But these are merely samples, familiar to the reader of Ariosto. A more complex and systematic example is provided by the famous episode of Discord at Agramante’s camp (XXVII, 40–81). Even though there are no explicit metalinguistic signals, Ariosto’s amusement at giving paradigmatic expression to the impasses of the romance mode is evident. The narrator describes a conflict of multiple desires interwoven with perfect circularity. As all the Saracen warriors try simultaneously to achieve their desires without delay, King Agramante’s champions find themselves entangled in an inextricable knot: Rodomonte against Mandricardo for Doralice, Mandricardo against Ruggiero for the eagle emblem, Ruggiero against Rodomonte for the horse Frontino, Marfisa against Mandricardo to finish their interrupted duel. In addition to disputes already underway, new ones erupt, sparked by a series of recognitions that start other rivalries: Gradasso against Mandricardo for the sword Durlindana, Sacripante against Rodomonte for the horse Frontino, Marfisa against Brunello for another sword. The quarrels accumulate and intersect, changing the alliances within the camp, as each claims a legitimate right of possession and accuses others of theft. Most importantly, each demands recognition of his or her prestige for priority in the contests. The complication of these multiple demands makes it hard to regulate precedence, hierarchies, and rights according to rational criteria. Framing this game of rivalries within a perfectly circular structure requires not only an elaborate sequence of combats, but also the resolution of the problem of the sequence:23 Son cinque cavallier c’han fisso il chiodo d’essere i primi a terminar sua lite, l’una ne l’altra aviluppata in modo, che non l’avrebbe Apolline espedite ...

(XXVII, 102)

There are five knights who have driven in nails to be the first to end their contests, the one tangled up with another in such a way Apollo could not have straightened them out ...

24

The Quest for Epic

Agramante’s failed attempt to mediate (significantly, he draws lots for the order of the duels, leaving it to chance) is ultimately similar to that of Ariosto, the director who must manage a narration that has space for the expression of all desires but that must nevertheless operate according to a precise hierarchy of choices in order to avoid the anarchy of continual digression: Ma d’un parlar ne l’altro, ove son ito sì lungi dal camin ch’io faceva ora? non lo credo però sì aver smarrito ch’io non lo sappia ritrovare ancora ...

(XVII, 80)24

But from one speech to the other, where have I gone so far from the road I have been following? Yet I do not believe I have so lost it that I cannot find it again ...

The desires of the individual characters all wish to express themselves simultaneously, but the effect of this narrative democracy is that these desires are always incomplete and partially represented. The realization of a desire is frustrated because of collective conditioning that is also responsible for the frustration of the desire nurtured by the narrator. Entrelacement turns out to be the most suitable expressive form for the representation of this complicated device. In fact, it becomes a theme in and of itself. Turning it into a thematic model, Ariosto successfully uses a technique that was traditionally merely a response to the demands of the poetics of variety or variatio. The irreducible differences between the various knights are parallel to the narrator’s comments on his organization of the narrative matter, the design of which kindles the fictive resentment of the characters. Yet there is more: Patricia Parker’s intertextual comparison with the Virgilian model also illuminates the different placement and function of the episode in the Furioso. From the point of view of narrative order, this has important consequences.25 When in Aeneid VII, 323 ff, Juno conjures from the infernal regions the fury Alecto to destroy the peace between the Latin king and the Trojans, the act signals the beginning of the epic agon that characterizes the second part of the poem (the part that sixteenth-century critics defined as ‘Iliadic,’ opposing it to the ‘Odyssean,’ or romance, emphasis of the first six books).26 In the Furioso Discord’s arrival in the pagan camp is the ‘centrifugal force’ that fractures the Saracens’ concerted epic action, which is only recovered with the accep-

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 25

tance of a truce. Its effect then is to return the knights to their usual pursuits. The breakdown of collective action is in keeping with the principle of the romance, or rather with ‘the virtually endless erring and digression in which any exercise of poetic closure becomes a literary tour de force’ (Parker 33–4). 6 This discussion has gradually approached a theme that cannot be avoided any longer: error. It is central in a poem that makes it the necessary link between love and madness: ‘chi su, chi giù, chi qua, chi là travia’ (one up, one down, one here, one there goes astray [XXIV, 2]). The two protagonists of the Furioso, Orlando and Ruggiero, are characters who sidestep their epic destiny in different but equally significant ways, one by tradition, the other, one might say, by choice. Both get lost in the intricate and deceptive paths of the romance forest. The possibility of epic closure of Ariosto’s tale faces the double problem of recovering Orlando’s lost wits (finding a unifying linearity to travel once again) and ending Ruggiero’s delays and confusions by restoring temporal progression to the action. A character’s error, like that of the romance form itself, can unfold as much in space (deviation, diversion, or digression) as in time (deferral, suspension, or uncertainty). Orlando and Ruggiero seem to embody this double possibility for error, as testified by two authoritative interpreters of divine plans. Orlando’s error is defined when St John explains to Astolfo in Paradise the nature and ends of his lunar quest: Sappi che ’l vostro Orlando, perché torse dal camin dritto le commesse insegne, è punito da Dio, che più s’accende contra chi egli ama più, quando s’offende.

(XXXIV, 62)27

You must know that your Orlando, because he took from the straight road the ensigns entrusted, is punished by God, who against those he most loves is most on fire, whenever he is offended.

Ruggiero’s error, though, is of another kind, and it is explained to him personally by the saintly hermit who, having offered him hospitality after he is shipwrecked on the African coast, baptizes him, and converts him simultaneously to the Christian faith and to marriage: Lo riprendea ch’era ito differendo

26

The Quest for Epic sotto il soave giogo a porre il collo ...

(XLI, 55)

He rebuked him because he had kept putting off submitting his neck to the soft yoke ...

The textual analysis that follows aims to demonstrate that deviation (‘torcere il piede,’ from the straight path) and deferral (continually postponing a pre-established outcome) are the two most characteristic errors of the romance mode. DEVIATION. The various ways in which the knights deviate from a preestablished objective are echoed in the narrator’s comments on the impossibility of following a single narrative iter without avoiding long digressive paths: Bisogna, prima ch’io vi narri il caso, ch’un poco dal sentier dritto mi torca ...

(VIII, 51)28

Before I tell you what chanced, I must turn away from the straight path a little ...

We find ourselves here in the stanzas immediately before Orlando’s decision (in the wake of his anguished dream) to betray Charlemagne and his mission, and to begin his wandering in search of Angelica. We can read in its metanarrative implications a series of episodes in which, between the lines of an internal conflict (e.g., honour vs love) or in the choice between two paths (e.g., Ruggiero at the crossroads),29 the comparison between two ways of writing, schematically reducible to the epic and the romance, appears. The following is just one such example: Or tornando a colei, ch’era presaga di quanto de’ avvenir, dico che tenne la dritta via dove l’errante e vaga figlia d’Amon seco a incontrar si venne.

(VII, 45)

Now returning to that one who divined all that was to come, I say she kept the very road where the wandering and uncertain daughter of Amon came to meet her.

The comparison is between the enchantress Melissa, who knows where

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 27

history is moving (she is in fact the tutelary deity of the marriage and therefore of the text’s epic destiny), and Bradamante, who erratically follows the tortuous windings of the romance journey. But let us return to Orlando. When he steps off the right path towards his sinful quest, literally heading towards his tragic date with madness, Ariosto comments: e sì come era uscito di se stesso, uscì di strada ...

(XII, 86)

and as though he were out of his mind he went out of the road ...

Madness, the pathological extreme of simple ‘error,’ determines Orlando’s departure from the right path, as it does the narrator’s digression. The latter declares himself no less a victim than his characters of this universal human condition. The central pivot, the essential intermediary of this game of internal references, is the ‘figure of the poet,’ as Robert Durling has masterfully defined it – that is, Ariosto’s choice of a double status as narrator and character. Thanks to this device, a process of thematic remotivation is set in motion that restores full efficacy to the worn-out image of the textual journey:30 Or, se mi mostra la mia carta il vero, non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto; sì che nel lito i voti scioglier spero a chi nel mar per tanta via m’ha scorto; ove, o di non tornar col legno intero, o d’errar sempre, ebbi già il viso smorto. Ma mi par di veder, ma veggo certo, veggo la terra, e veggo il lito aperto.

(XLVI, 1)

Now if my map shows me the truth, the harbour is not far out of sight, so I hope to fulfil on the shore my vows to Him who has protected me during such a long journey on the sea, where earlier my face was pale with the fear I would not return with my ship uninjured or would wander forever. But I seem to see, but I certainly see, I see land, and I see the open shore.

Here we have the fulfilment of a promise to friends that earlier seemed as though it might not be satisfied. In fact, bringing the ship of the poem into port and overcoming the shoals of error is the special quest

28

The Quest for Epic

of the poet, who pursues it among his many characters equally eager in their pursuits, despite dispersions, disorientations, and deceptions. This narrative voyage is not without errors or distractions or digressions. The characters are driven from the right path not only in the labyrinthine wood but also by the storms that regularly force those in search of adventure by land, air, or sea towards other shores. 7 Now let us consider one of these possible errors in detail, choosing, from among many that Durling analyses so well, the theme of madness that is common to both the poet and his characters (169–74). In the opening lines of canto XXIX, Ariosto takes his cue from the contradictory attitude of Rodomonte (who, after having declared his hatred of all women, at the sight of Isabella returns immediately to desiring them) to launch an invective against human inconstancy: O degli uomini inferma e instabil mente! Come sian presti a variar disegno! Tutti i pensier mutamo facilmente, più quei che nascon d’amoroso sdegno.

(XXIX, 1)

Oh shifting and unstable minds of men! how ready we are to vary our plans! We easily change all our intentions, chiefly those that arise from the anger of love.

This seems like a literal retort to what Rodomonte has previously said against women: Oh femminile ingegno, egli dicea, come ti volgi e muti facilmente, contrario oggetto proprio de la fede! Oh infelice, oh miser chi ti crede!

(XXVII, 117)

Oh female nature (he said), how easily you turn and change, you who are the very opposite of fidelity! Oh unhappy, oh miserable he who trusts in you!

This direct attack against a character can be turned back against the narrator himself, since he oscillates no less wildly in his attitude towards women, condemning in Rodomonte his own inconsistency and changeableness. In the course of the opening lines of canto XXIX, he sets him-

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 29

self up as a champion of women and avenger of their offended dignity against the imprudent African: ‘I am so offended ... that I do not pardon him until I show him by his own evil how great an error he has made ...’31 Then, at the end of the same canto, he laments that the mad Orlando was not able to avenge himself on Angelica and asserts that the vast majority of women are unfaithful: Deh, maledetto sia l’annello et anco il cavallier che dato le l’avea! che se non era, avrebbe Orlando fatto di sé vendetta e di mill’altri a un tratto. Né questa sola, ma fosser pur state in man d’Orlando quante oggi ne sono; ch’ad ogni modo tutte sono ingrate, né si trova tra lor oncia di buono ...

(XXIX, 73–74)

Oh cursed be the ring and also the knight who had given it to her! because except for it Orlando would have done vengeance for himself and a thousand more at one stroke. Would that not she alone but just as many as there are of them today had been in the power of Orlando, for they are all ungrateful in every way, nor is there an ounce of good to be found among them ...

In short, the poet allows himself to be caught in the act of inconsistency just after having reproved the very same quality in one of his characters. The only difference is that the relationship is reversed: here we have first praise, then condemnation. But the game is not over, and a new justification is required of the narrator. In the opening section of the following canto, he expresses regret at having let himself get carried away by anger, saying that it is because he is a man in love, and therefore no less mad than Orlando: ‘I am no less beside myself than Orlando was and I am not less worthy of excuse.’32 Love is the reason for that intellectual clouding that distinguishes people in the grip of madness, like Orlando, who ‘non discernea il nero dal bianco’ (did not distinguish black from white [XXIX, 73]), or like Rodomonte, who sins in not making the proper distinctions (‘incontra tutte trasse fuor lo stocco / de l’ira, senza farvi differenzia’).33 Rodomonte confuses the faults of a few women with those of the entire sex. Orlando’s oscillation between protectiveness and destructiveness towards Angelica finds an echo in the ambiguity that governs the poet’s

30

The Quest for Epic

attitude towards women, split between exoneration (the defence of their reputation against the calumnies of others) and denigration (the destruction of their reputation). It seems clear here that ranting and raving (‘error’ yet again) is both the shield that hides the double nature of Ariosto’s vision and the alibi for a knowing contradiction, a wilful ambiguity. His weak and inconstant irrationality as a character provides a strong alter ego for the narrator, who instead demonstrates his full rational control over the fictive world of the poem. 8 DEFERRAL. In canto X, having freed Angelica from the rock where she was chained to be fed to the sea monster, Ruggiero hurries to assert his rights as her saviour: Frettoloso, or da questo or da quel canto confusamente l’arme si levava. Non gli parve altra volta mai star tanto; che s’un laccio sciogliea, dui n’annodava. Ma troppo è lungo ormai, Signor, il canto, e forse ch’anco l’ascoltar vi grava: sì ch’io differirò l’istoria mia in altro tempo che più grata sia.

(X, 115)

In great haste, now from one part now from another he confusedly took off his armour. It seemed to him he had never been so slow before, for if he untied one lace he knotted up two of them. But the canto is now too long, My Lord, and perhaps listening to it wearies you, so I shall defer my story to another time when it may be more pleasing.

This stanza exemplifies the thematically motivated relationship between formal technique and representation. The reader’s expectations are frustrated at the same time as Ruggiero’s desire is aroused; the desires of both the reader and Ruggiero are deferred and suspended in a literal application of the technique of suspense. The narrator amuses himself by playing the same hoax on both character and audience, lacing them up in entangled knots, the encumbrances of a dense, inextricable plot (‘to lace up’ is etymologically linked to entrelacement, needless to say). This episode is the clearest rebuttal to the criticism of the sixteenth-century Aristotelians who attributed this knowing exploitation of a narrative technique to artistic shortcomings. Here the formal necessity of interrupting the story is converted into a thematic opportunity. The sus-

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 31

pension of the action, maliciously heightened by the excessive length of the canto, replicates for the sender/addressee the frustrations inflicted on the character with relation to the object of his desire. One critic has wittily described this as ‘cantus interruptus.’34 Ariosto is the only poet in this tradition to use the verb differire (to defer) in its technical meaning of suspension and postponement of the discourse. He regularly substitutes it for the conventional formulations (lasciare [to leave], abbandonare [to abandon]) of the popular oral narrative tradition.35 Furthermore, the poet employs the same verb just as frequently to express the momentary failure (and the postponement of gratification) of conquest or possession as a result of outside interferences. As the characters’ desires remain unsatisfied, so the narrator’s tale remains incomplete. Like the description of an event, the conclusion of a story, or more simply the name of a character, duels and conquests, marriages, and destinies are deferred to the following canto. One exemplary manifestation of deferral by disturbance is in the first canto, when Sacripante comes fortuitously upon Angelica, whom he wishes to make his own. This opening scene inaugurates Ariosto’s use of the term differire. While he braces himself for his amorous attack, the arrival of an unknown knight constrains Sacripante to a duel in which he is unexpectedly unhorsed. His ignominy is made all the greater when immediately afterwards he discovers that the victor is Bradamante, a woman who is herself in hot pursuit of her own object of desire, Ruggiero. Sacripante had not been able to tolerate (as he will recall) che quel con l’importuno suo sentiero gli abbia interrotto il gran piacer ch’avea ...

(I, 60)

that the fellow with his vexatious passing has blocked the great pleasure he would have had ...

Now, crestfallen, ... tolse Angelica in groppa, e differilla a più lieto uso, a stanza più tranquilla.

(I, 71)

he took Angelica quietly on the crupper, and reserved her for happier use, for a calmer place.

Like deviation, deferral thus also takes its place on the levels of both the

32

The Quest for Epic

enunciation and the enunciated. If digression represents a material straying, a literal excursus, deferral is simply the prolongation of the unfulfilled narrative caused by the entrelacement of the various quests. As we know, Ruggiero is the character who most completely embodies deferral with his irresolute, undecided, and often interrupted behaviour, a Hercules forever at the crossroads between fidelity to his king or to his lady, between honour and love, between Logistilla and Alcina. The words of the hermit remind us of the nature of his error: lo riprendea ch’era ito differendo sotto il soave giogo a porre il collo ...

(XLI, 55)

He rebuked him because he had kept putting off submitting his neck to the soft yoke ...

Even after his conversion, baptism, and marriage, one cannot say that Ruggiero (as well as the romance that is now decidedly directed towards its epic conclusion) has entirely dispensed with perplexities and delays. In effect, the uncertainty lasts almost until the final stanza of the poem, where Ruggiero’s hesitation to give the coup de grâce to his vanquished adversary Rodomonte is almost fatal for him: ma il giovene s’accorse de l’errore in che potea cader, per differire di far quel empio Saracin morire.

(XLVI, 139)

but the youth was aware of the error into which he might fall by delaying to make that cruel Saracen die.

Ruggiero eliminates the last onset of error with this act that resolves both the final duel and the poem, the last moment of doubt before a decision already made, a choice that is by now inexorable. As Raffaele Manica rightly observes, ‘we have before us two of the poem’s key words, and here both are erased’ by the dagger blows that take the life of the final antagonist and definitively shatter the inextricable knot of error and delay (84). 9 Ariosto’s desire for epic closure to the action of course also operates with respect to the incomplete world inherited from Boiardo. The dynamic equilibrium of the Furioso is made up of two equally necessary

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 33

forces in counterpoint. The pressure towards completion makes use of the setbacks and the frustrations induced by the reciprocal disturbance of the quêtes in order to guarantee the duration of the action. One of Boiardo’s most noted continuators, Nicolò degli Agostini, still lingered in an entirely romance world. His principal concern was to begin new tales as soon as he completed those left unfinished by Boiardo. He accomplished this by accumulation rather than by the progressive resolution of the narrative, thereby juxtaposing the fundamental principles of ventura and ‘quest,’ described by Riccardo Bruscagli with great acuity (Stagioni 102–5). Particular to the quest is the insurmountable distance between subject and object of desire. It is this distance alone that guarantees movement in space and continuity in time. Abolishing this distance means abolishing movement, and thus the life of the poem. Thus the tendency towards failure of the quests assumes a determining structural necessity beyond its thematic function. When Angelica, the principal object of many quests, gives herself to Medoro, she is lost to all her pursuers and exhausts the action sustained by her for half of the poem. Therefore, it is necessary to invent new dynamic stimuli to maintain the movement in the wood of error. These, in essence, are the pieces of armour, scattered by Orlando in his madness, that create new disputes and new rivalries among the knights. In my view it is no coincidence that this principle is foreshadowed in ideological form in the celebrated simile of the virgin as a rose in Furioso I, 42. This is another example of the reinterpretation of a literary topos that, in its long tradition from Catullus to Poliziano, focuses on the motif of the transience of beauty: Ma non sì tosto dal materno stelo rimossa viene e dal suo ceppo verde, che quanto avea dagli uomini e dal cielo favor, grazia e bellezza, tutto perde. La vergine che ’l fior, di che più zelo che de’ begli occhi, e de la vita aver de’, lascia altrui corre, il pregio ch’avea inanti perde nel cor di tutti gli altri amanti.

(I, 43)

But no sooner is she taken from the maternal stalk and the green bush than she loses all the favour, grace and beauty, however much, that she had from men and from heaven. The virgin who lets anyone pluck that flower for

34

The Quest for Epic which she ought to have more fervour than for her beautiful eyes and for her life, loses the worth she had before in the hearts of all her other lovers.

Here Ariosto celebrates the power of seduction, which consists of maintaining distance. When, instead, an object is possessed by someone, it is lost to all other pursuers. Narrative interest dissipates with the disappearance of this necessary distance, and Angelica is almost brutally expelled from the poem.36 It is hardly a coincidence that Ariosto’s first reflective opening, in the second canto, should be dedicated to the theme of unrequited love: Ingiustissimo Amor, perché sì raro corrispondenti fai nostri desiri? Onde, perfido, avvien che t’è sì caro il discorde voler ch’in duo cor miri?

(II, 1)

Most unjust Love, why so rarely do you make our desires correspondent? Whence, traitor, does it come that to you it is such a pleasure to cause the discord you see in two hearts?

It is not merely a question of introducing one of the poem’s fundamental themes but of affirming from the beginning that unrequited desires and mistimed affections are the necessary law of the work. The obvious consequence is that Ariosto’s complaint against ‘ingiustissimo Amor’ hides an objective flip side: if what Ariosto says he wishes for actually took place, humans might be happier, but his poem would have a truly short life. As a result, Ariosto does not discard Merlin’s magic fountain, an invention typical of Boiardo’s poetry of the ‘marvellous’ (from which Angelica and Rinaldo drink love and hate in turn, but out of sequence), as an unrealistic fable of romance, but exploits it thematically as the symbol of a structural law of the poem (Parker 32–3). 10 Once again, we see how the fortunes of characters originating in Boiardo’s magical world are used to advantage in connection with the structural principle of the quest and instances of narrative closure. Scholars have already focused attention on the symbolic figure of Orrilo, that strange monster who cannot be killed because his limbs reattach themselves to his body each time they are cut off.37 Boiardo linked the destinies of two characters, Grifone and Aquilante, to this strange creature. They find themselves committed to the vain enterprise

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 35

of killing Orrilo, constrained to this by two protective fairies who hope to save them from their prophesied fate of precocious and glorious death when they leave the East to join the war in France (Orlando innamorato III, 2, 42–3). The incomplete episode carries over to the Furioso. Tying it to the new dynamic system of competition between rival desires, we could say that the two young men’s ambition for glory is intersected by a contrary desire for perpetual deferral in favour of survival in obscurity – in other words, a desire for literal duration. Although it is a relatively minor incident, it parallels the one in which Ruggiero, our hero of deferral, is once again protagonist. He also has his tutelary divinity, the old sorcerer Atlante, who devises a series of traps and enchantments (the castle, Alcina’s island, the palace) to keep him from his destiny (when he will be converted to Christianity, marry Bradamante, and ultimately found the Este family) since it also entails an early death.38 The deferral strategy of the two fairies imposed upon Grifone and Aquilante resembles the ‘uninterrupted recommencement’ of the authentic Arthurian tradition: dismembering a body that mechanically reassembles itself without being able to bring closure to the adventure. In the Furioso, Astolfo’s stroke of brilliance in slashing the fatal hair that keeps Orrilo alive brings about the traumatic rupture of the iterative chain. From the perspective of narrative ends, Atlante’s subterfuges function as an important structural device. The sooner the epic-dynastic ending takes place, the sooner it puts an end to Ruggiero’s material existence and the artistic life of the poem, which, without this necessary action of disturbance, would be too quickly exhausted by the predestined marriage. Atlante’s protective actions towards Ruggiero move in exactly the opposite direction of the poem’s director, whose true antagonist he is, much more so than he is of Bradamante or Melissa.39 If the strategy of repetition and delay, embodied by the typical romance deities of an old sorcerer and two benevolent fairies, were to prevail, we would be immersed in a classic Arthurian romance that never reaches a final destination because the action is removed from any real unfolding in time and from the traumatic rupture of death. Atlante wants to keep his pupil within the enchanted palace of romance, from which both characters, by way of Boiardo, derive; but the lessons that Ruggiero learns in the Furioso, despite dispersals and hesitations, must culminate in his epic vocation as the hero-founder of a civilization. 11 Following Parker’s example, let us try to identify in general terms the signs of this changing structural tendency (Inescapable Romance 36–9). In

36

The Quest for Epic

the final cantos of the Furioso the Boiardo model progressively gives way to more imposing ones, Dante (Astolfo’s providential quest on the moon) and above all Virgil. It is the latter model that lends Ruggiero the appearance of Aeneas, saved by the intervention of Melissa/Venus (who solves the last remaining problem in the episode of Leone [XLIV, 12–XLVI, 64]) and prodded into the final proud challenge against Rodomonte/Turnus.40 Parallel to this intertextual movement, a series of signals scattered here and there in the text begins to create a system within this process, indicating a desire to recover the epic potential of the material. First of all, there is the gradual abandonment of entrelacement, which is increasingly rare in the second part of the poem.41 Then there is the progressive rationalization of the magical world (although this does not mean the abandonment of the magic implements that Astolfo, for example, continues to employ with efficacy). It is true that the breaking of the spell of Atlante’s palace – the very centre of erratic and aimless movement (XII, 29) – signals the definitive defeat of the sorcerer and the deceptions of romance. It is significant that this defeat coincides with the approach of the transition to the second part of the poem.42 Finally, there are the obvious expedients of conversion and recognition. These transfer a number of the pagan knights to the Christian ranks, including Sobrino and Marfisa, while death is the fate reserved for the unshakeable Mandricardo, Agramante, Gradasso, and Rodomonte. These are classic solutions elaborated by the chivalric tradition to give plausible conclusion to its institutionalized digressions. Conversion had for some time been an authentic ritual topos, whose original ideological significance lost vigour and meaning as its function as a narrative expedient grew. (We will have to wait for Tasso’s Clorinda for a tragic recovery of the conversion-death nexus.) So facile and hackneyed did it become that it lent itself to frequent parody by Pulci in the Morgante. Occurring with relative frequency in Boiardo, it becomes an almost obligatory outcome in Agostini, who inflicts it systematically on all the most noble and generous pagan knights without a shadow of irony. In practice Ariosto limits this expedient to the only conversion missing from the Innamorato, Ruggiero’s, respecting the rules of the game in the one instance where he can transform them into an essential factor for directing his tale towards an epic conclusion. It is a highly symbolic conversion of the romance hero, almost one of stature and identity, which parallels the recovery of reason by the other protagonist who has been regressively lost in the forest of the tale. In some ways, Orlando’s

The Furioso between Epos and Romance 37

‘alienation’ is the negative pendant of Ruggiero’s ‘education.’ These two opposing and complementary processes that evolve over the poem allow Ariosto to explore the possibilities of integration and dissonance in the narrative codes he employs. Orlando’s and Ruggiero’s paths converge only when epic closure makes this necessary to limit the potentially infinite error of romance. Tasso will try to exorcize this same error fifty years later by arguing for the unitary logic of epic against the ‘confusion’ of romance and its multiple plots that ‘distract the mind and hinder labour.’43 But for Ariosto the mingling of ancient and modern models is still an act of faith in the narrative possibilities of a pluralistic, subjective world compatible with the world of epic grounded in history. The final reconciliation in epic is anything but peaceful in the Furioso. Orlando’s madness, resulting from his abandonment of the public cause, and responsible for the repudiation of an entire tradition tied to his name, was to provide Aristotelian critics accusing the romance of lenience towards the ‘errant senses’ with a polemical weapon. But in compensation, Ruggiero’s surrender to the imperious urgencies of history (the epos that embodies reason in the hierarchy of human faculties) coincides with the assumption of his fate of prophesied death. In the succession of final coups de théâtre, every conclusion reveals itself as a mere prolepsis of a truer and more tragic conclusion, which remains outside the story. The late insertion of the story of Leone into the third version of the Furioso seems to respond to the desire for infinite unexpected adventures that provide the romance with one last throe before its definitive dissolution. In effect, the episode tells us that the principle of deferral is never truly abolished: projected over the celebrations of the happy nuptial ending is the sinister shadow of death. For now, it is Rodomonte’s death, but in a not-too-distant future it will be Ruggiero’s. This is the true unspoken conclusion of the poem, the event that, like Atlante, the poet has tried to avert. Ruggiero’s choice in favour of conversion and marriage, and against error and deferral (XLVI, 139), is effectively a choice of death.44

2 The Quest: Considerations on the Form of the Furioso

1 An analysis of the narrative form and thematic organization of the Furioso must recognize the central function of the quest (inchiesta). As the foundational theme for a whole genre, the quest is the transformation of the ancient chronotope (to borrow a term from Bakhtin) of the aventure, so familiar to the French medieval romance and inherited by Italian chivalric literature. Already in the Arthurian romances – and even more prominently in Chrétien’s last texts and in the whole cycle of the search for the Grail – the aventure is progressively framed within the quête: ‘The point of departure from which the text is organized is one of the “actions,” in relation to which all the others are defined as functions. An initial situation, generally provoked in an unforeseeable way, creates or reveals the absence of an object (thing or person), which, in the course of a wandering journey that will produce various conflicts, is ultimately obtained by conquest, for the greater good of the hero and the community to which he belongs’ (Zumthor 359). As I noted in chapter 1, Ariosto’s type of quest has particular characteristics that distinguish it not only from the more traditional versions of the theme but also from its most immediate and illustrious predecessor, Boiardo’s ventura. The constant alternation of plots notwithstanding, the Furioso’s action programmatically pursues the attainment of objects of desire by a variety of characters, often in competition with one another. In many cases, this pursuit is continued through the entire poem, being repeatedly renewed after a succession of individual failures. This contributes to defining a narrative model that is in part new, since it implies a different approach to history: a conception of time as progress and duration and of space as goal-oriented movement. The legacy of the open-ended aventure survives, however, woven into the new

The Quest

39

logic of the quest, creating the structural opposition that balances the whole poem. The quest is specifically directed towards a goal, whereas the aventure is characterized by chance circumstances that often distract the characters to the extent that the movement becomes centrifugal as they replace their original objectives with others. The knight is continuously driven through the paths of chance adventure, characterized by wandering and articulated through accidental encounters and conflicts. This dialectic has a considerable impact on narrative construction. In the previous chapter, I defined this effect as deriving from the dynamic intersection of the literary models of epic and romance. In this chapter, I mean to complement the argument of the previous chapter but take it in a slightly different direction. Although many critics argue that the quest has a determining structural function in the Furioso, they have restricted its centrality to one location in the poem, the wood in which the various searches intersect. This seems to me a rather reductive approach that does not account for the complex use Ariosto makes of this narrative device. I do not agree that the quest is restricted to a particular location, situation, or character. These are simply the sites in the narrative where the quest is most evident. The impression of unity in the Furioso is not based, as some have observed, only on recurrent formal and thematic symmetries, or on specific points of convergence deployed strategically. Nor is it based only on the refined procedures for homogenizing style and rhythm that characterize Ariostan discourse, particularly as displayed through the poem’s history of revisions. In my view, the impression of unity also rests on the constancy of a narrative device that regulates the construction of Ariosto’s entire edifice and operates even where it is least apparent, aided by a flexibility of expression that turns it to meanings wholly new in the context of the romance tradition. As concerns Ariosto himself, the inchiesta (as both ‘quest’ and ‘inquiry’) represents the intellectual equivalent of the predatory movement of his knights: an instrument for the appropriation of, and thus mastery over, a shifting and multifaceted reality. 2 Among the first to recognize and define the device of the quest was one of the Furioso’s most intelligent modern readers, the Anglo-American critic Donald S. Carne-Ross: ‘The Orlando Furioso is a quest poem; the motions of the various quests govern much of the narrative and express the theme of the work.’1 Precisely for this reason, he condemns the ‘epic conclusion’ of the final, substantial part of the poem that follows Orlando’s madness (XXIII-XXIV) and Angelica’s exit from the

40

The Quest for Epic

stage (XXIX), which he considers a concession to a ‘far more conventional world.’ This concession coincides with the silencing of the multiple perspectives that previously dominated the narrative and the progressive weakening of the prodigious inventive vitality sustained by the device of the quest. This is not the place to question such judgments of taste, which are based on debatable interpretations of authorial psychology2 or on critical conclusions that are substantially perceptive but that resolve a key problem with a few lines of condemnation. This problem concerns the relationship of the form of the Furioso to the narrative models Ariosto employed, and it is certainly among the most interesting and debated problems of recent criticism.3 Nevertheless, the assumption underlying Carne-Ross’s conclusions remains unavoidable: ‘with her [Angelica’s] exit, and Orlando’s madness, the Quest theme has lost its driving force. The interests which sustained the poem for so long are to be replaced by something else’ (204). For Carne-Ross, the lack of a dynamic surrogate constitutes the weakness of the second half of the Furioso, or at least its last third. While Carne-Ross is to be commended for emphasizing the centrality of the quest as a ‘unifying principle,’ he fails to see its continuity in altered forms. As a result, he laments both its disappearance and the resultant loss of unity and coherence. I would argue instead that, from that turning point in the action, the Furioso begins to modify certain structural characteristics according to the adjustments of its dominant narrative model. Therefore, it is inappropriate to speak of inconsistencies or betrayals in the poem’s design. This tendency to transform the model deserves to be recognized and analysed in a way that complements recent trends in Ariosto criticism. I refer to those approaches that have begun to see the Furioso – for too long closed within the vise-like grip of ‘evasion/harmony’ into which the brilliant pages of De Sanctis and Croce placed it – as playing an important historical role in rethinking and balancing the experience of humanist culture. Studies similar to those previously conducted on the poem’s ‘content’ are now required from the perspective of the formal model that Ariosto develops as a narrative function that is no longer a mere chivalric récit. If the whole Furioso – and specifically certain parts of it (I am thinking of the lunar sequence, the object of so many recent investigations)4 – appears increasingly like the complex and contradictory microcosm of the ideals of an epoch, it now seems opportune to consider how the ancient device of the quest might have assumed an expressive adaptability capable of giving form to this cognitive experience with unexpectedly broad limits. Analysing how the chivalric arche-

The Quest

41

type assumed new meanings will be the only way to show concretely and in practice the truth of the critical commonplace, often affirmed rather than demonstrated, by which Ariosto adapts these archaic scenarios to bring forth a new understanding of ‘the real.’ The first obvious consequence is that the new content also changes the formal model, altering the very nature of the quest. In adopting this perspective we must choose between two options, depending upon whether we give precedence to formal continuity or accentuate the change in subject matter. In this discussion I hope to identify and to describe, within the closely woven and smooth surface of Ariosto’s tale, structural ruptures and breaks in continuity, without, however, overemphasizing these swerves and thus falling into the trap of an overly schematic reading. While I cannot share Carne-Ross’s reservations, his recognition of a shift in the Furioso is well-founded and correct. The poem effectively ceases to interest him, not because the movement of the quest has been exhausted but because a particular kind of search comes to an end: the search for material objects of desire. As these objects are gradually expunged from the narrative, places that made up the habitual backdrop for such searches (such as the wood or Atlante’s palace) become more peripheral or disappear entirely. In the first part of the poem, these places stand out because the seekers continually return to them as a result of their repetitive and labyrinthine movement. Recalling the principal episodes, there is the wood of the first and second cantos that contains the pursuit of Angelica, the Scottish wood of canto IV where Rinaldo seeks adventure, the wood where Orlando and Ferraù fight for the helmet in canto XII, Cloridano and Medoro’s nocturnal wood in cantos XVII and XIX, and the wood of Orlando’s madness in cantos XXIII and XXIV. Alongside these forests, we have the enchanted palace, where the pursuers of Angelica ultimately arrive, first Orlando and then Ruggiero in canto XII, Bradamante in canto XIII, and Astolfo in canto XXII. With a degree of caution, it seems possible to affirm that the construction of the first half of the Furioso tends to be articulated predominantly through symmetries and repetitions. In some ways, this tendency is paratactic in its ordering of the episodes according to analogy and juxtaposition. The circularity of the action multiplies the repetitive, labyrinthine locales of ‘error’ and is set off by the intentional way in which the exploits of Orlando and Ruggiero mirror each other.5 Near the mid-point of the Furioso, marked off by the madness of Orlando, the action inspired by the material quest is exhausted within a

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The Quest for Epic

brief span of cantos: Astolfo destroys the palace and its deceptions (XXII, 16–23), and the knights, for the most part, leave behind the romance wood of their pursuits. The arms scattered by Orlando in his fit of madness unleash the last vertiginous movements of the mania for possession, and Zerbino finds himself paying with his life for his generous defence of the sword Durlindana from Mandricardo’s arrogance (XXIV, 75–85). The episode of Discord in the pagan camp (XXVII) places the definitive seal on the material quest, admirably concluding this aspect of the poem – if not completely (since many of the struggles for possession still await a later resolution), at least as regards its role as the focal point of narrative interest. This is the place in which the various threads of the quest all tangle together, culminating in the general quarrel that sees the different seekers simultaneously engaged in defending and claiming possession of various objects. With its inextricable knot of perfectly circular disputes, the episode emblematically concludes the predicaments of the vain and obsessive movement that characterizes the ambages of the errant knights. After this point, some of the settings change. The locales of war (Paris, Arles, Bizerta, Lampedusa) and of voyages (the courtly locales that Rinaldo visits along the Po, such as Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino; the fabulous locations such as Astolfo’s Ethiopia and the moon; the exotic ones such as Greece and Bulgaria where Ruggiero fights with Leone), and those of the ‘belle istorie,’ that is, the inserted, semi-autonomous tales (castles, forts, taverns), predominate in turn. Most importantly, the wood is no longer at the heart of the action, and the characters return there not to entangle themselves once more in the meanderings of error but, like Rinaldo in XLII, to detoxify themselves from the folly of love. It is apparent that some of the criteria of narrative ordering have changed. Departure from the norm of entrelacement becomes more frequent, thanks to the use of unusually long and continuous sequences, and the different plots begin to come together in dense and compact thematic nuclei. These transfer the principle of poetic variety to a single, unifying problematic. The intercalated ‘beautiful stories,’ the paradigmatic exempla, as well as the comments and reflections of the narrator that emerge on the margins of the principal action tend to form an organic whole with it, with the aim of articulating from various and contrasting perspectives a difficult ethical and epistemological subject matter. For now, let a few examples suffice (these are episodes to which I will return later in more detail). The adventures of Rodomonte

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disappointed in love (XXVII, XXVIII, and XXIX) expand into the ambiguous game of praise and condemnation of women, in which the narrator takes part directly. Astolfo’s providential journey takes place without interruption between cantos XXXIII, XXXIV, and XXXV and includes – during the course of the visits of the paladin to hell, the earthly paradise, and the moon – the episode of Senapo and the Harpies and St John’s reflections on the role of poets and the truth of poetry. Rinaldo’s ride down the River Po extends without a break across two very long cantos, XLII and XLIII. It includes the intercalated stories of the castellan who hosts him and of the Mantuan judge, stories that are arranged around the ‘test of the chalice’ and thus function as analogues to Rinaldo’s moral choice. These tales are linked by thematic juxtaposition and unified by the device of the quest, which the poet here employs for greater and more complex theoretical ends. It seems to me that, in fact, something changes in the poem, and it changes beginning at the structural watershed that is located, not by chance, at the poem’s exact geometrical centre and that inspires its title. Some sort of caesura must be placed where the action culminates in an exemplary tragedy. In the shadowy area of Orlando’s madness, the Furioso seems partially to change its nature. If this is indeed the case, it is because the nature of the quest that underlies the poem’s action changes. After this dramatic shift, the various searches in which the other knights are engaged gradually come to an end. This does not result, however, in the conclusion of the quest’s movement and the abandonment of the poem’s principle of narrative construction. Rather, it preserves and continues that principle disguised under other forms, forms that Orlando’s tragedy itself helps to define. 3 In recent years, there has rightly been great insistence on the diachronic stratifications of the three editions of the Furioso.6 Too little attention, however, has been paid to the poem’s internal and, so to speak, horizontal transformations. Clearly, it is not so easy to define what the courtly, chivalric narrative of the first half of the poem tends to become in the second half: indeed, the problem of the nature of the Furioso already embarrassed its earliest sixteenth-century critics. What we can assert is that, as well as recovering the epic model, particularly that of Virgil, Ariosto gives a new emphasis to certain tones and characteristics that the subsequent developments of the form of the novel have made more familiar to the modern reader. Here, for the time being, we can only direct our attention cautiously to certain threads of the story that

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are gradually emphasized. For example, I allude to the emotional, internalized nature of Bradamante’s quest, which, after so much vain pursuit, morphs into an atmosphere of jealous suspension and anxious waiting that grants a new space to the monologue and the ‘epistolary romance or novel’ on the narrative level. I allude, above all, to the increasingly frequent narrative dramatization of the great themes of amorous psychology (widely debated in the courtly treatises of the time) that confers a sort of essayistic quality to considerable parts of the poem. This structural tendency could not have taken place without the simultaneous transformation of the narrative device of the quest, which changes from a material search to a cognitive investigation. The ancient movement of the quête is intellectualized and gradually assumes ethical and epistemological dimensions. Here the goal of ‘acquisition’ is no longer an evasive object but rather a problematic truth. Orlando’s madness and the events it sparks represent the turning point of this metamorphosis. Nevertheless, how can we fail to take into account that this event, central though it is to the Furioso’s narrative economy, is located in a poem that is programmatically built upon the multiplication of actions and therefore entrusts its organic unity to a system of analogical correspondences that is essentially static? Seen in this light, Orlando’s madness becomes the epicentre of an exemplary catastrophe precisely because it is alluded to, anticipated, and recalled by similar events involving other characters though in less extravagant ways and following rhythms that are differently accentuated. The crises of Ruggiero (who reaches the point of considering suicide when he is convinced his beloved is lost to him), of Bradamante (whose jealousy degenerates into mad frenzy), of Rinaldo (who searches for Angelica as madly as Orlando does), and finally of Rodomonte (made a fool of first by the too-fickle Doralice, then by the too-faithful Isabella) carve analogous patterns into the design of the Furioso, but with contours that do not fully coincide. All of these crises assume the forms and the rhythms of the quest and approach in stages a traumatic event that cannot help but involve everyone else, while at the same time it is true that everyone, including the flesh and blood human beings in the real world beyond the poem, in some way participates in Orlando’s madness. The protagonist’s catastrophe is in every sense the central pivot around which the poem turns and the exemplary paradigm of the rhythm with which Ariosto’s plots unfold. It represents the point of convergence for the multiple thematic threads of entrelacement. It is also the

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point of narrative release that confers a bipartite form upon the poem. Entrelacement and a bipartite structure are methods of storytelling familiar to the epic genre and rooted in the medieval tradition. Leaving aside the former (for which I refer the reader to the studies cited in the previous chapter), we must remember that the bipartite scheme of the story is typical of those narrative forms (lives of saints, chansons de geste, courtly romances) that contain two distinct periods of action separated by a catastrophe. This catastrophe could be death, descent into the infernal regions, or the commission of a sin.7 Limiting the examples to the field of epic, Roland’s death in the Chanson de Roland is typical, while at the centre of some of Chrétien’s romances (Erec, Yvain, Lancelot) we find a merely symbolic death of the hero, a moral degradation from which he redeems himself with a series of rehabilitating tests. Like Tristan’s, Lancelot’s madness is one of the models for Orlando’s, but illustrious examples of catabasis come from the classical tradition, above all from the Aeneid, which the Middle Ages rewrote according to a bipartite scheme.8 Clearly these are narrative methods familiar to the tradition of the genre. Unusual in the Furioso is the dynamic tension that arises from these two different ways of organizing the tale. The ‘progressive’ impulse of the narration is partially counterbalanced by a consideration for symmetry and equilibrium. The technique of interweaving compensates for this by controlling the process of expansion/dispersion. It seems to me that the device of the quest responds to this double and divergent drive. On the one hand, it expresses a narrative and thematic coherence based on the principle of analogy (as Carne-Ross says, ‘Its unifying principle is that of analogy: the central thematic action, Orlando’s quest for Angelica, is submitted to the defining pressure of a great many other quests,’ 201). On the other hand, it conditions a structural change with the progressive modification from purely material quête (physical movement in search of a physical object) to a cognitive quête (intellectual movement directed towards exploring a problematic reality). This seems to be an effective means to identify an ordering principle for the varied and complex canvas of the poem. We are not, of course, dealing with a return to the search for a dominant inspirational motif as in idealist criticism, but with a response to a problem persisting through the history of Ariosto criticism that, even after the Crocean period, has seen numerous attempts to define a certain unity in the Furioso on a predominantly structural and formal basis. I believe such unity can be identified in the constancy of the device of the quest, a device that inspires

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the logic of the construction as a whole, provided that one recognizes the full and variegated range of its textual manifestations. 4 At the beginning of the narrative, the knights’ search is almost exclusively a material one and the predominant backdrop is that of the wood of ‘error,’ an unmapped space on which the casual, epiphanic appearance of an object of desire (a woman, armour, a horse) shapes the fickle trajectories of the quest.9 But it is not the only backdrop: in reality, all the crucial places of the poem are crossed by one or more threads of quest, in an arc that goes from the first Arthurian settings to the allegorical world of the moon. It is this metaphysical backdrop that represents the ideal angle of approach to the progressive intellectual abstraction that the quest undergoes. The moon is also the subject of a search, the entirely distinctive one carried out by Astolfo according to divine will. Before the searcher’s curious eyes is an inventory of objects (bladders, hooks, snares, locusts, bird lures, etc.) into which the substance of a dense allegorical intention has been deposited. These objects are abstractions materialized into things, and thus they can be acquired or lost, just as in the wood. Most importantly, this depository of lost things contains Orlando’s wits, which have become the object of a search like any other constitutive part of his identity as a knight, just like the pieces of armour that he scatters about precisely in the wood in the very moment when he falls into madness. Nevertheless, the moon is not simply the point of arrival for a quest, but a sort of summa or microcosm of the quest, since the object of Ariosto’s process of reflection is a survey of different human undertakings catalogued under the label of universal lunacy. The loss of functionality of these objects demonstrates the provisory nature of human goals and the vanity of pursuing them. Thus, from the lunar perspective, the whirling movements of the wood, differentiated and justified down here by the changeable objects of desire, are flattened into the list of a ‘lay vanitas vanitatum’10 made topical by the illustrious examples of Horace and Erasmus. As for human reason: Altri in amar lo perde, altri in onori, altri in cercar, scorrendo il mar, ricchezze; altri ne le speranze de’ signori, altri dietro alle magiche sciocchezze;

The Quest altri in gemme, altri in opre di pittori, et altri in altro che più d’altro aprezze ...

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(XXXIV, 85)

Some lose it for love, some for honours, some in seeking riches by scouring over the seas, some in their hopes from rulers, some over the follies of magic, some in gems, some in the works of painters, and some in something else they value more than some other thing ...

The poet’s search, carried out through Astolfo, is entirely encompassed by the object it analyses, a quête for all the various human quêtes. The changed nature of the object of the search corresponds to a different complexity of the quest. Ending happily with the last and most important acquisition, reason, this quest turns back and re-examines itself. Thus the movement of progressive transformation that definitively endowed the quest with the pure nature of intellectual investigation and cognitive acquisition culminates in the exploration of the lunar world. The ancient model of the quête has not disappeared but has lent its form to something different. Thanks to the allegorical metamorphosis of abstract values into perceptible, palpable objects that can be appropriated, Astolfo’s voyage has been transformed into a journey of understanding, into a cultural experience that subjects the foundations of humanist knowledge to critical investigation. 5 The ideal link between the worlds of the wood and of the moon is the place that is central in every sense to the Furioso, the locus amoenus that serves as the conclusive stopping place for Orlando’s quest and as the theatre of his madness. This is the episode in which the incipient transformation of the nature of the quest, and the intertwining of its material and intellectual dimensions, is clearly evident for the first time. Orlando’s search does not initially differ from any of the others in pursuit of women or horses or arms. His official entry into the ‘amorosa inchiesta’ between the end of October and the beginning of November occurs amid an anguished dream of loss: La notte Orlando alle noiose piume del veloce pensier fa parte assai. Or quinci or quindi il volta, or lo rassume tutto in un loco, e non l’afferma mai: qual d’acqua chiara il tremolante lume,

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The Quest for Epic dal sol percossa o da’ notturni rai, per gli ampli tetti va con lungo salto a destra et a sinistra, e basso et alto.

(VIII, 71)

In the night Orlando shares with the plaguing feathers much of his swift thought. Now to this side now to that he turns it, now brings it all together in one spot, and never keeps it still, just as the trembling light from clear water struck by the sun or the rays of the moon goes over the wide ceilings, with long leaps to right and left and low and high.

The dream prompts his decision to abandon the Christian camp to explore all of Europe in search of Angelica: Quivi il tutto cercò, dove dimora fece tre giorni, e non per altro effetto; poi dentro alle cittadi e a’ borghi fuora non spiò sol per Francia e suo distretto, ma per Uvernia e per Guascogna ancora rivide sin all’ultimo borghetto; e cercò da Provenza alla Bretagna, e dai Picardi ai termini di Spagna.

(XI, 6)

He sought everywhere in that place, where he remained for three days, without any result. Then in the cities and in the suburbs outside, he searched not merely in France and her vicinity but he looked in Auvergne and also in Gascony to the farthest hamlet, and he hunted from Provence to Brittany and from the Picards to the bounds of Spain.

In the two stanzas quoted the ‘circular motion of the Quest’ takes shape: ‘or quinci or quindi ... a destra et a sinistra ... e basso et alto ... il tutto cercò ... spiò.’11 This motion assumes the dominant role of leitmotif of our theme and is an unequivocal indication of its presence, even when the presence is disguised. With ‘circular motion,’ Carne-Ross has designated the stylistic procedure through which the theme of the quest in the Furioso is consistently manifested.12 This procedure indicates a precise spatial dynamic that, taking the form of fruitless and repetitive action, expresses the drama of a thwarted search and its frustrating emptiness. Far from seeming idle in the economy of the narration, this movement constitutes its emblematic figure. ‘Circular motion’ effec-

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tively describes the wanderings of the knights errant caught in the confusion of the ‘shady mazes’ in which they act (XIII, 42). The poem’s elevation of the vain and illusory search to emblematic status takes place in the episode of Atlante’s palace, one of the stops along Orlando’s way.13 The action described is still the material search for an object of desire, but it is complicated by the illusory confusion of phantasms and reality, which creates a cognitive problem. As far as the subject of desire is concerned, the counterpart to the evanescence of the object pursued, reduced to a pure simulacrum within the palace, is the alienated identity of the seekers, who can only recognize each other outside the labyrinth (XII, 31). Here the problems of identity and truth come to the foreground, as well as the means of recognizing, grasping, and possessing them – ‘circular motion’ insistently pervades Ariosto’s discourse. The system highlighted by Carne-Ross is evident in each of the endeavours that see Orlando and Ruggiero (XII), Bradamante (XIII), and Astolfo (XXII) struggle one after the other with the palace’s deceptions: the technical verb of the quest, cercare (to search [XII, 9; 12; 13; 19; 26; 29]); the circular and iterative nature of the movement, una et un’altra volta (once and again [XII, 16]), gli occhi aggira (turns his eyes ... to this side and to that [XII, 18]), in strano intrico avolti (wrapped up in strange confusion [XII, 25]); the adverbs of place that show the blind groping of the attempts, di qua, di là, di su, di giù (here and there, up and down [XII, 9; 10; 18; 29; XIII, 79; XXII, 15]). This formula is widespread in chivalric literature,14 but Ariosto takes it up again and readapts it to express the drama of the cognitive process and to inscribe upon it his modern dialectic of reason and madness: ‘It is like a great forest, where of necessity the way must deceive him who goes there; one up, one down, one here, one there goes astray.’15 It seems clear that the stanza in the lunar sequence dedicated to the description of human folly, with its anaphoric reiteration (‘Altri in amar ... altri in onori ... altri ... in cercar ricchezze ...’)16 is simply a variant of the ‘chi qua ... chi là’ that links the forms of the quest to the forms of madness and lends the most authentic meaning to the vain and inconclusive movements of error.17 As a matter of fact, in the medieval model of the quête, the physical and spiritual natures of ‘error’ had converged over time, something that was perhaps already discernible in Dante’s condemnation of Paolo and Francesca. It was there, one might argue, that Ariosto (who made such good use of Dante and his courtly formulas) may have read an infernal punishment that was also formal – a

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punishment fitting the crime – in the whirlwind that ‘di qua, di là, di su, di giù li mena’ (hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them [Inferno V, 43]), a contrappasso or just retribution that was formal as well as semantic.18 Ariosto’s theme of madness admirably binds together the principle of errancy that governs the physical quête of the knights and the sometimes tragic outcomes of error on an intellectual level. From the first canto on, this interlacing links the vain explorations in the wood to the errors of conceptual judgment: ‘Lo, how often human judgment errs!’19 It will be Tasso’s task to complete the semantic parabola of this technical term, which Ariosto tries out in the range of its many meanings. In the Liberata the original spatial sphere of chivalric adventure is knowingly resolved into the moral and ideological one of sinful deviance. The ‘errant knights’ become the ‘errant companions’ who oppose their individualistic objectives of glory and love to the collective mission embodied by Goffredo’s pietas. But let us return to Orlando. The stages that lead the paladin to the loss of his reason are measured by the skilfully modulated strokes of the leitmotif that marks the physical and intellectual movements of the quest. The compulsion to follow to the end a path of self-detrimental acquisition of truth triumphs gradually over the resistance of a desperate will to self-deception: Va col pensier cercando in mille modi non creder quel ch’al suo dispetto crede ...

(XXIII, 103)

With his imagination he keeps searching in a thousand ways to avoid what he believes in spite of himself ... Tre volte e quattro e sei lesse lo scritto quello infelice, e pur cercando invano che non vi fosse quel che v’era scritto ...

(XXIII, 111)

Three times and four and six that unhappy man read the writing, and all the time he was trying in vain to find that what was written there was not there ...

The meaning of the search has changed; the goal is no longer to end a protracted absence but to exorcize a presence that materializes itself in a peremptory and cruel manner. There remains the modal expression of repetitive and frustrated groping: in mille modi and tre volte e quattro e sei. In the second stanza cited, the intellectual inquiry imitates with

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mathematical precision the material methods of searching that Orlando had employed within Atlante’s palace: ‘Orlando, when he had sought through all the strange palace four times and six ...’ 20 Now condemned to an increasingly dramatic entanglement in the suffocating coils of circular motion, he relives the tragic parody of the quest in his agitated dream: sospira e geme, e va con spesse ruote di qua di là tutto cercando il letto ...

(XXIII, 122)

He sighs and groans and, often tossing on the bed, keeps trying this spot and that all over it ...

What Orlando ultimately finds is not the woman he sought but rather the proof of his definitive loss of her. The objects that mark the approach to his goal (the carved names on the trees and the lines inscribed by Medoro on the walls of the grotto, the bracelet Angelica gave to the shepherd) are no longer simple material realities but the sign of something else, the clues to a painful certainty for Orlando. The conclusion of his quest is more a cognitive acquisition than a material discovery. It is a truth tragically possessed rather than an object happily conquered. With Orlando’s catastrophe, the ancient movement of the quête ends with the indication of a new set of complex objectives. A new type of quest to pass on to others is initiated. This is a quest that does not reject the material movements and the attitudes of the chivalric quête but directs them towards the possession of cognitive truths.21 6 Angelica’s betrayal is more than the main event of Orlando’s private tragedy; it also marks an important stage in the development of the querelle des femmes that represents one of the privileged threads of Ariosto’s thought. Her elusive and fickle behaviour always has a paradigmatic value as an exemplum for the narrator. It also provides him with the spark to rekindle the debate on the theme of female fidelity. While the Lady is the most coveted object for most of the characters, her mysterious nature constitutes a no less constant object of ‘quest’ for the poet. In the second part of the Furioso the problem of Woman is increasingly made the subject of discussion in relation to two important episodes of the narrative, Rodomonte’s ‘humiliation’ (XXVII–XXVIII) and Rinaldo’s ‘test of the chalice’ (XLII–XLIII). The way in which Ariosto’s reasoning develops is symptomatic of the way the Furioso takes shape through the forms and movements of the quest.

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We should analyse these scenes closely. Doralice’s choice of Mandricardo over Rodomonte (XXVII, 107) inspires a series of interconnected narrative sequences that make up a romance nucleus: Rodomonte, betrayed by his lady and angry with his king, abandons the pagan camp (stanzas 107–11), launching an invective against women in general that the poet condemns (116–24). He stops at a tavern in Arles, where the publican recounts the misogynist story of Astolfo and Jocondo to cheer him up (XXVIII, 4–74). An old customer intervenes to contradict the moral of the story and defend women and their fidelity (stanzas 76–83). Rodomonte threatens him, but shortly afterwards Isabella’s heroic martyrdom directly confirms the old man’s words, when she prefers to die in the name of her beloved Zerbino rather than cede to Rodomonte’s violence (XXIX, 8–25). The suicide Isabella is raised up to heaven by God and extolled by the poet (stanzas 26–9). Immediately afterwards Angelica also leaves the scene with an undignified fall from her horse (stanzas 61–6). The poet does not hide his delight (stanzas 73–4), but then at once he makes amends for having let himself go in a generalized and indiscriminate attack on women (XXX, 1–4). The characters on stage may change, but the subject of the drama – sometimes comic, sometimes tragic – is always the same, revolving around the dialectic of approval or condemnation of women. Confronted with the accusations of infidelity that the African king carelessly extends to women in general, the narrator comments in a way that distances him from Rodomonte: ‘and certainly he departed from reason, because for one or two bad ones you find, it must be believed a hundred are good.’22 Yet it is the malicious formulation of Ariosto's concession to women that triggers the desire to subject such opinion to the close examination of experience, in accordance with an experimental method increasingly practised in the poem.23 It is at this point that the device of the quest, brusquely changing register, captures even the narrator in its web: Se ben di quante io n’abbia fin qui amate, non n’abbia mai trovata una fedele, perfide tutte io non vo’ dir né ingrate, ma darne colpa al mio destin crudele. Molte or ne sono, e più già ne son state, che non dan causa ad uom che si querele; ma mia fortuna vuol che s’una ria ne sia tra cento, io di lei preda sia. Pur vo’ tanto cercar prima ch’io mora,

The Quest anzi prima che ’l crin più mi s’imbianchi, che forse dirò un dì, che per me ancora alcuna sia che di sua fé non manchi. Se questo avvien (che di speranza fuora io non ne son), non fia mai ch’io mi stanchi di farla, a mia possanza, gloriosa con lingua e con inchiostro, e in verso e in prosa.

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(XXVII, 123–4)

If indeed of all those I have loved until now, I have never found one faithful, I do not intend to call them all treacherous and ungrateful, but to lay the blame for it on my cruel fate. There are now many of them and there have been more in the past who give a man no cause to complain; but my fortune decrees that if one of them is bad among a hundred, I shall be her prey. Yet I wish to seek so much before I die, rather before my hair grows whiter, that perhaps I shall one day say that for me too there is someone who is not wanting in fidelity. If this happens (and I am not beyond hope of it), I shall never be tired of making her famous as much as I can with tongue and with ink, both in verse and in prose.

The poet’s desire to place himself within the same realm as his characters is even more evident if we consider that stanza 124 is an addition to the third edition and that its insertion seems to stem from an attempt to complete a tried and tested narrative device. From this moment on, we may therefore talk with full justification of an investigatory quest about women carried out by Ariosto. This quest, which develops by means of juxtaposing contradictory positions, is a clear example of contamination between the model of modern treatises and the more archaic diegetic model of the quest (analysing as searching; oscillating over a definitive judgment as wandering here and there, moving from praise to condemnation; coming to the truth as finding).24 As we know, the culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries privileged this manner of debate, developing it in the typical forms of the humanist dialogue, where the confrontation of voices in dialectical contrast dramatizes a search for truth understood as an exercise of overcoming and of synthesis.25 In this way, the narrator’s investigative itinerary is assimilated to the physical voyage of the two seekers of female fidelity, Astolfo and Jocondo, in the tale that the publican of Arles tells the desperate Rodomonte to console him. The voyage is undertaken in order to test the spousal infidelity in others that they sadly discovered within their

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own domestic walls: ‘“Let us leave these ungrateful women” (said Jocondo) “and see if the others are as easy.”’26 Their voyage assumes the canonical sequences of the investigatory quest:27 the dialectic searching/finding; experimenting on an international scale (‘Travestiti cercaro Italia, Francia, / le terre de’ Fiamminghi e de l’Inglesi’);28 and verifying in the field an opinion formulated before leaving (‘E quante ne vedean di bella guancia, / trovavan tutte ai prieghi lor cortesi’).29 The last act of this special investigation confirms the experimental data with the force of paradox: the sexual unscrupulousness of Fiammetta (who, not content to lie with the two men who ought to satisfy by turn her feminine inconstancy, secretly welcomes a third man into the bed) demonstrates that in Ariosto’s universe the possibilities of the real always exhaust themselves one step beyond every possible human conjecture. Astolfo and Jocondo are convinced of the congenital fickleness of women, but they still delude themselves that they can trick them – with their ingenious solution of amicably sharing the girl between them so that ‘a duo saria fedele’ (she would be more faithful to two [XXVIII, 51]) – within a fixed norm of alternation, thus still within an aprioristic system of rules. The behaviour of Fiammetta – a genuine monstrum in the moral order, forming a pair with the physical monstrum of the dwarf who disports himself with the queen, Astolfo’s wife – gives the lie to even the last residue of a masculinist utopia and carries the motif that underlies the whole story to its extreme conclusion (‘contra quel che credea, gli fu risposto’;30 ‘e vede quel che duro / a creder fora a chi l’udisse dire.’) 31 It is a conclusion that distantly recalls the analogous situations of ‘overturned expectations’ in the military and chivalric register: ‘The king of the Saracens found at this place everything contrary to his expectations’;32 and ‘Oh, of how many battles does the end come out unlike what was believed beforehand!’33 7 The story of the chalice also constitutes the central nucleus of a small romance sequence framed by Rinaldo’s voyage.34 Around the principal action in which he is the protagonist, two exemplary tales unfold: the autobiographical tale of the Padanian host (XLIII, 9–46) and that of the helmsman who takes Rinaldo by boat along the Po concerning the judge Anselmo (XLIII, 72–143). This embryonic novel also seems to be based on the building principle of the exempla that provide the quest with a pluralistic range of voices and positions in dialectic contrast with one another. The typical narrative dramatization of a cultural contro-

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versy constructed with attacks and defences, confirmations and denials, here is based on the theme of the fidelity/infidelity of wives. Rinaldo’s refusal to drink from the chalice to test his faith in Clarice’s conjugal fidelity illustrates a distinctly anomalous behaviour. It is inspired by a mentality that is by now far from traditional chivalric ideology but that the Arthurian matrix of the episode nevertheless recalls.35 Rinaldo in fact declines the test, refusing to ‘venire al paragone’ (make the trial [XLIII, 65]). This rejection appears even more strident since the language is distinctly chivalric, where the test (prova) and the comparison (paragone) serve to put the reality of an opinion, a boast, or a reputation to the test of the facts. It is the same language used by the Padanian host, who chooses to ‘provare al paragone’ (prove by test [XLIII, 27]) his wife’s fidelity, after having scrupulously gone through all the canonical stages of investigation: leaving home, returning incognito, tempting his spouse, and putting her to the test. To his own detriment, the host's quest results in the acquisition of knowledge, which he interprets as a challenge to destiny and follows with the obstinacy of a tragic vocation: ‘si procacciò la sua ruina’ (he ... brought on himself his ruin [XLIII, 70]).36 The fruit is no less bitter when the search takes place on the level of intellectual assessment rather than on that of material appropriation. ‘And you showed little foresight in looking for what you would have preferred not to find,’37 comments Rinaldo. This rule of behaviour might well be applied retrospectively to many of the imprudent investigations that take place in the wood. Rinaldo’s choice thus creates a surprising dissonance between the heroic model of the test, the predestined and unavoidable culmination of the chivalric quest, and the self-protective morality of a prudence that refuses the ethics of the quest in its decisive and qualifying act. His pragmatic attitude, inspired by a utilitarian cost-benefit calculation (‘potria poco giovar e nuocer molto’ [I should be able to do little good and much harm], XLIII, 7]), is consistent with the tolerant attitude of Astolfo and Jocondo and the compromise adopted by the unfaithful judge and his faithless wife. It seems more correct historically to insert this attitude into an Erasmian perspective that, saving a place for life-giving illusions, distinguishes a somehow ‘wise madness’ (a ‘giocondo errore,’ a sort of beneficial ‘mental alienation’) from the ‘fury’ of unleashed passions that brings unhappiness and ruin to both the host and the judge.38 We also remember that Rinaldo earlier (in a decidedly Arthurian world) refused to weigh in on the guilt or innocence of the King of Scotland’s daughter Ginevra, in the name of a modern wisdom and a distinctively

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sixteenth-century rationality: ‘Whether it is true or false that Ginevra has taken her lover to her, I pay no attention to that.’39 The opposite of the wisdom that understands the fragile equilibrium of reason is the obstinate ‘will to know’ that challenges the harsh answers of destiny, the bitter fruit of a truth demanded at any cost. This theme characterizes the second novella even more than the first. It is another negative example that shows the value of Rinaldo’s prudent choice not to ‘cercare oltre alla meta’ (seek beyond the bounds [XLIII, 45]). The judge Anselmo stubbornly goes in search of something that almost makes him ‘uscir di se stesso’ (go out of his mind [XLIII, 121]), meditating his own death and plotting his wife’s. Knowing from divination that his wife will have betrayed him by the time he returns home, the judge hounds his wife's nurse with a professional zeal that enriches his investigation with police-style inquisitorial methods but that also frames his search within the outlines of circular motion: Con larghi giri circondando prova or qua or là di ritrovar la traccia; e da principio nulla ne ritrova, con ogni diligenza che ne faccia ...

(XLIII, 119)40

Moving in large circles, he tries to find the track now here and now there, and at the beginning he finds nothing, use all the diligence he may ...

Certainly, with this judicial investigatory quest we have arrived at the outer limits of the parabola of the theme’s transformation. I believe it is nonetheless important to note that, while the tools of the trade change in the transition from a knight errant on his quête to a bourgeois judge committed to his investigation, the methods of acquiring truth still do not differ from the methods of possessing an object. In one case at least, the integration of these two elements becomes the pretext for the narrator’s ironic game. He amuses himself in carrying out subtle changes of register, managing to ‘intellectualize’ the most malicious erotic quête of the poem, the story of Fiordispina. Having fallen in love with Bradamante, whom she has mistaken for a man and welcomed into her bed, the young daughter of the King of Spain bitterly discovers that she has conceived a desire impossible to satisfy. She then ingenuously clings to the dream of a miraculous transformation, repeatedly exploring her partner’s body:

The Quest Si desta; e nel destar mette la mano, e ritrova pur sempre il sogno vano.

57

(XXV, 43)

She awakes, and as she awakes, stretches out her hand and finds her dream still always deceptive.

Her condition and her gestures rigorously follow the rules of circular motion and echo those of Olimpia when she awakens on the desert island and discovers another cruel absence (X, 20–1). When Bradamante’s male twin, Ricciardetto, secretly takes her place, the miracle beseeched with ‘prieghi’ (prayers) and ‘voti’ (vows) during Fiordispina’s nocturnal hallucinations finds a living and breathing confirmation as Fiordispina ‘touches and sees that of which she had so great desire.’41 The object for which the maiden longs, to which the poet alludes only periphrastically each time, after so many ambages, ultimately receives its most proper definition in the new frame of the quest when Fiordispina, invited by Ricciardetto to check the reality of the filled gap, ‘with her own hand ... [found] out the obvious truth.’42 8 The ambages of the knights errant of old were chained to the material reality of a search through physical space and an acquisition of material objects. Ariosto took from these an instrument of experimental investigation with which he could explore the cognitive crisis of his time. He understood this in Erasmian terms as the supreme challenge of reason venturing into the labyrinths of error, a risky compromise with the alterity of madness. Just like Angelica herself, the truth for which everyone searches cannot be possessed, or, once it has been possessed, reveals itself to be the opposite of what one believed it to be. Sometimes it would be better not to look for it at all, with the wise prudence of those who, like Rinaldo, want to save their own illusions as necessary for survival. Linguistic mediation plays a fundamental role in this double register, both material and cognitive, because the chivalric model continues to provide the expressive codes even in those places where the referents have radically changed. The effect of estrangement is all the more strident, the effect of anachronism all the more ironic, the more Ariosto’s incessant work of ‘translation’ struggles to ensure an admirable continuity for the narrative. The case of the investigatory quest, analysed as an exemplary paradigm of this method, demonstrates how the expressive subtlety of Ariosto’s language allows him to operate unabashedly on both the narra-

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tive level of the search for Angelica and that of the search for the truth about the nature of women. It is through this linguistic sensibility that Ariosto recognizes the nature of the chivalric attitude as perpetual repetition and vain reiteration.43 This intuition is set off and emphasized through the ironic exploitation of the formula of circular motion. I believe that it is always the case in the Furioso that an ironic use does not in the least exclude a serious one. For this reason, it is not contradictory that the old model lends itself to the narrative dramatization of a modern cognitive act. In the same way, circular motion ceases to be a dull and repetitive action and is instead charged with new suspense and pathos, restoring the force of a hard-won and hesitant movement closer to the truth. The irony poured upon the vanity of error complements a strengthening of dramatic intensity. This in turn ennobles the old knights and turns them into characters with a tragic dignity. Counterpoised to Rinaldo’s wise renunciation, Orlando’s punctilious investigations in the wood and Anselmo’s domestic search are coloured by a vaguely Oedipal hubris, recognizable in the way the two characters race towards the tragic appointment with their destinies in compulsory stages. It is no coincidence that the image of Adam’s transgression (‘che tal certezza ha Dio più proibita, / ch’al primo padre l’arbor de la vita’)44 and, more faintly, that of Dante’s Ulysses (‘il mio voler cercare oltre alla meta / che la donna sua cercar si deve’)45 gleam in the background.46 But the roots of this self-detrimental quest are buried in that more archaic area of the text: the wood, realm of the material search. It is here that Ferrau, who has lost his helmet in the river and is painstakingly searching for it, finds it, but at the same moment finds the one he least desires to meet: the ghost of the knight from whom he disloyally took it (cf I, 25–8). It is here where Zerbino, committed to his despairing search for Isabella, ends up with the ‘odioso acquisto’ (hateful acquisition [XX, 134]) of Gabrina, his beloved’s perfidious jailer, whom he must nonetheless defend in obedience to the chivalric laws. It truly seems that a common law governs such characters and situations, according to which what is hated and feared is fatally inscribed in the destiny of each of the seekers. A type of Dantean contrappasso, or just retribution, whose theological justifications have been lost strikes them. In the Furioso, the dialectic of acquisition and loss, complementary to that of searching and finding, not only regulates pursuit in the wood but extends itself to the level of more abstract functions, outside the wood and beyond the purely material dimension: ‘It would be to stake a thousand

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against one in gambling, where much can be lost and little gained,’47 comments Rinaldo faced with his dilemma [XLIII, 66]).48 Indeed, by means of the more general question placed right at the very centre of the Furioso (‘e quale è di pazzia segno più espresso / che, per altri voler, perder se stesso?’),49 Ariosto seems to invoke an ideal of equilibrium. Continually suspended dangerously at the precipice, this ideal becomes the golden rule of an age dominated, in its most representative writings, by an aspiration to stable and definitive acquisitions. In Castiglione we see a preoccupation with acquiring or losing the favour of the prince and of women alike.50 In Machiavelli we see the problem of constructing and maintaining an efficient power structure.51 Ariosto, an eminently concrete and visual poet, transformed this common search for a kind of possession that might not be merely temporary enjoyment, for permanent gain that is not subject to being turned to the owner’s harm, into the dialectics of acquisition and loss of the material objects sought by the knights. With equal clarity, he polarized the abstract conceptual relationship of reason and madness into two physical spaces, moon and earth, each the opposite side of the other, in order to guarantee a system of proportional correspondences. The imbalance between wisdom and folly proves out in the final accounting of the quest, according to which, in the field of terrestrial actions, one always loses more than one finds. It was neither coincidence nor his Albertian source, the Somnium, but rather a stringent internal logic that made Ariosto imagine the moon as the lowest heaven ‘che sempre acquista / del perder nostro’ (which ever gains from our loss [XLIV, 25]).

3 Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso

1 Many readers have emphasized the narrative self-consciousness that strongly marks Ariosto’s writing. His awareness of the Furioso as a literary fiction enables him to exploit the function of the metalinguistic norms of narrative design. While these various normative procedures follow different textual strategies, they are certainly linked to the narrator’s decisive entrance into the field of representation. This occurs at the same moment that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century development of the romance form coincides with the self-conscious and learned reprise of popular epic and its literary topoi. Formal and technical questions related to ways of telling assume central importance in Ariosto’s great synthesis. Through these questions, the narrating ‘I’ is invited to come to terms with the rhetoric of the chivalric poet whose literary formulas authenticate the story and the fiction of orality. Moreover, the narrator is required to reflect on the structural foundations of the romance code (such as entrelacement, digression, suspense, and deferral). The tools and conventions inherited from chivalric literature converge in a sort of ‘anatomy of the romance.’ This scrutiny of a genre, which Aristotelian supporters of epic will later condemn for precisely this quality that modern formalists would call the ‘unveiling of the process,’ constitutes the uniqueness of Ariosto’s experimentation.1 Yet reflecting critically on the single genre of the chivalric romance inevitably implies a questioning of its whole expressive system, the literary institution of its specific cognitive values. This is particularly so if, as in Ariosto’s case, the successor focuses his erudite irony on the ‘marvellous’ of the chivalric tales, examining the tradition as a modern mythology. In my view, to limit Ariosto’s work to a bookish exploration of the library of an intertextual Babel would be reductive, however brilliantly

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executed. Ariosto’s recognition of all the possible forms of ‘error’ – starting with the errors of romance, predicated as the specific form of narrative model2 – collides with the nature of literature and the conditions of its legitimation. Ariosto openly directs ironies on truth and fiction against the tradition of the romance marvellous (and its auctor, Turpin) and, more allusively, against the claims to truth of the epic (and its auctores, Homer and Virgil). This ironic disposition reveals its most authentically ideological matrices when it is carried to its paradoxical extreme in St John the Evangelist’s ‘lunar’ discourse on the errors of poets (XXXV, 25–8). The episode on the moon represents the most radical questioning of literary truth in Ariosto’s poem. It is therefore a matter of seeing whether the phenomena of narrative self-consciousness do not also constitute the scattered fragments of an epistemological apparatus that Ariosto transforms into an exploration of the relationship between literature and reality, mobilizing a series of concepts (truth, fiction, verisimilitude, the marvellous) that in a few generations will become the object of theoretical speculation and heated polemical debate. The hypothesis of a close connection between these phenomena and vaster conceptual horizons would be all the more convincing should it lead to the implicit (and certainly not systematic) reconstruction of a literary theory and ars poetica that Ariosto never officially popularized. Durling’s seminal study on the figure of Ariosto’s narrator defined the rhetorical poses assumed by the narrator. But there remains the task of illuminating the equally interesting and many-sided figure of the reader, the narrator’s natural complement. In the text, the reader is also on stage as a result of the pretended act of public recitation by the chivalric poet. I mean here not only the primary referent of the average courtly public whom the narrator frequently addresses in moments of particular communicative tension, willingly assuming an attitude of good-natured tutelage towards it. Nor do I mean only the socially and culturally selected public that greets the conclusion of his efforts in the last canto and that constitutes the horizon of expectations of the work in Ariosto’s mind. Rather, the figure of the reader may be understood as a function included in the text as the alter ego and accomplice of a narrator who doubles himself by willingly assuming the role and simulating the reactions of this reader. The latter emerges in a particularly significant way in those passages in the text where Ariosto identifies himself as a reader of the tradition, which he takes as a source, whether a fictive source such as that embodied by Turpin, or one quite real but often

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hidden, as in the case of Boiardo. One thing is certain: the presumed source, by freeing the narrator from direct responsibility for inventing his material, gives him an intermediary status between the auctor upon whom he depends and the public he addresses. This is a public whose cultural prerogatives and mental and psychological attitudes he makes his own, since he is the first to propose himself as the beneficiary of a tradition that he revisits with the syncretistic mentality of the epigone. The narrator’s awareness of literature as fictio, the intertextual weft of echoes, memories, and quotations around which he constructs the allusive depth of his characters, as well as the formal stratification of his discourse, indirectly focus the attention of the poem’s readers on the question of its reality – on its plausibility. If it is true that behind that rich metalinguistic tool we can discern the outlines of a cognitive system, then we ought to regard Ariosto’s irony not simply as a way to capture the goodwill of his reader-accomplice but rather as an attempt to question the very modalities of reading by both writer and reader. In this chapter I propose to investigate the connection between truth and writing in the Furioso, starting from the hypothesis that it is precisely the strong link between the cognitive apparatus and the structural order of the work that explains Ariosto’s interest, an interest that is hardly gratuitous, in the analysis of narrative procedures. 2 In the beginning was Turpin. The name of the legendary founding father of chivalric epic recurs frequently in Ariosto’s verse, as do the other chivalric topoi that are part of the tradition being rewritten in his poem. From what little we know, the historical Turpin was Archbishop of Rheims and died between 789 and 794. He appears in the Chanson de Roland as a valiant warrior and dies in the rout of Roncesvaux. He was long recognized as the author of the so-called Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi (better known as the Chronique du pseudo-Turpin), now believed to have been compiled by one or more authors towards the middle of the twelfth century.3 He recurs throughout the epic tradition in its various historical and geographical branches as guarantor of the truth of the facts narrated, since he was first a participant and then the chronicler of the Christian wars against the Arab conquerors of Spain. From the beginning this quality of the truthful witness, which will become the object of joking irony in the later period of the genre, is one of the distinctive characteristics of the French works (unlike the Breton ones, which are characterized by fantastic unreality).4 The poet Jean Bodel, active in northern France between the twelfth and thir-

Turpin’s Role 63

teenth centuries, provides an account, already a commonplace in its own way, of the contrast between the two cycles, as understood by his contemporaries. The discriminating criterion here is historical truth: Le conte de Bretaigne s’il sont vain et plaisant cil de France sont voir chascun jour aparant.5

For the audience of the chanson de geste, as Hans Robert Jauss reminds us, historicity did not have the modern meaning of philological fact checking.6 Rather, all events legitimated by a tradition were considered historical. The narrator lays claim to the authenticity of what he recounts simply by referring to its source, which provides decisive proof that the material is respectably old and that the events are founded on real occurrences, all subject to reinterpretation. Quoting Turpin, that initial auctor, thus becomes an obligation for any poet who cares about the meaning of truth in his tale. It also becomes the seal of the historical reliability of the narrated events. In comparison with the truth of the chanson – which is identified with the historical tradition itself, linked to the collective memory of known events – the material of the Arthurian romance appears ‘vain’ and ‘pleasurable’ at the same time, since the romance’s only obligation is to a public wanting amusement rather than historical authenticity.7 In Italian popular epic, simply quoting Turpin (as was the case with any source, real or fictitious) was enough to support veracity. Compare the fifteenth-century work Altobello: ‘Turpino lo scrive che già vide quello’ (Turpin, who saw it, writes it down). This gesture had already become conventional. It was a distant memory of a real process that claimed to go back to the old French gestes, but that in fact went back to their vernacular translations in prose and the Franco-Veneto poems that first document the popularity of chivalric stories on the Italian peninsula.8 This sort of expression crystallized into a formula,9 which was integrated into the repertory of chivalric rhetoric from the end of the fourteenth century onwards. The formula appears increasingly in the fifteenth century in the extraordinary flowering of chivalric epic in vernacular octave stanzas, in the poems known as cantari. The ‘witness function,’ as Maria Cristina Cabani calls it,10 progressively stripped of true semantic importance, did not particularly contradict the tendency towards the hyperbolic marvellous that characterizes the cantari, and it would sometimes even be reduced to a simple metrical stop-gap.11 On the contrary, the source began to be used as a claim of authenticity,

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especially when the narrative seemed completely improbable. The educated heirs of the tradition followed this practice to varying degrees. Even if some doubt marred the fiduciary relationship between the creator of one of these vernacular epics and his auctor, the former would not hesitate to delegate to the latter the responsibility for the facts he faithfully reported. In any case, we are far from a critical approach to sources: philological scruples were not a part of the cultural baggage of the artists who created the cantari. Occasionally they make hypothetical propositions that allow the narrator to give greater credit to his own tale, rather than suggesting reservations about the truth expressed by the source: ‘se la storia non mente’ (if history does not lie [Spagna XXXI, 23]); ‘se Torpin non erra’ (if Turpin is not wrong [Ancroia II, 143]). Along with the predominantly parasitical nature of the formula, there remains the fundamental assumption that the truth of the tale ‘is essentially based on the possibility of linking the facts narrated to events that are already known, or rather already present in the collective memory, with a process of identification between “known” (already heard of) and “true” (having really happened). In practice an author of one of the popular vernacular epics is the defender of historical truth only inasmuch as it is traditional truth, and it is this act of total adhesion that guarantees him the necessary authority with his public.’12 3 The reduction of authenticating expressions to rhetorical commonplaces – already a feature of fifteenth-century poems such as the Spagna, the Rinaldo, or the Cantare d’Orlando – is the fundamental premise for the new and parodic meanings given to those expressions by the educated heirs of the chivalric tradition between the end of the quattrocento and the beginning of the cinquecento. The ironic reappropriation of Turpin’s credibility is the result of a self-conscious reprise after a break in the natural continuity of the genre. When a story is thought of as a work of fiction, the witness who guarantees its historical truth becomes part of the fiction itself; he is no longer outside the tale to legitimate it but within it, playing his part.13 Luigi Pulci is the first to quote Turpin as the ironic ‘truthful’ source of his narrative. Boiardo and his continuers follow the practice in a more systematic way, as does Cieco, the author of the Mambriano. A brief examination of Turpin’s presence in the works of Ariosto’s predecessors shows that on the level of invention (and this is not news), Ariosto is not very innovative.14 His originality must be sought elsewhere. In rarer cases in the Morgante, citations of Turpin as a witness simply

Turpin’s Role 65

repeat traditional modules taken from two vernacular epics, the Orlando and the Rotta di Roncisvalle. A hemistich such as ‘se Turpino non mente’ (if Turpin does not lie) is still balanced between an attitude of malicious caution (thus semantically important) and pure metrical passivity (Morgante XI, 38, and XII, 43]). The references to Turpin as auctor occur more frequently in the second poem, which concerns the episode of Roncesvaux effectively narrated in the Chronique. They provide an opportunity for comments from the narrator, who dwells with particular delight on questions relating to his real or presumed sources, as if imitating the philological habit of the Florentine humanists. In the Morgante XXVII, 103, the shadow of doubt insinuated about the chronicler’s reliability is already outside the conventional schemes and serves to trigger the parodic game: ‘Turpin has written (and I marvel still).’15 But if the question is left suspended within a halo of incredulity in this passage, another equally rash affirmation provides a teasing philological verification, and all distrust in the source readily dissipates: ‘At times I marvel at what Turpin writes / (but then on second thought and second reading / I realize he always tells the truth).’16 All the evidence suggests that, by resorting to a critical method and a rationalist mentality in asserting the truth of overtly fabulous episodes, Pulci aims to obtain a contradictory effect. At the moment he appropriates the hyperbole of the cantare artist, ‘Let Turpin be my witness once again: / in the third army were three hundred thousand men’ (XXV, 180),17 the narrator prepares to make it ridiculous with his comment, an aside to the listeners gathered to enjoy themselves with him. It is the sign of his indulgent discrediting of a whole body of literature, since amplifying the concessions to the fantastic is equivalent to destroying its trustworthiness. Pulci applies his philological humour to the scrutiny of his sources, real or imaginary, with such determination that it leaves one with the suspicion that Turpin and company are only a pretext for a knowing wink towards the humanist circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court. Pulci is an able multiplier of sources, and he amuses himself by providing both a chronology and documentation for them. As we read in Morgante XXVII, 78–80, the first chroniclers of the most distant events are Turpin and Ormanno, who ‘iscrivon quel che è vero e quel che sanno’ (write what is true and what they know). When Turpin dies, he deprives the Christian forces not only of his contribution as a bold warrior but also of an authoritative narrative voice. Thus the poet, who has entrusted the rudder of his ‘boat’ to Turpin, finds himself in the same sea of ‘error’ that will later disturb Ariosto’s navigation (‘io temo nella prima vista /

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di non uscir fuor del cammino alquanto’18 [XXVIII, 25]) since he must now ‘change helmsman.’ He then introduces other followers of Turpin into the poem to celebrate Charlemagne’s death, mixing historical personages such as Alcuin and invented characters such as Arnaldo and Lattanzio without any scruples. The least honoured for reliability among these is Alcuin himself, the master of the Schola Palatina, to whom the Vita Karoli, written between 814 and 828, was erroneously attributed. It was, however, written by a decidedly real chronicler, Einhard. Great enjoyment is had above all with Arnaldo (‘e ciò ch’e’ dice, il ver con man si tocca, / ch’una bugia mai non gli esce di bocca’19 [XXV, 168]), an imaginary author who provides Pulci with new material for the poem when he tells of the arrival of Rinaldo at Roncesvaux after the slaughter. He claims that his friend Politian directed him towards this source (XXV, 115), and he expresses his gratitude now that he is saved from being lost (‘ch’io era entrato in un oscuro bosco; / or la strada o ’l sentier del ver cognosco’ [XXV, 169]).20 Thanks to Politian, he avoids the appalling recourse to lies (‘E so che andar diritto mi bisogna, / ch’io non ci mescolassi una bugia, / ché questa non è istoria da menzogna’)21 and is protected from the annoying pressures of a public that pedantically insists on the true story (‘ché come io esco un passo della via, / chi gracchia, chi riprende e chi rampogna’ [XXV, 116]).22 These are motifs that Ariosto will make his own. Turpin appears more frequently in Boiardo’s Innamorato than in any other work in the tradition. From the frontispiece of the first edition, the poem declares itself to be translated ‘da la verace Cronica de Turpino.’ Boiardo believes that he must moderate the transgression of his own poetic invention – having dared to imagine an Orlando who is innamorato – by linking it to an intentional omission by Turpin from his account: Non vi par già, signor, meraviglioso odir cantar de Orlando inamorato, ché qualunche nel mondo è più orgoglioso, è da Amor vinto, al tutto subiugato; né forte braccio, né ardire animoso, né scudo o maglia, né brando affilato, né altra possanza può mai far diffesa, che alfin non sia d’Amor battuta e presa. Questa novella è nota a poca gente, perché Turpino istesso la nascose, credendo forse a quel conte valente,

Turpin’s Role 67 esser le sue scritture dispettose, poi che contra ad Amor pur fu perdente colui che vinse tutte l’altre cose: dico di Orlando, il cavalliero adatto. Non più parole ormai, veniamo al fatto.

(Innamorato I, I, 2–3)

Don’t think it strange, my lords, to hear Orlando innamorato sung: It always is the proudest man Whom Love defeats and subjugates. No strong arm, no audacity, No blade well-honed, no shield or mail, No other power can avail For in the end Love conquers all. Few people know this story, since Its teller – Turpin – kept it hid. He may have feared that his account Seemed disrespectful to the Count, For he whom Love defeated had Withstood all else, except for that – I mean Orlando, baron bold – But no more words; here are the facts:

This introductory declaration that the Innamorato is based on an incomplete testimony, or, rather, on a truth cautiously censored, aims to clear the field of the suffocating tutelage of the guiding source text, thus moving the narrative into a sphere in which apparent ‘transgression’ coincides with the conquest of inventive freedom. By relegating Turpin to a marginal space as an authority, Boiardo’s gesture opens up an unusual narrative and ideological horizon because he creates a much greater space in which to use him ironically. The abolition of the chain of authorial dependence grants the legendary chronicler full autonomy as a pure sign of narrative convention. No longer a founding father, Turpin becomes a free presence, evoked at the narrator’s will for the exigencies of a clearly ironic play on the reliability of the narration. Insinuating doubts about Turpin’s trustworthiness, to a degree unknown to Pulci, with the pretext of giving greater credit to Boiardo’s own tale, is now not much more than a narrative trick. Turpin makes an entrance only where his eyewitness account can underline the absolute unreliability, or at least the scant plausibility, of the facts:

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The Quest for Epic Io di tal botta assai me maraviglio, / ma come io dico, lo scrive Turpino. (I marvel at such fisticuffs, / But I say what Turpino writes. [I, XVIII, 21]) Turpino afferma che il conte de Brava / fo ne la vita sua vergine e casto. / Credete voi quel che vi piace ormai; / Turpin de l’altre cose dice assai. (Turpino says the Count of Blaye / Was chaste, a virgin, his life long. / You may believe what pleases you: / Turpino tells us lots of things. [I, XXIV, 14]) Turpin, che mai non mente in alcun loco, / dice che penne uscirno a poco a poco. (Turpino, and he nowhere lies, / says feathers soon began to rise. [I, XXIV, 53]) Ma Turpin, che dal ver non se diparte, / per fatto certo il scrisse alle sue carte. (But Turpin does not lie; he wrote / It in his pages as a fact. [II, VII, 1]) Turpin il scrive, e poca gente il crede, / che undeci braccia avia dal muso al piede. (Turpino / claims that it was (few think this true) / Eleven yards from nose to hoof. [II, XXVIII, 29])23

No less interesting, however, is Boiardo’s complementary practice of using Turpin to justify narrative transitions. In this way, he exploits and strengthens what is a typical form of transition for the authors of vernacular epic: the narrator says he must abandon the thread of the tale in order to be faithful to the guiding source text, and, by doing so, simultaneously demonstrates the authenticity of his story.24 Along with the function of witness, already the preeminent target of Pulci’s irony, a different but complementary role for Turpin appears in embryonic form in the Innamorato: that of the ‘director.’25 In a certain sense, Turpin represents the guardian of the plot, and his name is evoked to measure the rhythm of ‘leaving/returning’ dictated by the technique of entrelacement, and to legitimate a poetics of variety, typical of Boiardo. Discredited in Boiardo as guarantor of authenticity, Turpin begins to assume the role of the fictive governor of narrative order later emphasized by Ariosto. The Renaissance romance poem is born in this close connection of truth and structure, of inventio and dispositio, entrusting some of its most characteristic formal devices to its mythical founder. In fact, Boiardo’s Turpin is responsible for

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– transitions: ‘Ma parlar più di ciò lascia Turpino, / e torna a dir de Astolfo paladino’ (Turpino leaves the story here / To speak about Astolf, the peer [I, IX, 36]); ‘Or Turpin lascia questa diceria, / e torna a raccontar l’alta novella / del re Agricane ...’ (Here Turpin leaves this trifling tale / And turns to give the grand account / Of strong King Agrican ... [I, XIV, 10]); ‘Ma Turpin lascia qua la istoria vera, / che in questi versi ho tratto di sua prosa, / e torna a ragionar di Bradamante, / de la qual vi lasciai poco davante’ (But Turpin’s truthful history, / Which I transpose from prose to verse, / Now turns to tell of Bradamant. / Not long ago, I left her [III, VIII, 52]); – omissions: ‘Quel che si fusse poi di Norandino, / né di Costanzo, non saprebbe io dire, / perché di lor non parla più Turpino’ (What happened next to Norandino / Or to Costanzo, I don’t know / [Turpino mentions them no more] [II, XX, 41]); ‘quel che ne fosse, non scrive Turpino, / et io più oltra ve ne so dir nulla’ (What happened, Turpin does not say, / And I know nothing more than that [II, XXIV, 34]); – inaccuracies and gaps (the very things of which Boiardo’s inventio availed itself): ‘Fie’ maggior prova ancora il fio de Amone, / ma non se ponno in tal modo contare, / ché con lui se afrontarno altre persone, / che Turpin non le seppe nominare’ (Amone’s son does greater deeds, / But only some can be reviewed, / Since he confronted many men / Whose names Turpino never knew [I, XIX, 49]); – postponements: ‘Ma poi vi conterò questa aventura, / e torno a Brandimarte e Fiordelisa, / come Turpin la istoria a me divisa’ (I’ll tell this story later on. / First, Brandimart and Fiordeli: / Turpino’s narrative guides me [II, XIX, 15]); ‘ma nel presente qua non se raconta, / perché Turpin ritorna alla travaglia / di Brandimarte e sua forte aventura, / sin che il conduca in Francia alla sicura’ (I won’t / Continue in this vein at present / Because Turpino turns to tell / Of Brandimart’s good fortune, till / It takes him, safe at last, to France [II, XXV, 22]). 4 Like his predecessors before him, Ariosto emphasizes his relation to the auctor Turpin, making him the parodic simulacrum of the fidelity to truth that ties the modern narrator to a source feigning to be omniscient.26 The truth-claims of the tale and its apparently chaotic order are mainstays of Ariosto’s humour. In both, Turpin plays a central role.

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Compared to Boiardo, however, in Ariosto the game is more complicated because Turpin’s function is to unmask the rules of the literary device through the brilliant linking of two roles traditionally attributed to him (authorizing and directing the action). The fiction of a venerable and authoritative written text that predates the creation of the new text means, on the one hand, a wealth of narrative choices and, on the other, the simulation of historical truth. The more explicit Ariosto’s metanarrative game with Turpin becomes, the more the double function attributed to Turpin opens up. In his capacity as the guarantor of authenticity he is responsible for the presumed truth of the writing. But the venerable source finds himself caught in the game of someone who prefers him to be the tool that manifests narrative self-awareness, to be the guarantor of artificiality. From the interaction of the two roles, ably exploited to ironic ends, emerges the fact not only that Turpin lies and his stories are implausible but also that through him the particular type of writing that is the romance exhibits its nature as literary fiction. The implausibility of romance writing is strictly connected to its formal procedures. For example, we might observe how Ariosto plays ironically with the canterino convention that recognizes the narrative material as pre-existent to his version of the story. In this case, the narrator has to pass on only those segments of reality he has come to know, thanks to the work of documentation. This function is essentially the same as Boiardo’s alibi that justifies his invention. As the principal source of the events narrated in the poem, Turpin is above all called upon to shoulder the responsibility for what is told and omitted. Behind this convenient screen, Ariosto exploits romance devices in a continuous dialogue with the reader. To be sure, this is made up partly of complicitous winks but also of frustrations and provocations. Turpin is first and foremost the one held responsible for the poem’s romance ‘errors.’ His digressions, identified technically as such, must be pointed out to reassure the reader whose narrative expectations have been disappointed: Ciò che di questo avvenne, altrove è piano. Turpin, che tutta questa istoria dice, fa qui digresso, e torna in quel paese dove fu dianzi morto il Maganzese.

(Orlando furioso, XXIII, 38)

Turpin, who tells all this story, here digresses and returns to that land where the Maganzese was killed not long ago.

Turpin’s Role 71

The narrator’s censure of the obscene novella of Astolfo, Jocondo, and Fiammetta is a specific provocation to Ariosto’s female readers.27 Here citing Turpin is a way of making the reader increasingly aware of the intentional contradiction (for which the supposed source is jokingly made responsible) between the praise of women in the prologue and the antifeminist story that is about to be told: Donne, e voi che le donne avete in pregio, per Dio, non date a questa istoria orecchia, a questa che l’ostier dice in dispregio e in vostra infamia e biasmo s’apparecchia; ben che né macchia vi può dar né fregio lingua sì vile, e sia l’usanza vecchia che ’l volgare ignorante ognun riprenda, e parli più di quel che meno intenda. Lasciate questo canto, che senza esso può star l’istoria, e non sarà men chiara. Mettendolo Turpino, anch’io l’ho messo, non per malivolenzia né per gara.28 Ch’io v’ami, oltre mia lingua che l’ha espresso, che mai non fu di celebrarvi avara, n’ho fatto mille prove, e v’ho dimostro ch’io son, né potrei esser se non vostro. Passi, chi vuol, tre carte o quattro, senza leggerne verso, e chi pur legger vuole, gli dia quella medesima credenza che si suol dare a finzioni e fole. Ma tornando al dir nostro, più ch’udienza apparecchiata vide a sue parole, e darsi luogo incontra al cavalliero, così l’istoria incominciò l’ostiero.

(XXVIII, 1–3)

Women, and you who hold women in high esteem, for God’s sake do not give ear to this story, this that the host is getting ready to tell to your dispraise and shame and censure, even though a tongue so vile cannot blemish you nor give you any glory, and it is the old custom that an ignorant and vulgar man reviles everyone and speaks most of what he understands least. Skip this canto, for the story can hold together without it and will not be less clear. Since Turpin set it down, I also have set it down, not through ill-will or for the sake of strife. That I love you, besides my tongue that has

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The Quest for Epic set it forth – which has never been stingy in praising you – I have given a thousand proofs, and I have shown you I am and I cannot be other than yours. Skip over, who will, three leaves or four, without reading a line of them, and he who does wish to read, let him give it that same belief that is given to fictions and follies. But turning to our tale, when the host saw an audience prepared for his words and a seat given him opposite the knight, he began his story as follows ...

This case of the obscene novella that can nevertheless be skipped by the reader is undoubtedly exemplary of the interweaving of truth and structure in the Furioso. Ariosto’s appeal to Turpin’s authority is an ironic delegation of responsibility that does nothing but emphasize – contradicting the apparent restriction – that there is nothing in the text that has not been freely chosen by its author. This tenacious will comes out all the more strongly the more Ariosto enumerates the reasons for leaving out the host’s story. In fact, it is not essential for the narrative structure: ‘senza esso / può star l’istoria’ (the story can hold together without it);29 nor is it necessary for comprehension: ‘e non sarà men chiara’ (and will not be less clear); and what is more, it is false and provocative: ‘in dispregio / e in vostra infamia e biasimo’ (to your dispraise and shame and censure). Turpin is a mask for the criteria of narrative selection, or rather of the self-referentiality of the text that lies behind the ironic invitation for readers to skip this scandalous part,30 after having pricked their curiosity or, if they really do want to read it, to consider it a lie. It is precisely this apparent sprezzatura that confirms the centrality of Turpin’s function in the poem. The irony is clear when one considers that the narrator himself has already provided for eliminating insignificant moments simply by not writing them, so that each segment legitimates its own presence as necessary. Consider the following stanza, designed to confirm what is absent from Turpin and to justify a narrative ellipsis in Orlando’s biography:31 Credo che ’l resto di quel verno cose facesse degne di tenerne conto; ma fur sin a quel tempo sì nascose, che non è colpa mia s’or non le conto; perché Orlando a far l’opre virtuose, più che a narrarle poi, sempre era pronto:

Turpin’s Role 73 né mai fu alcun de li suoi fatti espresso, se non quando ebbe i testimonii appresso.

(XI, 81)

I believe that the rest of that winter he did deeds worthy to be taken into account; but even at that time they were so hidden that it is not my fault if I do not now relate them, for Orlando was always more ready to do deeds of valour than later to tell of them, and none of his deeds was ever made known except when witnesses were present.

Memory of the events has not been lost, but the witnesses are missing. Orlando, the only possible source, is reticent, to say the least. The irony of this stanza can only be understood in the context of the cantari tradition, where the constant presupposition of material authenticated by the sources then re-elaborated by the narrator is like a warp of weaving over the pre-existent weft.32 That tradition includes a given passage – even though it may not be essential to the narrative, and despite its provocative nature – only because Turpin included it in his tale. Here Orlando carries out innumerable worthy undertakings, but we know nothing of them because there are no witnesses. The play with the source serves to simulate the criteria of inclusion /exclusion within which the narrator, who is absolutely free, operates. To construct his text, he amuses himself by making up someone else who legitimizes it. The cunning devices of the cantari system, far from allowing Ariosto to present himself as guarantor of fidelity to a source, or to perpetuate the rite of appealing to historical truths, serve instead to divulge the fictionality of the whole operation. In short, the venerable source compels me to go off track (digression); he compels me to write (attack on women); finally, he compels me to omit (biographical ellipsis). Turpin is the ironic disguise of romance ‘error.’ There is a final and decisive consideration suggested by the story in Furioso XXVIII. It concerns the invitation to the reader who might still want to follow the tale, despite the narrator’s warnings to give these stanzas ‘quella medesima credenza, / che si suol dar a finzioni e fole’ (that same belief that is given to fictions and fables). Here Ariosto applies a technique of metonymic restriction that consists of limiting the field of unreliability of the whole (the poem) to a part (the host’s novella). By reducing the figure of irony to its ground zero, he ensures that all literature and not just a single one of its texts, that the whole text and not just a single section of it, must be read with ‘that same belief that is given to fictions and fables.’ It would be misleading to accuse a

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single episode of a completely fictional poem such as the Furioso of being false. On the other hand, during the lesson he gives the astonished Astolfo on the moon in canto XXXV, St John the Evangelist replies that it is equally misleading to expect that a single text (or a privileged genre) might be removed from the ‘error’ into which every form of literary writing (as profane language) must necessarily fall. The reservation Ariosto ironically applies here finds in those extreme theses its paradoxical overturning, so that the two passages end by reciprocally and antithetically denying one another. I have deliberately brought up this parallel with the Evangelist’s lunar discussion to show the dimension in which Ariosto places his joking intimacy with Turpin. This dimension is relatively new in comparison with Ariosto’s predecessors. In ever-increasing awareness, the relation of the modern author to the legendary authority ends up transcending the beautiful chivalric fable by questioning the very ontological status of literature. In this sense, the formulas of authentication by a witness, in which can be seen the primary legacy of the canterino tradition, are strongly linked to that ironic or, rather, critical attitude that is Ariosto’s fundamental instrument for analysing the romance form. The parodic use of the formulas consists first of all simply in taking them literally, showing their implausibility in hyperbolic language that negates itself as it is spoken; the more it asserts, the more it belies itself. The narrator cites his source to authenticate a situation that is clearly quite without credibility, and the endorsement of the source emphasizes the narrator’s opposite intention.33 Yet even those cases that show the opposite attitude are particularly meaningful. Here it complements what I have called the attitude of limiting the marvellous, and it consists instead in limiting the credibility of the real: I tronchi fin al ciel ne sono ascesi: scrive Turpin, verace in questo loco, che dui o tre giù ne tornaro accesi, ch’eran saliti alla sfera del fuoco ...

(XXX, 49)

The fragments went up to the sky. Turpin, trustworthy in this place, writes that two or three came down burning, that had gone up to the sphere of fire ...

Ariosto is describing the duel between Ruggiero and Mandricardo, a duel so bloody that it smashed their clashing lances into a thousand

Turpin’s Role 75

pieces.34 His technique restricts what can be believed with the roles reversed: the novella included in Furioso XXVIII because of Turpin is described as ‘credenza e fola,’ whereas here Turpin – usually untrustworthy – is ‘trustworthy in this place.’ The limitation of the credible to a clearly false sphere presumes the ironic extension of the part to the whole. This passage found an exceptional commentator in Galileo, whom I quote from The Assayer in which he attacks the prevailing science of his day: E forse che il grand’Ariosto non leva ogni causa di dubitar di cotal verità, mentr’ei la fortifica coll’attestazione di Turpino? Il quale ognun sa quanto sia veridico e quanto bisogni credergli.35 And does not perhaps the great Ariosto remove every cause for doubting such truth, while he strengthens it with his reference to Turpin? Everyone knows the extent to which he is truthful and how much one need believe him.

A literary dilettante enthusiastic about Ariosto’s greatness, Galileo fights the same battle that he did as a scientist in polemic against the natural philosophers and the most orthodox Aristotelians, perceived as incapable of tracing a clear line of demarcation between the book of nature and the book of literature, between cosmic phenomena and poetic metaphors.36 They think of philosophy as being like a book founded on the principle of authority, or like a product of the imagination, like the Iliad and the Furioso, ‘libri ne’ quali la meno importante cosa è che quello che vi è scritto sia vero’ (books in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true). Parmi, oltre a ciò, di scorgere nel Sarsi ferma credenza, che nel filosofare sia necessario appoggiarsi all’opinioni di qualche celebre autore, sì che la mente nostra, quando non si maritasse col discorso d’un altro, ne dovesse in tutto rimanere sterile ed infeconda; e forse stima che la filosofia sia un libro e una fantasia d’un uomo, come l’Iliade e l’Orlando Furioso, libri ne’ quali la meno importante cosa è che quello che vi è scritto sia vero. Signor Sarsi, la cosa non istà così. La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi a gli occhi (io dico l’universo), ma non si può intendere se prima non s’impara a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri, ne’ quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e

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The Quest for Epic i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi, ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezzi è impossibile a intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto.37 In Sarsi I seem to discern the firm belief that in philosophizing one must support oneself upon the opinion of some celebrated author, as if our minds ought to remain completely sterile and barren unless wedded to the reasoning of some other person. Possibly he thinks that philosophy is a book of fiction by some writer, like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso, productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true. Well, Sarsi, that is not how matters stand. Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. (Trans. Drake 238–9)

What unites Galileo the reader and Ariosto the writer (beyond their shared poetic taste) is the awareness that literary fiction is exonerated from investigating reality, and that therefore the opposition between truth and falsehood is neutralized in fiction. The scientist is also concerned with limiting spheres. For him, all literature is in the realm of the unbelievable. This underlies Galileo’s approval of Ariosto’s joking compromise (where the fantastic part metonymically refers to the whole) and the rejection in his polemical Considerazioni of Tasso’s earnest compromise (where the true and fantastic parts are said to coexist and intermingle). The aims of the scientist are obviously different from those of the writer: truly important to Galileo is not designating a trade zone where fiction and metaphors are enjoyed or at least permitted, as Francesco Orlando notes: ‘rather it preserves the purity of the zone from which they have been banished; not by austere aesthetic criteria as superfluous ornamentation, but rather by indispensable scientific rigour, as a disturbance, an evasion, a mystification.’38 What Galileo sees as dangerous is ‘that confusion among zones of language that becomes a confusion among ways of thinking, whenever the logic of a certain language pretends to substitute for the necessary logic of a certain way of thinking.’39 Actually, Galileo ‘gives reason to the fictitious essence of poetry in the very act of discrediting it in order to distance it from the

Turpin’s Role 77

truth.’40 The requirement is that of never passing off as integrally truthful ‘quel discorso la cui speciale verità sta nell’assoluta libertà di finzione’ (that discourse whose special truth is in the absolute freedom of fiction).41 Nevertheless, Ariosto’s attitude is never the absolutely unilateral one that the overly rational Galileo perhaps expected of him. An awareness of rigorous distinction between fields does not prevent Ariosto from enjoying shifting the ground, so that he orients himself at one moment towards maliciously giving credit to Turpin’s most implausible affirmations, then towards the no less amused and feigned reservations of prudent scepticism. In the scarcely credible description of Ruggiero’s wonderful enterprises against the Maganzesi, Turpin again intervenes to set things straight with his auctoritas: Il buon Turpin che sa che dice il vero, e lascia creder poi quel ch’a l’uom piace, narra mirabil cose di Ruggiero, ch’udendolo, il direste voi mendace ...

(XXVI, 23)

The good Turpin, who knows he speaks the truth and lets men then believe what they please, tells wonderful things of Ruggiero, so that if you heard him you would call him a liar.

The candour and obliging superiority with which Turpin launches his improbable truths is designed to solicit the most radical diffidence from the reader. But the narrator does not so much critique Turpin for this outlandish record of Ruggiero’s deeds. He is not bothered that every claim to truth assumes a contrary value of negation, particularly the more it is displayed, proved, and exaggerated. Rather, a certain residue remains that is destined to give delight to the rationalist reader such as Galileo, who, when called by Ariosto to be a smiling accomplice of indulgent superiority, also discovers the pleasure of the fantastic and the irrational. Ariosto’s attitude towards the mythical bard is the same attitude he has towards literature and its fictitiousness; lacking all credibility and authority, it is nonetheless capable of seduction. What cannot be cancelled is the other side of a similar ‘compromise formation’: the partly good-natured, partly derisory indulgence of Turpin covers with rationalist scepticism the narrator’s regressive abandonment to the temptations of romance hyperbole. It is precisely this feature that makes the Furioso a work singularly split between geometric reason and imaginative regression. Turpin is simply

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the symbolic figure of a system of authentication designed to demystify all verisimilitude; nevertheless, he cannot be caught out in a lie unless the letter of the text pretends to take his quips as truthful. Ariosto manages to hold onto the charm of the Turpinesque fantastic, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he strips him of his authority, precisely under the pretext of confirming or legitimizing it. In other places, Ariosto strips away Turpin’s authority in order to make it his own. This action particularly distinguishes Ariosto from other chivalric poets. With the calculating reuse of features of the chivalric code, such as the accumulation of details that give an illusory effet du réel, Ariosto occasionally demands an authority such as Turpin’s for himself. He attempts to create a verisimilitude within the story by providing, in the feigned simplistic way of the singers of the cantari, a series of circumstantial details that aim to particularize an event to make it more credible. Thus the narrator manoeuvres between fantastic incompleteness and scrupulous precision, very much conscious that the effect of plausibility is destroyed by inaccuracies and approximations just as much as it is created by the multiplication of details. He may also insist with pretended authorial solemnity on the reality of something completely unreal. For example, the existence of the hippogriff:42 Non è finto il destrier, ma naturale ch’una giumenta generò d’un grifo: simile al padre avea la piuma e l’ale, li piedi anteriori, il capo e il grifo; in tutte l’altre membra parea quale era la madre, e chiamasi ippogrifo: che nei monti Rifei vengon, ma rari, molto di là dagli agghiacciati mari.

(IV, 18)

His charger is not counterfeit but natural, borne by a mare to a griffin; it had feathers and wings and front feet, head, and beak like its father; in all other parts it seemed like its mother, and it is called the hippogriff; they are found, but are rare, in the Riphaean mountains, far on the other side of the frozen seas.

Here there is no need to cite Turpin to make a tried and tested device work. The poet achieves the same effects by donning Turpin’s worn-out robes and invoking the discredited language of his authority. The manifest insubstantiality of what is described is contrasted with the typical tools of realist illusion: morphological details, the history and habits of

Turpin’s Role 79

the animal, and finally, sealing the whole, the mark of authenticity of the guarantor-poet. If Turpin is required to lend the prestige of his authority to the most irrelevant details, to sanction with the solemnity of ipse dixit the least likely of affirmations, we might well define what Ariosto does when he accumulates ‘realistic’ details within a manifestly implausible whole as a ‘Turpinesque method.’ For example, it is striking that in the moments of greatest symbolic tension (as in Atlante’s palace) or of greatest metaphysical abstraction (as in the world of the moon), Ariosto demonstrates an analogous concern for the stabling and feeding of horses: ‘[They] were feeding in a room near the entrance that was always supplied with barley and straw’ (XII, 32);43 ‘[I]n another his horse was furnished with good grain, of which there was plenty for him’ (XXXIV, 60).44 Here, the hyperrealism of the vernacular epic tradition is prosaically used to lower symbolic tension; but confirming the way in which this method complements the gap-filled vagueness usually displayed by the same cantari artists is of the utmost importance. These two techniques work together to destroy any hypothesis of verisimilitude.45 To be sure, Ariosto puts on display the forms of this absurd verisimilitude, and not the content. But it is precisely the content that is parodied in this process. Ariosto’s feigned caution in refusing to take a position on such material creates a parodic contrast with the absolute futility or marginality of the questions confronted. I allude to those parenthetical asides, rooted in the hypothetical formulas of the artists of the cantari, that serve in similarly stereotyped ways to express cognitive uncertainty and doubtful oscillation. Ariosto extends them to more generalized uses that question his own status as omniscient narrator. These multiple devices vary from an agnostic presentation of the true /false alternative – Narran l’antique istorie, o vere o false, / che tenne già quel luogo un re possente. (Ancient histories, whether true or false, tell that once a powerful king held that place. [VIII, 52]) O vera o falsa che fosse la cosa / di Proteo (ch’io non so che me ne dica), / servosse in quella terra, con tal chiosa, / contra le donne un’empia legge antica. (Whether the thing about Proteus was true or false – for I do not know who can tell me about it – an ancient pitiless law against women, with such a commentary, was preserved in that country. [VIII, 58])46 Marfisa, o ’l vero o ’l falso che dicesse, / pur lo dicea, ben credo con pensiero, / perché Leon più tosto interrompesse / a dritto e a torto, che

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The Quest for Epic per dire il vero. (Whether she spoke true or false, Marfisa still said it, I well believe with the notion that thus, rightly or wrongly, she could forestall Leon sooner than by telling the truth. [XLV, 105]) La Luna a quel pregar la nube aperse / (o fosse caso o pur la tanta fede), / bella come fu allor ch’ella s’offerse, / e nuda in braccio a Endimion si diede. (At that prayer the Moon opened the clouds [whether it was chance or only such great faith], beautiful as she was at the time when she offered herself to Endymion and gave herself naked into his arms. [XVIII, 185]) E ricordassi che passando avea / veduta un’erba in una piaggia amena; / fosse dittamo, o fosse panacea / o non so qual, di tal effetto piena, / che stagna il sangue ... (And she recalled that in passing she had seen in a pleasant spot an herb – whether dittamy or panacea, or whatever it was – full of such virtue it would stanch blood ... [XIX, 22])

– to formulas that represent the clarification of various competing hypotheses, accompanied by an occasional cautious opinion – Con la fata Morgana Alcina nacque, / io non so dir s’a un parto o dopo o inanti. (Alcina was born with Morgan the Fay, I cannot tell whether at one birth or before or after. [VI, 38]) O fosse la paura, o che pigliasse / tanto di sconcio nel mutar l’anello, / o pur, che la giumenta traboccasse, / che non posso affermar questo né quello. (Whether it was fear or whether she got too much off balance in changing the ring or merely that her horse stumbled – for I cannot affirm this or that. [XXIX, 65]) O che natura sia d’alcuni marmi / che muovin l’ombre a guisa di favelle, / o forza pur di suffumigi e carmi / e segni impressi all’osservate stelle / (come più questo verisimil parmi) / discopria lo splendor più cose belle. (Whether it is the nature of some marbles that after the fashion of torches they drive away shadows, or it is merely the force of incense and chants and signs set down after the stars have been observed [and the latter appears to me more like the truth], the brightness uncovered other fine things in both sculpture and painting that ornamented on every side the awesome place. [III, 15]) Quel che fosse dipoi fatto all’oscuro / tra Doralice e il figlio d’Agricane, / a punto racontar non m’assicuro; / sì ch’al giudicio di ciascun rimane. (What

Turpin’s Role 81 then happened in the dark between Doralice and the son of Agrican I do not feel sure of relating to the dot ; so it is left to the judgment of each man. [XIV, 63])47 Io dico forse, non ch’io ve l’accerti, / ma potrebbe esser stato di leggiero: / tal la bellezza e tali erano i merti, / i costumi e i sembianti di Ruggiero. (I say perhaps and I would not affirm it to you, but it easily could have been; such was the beauty and such the merits, the ways and the features of Ruggiero. [XXX, 72])

Sometimes the game becomes more insistent. While questions left suspended continue to be absolutely irrelevant in the economy of the tale, Ariosto furnishes them with multiple variations of possible outcomes. He then entrusts the choice of the most believable one to the responsibility, or better, the will, of the readers. They are asked to choose between completely heterogeneous hypotheses, as in the case of the troublesome hermit who defends Isabella when Rodomonte casts him out to sea. Various realistic, completely fantastic, and even hagiographic versions of an end to his story accumulate and compete with one another: Che n’avenisse, né dico né sollo: varia fama è di lui, né si ragguaglia. Dice alcun che sì rotto a un sasso resta, che ’l piè non si discerne dalla testa; et altri, ch’a cader andò nel mare, ch’era più di tre miglia indi lontano, e che morì per non saper notare, fatti assai prieghi e orazioni invano; altri ch’un santo lo venne aiutare, lo trasse al lito con visibil mano. Di queste, qual si vuol, la vera sia: di lui non parla più l’istoria mia.

(XXIX, 6–7)48

What became of him I neither say nor know; there are various tales about him and they do not agree. One says he lies on a rock, so broken that his feet are not to be told from his head; and another that he fell into the sea, which was more than three miles distant from there, and that after making many prayers and petitions in vain, he died because he did not know how to swim; another that a saint

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The Quest for Epic came to aid him, drew him to the shore with a visible hand. Any of these may be true as you prefer; my history says no more of him.

Ariosto’s readers, to whom the ascertainment of the truth is normally presented as an irrelevant question, here, on the contrary, are invited to judge with an amused eye the casuistry of the event’s many possible variants and to choose for themselves whichever they find most plausible or simply most preferable. It is a form of agnosticism, as, for example, ‘Di queste, qual si vuol, la vera sia’ (Any of these may be true as you prefer), that will be transformed into a paradoxical taste for overturning during the revision of the historiographical myths carried out by St John in the lunar world where Ariosto allows himself to challenge the assumption of any version privileged in its monopoly of the truth.49 The humanist critique of sources, the meticulous exactitude of the philologist, and the scruples of documentary truth that Ariosto ironically flaunts humorously manifest themselves from the minimal level of numerical specifications (‘Turpino dice appunto che fur sette’ [Turpin writes that there were exactly seven] XIII, 40), to the dramatic level of the exercises of textual criticism with which Orlando tries to distance himself from the progressive disclosure, entrusted to writing, of Angelica’s betrayal (XXIII, 103–4). The exhibition of a rationalist mentality, educated with the rigour of philology and the scepticism of doubt (in which we may perhaps recognize an inheritance from Pulci),50 also avails itself of the collation of witnesses, when it is a question of closing a gap and giving completion to occurrences left in suspense by the principal source: Quindi partissi il disleale, e tolse In compagnia la vecchia maledetta. Non si legge in Turpin che n’avvenisse; ma vidi già un autor che più ne scrisse. Scrive l’autore, il cui nome mi taccio, che non furo lontani una giornata, che per torsi Odorico quello impaccio, contra ogni patto et ogni fede data, al collo di Gabrina gittò un laccio, e che ad un olmo la lasciò impiccata; e ch’indi a un anno (ma non dice il loco) Almonio a lui fece il medesimo giuoco.

(XXIV, 44–5)

Thence the traitor departed and took in his company the cursed old

Turpin’s Role 83 woman. You cannot read in Turpin what became of them, but once I saw an author who wrote more about it. That author, whose name I keep silent, writes that they were not distant a day’s journey, when to rid himself of that clog, Odorico, against every oath and every pledge he had given, threw a noose around the neck of Gabrina and left her hanged on an elm; and that a year later (but he does not tell the place) Almonio played the same trick on him.

These declarations also unfold along ambiguous lines. One would say initially that the unnamed chronicler was a part of Ariosto’s imagination; nevertheless, Rajna’s tireless efforts have suggested that the poet should be taken literally,51 marking a source – certainly of another kind, literary and cultured – that could in effect have suggested a similar outcome. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (but VI, 30, and not VII, 30, as almost all commentators repeat, following Rajna) the old woman jailer, from whom Lucius has managed to free himself together with her young female prisoner, is punished by the bandits who are her accomplices by being hanged from the branch of a cypress. Exhibiting his false sources and hiding the true ones, Ariosto provides us once again with an indication of his real methods of composition, which consist not in the collation of documentary testimonies but in the intermingling of literary models of disparate origins. Another of Ariosto’s interventions suggests similar observations. This time he deals not with omissions but with a disagreement among sources that obliges the narrator to determine which of two versions of the same story is correct. He contrasts the fifteenth-century poem Uggieri il Danese and the Innamorato. In the first, Grifone and Aquilante are presented as the sons of Ricciardetto; in the second, of Oliviero. Ariosto establishes Boiardo’s version as the truth, according to a purely arbitrary criterion but founded on the greater fame of one version, of one text compared with another: Ma non bisogna in ciò ch’io mi diffonda, ch’a tutto il mondo è l’istoria palese; ben che l’autor nel padre si confonda, ch’un per un altro (io non so come) prese ...

(XV, 73)

But it is not needful to be lengthy about this, for the story is well known to all the world, though the author is wrong about the father, because he took one for another (I do not know how) ...

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With the pretext of practising his playful philology, Ariosto not only highlights the ‘errors’ of literature as regards the facts but also shows the discrepancies that may occur in the weaving of literary intertextuality. In this passage, Boiardo is behind Ariosto’s ‘truth,’ although Boiardo as reference text is never actually cited, remaining hidden behind Turpin’s fictive authority.52 Take the episode of the skirmish between the horse Baiardo and the winged monster produced by Malagigi’s enchantments: Forse era vero augel, ma non so dove o quando un altro ne sia stato tale. Non ho veduto mai, né letto altrove, fuor ch’in Turpin, d’un sì fatto animale: questo rispetto a credere mi muove, che l’augel fosse un diavolo infernale che Malagigi in quella forma trasse, acciò che la battaglia disturbasse.

(XXXIII, 85)53

Perhaps it was a real bird, but I do not know where or when there has been another such. I have never seen one or read of such an animal anywhere except in Turpin. This state of things moves me to believe the bird was an infernal devil that Malagigi brought into that form in order to break off the combat.

A demon is sent to interrupt the duel between Rinaldo and Gradasso, an invention that actually goes back to Boiardo. For this reason, Ariosto’s false attribution of it to Turpin, removing the authentic father in favour of the putative one, is the equivalent of claiming its paternity for himself. Even in creating the story of Angelica’s ring, the narrator interrupts the summary at a certain point, almost with a gesture of impatience: ‘A che voglio io tutte sue prove accorre, / se le sapete voi così come io?’ (But why should I run through all her exploits, when you know them as well as I do? [XI, 5]).54 Boiardo had already narrated the history of the movement of this ring from owner to owner, and Ariosto presumes that Boiardo’s stories are well understood and established in the minds of his readers (as Pigna recalled).55 5 Now it is time to focus on the figure of the reader in a more specific way. We have seen how the system that depends on the representation of Turpin develops, how it puts forward the essential question of the

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relation between truth and fiction in poetry. It is this ideological knot that we must now confront, since it informs the literary institution in its conditions of existence and legitimation. If one were to reduce it all to a gratuitous ironic game, it would be difficult to explain persuasively the strong self-reflexive quality of a work like the Furioso. Ariosto’s metanarrative commentary, which we have examined with regard to his sources (Turpin and the chivalric texts), now needs to be considered with particular attention to the figure of the addressee, or rather to that imaginary reader whose involvement is constantly sought and whose complicity is constantly requested. As we know, thanks above all to Dionisotti’s studies,56 Ariosto undertook his poem in circumstances that were no longer very favourable to the chivalric genre. At that time, writers of tales of knights and damsels were coming under criticism for seeking to satisfy popular taste and for disdaining the cultivated public. These polemics determined Boiardo’s lack of fortune in the sixteenth century, because they confirmed the discrimination between a high literature that followed the models of historical epic and a low literature of escapist entertainment that continued to feed itself on ‘dreams.’57 Ariosto’s ironic insistence on the veracity of that which is least believable in a poem the whole of which was entirely fabulous assumes a more precise and specific meaning if it refers to an ideal audience of cultivated readers, educated in the noble and authoritative forms of epic, and attentive to verisimilitude as a canon of judgment. Therefore it is a question not of generic self-reflexive irony but of a subtle and complex web of allusions directed towards a contemporary reader by a writer who was extraordinarily sensitive to the production and consumption of the literary work. The survey of friends who wait for the ship of the poem at the port at the opening of its last canto is lucidly programmatic.58 This catalogue, far from exhausting itself in the decorative-encomiastic scenography, represents a sample of the poem’s ideal readers, who cross the arc of time of the three versions of the poem and create an artificial synchronization. Framed in the context of the antichivalric polemic, Ariosto’s choice stands out because it substantially upsets the position of those who saw the romance genre as ‘low,’ destined for a crude and easily pleased reader. Those who celebrate the approach of the poem as ship are far from the ‘vulgo errante.’ Rather, they are the elite of intellectual society of the first three decades of the sixteenth century chosen according to criteria of national representation. Ariosto invites the attention of this culturally and socially recognizable public at the moment in which he, like Dante, invites them to penetrate the veil of

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the allegorical plot that surrounds Ruggiero’s experience in Alcina’s realm: Chi va lontan da la sua patria, vede cose, da quel che già credea, lontane; che narrandole poi, non se gli crede, e stimato bugiardo ne rimane: che ’l sciocco vulgo non gli vuol dar fede, se non le vede e tocca chiare e piane. Per questo io so che l’inesperienza farà al mio canto dar poca credenza.59 Poca o molta ch’io ci abbia, non bisogna ch’io ponga mente al vulgo sciocco e ignaro. A voi so ben che non parrà menzogna, che ’l lume del discorso avete chiaro; et a voi soli ogni mio intento agogna che ’l frutto sia di mie fatiche chiaro. Io vi lasciai che ’l ponte e la riviera vider, che ’n guardia avea Erifilla altiera.

(VII, 1–2)

He who goes far from his native land sees things far different from what until then he believed, and afterward when he tells of them, he is not believed and is thought a liar, for the foolish multitude will not put faith in him if it does not openly and plainly see and touch them. From this I know that inexperience will make my song gain little belief. Whether I get little or much of it, I do not need to care about the foolish and ignorant throng. I am certain it will not appear false to you who have the clear light of reason; and every purpose of mine struggles to make dear to you alone the fruits of my labours. I left you when they saw the bridge and the stream the proud Erifilla had in charge.

Here also the narrator does not hold back on ambiguity and understatement, but the irony he constructs is one degree removed. His treatment of an allegorical subject, singularly implausible from the ‘realistic’ point of view, is the pretext for the usual insistence on the veracity of his own tale that is normally understood by antiphrasis. In this case though, he wishes his claim to truth to be taken literally, under pain of confirming mistrust that here is really the mistrust of ignorant masses but that normally is presented as a healthy critical habit of those who have ‘il lume del discorso’ (the [clear] light of rea-

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son).60 Furthermore, the appeal to the reader’s faculty of reason is made in terms of factual experience contrasted to the erroneousness of the masses’ beliefs. It is almost as if understanding the hidden meaning were not a pure intellectual experience but a fact of concrete experience, available only to those who have travelled widely and who have a broad knowledge of the variety of the world, and thus also of its allegories. Certainly, travelling is traditionally a metaphor for the experience of reading and writing, and the variety of the world is the variety of books. But to expect a literal credibility for the allegorical tale is an ironic way to make readers aware of the entirely literary nature of the referent of the text. Apparently anxious to take charge of an arduous passage of the tale, much as Dante might have done, Ariosto makes this appeal with no other goal than to confirm the pact of complicity with the reader, who collaborates with him to lend credence to the illusion of the literary fiction. Since allegory is a discourse to be deciphered, by its nature it is destined to disappoint the reader who demands verisimilitude. When Ariosto claims to bend himself to the requirements of the likely (as in the description of the hippogriff), he pretends to content the reader (whom he is actually teasing) who expects the truth from his text. This is precisely the reader who does not have the clear ‘light of reason.’ Let us take for example the amused digression – added in the 1521 edition – on the topography of the island of Lampedusa, where the final triple duel between the Christian and pagan champions takes place. With a sudden shift in narrative register, the poet introduces the objection (whether it be true or false and despite the encomiastic intention that develops from it) raised by his friend Federigo Fregoso (or Fulgoso as Ariosto renames him to play with the image of splendour), who had already appeared as an interlocutor in the Cortegiano and Bembo’s Prose. Such a rocky island, Fregoso contends, would be an unlikely space for a fight of this nature:61 Qui de l’istoria mia, che non sia vera, Federigo Fulgoso è in dubbio alquanto; che con l’armata avendo la riviera di Barberia trascorsa in ogni canto, capitò quivi, e l’isola sì fiera, montuosa e inegual ritrovò tanto, che non è, dice, in tutto il luogo strano, ove un sol pie’ si possa metter piano:

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(XLII, 20–2)62

Here Federico Fulgoso is somewhat in doubt about my story lest it not be true, because having passed along the shore of Barbary everywhere with the fleet, he came there and found the island savage, mountainous, and rugged to such an extent that in all that wild place, he says, nowhere can a single foot be set down level, and he does not think it likely that on the steep isle six knights, the flower of the world, could have carried on that fight on horseback. To which objection I answer thus: At that time there was at the base of the cliff a level spot fit for this purpose, but later a rock broken loose by an earthquake fell on it and covered it all. So, O bright fulgor of the race of Fulgosa, O serene, O ever-living gleam, if ever you reproach me for this thing – and perhaps in the presence of that unconquered leader because of whom your native land now rests, abandons all hate, and wholly turns to love – I pray that you may not be slow in saying to him that it can be I am not a liar in this.

It is important to note the way in which the philological scruple of plausibility is knowingly suited to the humanist mentality, embraced by the poet even as he contradicts it in an indulgent parody. We have here an exemplary reply to the reader who looks pedantically for the ‘realistic.’ For this reader, Durling observes acutely, the poet creates a handmade truth to which the poem can refer, and in fact adapts his story to the exigencies of the fiction to the point of rewriting it.63 Yet the reader

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who has the clear ‘light of reason’ knows perfectly well that literature is all ‘fictions and fables’ and so does not worry about the criterion of verisimilitude in judging a text or a genre or in establishing hierarchies of literature. Although Ariosto sometimes pretends to bend his own writing to such a criterion, his serious intention is to denounce that criterion as irrelevant. 6 Let us remember once again that one of the criticisms most frequently made of the romance was its traditional indifference to truth founded on the authority of history. The long mid-century debate that will lead to the neo-Aristotelian theories on the verisimilar heroic poetry and the querelle on the artistic legitimacy of the Furioso and the Liberata that emerges in a climate of an open polemic against Ariosto have distant roots. It is not antihistorical to recognize the priority of understanding and precociousness of views that, I repeat, make Ariosto the first credible anatomist of the romance form. The strong metaliterary awareness that constrains him to exhibit the devices of textual production complements the denunciation of poets’ lies that he entrusts to certain places in his tale, and to one in particular, the aforementioned discourse of St John.64 It defines a concept of poetry that, leaving aside the nobility or antiquity of a tradition, reveals itself as a fictive operation, as a fairy tale or a lie: one’s own case just as much as the case of other poets, equally true of the modern romance as of the ancient epic. A passage cited earlier gives a first indication of this problem: Cinque e più a un colpo ne tagliò talotta: e se non che pur dubito che manche credenza al ver c’ha faccia di menzogna, di più direi; ma di men dir bisogna. Il buon Turpin, che sa che dice il vero, e lascia creder poi quel ch’a l’uom piace, narra mirabil cose di Ruggiero, ch’udendolo il direste voi mendace ...

(XXVI, 22–3)

Five and more of them he sometimes wounded at one stroke, and if it were not that I greatly fear that the truth having the face of a lie would lack belief, I would speak of more; but it is needful to speak of less. The good Turpin, who knows he speaks the truth and lets men then believe what they please, tells wonderful things of Ruggiero, so that if you heard him you would call him a liar ...

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In this Turpinesque context, the presence of the Dantean subtext, ‘To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lips so far as he can’65 (Inferno XVI, 124–5), is surprising.66 Or rather, the allusion to a work that is exemplary for its eschatological testimony on the relation between poetry and truth might surprise us. It is nothing new for Ariosto to parody Dante; nevertheless, it is striking here that Dante’s memory ‘contributes to the flaunted – and thus ambiguous – emphasis of the poet’s declaration.’ It becomes the match to the ‘no less solemn and ambiguous reference to Turpin’s authority.’67 We can already see how from Ariosto’s perspective Dante and Turpin can both become the target of the same smiling polemic. Even as it starts from the ‘dark wood,’ one of the topical places of the romance punctually revisited by Ariosto, the Dantean path develops entirely outside and against this place of error (such that the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno V has been read as a criticism of the romance and its mystifications) and dwells in the antithesis between the fateful journey of the pilgrim and the mad flight of Ulysses. Anchored instead in the secular terrain of romance, Ariosto echoes Dante almost exclusively to show how his genius takes different routes. These echoes, no less than the romance topoi, recur frequently in the moments that underscore the error of writing rather than its truth.68 St John’s discourse on the lies of Homer and Virgil is precisely one of these topical places. During his explanation of the lunar allegories to Astolfo, St John’s political digression is framed by a discussion of the complex relation between poetry and truth. This relation becomes even more problematic if viewed from the perspective that inspires the Apostle’s argument: contemporary politics and the so-called ‘courtly pact,’ that is, the exchange of protection and political praise between prince and writer. On the one hand, Ariosto defends his position, distinguishing between adulatory poets (the numerous crows) and true poets (the exceedingly rare swans). On the other, he acknowledges an incontrovertible nucleus of truth in St John’s deliberately paradoxical thesis about poetry’s deference to power. In order to give the problem historical depth and evaluate it from its most extreme perspectives, the author of the Gospel proposes an outright revision of literary history. He affirms that it was the concrete advantages and honours given to poets that created for the celebrated heroes of literature the reputations that benefit their powerful descendants. In actual historical reality we are to believe that it may not be true that Aeneas was so compassionate, or

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Achilles so strong, or Hector so proud, just as it is not true that Augustus was as saintly and benevolent as Virgil claims. In fact, only ‘[h]is having had good taste in poetry excuses him this wicked proscription’ (XXXV, 26). By the same token, Nero’s bad reputation can be ascribed to his scant attention to propaganda; and the same can be said for characters such as Dido, ‘who is reputed a strumpet merely because Maro was not friendly to her’ (28). But if poets lie, then a radical suspicion assails the history they celebrate. Homer tells us of a victorious Agamemnon, of defeated Trojans, of Penelope as an exemplary wife for her chastity and virtue, but in reality one might well think that things went quite differently, so that ‘if you wish the truth not to be hidden from you, change all his story to the opposite’ (27). Be sure, then, that the Greeks were defeated and not the Trojans, and that Penelope deserves the same bad reputation attributed to Dido. To forestall the possible objections of his astonished listener, St John presents his own credentials as writer of the Gospel and of the Apocalypse, showing that he has the necessary qualifications to make such serious allegations about the whole category of writers. He even allows himself to lay it on thick when, with a malicious slip of the tongue, he asserts that the immortal fame he himself enjoys is simply the rightful recompense rendered him by Christ, the Lord he celebrated in his writings: E sopra tutti gli altri io feci acquisto Che non mi può levar tempo né morte; e ben convenne al mio lodato Cristo rendermi guidardon di sì gran sorte ...

(XXXV, 29)

And more than all the others I gained something that neither time nor death can take from me, and it is indeed fitting for Christ, whom I have praised, to give me reward so great in its kind ...

It is certainly not by chance that over the centuries these stanzas have attracted the attention of illustrious readers such as Tasso, Voltaire, and Manzoni, all in different times and ways committed to a rationalist polemic. In his Discorsi dell’arte poetica (book II), Tasso cites Furioso XXXV, 27: ‘[T]hat the Greeks were defeated, and Troy victorious, and Penelope a whore’69 as an example of poetic praxis that is condemnable because it goes beyond the limits of what is permitted: ‘This robs

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poetry of that authority which comes to it from history and which moved us to conclude that the theme of epic poetry must be based on some history.’70 In fact, what the epic poet absolutely must not do is ‘to change completely the ultimate conclusion of the actions he chooses to treat or even of some of those principal and better-known incidents already accepted as true by popular report.’71 It is, however, within his authority to use his imagination to reconstruct marginal circumstances, secondary episodes, to mix the times and orders of things, demonstrating himself to be more ‘artificioso poeta’ (artful poet) than ‘verace istorico’ (truthful historian).72 Tasso’s protests bring up the question of the legitimacy of poetic writing, tied to the truth of history (or of the high literary tradition, which is the same thing) that limits its operative sphere. This disagreement illuminates historically the future of the contradictions that Ariosto has the merit of implicitly placing, and in some ways also anticipating, by putting his own poetic operation under the tutelage of a vaster cognitive inquiry. But where should one locate an authentic position of Ariosto’s in the context of a discourse so determinedly paradoxical and openly controversial? More than a desecration sanctioned by the ‘carnivalesque’ view of the lunar observer, Ariosto’s seems to me a form of integral historicism, with a humanist matrix. It does not so much exclude the possibility of the truth in the client-provider relationship between lord and poet; rather, the universal import of such truth has been radically relativized.73 David Quint rightly observes that the perception of the whole Western poetic tradition as a pack of lies appears, from this point of view, as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the historicist ideas of humanism, which put its philology in the service of so many battles in the name of historical truth.74 St John’s revelation connects the universality of error to the historical conditioning of poetry, demonstrating that it is not the institutional vice only of romance as a ‘low’ genre. The courtly vice of adulation is shared as much by the swans as by the crows. The Evangelist’s words suggest that romance, suspect because of its Turpinesque tendencies, can be in reality not a literary monster75 but rather living proof of literature’s nature as fiction – that is, of the fact that any type of poetry is ‘deviant’ by definition.76 Through the romance, Ariosto shows us the nature of literary truth and the illusory character, in historicist terms, of such truth. But if there does not exist a writing without ‘error,’ so much the less may we recognize a genre as authoritative or privileged, taking as the parameter of judgment its fidelity to the truth, notwithstanding the prej-

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udice for the greater authority of epic, which the early-sixteenth-century flowering of poetry in ottava rima on contemporary history and classical mythology witnessed (among which was a Troiano that reinterpreted the Homeric-Virgilian legend).77 In fact, the fame of the epic poets across the centuries would be assured not by the privilege of historical truth but by the political legitimation of their literary inventions. The romance’s ‘error’ also characterizes literary history, in its turn a history of ‘errors.’ So Homer and Virgil, the two greatest poetic authorities, are presented, with an amused but not gratuitous sense of the paradoxical, as examples of liar-authors: in the end, even their truth coincides in substance with the so much more ingenuous one of Turpin and of the romance; it represents a principle of authority rather than of truth.78 What is more, this principle of authority is nothing but the recognition of a tradition – canonized by the epic (ancient), misrecognized by the romance (modern). The truth about which Ariosto creates so much irony is his awareness of depending on other texts, whether it manifests itself in the Furioso’s prestigious density of cultivated allusions and echoes or in its amiable and good-natured winking at Turpin. Poetry neither reflects history, nor betrays it; it simply confirms or denies other poetry. Saving the worst for last, Ariosto’s reasoning culminates with his most paradoxical thesis, where the Evangelist says that even he was a writer in the service of quite a lord, that is, Christ. The provocation is that St John appears not so much the interpreter of the divine word as the prestigious representative of the writers’ guild, who treats his Gospel not as revealed truth but almost as another expression of the courtly poetry he has just finished condemning. The discussion, which has already involved all literary texts, even the most prestigious, in a general discrediting of authority, concludes with the most risky and pointed affirmation, threatening to degrade even scripture to the rank of fiction, the Word to the rank of the literary word. There is an argumentative crescendo in which Ariosto maliciously enjoys himself by progressively raising the aim of his profanation, saving neither political power nor religious dogma. He moves from Turpin’s ingenuous tall tales of romance to the sublime topoi of the epic – the noblest form of secular writing – to end with the sacredness of the revealed Word. Ariosto’s paradox is an extremism of the truth entirely internal to his literary ideology, and I would not say that he aims consciously, intentionally, at blasphemous desecration, as Voltaire liked to think.79 Despite the involuntary, and nonetheless objectively malicious, self-injury of St John,80

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and despite other occasional Turpinesque degradations of the Bible in which Ariosto sometimes takes delight,81 literature remains the central and constant objective of the entire digression. If there is ‘revelation,’ it does not concern any truth of faith, and fundamentally it is not that all literature is a lie. Rather, it is that every truth is relative because it is historically conditioned, an assertion that conforms perfectly with the assumption of the upside-down point of view that characterizes all the truths of the moon. The courtly ‘mode of production’ is a contingent form of literature, a mode of its historicity, and thus of its ‘error.’ While it negates the reliability of a poem compromised at its origin by the relation of patronage (the courtly pact), it also denies the legitimacy of a hierarchical distinction of ‘genres’ founded on the claims to greater dignity of the epic weighed against the gratuitous fancies of romances. Revelation does not belong to St John the Apostle, but to St John the Writer: it is the explicit revelation of the rules of the literary game (of which Turpin is the candid emblem), carried out for the benefit of a reader who sees by the clear ‘light of reason.’

4 Tasso versus Ariosto?

1 There is a curious gap in our literary historiography when it comes to the relationship between Ariosto and Tasso. The two authors have always been treated in autonomous monographs, even in those works whose titles promise something more than a simple, contrasting diptych.1 The absence of a serious analysis of the formal and ideological nature of their relationship appears all the more curious when we consider that this kind of work represents one of the most lively and original elements specific to the Italian critical tradition, ranging from the positivist Quellenforschung, to Contini’s studies on poetic memory, to more recent works on literary intertextuality. My impression is that by privileging the shift in literary theory and poetic program that Tasso himself emphasized, critics have muted the obvious echoes in which Tasso’s continuity with Ariosto manifested itself. Ariosto’s work represents an illustrious summa of the romance tradition, and Tasso repudiates it less in reality than he affirms in theory, because it is in relation to it (and not only in his historical role as ‘imitator’ of Ariosto) that he begins his decisive encounter with modernity and ‘the custom of current times.’2 Although the historicist approach has given Tasso studies some of their most concrete results (I am thinking above all of Caretti’s work), from this perspective it reveals limits in its abstraction, or at least the limits of its prejudices. It is not so much a question of having the right perspective on the opposition Ariosto-Tasso as of recognizing its ambivalent nature. To do so means to compare Tasso’s theoretical positions with his concrete textual strategies, where, despite everything, the legacy of Ariosto and of chivalric literature is generally still evident. I believe modern commentaries on the Liberata ought to focus more on this dimension, and in this chapter I intend to do so. At the same time, I

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would like to take into account the more obscure aspects of Tasso’s negation and rejection of Ariosto as well. Behind his denial lie indisputable inheritances and dependencies that cannot be confirmed from a purely historicist or positivist perspective because they are the result of censorship and repression. Harold Bloom’s well-known and controversial book on the ‘anxiety of influence,’ or rather, on the Oedipal antagonism that afflicts every great follower’s relation to a literary father, suggests a point of departure of particular interest for my critical approach. According to Bloom, the follower’s struggle against his burdensome precursor constitutes his identity and poetic space. It is precisely from this perspective – although without Bloom’s excessive psychological implications – that I intend to propose some considerations on the historical, cultural, linguistic, and indeed psychological modalities of the relationship that is established (obviously from the viewpoint of the follower Tasso) between these two great masters who worked in the same Ferrarese environment, at the same court, in the same literary genre, only a couple of generations apart. To understand the attitude at once of reverence and repulsion, of veneration and antagonism, that links Tasso to Ariosto, one need only read the Discorsi dell’arte poetica, written by Tasso at the same time as the Liberata. Tasso constantly has Ariosto’s romance model before him, a successful but nevertheless anomalous model by the standards of the triumphant neoAristotelian pronouncements of the day. He struggles against it as he tries to build his own path to the heroic poem, especially after the conspicuous fiasco of Trissino’s ambitious L’Italia liberata dai Goti. One might also simply read the ‘Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme liberata,’ where, in a defence of the memory of his father Bernardo, Ariosto’s friend and also a chivalric poet, Torquato is dragged into a passionate defence of himself and his poem (the poem he had rejected and revised into the Gerusalemme conquistata in those very years, as an irony of fate would have it) against Ariosto’s supporters. Against his will, Tasso finds himself taking sides in a dispute that was among the longest and fiercest of Italian literary history. In a certain sense, his destiny was inevitable, since this querelle sanctioned an antagonistic principle a posteriori, capturing the spirit of emulation that had governed Tasso’s epic ambition as Ariosto’s heir. Torquato found himself in a curious and embarrassing situation, for he was linked by birth to a poet who was de facto militantly on Ariosto’s

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side, since Bernardo’s poem, Amadigi (published in Venice in 1560), obeyed the Aristotelian rules no more than the Furioso did. In a mortifying episode, Bernardo Tasso’s lack of success with the courtiers of Prince Sanseverino in Salerno forced him to modify his poem, which he had initially organized around a unity of action.3 As Margaret Ferguson acutely points out, Torquato was unable to defend his father without betraying his own poetic ideals, the very ideals that he opposed to Ariosto’s.4 His defence of Bernardo is at the same time a position against him and against the feeling of guilt provoked by the son’s symbolic complicity in a critical act approaching patricide: ‘And because one could say that my father, who is dead in the grave, lives on in his poem, he who tries to attack his poetry causes him to die once again.’5 2 I would like now to turn to a text that is not as well known as the ones already mentioned: a few passages from a letter written by Tasso in reply to a young literary friend, Ludovico’s grand-nephew, Orazio Ariosto. These seem to me to be exemplary of this antagonistic emulation: Ella [la corona poetica] già dal giudicio de’ dotti e del mondo, e del parere, non che d’altri, di me stesso (il quale, se non annoverato fra’ dotti, non debbo almeno essere escluso dal mondo) è stata posta sovra le chiome di quel vostro, a cui sarebbe più difficile il torla che non era il torre ad Ercole la mazza. Ardirete voi di stender la mano in quelle chiome venerabili? Vorrete esser non solo temerario giudice, ma empio nipote? E chi poi da mano malvagia e contaminata di sceleraggine riceverà volentieri il segno e l’ornamento de la sua virtù? Dunque, né da voi io l’accetterò, né per me tanto ardisco; ma tanto non desidero. Quel buon greco che vinse Serse, soleva dire ch’i trofei di Milziade spesso il destavan dal sonno: né questo gli avveniva perché disegnasse egli di struggerli; ma perché desiderava d’alzarne per sua gloria altri, a quelli o uguali o simiglianti: ed io non negherò che le corone semper florentis Homeri (parlo del vostro Omero ferrarese) non m’abbiano fatto assai spesso noctes vigilare serenas; non per desiderio ch’io abbia mai avuto di sfiorarle o sfrondarle, ma forsi per soverchia voglia d’acquistarne altre, se non eguali se non simili, tali almeno che fossero per conservar lungamente il verde, senza temere (userò le vostre metafore) il gelo della morte. Questo è stato il fine de le mie lunghe vigilie, il quale s’io conseguirò, terrò per bene impiegata ogni mia fatica; se non, mi consolerà l’esempio di molti famosi, i quali non si recarono a vergogna il cader sotto grandi imprese.6

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The Quest for Epic The poet’s crown has been placed above the locks of that relative of yours already by the judgment of the learned and of the world, by the opinion of others, not to mention myself (who, if not to be numbered among the learned must at least not be excluded from the world). It would be harder to take the crown from him than taking the club from Hercules. Would you dare to stretch out your hand to those venerable locks? In addition to being a reckless judge will you also be an impious nephew? And who then will willingly receive the sign and ornament of his virtue from a wicked hand, contaminated by iniquity? So, I will not accept it from you, nor would I dare such a thing myself; but in any case I do not wish it. That good Greek who beat Xerxes was wont to say that Miltiades’ war trophies often woke him from his slumber. This did not happen because he planned to destroy them but because he wished to erect other monuments, equal or similar, to his own glory: and I do not deny that the crown semper florentis Homeri [of still-thriving Homer] (I speak of your Ferrarese Homer) hasn’t made me fairly often noctes vigilare serenas [pass many sleepless nights]; not because I had any desire to come close to it or to strip it of its laurel leaves, but perhaps because of an excessive desire to acquire another crown, if not equal, if not similar, at least such that it might remain green for a long time, without fearing (I will use your metaphors) the chill of death. This has been the aim of my long vigils, and if I succeed in it, I will feel my every labour to have been well spent; if not, the example of the many famous men who felt no shame at failing under great undertakings will console me.

Tasso’s usually tormented epistolary prose becomes even more contorted here thanks to the impressive sequence of negations that amass on the surface of the text to cover up a transparent admission of guilt, culminating in the violence of the ‘castrating’ images: ‘togliere a Ercole la mazza’ (taking the club from Hercules), and ‘sfrondare le corone dell’Omero ferrarese’ (strip the Ferrarese Homer’s crown of leaves). Farther on, Tasso even introduces the image of the duel and physical struggle, assuming ideally the role of Virgil’s Dares, who refuses, on one occasion, to fight the old and famous boxer Entellus (cf Aeneid V, 386 ff): Sia pur lunge da me questo orgoglio, e questa giovenil confidenza: segga per me, e si riposi il vostro vecchio Entello, ch’io non lo costringo con importuna disfida ad alzarsi da la sua sedia; ma l’onoro, e me gl’inchino, e lo chiamo con nome di padre, di maestro e di signore, e con ogni più caro e onorato titolo che possa da riverenza o affezione essermi dettato.7

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May this pride be far from me, and this youthful confidence: may your old Entellus stay seated, and rest, as I will not constrain him with an importunate challenge to rise from his seat. But rather I honour him and kneel before him and call him by the name of father, of master, and of lord, and with every dearest and most honoured title that may with reverence or affection be spoken by me.

But let us continue with a direct comparison of the two poems. The figure of the narrator, the textual link that joins the end of one poem to the beginning of the other may seem surprising, yet I believe it is an indisputable connection. The last canto of the Furioso opens with the famous proem of farewell from the poet who has reached the end of his textual navigation, and the dedication of the Liberata contains the first and only instance when the narrator refers to his own biographical identity, offering the poem to his lord and protector, Alfonso II d’Este.8 These few stanzas, positioned at the end of one work and the beginning of the next, seem to be linked by a sort of ideal continuity, at least as far as Tasso desired to conceive of himself as the heir (both victim and master) of Ariosto’s ‘error.’ Or, se mi mostra la mia carta il vero, non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto; sì che nel lito i voti scioglier spero a chi nel mar per tanta via m’ha scorto; ove, o di non tornar col legno intero, o d’errar sempre, ebbi già il viso smorto. Ma mi par di veder, ma veggo certo, veggo la terra, e veggo il lito aperto.

(Orlando furioso XLVI, 1)

Now if my map shows me the truth, the harbour is not far out of sight, so I hope to fulfil on the shore my vows to Him who has protected me during such a long journey on the sea, where earlier my face was pale with the fear I would not return with my ship uninjured or would wander forever. But I seem to see, but I certainly see, I see land, and I see the open shore.

Ariosto’s poet declares his legitimate satisfaction at keeping the promise made to his friends, which he feared he might not be able to fulfil. Guiding the ship of his poem into port and overcoming the rocks of error is the special quest of the narrator. While the characters of the Furioso are distracted by the labyrinthine tangles of the wood, or regularly

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steered off course towards unexpected shores by storms, the narrative journey itself is also threatened by the ‘errors’ of spatial deviation (whether in the form of digression or excursus) and temporal deferral (suspension of the narrative thread; literal suspense, but also thematic suspense, as, for example, in the continual postponement of Ruggiero’s conversion and marriage, the predestined conclusion of the poem). ‘Error’ coincides with the principal devices (digression, deferral, intermittence) of the romance code, which Ariosto reveals in order to realize his goal of the estrangement of the literary fiction, as Pigna rightly intuited very early on: ‘And because the whole poem is about errant people, he is equally errant, inasmuch as he takes and leaves infinite things infinite times.’9 Situated in this double register, both narrative and metanarrative, the tired metaphor of the textual journey is restored to full functionality.10 All the spatial metaphors for error find metanarrative counterparts: deviation, diversion, digression, and so on. The various ways that the knights deviate from their original goals find an equivalent in the narrator’s comments on his own tale and the impossibility of maintaining a single narrative line: ‘But before I tell you what happened, I must slightly deviate from my route,’ and ‘But with one thing and another we seem to have strayed right off our path; where was I?’11 The fiction of bewilderment is clearly designed to underline the contrast with the poet’s control over his narrative material. Error is not an unpredictable unknown, a risk always lying in ambush, but a deliberate test that is offered in order to emphasize the author’s ability. 12 The Liberata’s dedicatory stanza can be read in the context of Ariosto’s preamble-farewell: Tu, magnanimo Alfonso, il qual ritogli al furor di fortuna e guidi in porto me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli e fra l’onde agitato e quasi absorto, queste mie carte in lieta fronte accogli, che quasi in voto a te sacrate i’ porto. Forse un dì fia che la presaga penna Osi scriver di te quel ch’or n’accenna.

(I, 4)

You, magnanimous Alfonso, who recover from Fortune’s fury and guide to port myself a wandering pilgrim tossed among the reefs and amid the waves, and almost overwhelmed; receive with cheerful countenance these my pages that I bring as an offering consecrated to you. Perhaps one day it

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will be that my prophesying pen may dare to write of you what today it hints.

In the Liberata, this metaphor has a predominantly biographical and existential sphere of reference,13 so much so that it places the topos of the court-as-port over that of the poem-as-navigation.14 Nonetheless, Tasso presents his poem in exchange for the security provided by the institution of the court. The Furioso is also a debt paid with ‘opera d’inchiostro’ (labour in ink): ‘Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole / pagare in parte, e d’opera d’inchiostro.’15 The intertextual comparison, with the nautical metaphor as the most immediate trait d’union, is even more tempting. Tasso dramatizes Ariosto’s much-feared navigational error with his own image of a castaway battered among the rocks and almost drowned, a pilgrim for whom the port is yearned-for salvation, and whose sole reason for survival is his prince’s welcome. The correspondence of language and image is evident. Though Ariosto is less dramatically responsible for the poem’s safe arrival, he also conceives of the prince as a guide in the Furioso: ‘a chi nel mar per tanta via m’ha scorto’ (to Him who has protected me during such a long journey on the sea [XLVI, 1]).16 Ariosto’s ‘mia carta’ (my map) (signifying both nautical chart and poetic work) in the Liberata becomes ‘queste mie carte’ (I, 4, 5). The joyful reaction of waiting friends, ‘la letizia c’han del mio ritorno!’ becomes Alfonso’s ‘lieta fronte’ (cheerful countenance). But above all, ‘i voti scioglier spero’ (I hope to fulfil ... my vows [XLVI, 1, 3]) reminds us of the ‘in voto’ (as an offering) of Liberata I, 4, 6. This is linked to the fundamental movement of Tasso’s poem, founded on the ‘sciogliere il voto’ (discharging of his vow) with which Goffredo carries out his mission to liberate Jerusalem. The last line of the Liberata is ‘il gran Sepolcro adora e scioglie il voto.’17 Thus is established a complex web of intra- and intertextual relations between the Furioso and the Liberata, particularly between the poetic action and its metanarrative reflections. As I have said, the dedication contains the only (and thus all the more significant) allusion to Tasso’s historical self. Unlike Ariosto, who is present on stage with his characters, Tasso eliminates himself from the text, following the canon of epic distance.18 This is particularly interesting because, like Ariosto, Tasso also assimilates his personal travails as poet within the fundamental thematic movement of the text. Tasso predicts that Alfonso, the ‘emulo di Goffredo’ (imitator of Godfrey [I, 5]) will intervene to save him from his condition as a ‘peregrino errante’ (wandering pilgrim), guiding him

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to the serenity of the port. In just the same way, the captain Goffredo leads his ‘compagni erranti’ (wandering companions) back beneath the holy standards.19 Tasso perceives himself (and obviously not only in this place) as the heir and victim of Ariostan ‘error’: the anguish of the castaway prevails over his feelings of domination by Ariosto. Moreover, Tasso often exorcizes the dangers inherent in accepting romance variety on the psychological level, especially where the figures of the ‘peregrino errante’ and the ‘fanciullo infermo’20 appear along with the figure of the castaway. He closely connects to artistic experience the perception of a threat to the psychic integrity of the narrating ‘I’ committed to imposing order and rationality on the poetic material and who controls the temptation to spin the narrative off in different directions: ma quanto meglio opera chi riguarda ad un sol fine che chi diversi fini si propone, nascendo dalla diversità de’ fini distrazione nell’animo e impedimento nell’operare, tanto meglio operarà l’imitator d’una sola favola che l’imitatore di molte azioni. 21 but he who has only one aim works so much the better than he who proposes various aims, since from the diversity of aims distraction in the soul and impediment to the work are born; thus, so much the better will the imitator of a single tale work than the imitator of multiple actions.

In his usual ironic and detached way, Ariosto evoked the spectre of ‘madness’ in connection with the excessive and potentially infinite multiplicity of his subject matter: Pazzia sarà se le pazzie d’Orlando prometto raccontarvi ad una ad una; che tante e tante fur, ch’io non so quando finir: ma ve n’andrò scegliendo alcuna solenne et atta da narrar cantando, e ch’all’istoria mi parrà oportuna;

(XXIX, 50)

It will be a mad act to promise to recount to you one by one Orlando’s mad acts, which were so very many that I do not know when I should finish, but I shall merely go on choosing from them some that are striking and suited for telling in song and that seem to me fit for my story.

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Here, in Ariosto’s case, we should note that it is not a question of recounting a series of events with more or less detail. Rather, it is an issue of choosing between a narrative line directed towards multiplicity and one directed towards unity. The narrator turns towards the latter when his concern to ‘finish’ the tale within a reasonable time manifests itself.22 The wood in which the Furioso’s various actions joyfully scatter becomes a setting for happy forgetfulness, but it seems to evoke a state of anxious bewilderment in Tasso. At the beginning of the second book of the Discorsi del poema eroico, he confronts the problem of his subject matter or, to be more precise, of the narrative choices and selections that it requires: Ma qual è più incerta, quale più instabile, quale più inconstante della materia? Prudentissimo dunque conviene che sia colui il quale non s’inganni nello scegliere dove è tanta mutazione e tanta incostanza di cose; e la materia è simile ad una selva oscura, tenebrosa e priva d’ogni luce. Laonde se l’arte non l’illumina, altri errarebbe senza scorta e sceglierebbe per aventura il peggio in cambio del meglio. But what is more uncertain, what more variable, what more inconstant than the material [of poetry]? Supremely prudent he must therefore be who would not go wrong in choosing where there is so much variability and uncertainty in the things involved. And the material [of poetry] is like a dark forest, murky and without a ray of light. Hence, if art does not illuminate it, one might wander without guide and perhaps choose the worse instead of the better.23

Monsters may populate this wood, as we see when we move from the subject matter to the ‘favola,’ to the ‘testura’ or weaving together of events. Ariosto’s poem itself may appear to be the sinister image of a mutilated body, a headless fable, which, in order to achieve its ‘intierezza’ (wholeness),24 must, like the giant Orrilo (Furioso XV, 65– 87), reattach itself to a poem that is in turn mutilated at its tail end, the Innamorato. This fusion creates a poetic monster ‘disconvenevole e dismisurato’ (inappropriate and gargantuan) that bewilders the reader by compromising his faculties of memory.25 We will return to discuss this wood shortly. The notion of ‘error’ is no less broad or ambiguous in the Liberata. On the one hand, it suggests sinful deviance, on the other, wandering

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and adventure, but also diversification and variety within the epic fabula.26 Let us take the episode of Erminia who ‘erra senza consiglio e senza guida’ (wanders without help or guidance [VII, 3]) in a regressively romance world. This episode is a true concentration of topoi of chivalric ventura: disguise, nocturnal escape, interception, and pastoral interlude. Consequently, the intertextual references to Ariosto are denser here.27 Tancredi’s misunderstanding about a presumed visit of Clorinda (Erminia in disguise) induces him to abandon the Christian camp in order to follow a phantom of love that lures him from his duties as a crusader and consigns him to the snares of Armida, who takes him prisoner. The two characters’ ‘error’ is nevertheless also the narrator’s ‘error,’ in the sense that it is a digression from epic’s straight path of unity: ‘It could perhaps seem to them [the Roman judges who revised the Liberata] that in Erminia and Tancredi’s errors I veer too wide from the fabula.’28 Conceptualized as a criticism of romance, the principles of form become totally moralized in Tasso, so that the convergence of these two aspects of error become indicative of a more general tendency in the poem. Here, the original spatial sphere of chivalric adventure in the Liberata becomes that of ideological and moral deviance. The ‘cavalieri erranti’ (knights errant) become the ‘compagni erranti’ (wandering companions) who oppose their individual desires for glory and love to the collective mission of the crusade represented by the superior authority of Goffredo. 3 A gruelling conquest over his anguished nostalgia for the free world of romance, Tasso’s will for epic song is embodied in the ambivalence of his emotions and judgments towards his own poetic father, Ariosto. Tasso reconstructs the unity of a collective quête (or quest) while representing the individual quêtes as sinful because they intersect and interfere with the ultimate goal. This is precisely the scenario that is offered us from the first stanzas of what is no longer a ‘romance’ but a ‘heroic poem’ (Liberata I, 8–10). God sees Goffredo alone among the various Christian leaders as the one who ‘longs to drive the wicked pagans from the holy city,’ and who will ultimately triumph in his desire to bring back ‘under the holy signs his wandering companions.’29 He therefore directly inspires Goffredo’s investiture as supreme leader of the Christian army. In the name of a unitary epic will, the motives of all the other characters are dismissed as so many romance evasions. These evasions include that of Baldovino, ‘who single-mindedly aspires to human grandeurs’;30 that of Tancredi, who holds ‘his life in scorn, so much a vain love torments and martyrs him’;31 and that of Rinaldo, who cultivates

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‘an immoderate burning thirst for honour.’32 Here, God ‘turned His eyes below and saw in one moment and in one glance whatever the world contains within itself’ (I, 7).33 God no longer contemplates the varied spectacle of human folly, as if from an Ariostan moon, but instead sees the reasons for a sinful distraction, if not betrayal: ‘chi su, chi giù, chi qua, chi là travia’ (one up, one down, one here, another there goes off the track [Furioso XXIV, 2]). What is condemned here if not the varied and complex world of romance adventure with its dispersed aims? We might observe that the judging gaze of God coincides with that of the narrator, the maker of his poem. All the central points and inconsistencies in Tasso’s theoretical discourse converge on the question of unity and variety. This is no coincidence, since from the time of his youthful ars poetica they represent for him the structural criterion that truly discriminates between chivalric romance and heroic poem. In a famous page of the Discorsi the unity/variety antithesis finds its ontological foundation in a double simile. On the one hand, this simile correlates the universe created by God and the work created by the poet, as macro- and microcosms; on the other, it links the ultimate author, the divine maker, and the poet who is worthy of the name of maker: sì come in questo mirabile magisterio di Dio, che mondo si chiama, e ’l cielo si vede sparso o distinto di tanta varietà di stelle, e, discendendo poi giuso di mano in mano, l’aria e ’l mare pieni d’uccelli e di pesci, e la terra albergatrice di tanti animali così feroci come mansueti, nella quale e ruscelli e fonti e laghi e prati e campagne e selve e monti si trovano, e qui frutti e fiori, là ghiacci e nevi, qui abitazioni e culture, là solitudini e orrori; con tutto ciò uno è il mondo che tante e sì diverse cose nel suo grembo rinchiude, una la forma e l’essenza sua, uno il nodo dal quale sono le sue parti con discorde concordia insieme congiunte e collegate; e non mancando nulla in lui, nulla però vi è di soverchio o di non necessario; così parimenti giudico che da eccellente poeta (il quale non per altro divino è detto se non perché, al supremo Artefice nelle sue operazioni assomigliandosi, della sua divinità viene a partecipare) un poema formar si possa nel quale, quasi in un picciolo mondo, qui si leggano ordinanze di eserciti, qui battaglie terrestri e navali, qui espugnazioni di città, scaramucce e duelli, qui giostre, qui descrizioni di fame e di sete, qui tempeste, qui incendii, qui prodigii, là si trovino concilii celesti e infernali, là si veggiano sedizioni, là discordie, là errori, là venture, là incanti, là opere di crudeltà, di audacia, di cortesia, di generosità, là avvenimenti d’amore or felici, or infelici, or lieti, or compassionevoli; ma che nondimeno uno sia il poema che tanta

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varietà di materie contegna, una la forma e la favola sua, e che tutte queste cose siano di maniera composte che l’una l’altra riguardi, l’una all’altra corrisponda, l’una dall’altra o necessariamente o verisimilmente dependa, sì che una sola parte o tolta via o mutata di sito, il tutto ruini. (Discorsi dell’arte poetica, Book II, 35–6)34 In this marvellous domain of God that we call the world we see the sky sprinkled and adorned with so great a variety of stars; and, descending from realm to realm, we see the air and ocean full of birds and fish, and the earth a hospice to so many animals both wild and tame, and on earth streams and fountains and lakes and meadows, and fields and forests and mountains, and here fruits and flowers, there ice and snow, here dwellings and farmlands, there wastelands and emptiness. Nonetheless, the earth, which encloses so many and diverse things in its bosom, is one; and its form and essence are one; and one, the knot by which it joins and binds its parts in discordant concord. While it lacks nothing, nothing in it is excessive and unnecessary. Just so, I think an excellent poet – who is called divine for no other reason except that by working like the supreme Artificer he comes to share in his divinity – can shape a poem in which, as in a little world, we read of mustering armies, land and sea battles, conquests of cities, skirmishes and duels, jousts, drought and starvation, tempests, fires, prodigies; and we find heavenly and hellish assemblies and see sedition, discord, wanderings, adventures, enchantments, cruelty, boldness, courtesy, kindness, and love – sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, sometimes pitiful. And still, the poem which contains such a variety of matter is one; its form and its plot are one; and all these things are brought together in such a way that one thing shows consideration for another, one thing corresponds to another, and through either necessity or verisimilitude one thing depends on another in such a way that by removing a single part or by changing its place, we destroy the whole. (Discorsi, trans. Rhu, 30–1)

Along with Georges Güntert, we can say that Tasso aspires to understand variety within the totalizing vision that is the privilege of God, who enjoys the totum simul because he knows everything in a single instant. When the Christian God turns to contemplate the crusaders scattered across Palestine, he uses a similar panoramic vision that allows him to embrace everything ‘in un sol punto e in una sola vista’ (in a single moment and at a single glance); that is, to understand variety as unity. In becoming an actor in the drama himself, God controls its viewpoint.

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His gazing on the world from that sublime height becomes equivalent to the focusing of the narrator’s rhetorical perspective. Bearing in mind the passage cited from the Discorsi, it seems clear that Tasso ‘in the lofty position that he reserves for the omniscient God, wants to represent the very place due to the poet within the poem,’ and that, in practice, ‘Tasso’s God’s totalizing vision projects onto the level of the action (and thus onto what is enunciated, that is, the narrative content) a cognitive disposition proper to the poem’s enunciatory requirements.’35 From the outset of the Liberata, ‘romance’ coincides with the diabolical work of breaking up the Christian camp, precisely because of its fundamental attraction towards plurality. Such is the very plan outlined by Satan at the end of the infernal council in canto IV: Sia destin ciò ch’io voglio: altri disperso se ’n vada errando, altri rimanga ucciso, altri in cure d’amor lascive immerso idol si faccia un dolce sguardo e un riso.

(IV, 17)

Let fate be that which I will; let one go wandering astray, another lie slain; let another, drowned in the lascivious concerns of love, make a sweet look and a laugh his idol.

We hear once again Ariosto’s good-natured lunar catalogue of ‘follies,’ but demonized in Tasso’s rewriting: ‘Some lose [their wits] in loving, some in seeking honours, some in scouring the seas in search of wealth.’36 In the Furioso the space for diabolical intervention is much more limited than in the Liberata, and opens up just when Rinaldo and Orlando are absent from the Christian camp, and thus at a moment when the poem abandons the epic scene in favour of romance adventure. In the Liberata, however, diabolical intervention itself causes the warriors to abandon the Christian camp (and thus to abandon the constraints of epic). While in the Discorsi dell’arte poetica there is a simply hedonistic defence of the ‘enchantments’ and ‘bewitchments’ that originated in the romance and are strongly Ariostan, in the later Discorsi del poema eroico the defence of the supernatural results from a shift in the role of the marvellous from the peripheral and marginal areas of the ‘episodes’ to a more central function. In the name of this changed function, the task of complicating the plot is transferred to the supernatural’s diabolical matrix, and the task of ‘dissolving the knot’ to its divine matrix. While revising his poem, Tasso argues at length with the Roman censors about the necessity of the

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infernal council, recognizing it as not episodic but rather the very beginning of the desis, the construction of the narrative knot.37 The harangue that the newly elected Goffredo addresses to the crusaders can be read as an ‘anti-romance’ tirade, since he always represents the most tenacious opposition to the chivalric ethic in the poem. He affirms that ‘we never abandoned our beloved families and our native nest ... in order to gain a little noise of popular acclaim and to possess a barbarous land.’38 Goffredo marks the limits of the chivalric enterprise from his point of view, which is that of the Christian epic. The flatteries of the mellifluous Egyptian ambassador Alete will turn precisely in that direction when he appeals to a misunderstood sense of honour and individual glory in order to dissuade Goffredo from the crusade (II, 66–7). The threat of romance ‘deviance’ is expressed in the fear that ‘the force of our arms be either stalled or turned to another place’39 and that the same weapons ‘are twisted and turned contrary to the ends that the Giver intended.’40 As for Goffredo personally, he will prove to be impassive even before Armida’s amorous snares (‘né impedimento alcun torcer da l’orme / pote, che Dio ne segna, i pensier santi’).41 To justify the ‘historical’ relevance of this image, we need only recall that the most famous error of chivalric history is that of Ariosto’s Orlando, punished with madness by God precisely ‘because he took from the straight road the ensigns entrusted.’42 Throughout the poem, Tasso opposes God’s warrior’s devoted determination to ‘adore the great sepulchre and discharge his vow’43 – an aim that Goffredo reiterates almost obsessively – to the honour of the chivalric hero. The claim of the text as an epic negation of romance adventure coincides with its hero’s determination. The author, who is indeed truly ‘emulo di Goffredo’ (an imitator of Godfrey), lives out the same obsession. In the Discorsi he continually confronts the question of the ‘knot’ and the ‘dissolving of the knot.’ His ‘vow’ to be discharged, or ‘knot’ to be untied, is the Aristotelian desis or complication of the plot – the peripeteia or reversal, the crisis, the romance tangle that ultimately leads to the lusis of epic resolution. ‘Romance’ is then placed under the sign of Satan or, to put it more precisely, the subversive plan that Satan outlines is essentially a review of the multiple plots of the poem.44 It is noteworthy that both Satan and the romance lack independent status and an autonomous existence, since they are, as it were, both generated from the rib of the epic god. In the Discorsi, Tasso hammers home that romance is not a genre independent from epic, as the Ferrarese theorists Giraldi Cinzio and Pigna had maintained, but one of its deviations, anomalies, or ‘errors.’ More precisely, it is a genre that (resuming the metaphor used earlier) ‘torce il passo’

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(twists its course) from an ancient epic path to follow one of variety and error, as does Ariosto who ‘moving away from the path of ancient writers and Aristotle’s rules, embraced multiple and varied actions.’45 Other neoAristotelian critics had already made this point, but Tasso’s genius consists in assimilating de facto the error of the romance within the error of Satan, with his nostalgia for the sublime and the ‘stellati giri’ (starry quires [IV, 10]) from which he fell. This nostalgia translates itself into antagonistic determination and a passionate plan of subversion. In this sense, one could say that the ‘romance’ is the authentic ‘return of the repressed’ of Tasso’s poem and that its demonization is the specific form of a Freudian denial.46 Before moving on to another direct intertextual comparison, it is worth expanding our dossier of Tasso’s broadly ‘anti-Ariostan’ choices by noting the role played in his poem by two typical elements of the romance world. God’s plan for Rinaldo’s liberation from Armida’s prison significantly depends on a magician, the wise man of Ascalona, and Fortune, helmswoman of the fateful boat that will conduct the two liberator paladins, Carlo and Ubaldo, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The magus of Ascalona, following an order directly from God, instructs the two knights on this undertaking, or more properly, ‘quest,’ given that, on this one occasion (XIV, 35),47 Tasso uses Ariosto’s term while clearly marking his distance from it. The new function assigned to the romance character, whose traditional faculties are subordinated to the requirements of epic teleology, seems symptomatic here. It is most striking that this procedure corresponds, on the narrative level, to the edifying events of the magus’s own conversion from the pagan error of a proud, blind science to his latter placid submission of such science to the truth of faith (XIV, 45–6). It is almost unnecessary to point out the correlation of this process to the poem’s structural and ideological coordinates.48 In addition, Fortune’s boat is a recurrent topos of the chivalric romance, traditionally travelling without human control, bearing our hero on his quests from one episode to another. It is the very embodiment of the constitutive principle of ventura and digression that necessarily postpones every foreseen conclusion to the tale. With these two guides, the poem must abandon the epic scene, following the most extreme and peripheral paths of romance for three long cantos (in the belly of the earth [XIV]; along the African coasts [XV]; outside the Pillars of Hercules [XVI]), but only in view of a return to it; that is, of a restoration of the centripetal movement and its geographical centre. Tasso borrows his version of Fortune from Dante, where she is minister of divine Providence (Inferno VII, 61–96), in order to make her apparently

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random actions into the conscious realization of a plan that originates from an inscrutable will. In fact, that ‘fatal donzella’ (fated damsel) tames the sea and takes the helm in order to reach Armida’s island, where she will carry out the mission authorized by God himself, retrieving Rinaldo for the Christian cause. Fortune’s boat no longer sets sail on the digressive waters of romance. Instead, it has become a necessary tool of the epic machine whose task is to make the achievement of the providential goal coincide with the end of the tale.49 4 The wood is undoubtedly the most important topos of the romance. The intertextual comparison is strong, but once again it functions in the capacity of overturning and negation. This clearly emerges from rereading the thirteenth canto, where the forest, with its sinister impenetrability, spells, ghosts, and anguished voices that echo and chase after one another, is like an uncanny transformation of Ariosto’s wood. All the romance conventions are employed here, and the various and vain attempts of the crusaders to penetrate this forest enchanted by demons in order to collect wood needed for the war assume the forms and the language of the Ariostan quête.50 If it is true that epic conquest is built on the exorcism of the ‘devilish’ charm of romance, it is then permissible to attach another symbolic meaning to the liberating gesture with which Rinaldo definitively breaks the spell of the wood in canto XVIII. I believe that beyond the genetic links with a typical romance locus,51 the connections of situation and language with a specific Ariostan episode are particularly meaningful, in this case an episode not in the Orlando furioso itself but in the fragmentary Cinque canti attached to the Furioso. In Cinque canti II, 101–25, the poet describes a ghastly, impenetrable wood. The sinister apparitions in this forest, where the sorceress Medea and her entourage of demons have made their home, terrorize the Christian soldiers sent to find timber for the siege of rebellious Prague. In the end, only Charlemagne (or Charles, as Ariosto calls him) manages to cut down the ancient trees, after he has exorcized their maleficent influences with a solemn mass held by the bishop Turpin.52 Galileo, that first great comparatist, had already intuited that the Cinque canti led to the Liberata. Paying a rare compliment to Tasso (despite immediately renewing an unfavourable comparison to Ariosto) on the council of demons of canto IV, Galileo writes: Questo concilio di diavoli mi par tutto bonissimo; e ben che non aviamo nel Furioso da farli parallelo, potremo nondimeno legger quello delle fate,

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posto nel primo de’ Cinque Canti aggiunti, dove loro ancora si preparano alla rovina dell’Imperio di Francia.53 This council of devils seems to me entirely excellent; and although we do not have anything in the Furioso to match it, we might nevertheless read that of the fairies, placed at the beginning of the added Cinque Canti, where they too prepare themselves to destroy French rule.

Galileo alludes to the council of fairies called by Alcina and presided over by Demogorgon, through which they plan to intervene against the Christian army. Alcina uses Envy to stimulate Ganelon’s ambition and disloyalty against Charlemagne. This specific tradition has roots in the Homeric poems. We might also note the sinister connotation with which Tasso loads Ariosto’s language and images, from whom he learned the important epic implications of placing a demonic council at the origins of anti-Christian machinations.54 Gathered together from remote parts of the world, the fairies, borne by demons and fantastic animals that embody an image of marvellous variety,55 assemble on Mt Imavo (the Himalayas). Alcina pleads Morgana’s case, enumerating the offences committed by Orlando against her in the past. This is not the biblical story evoked by Satan on the subject of the prevarications of the Christian God (Liberata IV, 9–17) but, more modestly, an evocation of Boiardo’s story: ‘I need not to tell you how and why and how many times and in how many ways Orlando has offended Morgana, to our common shame, because the matter is well known to all.’56 Listening to Alcina, who is speaking pro domo sua since she has not forgotten Ruggiero’s betrayal, all the fairies of the romance tradition (Falerina, Dragontina, Silvanella, etc.) find reasons to complain about the Christians. In the end, the wise Demogorgon, in language that closely recalls Satan’s pronouncement in IV, 17,57 entrusts Alcina with the charge of being the one to ‘vendicare il commun scorno’ (to avenge their common shame), and ‘let Orlando, let Charles, let the lineage of France, let the entire Empire be wiped out; and let no sign or vestige remain, let no one even know enough to say: “Here once stood Paris”’ (I, 30).58 Alcina resolves to ask for Envy’s help in baiting Ganelon. The fairy goes to visit Envy in her infernal home and invokes her intervention by refreshing in her memory the recent Christian usurpation, restating the story of the ‘vil gente che fuggì da Troia’ (base people who fled from Troy).59 Ariosto concludes with a couplet reminiscent of Tasso: ‘[N]ow Pepin’s son Charles rules the Empire and lays down the

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law to Europe and the whole world.’60 The insistent series of harangues follows: ‘Can you suffer ... can you suffer that he now rule over many provinces, and curb all the East, and that from the Indus to the farthest distant waves the earth and sea should tremble at his great name?’61 We should compare this with the similar solicitations of Liberata IV, 13: e soffrirem che forza ognor maggiore il suo popol fedele in Asia prenda? e che Giudea soggioghi? E che ’l suo onore, che ’l nome suo più si dilati e stenda? che suoni in altre lingue, e in altri carmi si scriva, e incida in novi bronzi e marmi? Che sian gl’idoli nostri a terra sparsi? ch’i nostri altari il mondo a lui converta? ch’a lui sospesi i voti, a lui sol arsi siano gl’incensi, ed auro e mirra offerta? and shall we suffer it that His faithful gather in Asia daily a greater power? and that they bring Judaea under the yoke? and that His honour, His name be the more extended and spread abroad? that it resound in other tongues, and be written in other oracles, and cut in new bronzes and marbles? That our idols be scattered on the ground? that the world convert our altars to Him? that for Him the trophies be hung up, for Him alone the incense burned, and gold and myrrh be offered?

I will show in the following chapter how the Cinque canti details the disintegration of the free romance world evoked by Ariosto in the Furioso. Charlemagne’s empire, which had provided the historical scene for a centuries-old genre, undergoes a definitive rout by obscure demonic forces, the pressing presence of evil, carrying away the feudal-chivalric imaginary. With respect to the Orlando furioso, Ariosto’s narration in the Cinque canti takes a rather anomalous turn, leaning towards a historical epos veined with contemporary anxieties, leaving unanswered questions about the genesis of this ‘addition’ (if, indeed, it is a question of ‘addition’)62 and the overall strategies of its author. This gloomy and dramatic narration of the conflicts threatening the unity of Christian Europe, opposing the Franks to the Lombards and the central European powers,63 has rightly been read in a historical perspective that recognizes its topicality.64 The wars that were unleashed by Francis I

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together with Charles V’s attempts to achieve European hegemony created a climate marked by the decline of Italian liberty and troubled by nascent religious divisions. How could this new perspective on the fate of the ‘romance’ fail to attract Tasso’s attention? In the new epos of the crusade, narration was restored to the high model of epic and justified by the aims of religious ideology, while the romance code progressively lost its autonomy and legitimacy, at least until it coincided with that space of ‘error’ where Satan suffers for his necessary marginalization but also proudly lives out his irreducible otherness. Although in the Liberata Tasso relegates the romance to the space of epic ‘disturbance,’65 and mockingly imitates it on occasion in the adventurous freedoms of those who (like Erminia) carry out their nocturnal escapes in disguise, romance continues to represent a temptation that is resisted but never definitively repressed, placing a strain upon Tasso’s epic vocation. On the brink of his highest undertaking, Tasso seeks, in the figure of the castaway, to exorcize Ariosto’s ‘error’: the enticements of romance deviance and dispersal (Liberata I, 4).

5 The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto’s Cinque canti

1 Whatever the reasons for Ariosto’s decision not to incorporate the Cinque canti into the body of the Orlando furioso, this fragment, despite its incompleteness, offers an appropriate dramatic setting for the final artistic representation of the chivalric world. There were already clear signs of crisis in the first edition of the Furioso, and it was probably in the narrative and ideological context of that edition that the Cinque canti came into being.1 Other signs of crisis were to mark the more severe physiognomy of the third edition. The pessimistic aspects of the final version of the poem, which caused previous critics concerned with preserving the ‘harmony’ of the Furioso to see the Cinque canti as a sort of negative flip side to the main narrative, seem to condense into one whole. As a result, the dynamic proportions of Ariosto’s writing have been distorted. The author’s act of deletion has been matched by an act of genuine critical repression that aimed to free the undisturbed sunniness of the first Furioso by pushing all the shadows onto the ‘addition.’ Having made these necessary prefatory remarks, I should add that, read outside the context of a wider project and cut off from the play of dialectical balancing acts, the Cinque canti lend themselves to a reading that emphasizes the tones of high drama in the poem. In particular, the last stanzas (with the defeat of Charles,2 the overthrow of the Christian armies, and the emperor’s fall into the river) fade out as in a film into a vision made all the more gloomy by the unfinished nature of the narrative itself. A generation away from Boiardo’s dramatic giving up on the writing of the Orlando innamorato in the wake of the invasion of Italy by the French king, Charles VIII, the Cinque canti replicate the same trauma of incompleteness, establishing the fragment as an impregnable site of resistance to the Furioso, a poem that had constantly aimed to use

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the canons of classical closure to check its nature as an open, polymorphous, restless romance. Although the narrative form of the Cinque canti ends in failure, it is nevertheless in their narrative and thematic substance that we must look for the reasons behind the end of the chivalric adventure and the disappearance of a scenario celebrated by four centuries of literature. In the Furioso, despite difficulties and contradictions, ‘harmony’ finds its proper measure in the poem’s epic-dynastic outcome, although only at the price of leaving the chivalric hero Ruggiero’s foretold death outside the text.3 This event is the actual repressed site of all Ariosto’s narration, the postponed obligation that the Cinque canti vainly try to fulfil. The main body of Ariosto’s poem expels the subject that remained purely intentional in Boiardo (‘vi contarò ... come Rugier, che fu nel mondo un fiore, / fosse tradito; e Gano di Maganza, / pien de ogni fellonia, pien de ogni fele, / lo uccise a torto, il perfido crudele’),4 the thread that Ariosto’s tapestry had to continue (‘Ruggier da quel dì ch’ebbe la fede, / dovea sette anni, e non più, stare in vita; / che per la morte che sua donna diede / a Pinabel, ch’a lui fia attribuita, / saria, e per quella ancor di Bertolagi, / morto dai Maganzesi empi e malvagi’). 5 Ariosto’s attempt to reintegrate these events into the text lies behind the unfulfilled project of his addition in the Cinque canti. The failed destiny of this unfinished piece of writing, which is more than the mutilated tale of the rout of the Christian empire, throws a disturbing shadow over the fate of the romance universe. In this sense, the formal incompleteness of the Cinque canti is the most obvious sign of a real and definitive dissolution of the chivalric world, the paradoxical completion of a genre. 2 The narrator’s attitude has changed profoundly from the Furioso to the Cinque canti. In a tale that proceeds in a generally unitary block, cohesively and solidly constructed around its epic centre (unlike the finished major poem), Ariosto’s two privileged authorial roles, as director of entrelacement and as ironic narrator, pay the price. We need to account for these two new phenomena. Only a few, rare traces of irony survive in the Cinque canti. As readers we smile our last at the usual game of profuse poetic compensation in praise of women previously berated, at the opening of Canto IV: ‘Donne mie care, il torto che mi fate ...’ (My dear ladies, the wrong you do me). On the level of more free and easy divertissement, we can enjoy the light touch of irony when the famous quartet of Avino, Avolio, Ottone, and Berlingiero is split up by the temporary defection of one of its members because

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of illness (III, 66]). We also rediscover familiar clichés such as the fantastic hyperrealism of Gloricia’s ship (I, 105), or Ariosto’s good-humoured distance from Turpin when the latter’s tales get too tall (IV, 87). But Ariosto’s use of irony as a key structural element of romance has definitively come to an end. In the tense, violent, and above all hypocritical universe of the Cinque canti, his narrative voice has radically changed tone. No longer divided between the roles of narrator and character, and therefore no longer joyously intermingled with the pluralistic choir of other voices, it is now that of an omniscient narrator alone. The weakening of the ironic register can be attributed to the crisis of ‘courtly’ ideology and a poetics understood as a ‘demiurgical ordering, the architecture of chaos.’6 The divergence of narrator and character ends their complicity in romance ‘errors’ and promotes a new narrative focus that ceases to play indulgently on human weaknesses and instead privileges the task of unmasking hypocrisy and denouncing wicked intentions.7 The crisis of chivalric courtesy in the Cinque canti creates an ironic counter-melody that renders the famous irony of the Furioso incongruous. Good-natured tolerance gives way to the bitter tones of denunciation, impoverishing the chromatic range of Ariosto’s narrative voice. In some ways, these moralistic overtones are also a sign of defeat, almost as if the authorial power so admirably maintained throughout the Furioso, had itself entered a crisis. From this perspective, the Cinque canti seem almost paradoxical. In the Furioso, Ariosto’s control over his subject matter and characters meant that he could allow himself to merge with them and intrude into the narrative level. The return to a more reassuring omniscient voice of unmaking and denunciation in the Cinque canti seems instead to indicate a defensive choice, the choice of an author who is opting out, who no longer wants to play the game because he has lost faith in an ordered reality. Characters in the Cinque canti take up the ‘ordir trame’ (laying out the warp of the narrative threads) and the ‘tesser tele’ (weaving of the design), procedures in the Furioso that the poet uses to mark the game of his poetic fiction.8 These motifs of narrative and plot design are no longer the exclusive prerogative of the author; rather, they are the behavioural cipher of the two ‘scheming’ characters, Ganelon and Alcina, who most rival him in his directorial role: ‘[Ganelon] in order to accomplish a plot that he had partly arranged, partly kept in his heart, he pretended [and spread word] that he had made a vow’;9 ‘Alcina had plotted for Ganelon to arrive on her shore’;10 ‘[Ganelon] had plotted all this intrigue which the Lombard was now about to weave’;11 ‘[Ganelon]

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to pursue his intent, he would have plotted not just one but a thousand treasons every day’;12 ‘Having already set the threads in the warp, Ganelon prepared the woof of the plot he was weaving.’13 The crisis of Ariosto’s directorial role indicates an abdication in the face of the ‘confusion’ of the real,14 while his repossession of a position of authorial superiority reliant upon the power of denunciation does not in the least correspond to a restoration of authoritativeness. As we shall see, the Cinque canti put the whole historical and political issue of authority into question. The Neoplatonic Demiurge (a metaphor for the poetic artifex some critics have seen as the god of the Furioso)15 is exiled in the Cinque canti from the directorial position and doubled instead by the character of Demogorgon (previously found in Boiardo).16 As the head of the council of fairies, he draws together the threads of the anti-Christian conspiracy. As the expression of an antagonistic will, a much more sinister antagonist than the good old sorcerer Atlante, the Demiurge seems to take over Ariosto’s plot and impose himself as the demonic director of the Antitext. The narrator who cunningly plays with the interruption of the tale as a rhetorical device in the Furioso here finds himself confronting another kind of gap. Not only does the mutilation of the text twice interrupt the story (V, 72 and 93), but a Babel–like confusion of languages sometimes disturbs the characters’ dialogue. When Rinaldo and Orlando are set against one another by Ganelon’s intrigues, they exchange insults and reciprocal accusations of betrayal in a total communication breakdown that makes each completely deaf to the reasoning of the other. The text’s greatest gap opens up just as a glimmer of reciprocal understanding is about to emerge, so that the reader remains suspended on that ‘fastel da non ne trar construtto’ (incomprehensible bundle [V, 70]). The linguistic confusion is the expression of military and political confusion, in which it is hard to tell friend from enemy, once the traditional system of alliances and consanguinity has been subverted. At this point, identity itself is questioned by the vertiginous game of disguises of Vertumnus, a magical demon and a master of disguise whom Alcina puts at Ganelon’s disposal for his trickery. The writing has generated its own metaphors, so to speak: Rinaldo’s ‘incomprehensible’ discourse is in a way the literal ‘deconstruction’ of Ariosto’s text, which proceeds parallel to the Christian empire’s political destructuring. The ‘weaver’ poet, seeing his directorial prerogatives compromised, reacts by recompressing the tale into a unitary structure that abandons the varied paths of romance entrelacement. This monolithic narrative

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approach contributes in turn to the ‘austere and almost wintry’ tone of the tale.17 Now that it is no longer an open, pluralistic interweaving of strands, the story proceeds by dramatic scansion, without second thoughts and hesitations, towards the inevitable catastrophe. This need for narrative closure goes along with a Manichean radicalization of values and characters, at the same time that an eminently dualistic logic supplants the logic of pluralism. Ariosto abandons not only the formal but also the ideological principle of romance, namely, its multiple perspective. It is certainly a step backwards, given that the Cinque canti bear the traces of the ‘oral narrative technique’ and of a ‘mechanically additional structure.’18 Yet it is a step backwards that in fact restores the historical form of the epic tale (that of the French chansons de geste, which were recast as vernacular epics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and which underlie a poem like Pulci’s Morgante), filling it with the tones of a new morality and sensibility that were essentially extraneous to the romance universe of the Furioso. The courtly world has disappeared along with the techniques of representation that inaugurated Boiardo’s practice of contaminatio between stories of arms and stories of love, the first decisive step towards romance plurality. Following the tendency common among the other continuators of the Innamorato, the Cinque canti recover a Carolingian dimension, which seems to announce not so much the advent of the heroic model of Tasso’s epic (as I indicated in the previous chapter)19 but a return to the pre-Boiardo form of the genre. In fact, the plot of the Cinque canti follows a single thread (the rebellion of the Christian peoples incited by Ganelon against the authority of Emperor Charles), which brings together the assorted threads criss-crossing the poem into a single, compact block. Ariosto no longer seems to be inspired by a model of paratactic coordination consistent with the poetics of varietas and the technique of the ‘diverse fila’ (different strands) but instead arranges his tale according to a principle of logical and chronological subordination (with very few disruptions between fabula and plot). In the sense explained above, the model is markedly more epic. The narrative functionality of the novella-like inserts demonstrates this by contrast. There are three primary examples of these inserts, two of them handled by the narrator and one by a character, and normally they would tend to confirm the ‘open’ nature of Ariosto’s writing. The narrator introduces the ‘strange case’ of Penticone, Ottone da Villafranca, and his wife, Bianca (II, 58 ff), in order to explain the resolution of the war on the Lombard front. The story of the ‘sin of love’ that

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Astolfo tells Ruggiero (IV, 54 ff) to explain his imprisonment in the belly of the whale is a typical ‘second’ story that parallels that of the Furioso VI, 17–53, where Astolfo similarly precedes Ruggiero in his fate as victim of Alcina’s revenge. In both cases, Ariosto uses explanatory flashbacks that, despite their narrative autonomy, remain solidly anchored to the tale’s main plot. The case of Suspicion’s ‘novella’ is more anomalous. The story is told in the first person in the narrative space that is most particularly the narrator’s, the proem (II, 10–17).20 Here the tale has almost no narrative function, and yet it would be difficult to label it as gratuitous or merely escapist. In fact, it represents a fierce moral fable on the corruption of power, recalling the code of writing Ariosto employed in the Satires written during those same years. The brief ‘istorie’ that Ariosto inserts into the Satires are exempla (or examples, as the author defines them, cf Satire III, 107), narrative segments that intersect the main line of argument in order to confirm it. If it is true that the satiric code (as a form of mixed writing) at least partly influences the narration of the Cinque canti, then we have another proof of the proximity of the two texts in terms of their genesis and date. One might also note that, while the exemplum of Suspicion is an explicit moral fable about power, the two longer flashbacks speak of amorous sins that were equally the result of abuses of feudal authority.21 We should bear in mind that these are the only two stories about love in the Cinque canti. Because they are also strongly interwoven with the theme of power and its violence, this only confirms the exquisitely ‘political’ nature of the fragment and the definitive destruction of the literary moment when ‘loves’ delightfully mixed with ‘arms.’ 3 The difference between the Cinque canti and the Furioso is not only a question of narrative technique. But the Canti do displace the inheritance left by the narrative models and the particular arrangement of the text in the chivalric tradition. I would say the most significant thing that emerged from the project of annotation and commentary I undertook on the Cinque canti22 is the way in which Ariosto’s writing moves in two divergent directions, which we might identify emblematically as Pulcian and Machiavellian. The Pulcian substratum, fairly limited in the Furioso,23 is much more notable in the Cinque canti, where Ariosto uses the model of Boiardo less and less.24 This means that increasing echoes of a ‘popular’ language are heard and that the subject matter goes back to the low popular tradi-

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tion of the vernacular cantari and to Luigi Pulci’s return to it in his Morgante (1483), rather than to the high courtly tradition of the Innamorato. This tendency is not limited to the lexical level. The narrative subject matter of the Cinque canti bears some unmistakably archaic roles, situations, and themes essentially outside of the Boiardesque romance, but still vital in the Morgante. Particularly, Ganelon’s renewed importance as the plotter of deceptions restores him to his old role in the medieval chansons. Moreover, his betrayal presupposes Charles’s absolute blindness towards his trusted adviser’s intrigues. This was the traditional version of events, which had diminished the emperor’s authority and credibility over the centuries, increasingly marginalizing his character in high chivalric literature. Even Rinaldo, whom some critics have seen as the Furioso’s most modern character,25 is sucked back into his image as rebellious vassal, part of the traditional representation of the provincial nobility’s feudal impatience with the monarch’s centralized power. The proselytizing emphasis that animates Ruggiero and Astolfo in the whale’s belly is also part of this ‘regressive’ tendency. It represents a return to a characteristic aspect of the great adventures of Orlando and other paladins in the east, with their mass baptisms of infidels, that existed up until Pulci’s comic-grotesque parody. This aspect is almost entirely absent in the Furioso. We might speak of a ‘Pulcian’ rather than a ‘Boiardesque’ textual strategy in the Cinque canti. Pulci had condensed the Maganzese subject matter, with plots very similar to those of the Cinque canti, and used it as a kind of appendix to his Morgante.26 Yet in the Cinque canti there are elements that drastically contradict the tendency to return to a more archaic and popular chivalric subject matter, leaning instead towards contemporary issues. This contemporary perspective leaves its mark on Ariosto’s writing, especially in terms of religion and politics. The first important matter to note is that the enemy has changed. The Moors, the infidels, and the pagans have more or less vanished (‘with Agramante dead and King Marsilio put to flight’ [II, 34]), and Charles finds himself fighting a political and religious antagonist from within the Christian ranks. The ‘schism’ on the north-eastern side of the empire has all the appearances of civil war. It is no coincidence that this promotes Lucan’s Pharsalia27 among the narrative models that Ariosto uses most often. Nor is it coincidence that the conflict erupts in those regions (Saxony and Bohemia) that were the hotbeds of religious revolt in Ariosto’s time. The first centrifugal pressures come from the home of Hussite reformism, Prague, presented as ‘nemica della fede’ (enemy of

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the faith [II, 95]) and the deconsecrated land of the new religion of sexual libertinism and promiscuity of the fairy-sorceress Medea.28 Furthermore, the ‘contemporary’ perspective means that traditional allusions to the corruption of the Roman church are to be taken less for granted: ‘This is that holy ship that sails to Heaven, which Peter removes from Rome, so that it does not sink into the waves of rape and simony’ (I, 91).29 In the same way, the possible suggestions of anti-Lutheran polemics (‘Ma perché fede quasi morta è detta / quella che sta senza fare opre a bada, / procacciamo con buon’opre che sia / più grata a Dio la tua fede e la mia’)30 give a more militant flavour to the proselytizing that, as I have said, seems to be the legacy of an older chivalric tradition. It thus seems possible to argue that religious issues are considered with greater anxiety in the Cinque canti than in the Furioso, where such references are both statistically and substantially less significant. But other more purely political aspects of the literary tradition lend themselves to a rereading in the light of contemporary events and ideas. Ganelon appears in the partially new light of Machiavellian wickedness – if we analyse his behaviour for its diplomatic shrewdness and courtly dissembling, both of which exceed his conventional stereotype as a traitor. He is not only the fraudulent adviser of tradition but also the able strategist of a plot that emphasizes his ‘foxlike’ qualities.31 A master of propaganda, he demonstrates above all a singular care for his ‘image’ and shrewdly orchestrates a false ‘opinion’ about his intentions and movements: ‘sparge il rumor d’andar verso Baiona ...’ (spreads the rumour that he is going toward / Bayonne [III, 70]). He even makes a devout pilgrimage to the Holy Land (‘finse aver voto, e ne sparse la voce, / d’ire al Sepolcro e al monte della Croce’)32 just to be able to pursue his fraudulent aims. Machiavelli’s suggestion that ‘it is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them’ (Prince XVIII) suits this parvenu, who studies like a prince, indeed: Gano, non gli bastando che maggiore non avea alcuno in corte, eccetto Carlo, era tanto insolente, che minore lui vorria ancora, e avea disio di farlo; et or che sopranaturale favore si sentia da colei che potea darlo, oltra il desir avea speme e disegno fra pochi giorni d’occupargli il regno.

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E pur che fosse il suo desir successo, non saria dal fellon, senza rispetto che tra gli primi suoi baroni messo Carlo l’avea di luogo infimo e abietto, stato ferro né tosco pretermesso, né scelerato alcun fatto né detto; e mille al giorno, non che un tradimento, ordito avria per conseguir suo intento.

(III, 3–4)

Not satisfied that he had no one greater than himself at court except Charles, Ganelon was insolent enough to want Charles his inferior, too, and desired to make him so; and now that he enjoyed the supernatural favour of one who had such gifts within her power, he had, in addition to his desire, hopes and plans to occupy the throne in a few days. And, as long as it accomplished his desire, the villain would not forgo sword or poison, or any wicked deed or word; nor was he deterred by the fact that Charles had raised him from a base and abject estate to a position among his foremost barons; to pursue his intent, he would have plotted not just one but a thousand treasons every day.

These Machiavellian echoes are probably more the result of chance correspondences than of explicit debts, which would in any case be chronologically unlikely.33 Perhaps the humanist reflections of Platina, Carafa, or Pontano on the jealousies of courtly life and the deceptions of power would be enough to explain some of Ariosto’s analyses.34 Nevertheless, we find confirmation of political maturity in Ariosto’s writing from the opening scene of the Cinque canti: the council of fairies is a little masterpiece of the hypocrisies and diplomatic dissembling at which Alcina excels. Here she is much more the astute political strategist than the ‘enchantress’of the Furioso, as she ably manoeuvres her intermediary, Ganelon. It is inevitable that first misunderstandings and then secret plottings should flower in this polluted ground among such victims of political intrigue as Rinaldo and Orlando, who are also forced into the dirty game of Charles’s total war. The same is true of the victims of overbearing feudal and masculinist force, like the lady who is harassed by Penticone, ready to grasp without scruple at an ‘honest dissimulation’ in order to defend her threatened honour.35 In the tense climate of suspicion and hypocrisy, where authority is stripped of its legitimacy by abuse and power expresses itself as machination and con-

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spiracy, we seem to hear an echo of the Machiavelli who wrote one of the most famous and bitter reflections on Italian politics: Credevano i nostri principi italiani, prima ch’egli assaggiassero i colpi delle oltramontane guerre, che a uno principe bastasse sapere negli scrittoi pensare un’acuta risposta, scrivere una bella lettera, mostrare ne’ detti e nelle parole arguzia e prontezza, sapere tessere una fraude ... governarsi co’ sudditi avaramente e superbamente ... disprezzare se alcuno avesse loro dimostro alcuna lodevole via ...; né si accorgevano i meschini che si preparavano ad essere preda di qualunque gli assaltava. (Arte della guerra, VII) Before our Italian princes had been scourged by men from beyond the Alps, they thought it sufficient for princes to write handsome letters, or to return civil answers to them, to excel in drollery and repartee, to undermine and deceive one another, [...] to keep up a haughty kind of state and grind the faces of their subjects [...] to browbeat those who endeavored to point out anything that was salutary or praiseworthy [...] They did not foresee (weak and infatuated as they were) that by such conduct they were making a rod for their own backs and exposing themselves to the mercy of the first invader. (Trans. Farneworth 210)

The poverty of Italian politics, without authority and vainly founded on a presumed diplomatic ability, is embodied in the figures of Charles and Ganelon, ultimately both losers: the prince without force and his traitor secretary (who certainly knows how to plan deceptions and write letters!). In a recent study, David Quint pays close attention to the political aspect of Ariosto’s tale. The poet at first lays the responsibility for the imminence of an ending at the door of mysterious external forces (Demogorgon and the fairies). But as the story proceeds, these forces increasingly resemble demonized forces within the Christian world that were all too real and operative within Ariosto’s contemporary society. ‘When one asks just what is it that is coming to an end in the Cinque canti, the answer might be summed up as “chivalry” itself, or, more properly, a feudal order of society that constituted chivalry as a system of values. The Cinque canti depict feudalism falling victim to a new social arrangement in which the princely court becomes an increasingly important site of power: it is the site as well of the poem’s personified figures of Envy and Suspicion.’36 Through these two allegories of power

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– Suspicion, to whom the poet dedicates his sinister moral fable, and Envy, whom Alcina asks to goad Ganelon – Ariosto is in fact demonizing the Prince and the Courtier, the dominant figures in the construction of the modern state in early-sixteenth-century literature. The intrigues of the Cinque canti are all conceived and promoted within the court itself, the new and powerful institution around which an increasingly centralized and absolute power is consolidated. According to Quint, while the patriarchal and feudal society founded on the bonds of faith, honour, and reciprocal obligation – which Ariosto views from a nostalgic perspective – collapses, the Cinque canti rewrite the ancient rivalry that the chivalric tradition attributed to the opposed clans of Chiaramonte and Maganza. It becomes a competition between a progressively marginalized warrior nobility (Rinaldo and Orlando) and a courtly aristocracy that works directly in the service of the prince, but also pursues its own independent political interests. Charles, too, is tempted to embody the figure of the new prince. Before being ‘drugged’ (V, 4) by Ganelon, he is a commander faithful to Machiavelli’s precept of comparing one’s own actions to the illustrious actions of the past: E per gli molti esempi che già letto de’ capitani avea del tempo veglio, com’uom ch’ amava sopra ogni diletto d’udir istorie e farne al viver speglio, e più perché vedutone l’effetto per propria esperienza, il sapea meglio; conobbe al tempo la prestezza usata aver più volte la vittoria data.

(II, 50)

And from the many examples of captains of ancient times that he had read, for he loved above every other pleasure listening to histories and holding them up as a mirror to life – and because he knew even better having seen the effect in his own personal experience – Charles understood that speed used at the right moment has yielded victory on many occasions.

The brilliant surprise military action with which the emperor anticipates Cardorano’s moves and besieges rebellious Prague comes to nothing because of Ganelon’s malicious advice to protract the siege and accept the chivalric challenge put forward at his suggestion by the Bohemian king in order to buy time. Charles embodies in the same act two

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contradictory Machiavellian attitudes, one ‘impetuous’ and one ‘prudent,’ because he proves ultimately to be incapable of reconciling auctoritas and experience or, in other words, of comparing the lesson of the ancient ‘histories’ with the contemporary models of the ‘art of war.’ While the Cinque canti generally privilege the movements of vast military bodies on the battlefront in consonance with the new techniques that artillery had imposed on European warfare (the same artillery deplored in Furioso XI), Charles’s tactical solution, initially a modern and timely one, degenerates into a harmful regression to the chivalric war by duel, the ‘romance’ deferral of the siege. In their own way, narrative techniques and military tactics each renew the simultaneous movement towards both the archaic and the contemporary that marks the Cinque canti. 4 Ariosto is no less suspended between ‘new’ and ‘ancient histories’ than his character Charles.37 It is not only a question of his accepting or rejecting models of writing, or even reconciling them in an attempt at ‘modernity,’ that perhaps represents the first great missed opportunity of the Cinque canti. Alongside the perplexities of a commander who does not know how to span the new, integrating it in Machiavellian style with the authority of the old,38 we find the associated anxieties of a narrator who repeatedly expresses his own awareness of a degraded present. The moments when the chivalric fiction opens out into contemporary history never allow for favourable comparisons but instead indicate a fracture opening within the narrative structure, the sign of the invasion of a contemporary world that neither the poet nor his characters can easily rationalize. At times, the narrator seems to give in to the rising disorder: ‘he looks for causes and responsibilities. Yet he sees nothing but fairies, devils and monsters: in heaven and on earth. He, too, does not know how to go beyond suspicions and conjectures – varied as they are – and discover the presence of the formless, the deformed, the monstrous.’39 The theme of the degeneration of modern times echoes through the whole of the second canto in particular, with dramatic insistence. It is visible in the forceful argument against tyranny (‘ma se ne tace, perché è sempre meglio / lasciar i vivi e dir del tempo veglio’),40 where the narrator’s evocation of a happy past is a convenient shield for his reticence on contemporary matters. It is also notable in the argument against mercenaries (‘non si sentiva allor questo rumore / de’ tamburi, com’oggi, andar in volta’),41 where Machiavellian echoes42 provide the backdrop for a live concern

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about breaking the local bonds and the feudal links of the chivalric tradition. We also see it in the polemic against court society, where, with a last great touch of irony, Ariosto, refusing to provide contemporary examples of blind and ungrateful lords, pretends to shield his own political self-censorship behind scruples of narrative convenience (the boredom his reader will feel because of the length of the tale): e senza ritornar al tempo antico n’avrei più d’uno a nostra età da torre: ma se più verso a questo canto giungo, temo vi offenda il suo troppo esser lungo.

(II, 135)

and I could take more than one from our own age, without going back to older times: but, I fear, if I add more verses to this Canto, you might be offended by its being too long.

But the heart of this bitter comparison between present and past lies in the two Boiardesque stanzas that recall the happy times of the early days of the Este dynasty: Chi si ricorda il dì di san Giovanni, che sotto Ercole o Borso era sì allegro? che poi veduto non abbian molt’anni, come né ancora altro piacere integro, di poi che cominciar gli assidui affanni de’ quali è in tutta Italia ogni core egro: parlo del dì che si facea contesa di saettar dinanzi alla sua chiesa. Quel dì inanzi alla chiesa del Battista si ponean tutti i sagittari in schiera; né colpo uscia fin ch’al bersaglio vista la saetta del principe non era; poi con la nobiltà la plebe mista l’aria di frecce a gara facea nera: così ferito ch’ebbe il bosco Carlo, fu presto tutto il campo a seguitarlo.

(II, 120–1)

Who remembers the feast day of St John, which under Ercole and Borso was so merry? They have not seen it for many years, or any other unmiti-

The Shattering of the Chivalric World 127 gated pleasure either, since the unremitting afflictions began from which every heart in Italy is sick: I speak of the day on which they used to have an archery contest in front of the church. On that day, before the Church of the Baptist, all the archers lined up in a group; and no shot left before the Prince's own arrow was seen in the target; then the common people, mixed together with the nobility, blackened the air with their arrows in competition: in the same way, once Charles had struck the forest, the whole camp was ready to follow his example.

The more Charles’s weakness becomes apparent and he is shown to be unable to protect his empire, the more the polemical insistence on the authority of the ancients or on the elegiac laudatio temporis acti denounces the vacuum of power. The vacuum occurs when a good, legitimate, and authoritative paternity (Charles, the ‘saggio padre di famiglia’ [wise father of a family] I, 60) gives way to a perverse, iniquitous, and usurped paternity (Ganelon, ‘ch’era d’insidie e tradimenti il padre’ [who was the father of treacheries and betrayals] II, 32). The crisis of authority has two opposing faces: on the one side Charles’s weakness and on the other the excesses of the tyrants, those monsters whose sinister shadow falls upon the third edition of the Furioso (Cimosco and Marganorre), who are condensed in the Cinque canti into the new allegory of power (Suspicion). The comparison makes reference to the present as if it were a degenerate ‘son’ of the past. The patriarchal model is in crisis because the examples of the ancients no longer hold any meaning and the feudal ties of relationship have come undone. Charles is the victim of an identity conflict, caught between a charismatic feudal model and a pragmatic courtly one, and this conflict leads to his irresolute actions, since he is no longer the good shepherd of his people and is not yet the unscrupulous Machiavellian prince. Belying the patriarchal images of the shepherd and his flock that recur with symptomatic insistence throughout the poem, the figure of the ‘empio e maligno’ (wicked and malignant) son who raises his homicidal hand against his father stands out. This figure emerges into the narrator’s consciousness and is consigned to a laborious simile when Charles believes that ‘in corvo il cigno / Rinaldo essere mutato’ (Rinaldo has been transformed from a swan into a crow [III, 55]). This same son declares his rebellion by drawing from a bestiary symbology, loading himself with the full weight of symbolic violence that Ariosto wished to condense into his poem’s emblematic imagery. Entering the field against Orlando, who still wears the signs of his unfailing loyalty to the king (V, 49), Rinaldo bears the famous impresa of bees

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chased out of the hive that the first edition of the Furioso bore, almost as if to testify that these fathers, as well as being weak and oppressive, are also ungrateful: ... era adorno d’un ricco drappo di color cilestro sparso di pecchie d’or entro e d’intorno, che cacciate parean dal natio loco da l’ingrato villan con fumo e foco.

(V, 46)

... dressed in a rich cloak of celestial hue, spotted around and about with bees of gold that seemed to have been chased from their nests by an ungrateful farmer with fire and smoke.

Did not Ariosto himself engage in a disconcerting autobiographical confession of his own mythologically transfigured Oedipal feelings in the Satires he was writing at the same time? Che s’al mio genitor, tosto che a Reggio Daria mi partorì, facevo il giuoco, che fe’ Saturno al suo ne l’alto seggio, sì che di me sol fosse questo poco ne lo qual dieci tra frati e serocchie è bisognato che tutti abbian luoco, la pazzia non avrei de le ranocchie fatta già mai, d’ir procacciando a cui scoprirmi il capo e piegar le ginocchie.

(Satires III, 13–21)

If, as soon as Daria gave birth to me in Reggio, I had played the same trick on my father that Saturn played on his in the lofty throne, so that mine alone were this pittance in which it is necessary that ten brothers and sisters have a share, I would never have committed the folly of the frogs, to have gone in search of someone to whom I could bare my head and bend my knee.

Resisting the temptation to link the gap-filled plot of the Cinque canti to unverifiable biographical hypotheses, I will limit myself for the moment to this single suggestion from the Satires, noting that its Oedipal mythology finds a small but not irrelevant place among the various symbolic registers of Ariosto’s ‘addition.’

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In the archaic and traditionally escapist forms of the romance genre, Ariosto seems to confront head-on the tragedy of our sixteenth-century Italian history. Charles’s defection in the poem could be ideally linked on the one hand to the actual illness of the Duke of Urbino (whose wife substituted for him in the Cortegiano) and on the other to Machiavelli’s heartfelt plea for an until-now absent and still unidentifiable prince to assume the task of liberating Italy. The historical scenario reflects back onto the poetic fiction the image of a sick or absent ruler, or an inadequate one, a phantom authority who must speak by proxy and act through representatives. Thus emerge the images of the people who pay for the errors of their ruler (V, 5); of the lost flock and its shepherd (III, 11; IV, 76); and of the family in mourning that laments the fate of husbands and sons (II, 76). Ariosto effectively reduced the vast and confused European setting to the dimensions of a family romance in order to delineate its elusive borders and at the same time give greater strength to the drama. For this reason, he constructs the bitter events of the Cinque canti upon his perception of a failure of power that unhinges the order of secular institutions: family, civil community, state. Having abolished the traditional Moslem enemy, this work is one of the rare cases of chivalric writing that represents an internal crisis. In this it is surprisingly in tune with the contemporary European scene, where political hegemony was fiercely disputed between France and Spain and where the Christian family had dramatically discovered the alterity and the schism within itself. Charles’s lost energy would be restored to the Christian epos only with Tasso’s creation of a leader gifted with the charisma and authority of Goffredo di Buglione. Not by chance, Tasso’s Goffredo is a leader who first has to control the centrifugal forces of his ‘compagni erranti’ (wandering companions) in order to destroy the pagan enemy. Was Ariosto perhaps in time to discern, beyond the ritual encomium, a new possible father in Charles V, whom he celebrates in the third edition of the Furioso in the familiar guise of the ‘shepherd’ capable of coming back to reunite the political and religious flock in a single ‘fold’?43 If for Europe as a whole in 1532 this could seem like a possible solution after so many divisions and struggles, it was certainly not the case for Italy, where it instead represented the sanctioning of its definitive exit from continental history. We must now examine close up the dramatic effects of the authority vacuum that makes the scenario of the Cinque canti so bitter and desolate. The breaking up and disruption of the imperial structure are the

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direct consequences of ‘Discord in the Christian camp,’ sowed by Alcina’s vendetta and put into action by Ganelon’s intrigues. The peoples of the northern and eastern edges of Europe have been stirred up against the central empire; Charles declares his sons and nephews rebels; Rinaldo lines up against Orlando; Ruggiero and Astolfo end up sequestered in the belly of the whale. The tale, in every sense, can no longer find its centre. In line with the ‘marvellous’ of chivalric writing, Ariosto tends to provide a supernatural interpretation of this chaos, rejecting the rational search for the historical causes of the disorder.44 In my view, this not only explains the introduction of the diabolical council of fairies at the beginning of the work (which links the action’s ‘disruption’ back to an ancient epic matrix, the heavenly prologues of classical poems) but also anticipates its restoration in Tasso (the infernal council of the Liberata).45 The recurrence of similes and images that compare history’s anarchy to nature’s disorder and see it as the effect of mythical primordial violence goes in the same direction. In both cases Ariosto’s writing reveals his awareness of the epochal trauma in contemporary history along with the inability of reason to comprehend it. The landscape of the Cinque canti would not be so geologically diverse and uneven without the primeval subversion directed against the father to which the chivalric story constantly alludes.46 The memories of the Giants’ struggle against their father, Jove, connects the Oedipal act of rebellion against celestial power with the image of the disruption of the natural order: ‘[T]he day when Lemnos was torn from its roots and thrown with Cyprus and Delos against the heavens by the sons of Earth.’47 During the fratricidal battle between Orlando and Rinaldo, two forests of lances advance (as in Macbeth) towards the clash within an overturned natural order that makes the poet recall another island, Delos, drifting unanchored through the Aegean Sea before finding its stable and definitive geographical location through the aid of Apollo.48 When the lances are lowered, ‘it seems as if the horrid Black Forest were falling to the ground, cut down at its foot all at the same instant,’49 and the noise of iron once again recalls mythological violence: ‘[S]imilar, perhaps, to what Italy heard when the island mass of Ischia was torn away from the Apennines and laid as an eternal burden upon Typhoeus’ (V, 54).50 This episode, along with the one that follows it a few stanzas later,51 also refers to the Giants’ fight to dethrone Jove. Plunging from the mythical to the historical, the rebellion of sons against fathers is the mythical foundation of the violence that is now renewed in the divisions of the Christian empire. The clash between

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‘[two cousins] equipped with their lances (one made of elm, the other of oak)’52 seems to set nature against itself, when ‘[t]he oak and the elm were broken into bits and splinters as if they had been made of cane,’53 creating an internal shattering of that chivalric wood through which Angelica flees in the first canto of the Furioso: ‘[T]hat she heard from the oaks, the elms and the beeches.’54 I refer here to the wood that Charles was able to violate earlier only with a solemn liturgical act after it had remained undivided and inaccessible for centuries (II, 101). But that Charles who overcomes the superstitious anxieties of his soldiers and anticipates the sacred gesture of Tasso’s Goffredo (Liberata XVIII, 41), first commanding his men ‘che dal piede / taglin le piante’ (to cut down the trees at their base) and then with a formidable blow personally splitting an elm that ‘cadde in duo tronchi, come fu percosso’ (fell cut in two as it was struck [II, 119]), was certainly still fully possessed of his charisma. Thinking of Ariosto’s natural father, an imaginary castrated Uranus, we cannot but note the symbolic gesture with which, in these same years, the poet was breaking up the mythic geography of the classical and modern epic (the Mediterranean of Ulysses and his followers and the wood of the errant knights) and, intentionally or not, making his poem (itself reduced to a fragment) correspond to it. On the contemporary social scene, undue mixings of roles and hierarchies result from this disruption. The deep anxieties of the present align in a state of anarchy that makes the narrator project the positive values of variety and pluralism (the founding requirement of the romance mode itself) back into the past. If Ariosto idealizes the harmonious participation of subjects in the small Este fatherland in the days of the good Dukes Ercole or Borso (‘con la nobiltà la plebe mista’)55 (those times mythologized in his nostalgic re-evocation of Ferrara’s ‘feudal’ origins), he sees before him an unlawful and repugnant promiscuity promoted by the libertine arts of Medea in the wider European scene of rebellious provinces. He blames the obscene couplings of women and men, nobles and plebeians, mothers and sons (‘e meschiarsi le madri coi figliuoli, / e con le sorelle i frati ...’)56 (i.e., the destruction of the family) on the various groups associated with the Reformation. In order to do so, he refers to the well-known conceptual stereotype that exorcizes as a monstrum of ‘nature’ the more audacious and transgressive outcomes of a culture that has escaped the control of political and religious orthodoxy. That we are dealing with the projection of taboos and repressed desires (from communist distribution of goods to communal possession of bodies) seems to be evident in the curious celebratory tone – however

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tongue-in-cheek – of Ariosto’s depiction of an inverted golden age in Medea’s realm.57 It loads with ambiguous meaning the heretical experience of the ‘other’ that Dante had already condemned in his character Fra Dolcino. But explorers such as Vespucci had reclaimed that experience in the New World, and it would be celebrated by Utopian writers (Erasmus, Campanella, More).58 5 This ‘confusion’ affected the very political institutions that had brought together and Christianized Europe. We might think of the babel of languages recalled earlier when the two cousins become antagonists through misunderstanding, but also of the continual uncertainties or, more often, the bitter surprises of those who expect to be dealing with friends and allies only to discover that they have suddenly become adversaries (as happens to Ruggiero with Riccardo in IV, 17, and to Rinaldo with Orlando in V, 34). The description of the final battle between Charles’s regular army and the rebel forces takes its inspiration entirely from this theme: in gran confusion tornò quel grande ordine, e non è più chi regga o guidi

(V, 55)

that great military order turned to great confusion, and there is no one who commands or rules any longer

It is not only a question of fundamental ties that are cut in the fury of battle. Here the narrator’s voice makes itself heard in the fray a number of times to underline the properly ethical valence of this disorder, which expresses a general crisis of social unity. This theme was anticipated earlier when Riccardo, an unknowing pawn in Ganelon’s game, did not hesitate to sacrifice a considerable part of his crew to the flames in the naval encounter with Ruggiero: ‘mostrò di pochi altri tener cura’ (showed he cared little for anyone else [IV, 27]). But now, the breaking up of the Christian body becomes total and absolute: ‘It was enough, it was too much, for each man to look out for himself,’59 and it is not a matter of simple individual egotism but of a collective collapse of values: quivi la cortesia, la caritade, amor, rispetto, beneficio avuto,

The Shattering of the Chivalric World 133 o s’altro si può dire, è tutto messo da parte, e sol ciascun pensa a se stesso.

(V, 92)

there courtesy, charity, love, respect, gratitude for favours received in the past, or anything else one can say is put aside, and each one thinks only about himself.

As the various sections of the army come apart, the hierarchical link to their leader is broken, so that in the end even Charles finds himself abandoned by his men, and his fall into the river is the clear symbol of the overturning of regal authority. This is, then, a weak power suffering from a crisis of solidarity. Ariosto’s pessimism in the Cinque canti seems to draw upon obscure historical and religious forces, which allude, through the thin and porous filigree of the chivalric tradition, to the contemporary Italian and European scene. If the atmosphere appears gloomier in the Cinque canti, it is because there is no political solution on the horizon, and the religious situation, which had become more restless and pressing, confers an epic-tragic tone on the tale. This causes the delicate framework of the romance to crumble along with Charles’s empire. While in the Furioso the war is entirely directed towards an external front and makes an infidel king repent of his ‘folle gesto,’ thus reinforcing the Christian order and the reasons for its political and religious hegemony, in the background of the Cinque canti we perceive a spreading motif of punished hubris that overturns those reasons in one mysterious blow. A providential and expiatory ideology that is essentially absent from the Furioso colours here and there the text of the Cinque canti and ends by triumphing over all the other ‘orditori di trame’ (weavers of plots), including the narrator: ‘Ganelon arranged the threads, but in the end the Power on High wove the cloth to his harm.’60 But the actions of the wicked, who are punished by divine justice and no longer by the narrator – who has been deprived of his authority61 – do not exculpate the paladins for their ‘arrogance,’ which is invoked a number of times to explain that the internal crisis of Christian power involves more than the plots and hostile desires of others.62 This ‘arrogance’ is the inevitable outcome of an authority that neglected its historic task and ‘has gone too far,’ of a power that is corroded at its sacred roots (‘si tronca al nostro regno / il nervo principal, la maiestade’),63 which responds with machinations rather than good administration, with vendetta rather than justice: ‘Whoever achieves

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vengeance, beyond offending the one who has offended her, defends herself from many others as well.’64 This is so emphasized that it seems Machiavelli and his raison d’état make their voices heard even, incongruously, in the council of fairies. Between the weaknesses of the individual leader and the collective arrogance of Christian society, one senses in the Ariosto of the Cinque canti a powerful desire for regeneration. Still uncertain of causes and solutions, the poet prefers to shift the blame for the political and religious storm that gathers over Europe – and that puts in doubt the fragile Italian states’ hopes for survival – onto the ‘grande vecchio,’ Ganelon, and other supernatural puppeteers drawn from modern and ancient mythology. The Cinque canti were destined to be condemned and set aside despite the fact that the work’s last scenes opened up a possible glimmer of salvation: Charles, having escaped the waves thanks to his white horse, ‘da questo al fin fu ricondotto a proda’ (by this horse Charles was finally brought back to shore). Is this an act of faith in history or simply conceding one last chance to the romance? Not knowing the final outcome of the fabula (but knowing the Italian history of the cinquecento) we can only imagine that, despite all the crises, Ariosto deluded himself for almost a decade that he could reconstitute those compromised balances, retie threads of inevitably broken tales. The apocalypse of the romance is a matter of fact; it counts for little that in the intentions of the author it might for a time have represented a transition with other outcomes.

6 Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity

1 Lanfranco Caretti’s approach to interpreting Tasso’s poetry represents the maturation of a critical tradition that began with Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura.1 His famous formula of ‘spiritual dualism’ summarizes this approach. It both establishes a constant reciprocal reference between writing and the ideological-cultural context in which it was written and identifies the ‘entirely new structure’ of the Gerusalemme liberata in the context of conflicting impulses and counter-impulses, between unifying and centrifugal forces that influence one another (72). Clearing the field of Tasso criticism of romantic impressionism once and for all, Caretti returns to the real historical matrices of ‘spiritual dualism.’ He seeks them in concrete poetic expressions, most importantly in the Liberata. There this phenomenon appears as a mirror of the contradictions of a whole epoch and a record of an identity crisis that sought to resolve itself in the ‘totally committed attempt to reconcile classicism with modern religious anxiety’ (57). Caretti’s interpretation defines Tasso’s text as an eminently dualistic structure and provides solid assumptions and fertile perspectives for an attempt such as this one to read the Liberata using semiological models derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. This essay results from a conviction that this type of reading does not represent an untimely step backward on the road that Tasso criticism has for some time pronounced impassable. If anything, I intend to move in the opposite direction, working to eliminate any residue of psychologism in interpreting Tasso. At the same time, I want to avoid the perils of schematic reductionism to which psychological criticism has accustomed us, justifiably earning the mistrust of many interpreters. But today these statements no longer

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sound paradoxical or suspect. The Freudian concept of the ‘formation of compromise’ provides us with a linguistic model particularly wellsuited to defining the unstable device of ‘impulses and counterimpulses,’ the attempted reconciliation and real semantic divergence through which Tasso concretely expresses his ‘spiritual dualism’ in his text. Francesco Orlando has emphasized that, when Freud spoke of the ‘compromise formation,’ he did not in fact mean ‘the outcome in itself of a clash of psychic forces, but rather the linguistic manifestation in a broad – semiotic – sense of that outcome, which by itself leaves room, at the same time, for both the conflicting forces that have become meaningful through that conflict.’2 In my view, we must recognize the ‘entirely new structure’ of the Liberata in the exemplary function of the model of ‘compromise’ in Tasso’s text. As we shall see, there are precise historical reasons for this exemplarity. The application of the Freudian model lends greater clarity to my approach. In previous works, I have argued that in the Liberata Tasso represents not one point of view but a multiplicity of antithetical points of view. These arise from the unresolved conflict created between the ideology that structures the text and the emotional identification that it offers the reader.3 It is important to remove this concept of emotional identification from the psychological sphere to which it naturally belongs, despite the contradiction that this entails. A precise linguistic explanation of the concept that articulates it in terms of stylistic codes and structures of meaning will allow it to continue to function in the absence of more appropriate definitions. I would also strongly emphasize that the text’s assumption of contents in compromise allows us to situate its contradictions within an open range of meanings that is nevertheless neither undefined nor limitless: its limits are those of its historical specification. Here my reading connects with Caretti’s. His stringent formula implicitly condemns critical readings of the Liberata afflicted with opposite distortions: readings that arbitrarily multiply the meaning in the name of a misunderstood ambiguity and those that reduce the complex dynamics of meaning in the poem to an exclusive, partial vision that is not without hidden ideological allusions. Based on these premises and working from a precise methodological perspective, this analysis aims to test the legitimacy of a figurative reading of the military clash between the Christians and the pagans that constitutes the narrative subject of the poem. From this point of view, the war to conquer Jerusalem entails a hegemonic struggle between two dif-

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ferent codes, two antithetical systems of values. The pagans are the champions of one system that might be described schematically as representing the ideals of secular, materialist, and pluralist humanism. The other, upheld by the Christians, voices the authoritarian religious aspirations of Counter-Reformation culture. While the historical subject of the narration, gleaned from the chroniclers of the Crusades, sets up the clash between two opposed religions and cultures, it is much more characteristic of a conflict between two codes engendered within the same culture and the same society (a society both Western and Christian) that have become incompatible. Notably it is God and Satan, rather than God and Mohammed, who compete in the heavenly war that takes place parallel to the earthly one. Christian truth here finds its antagonist not in an alternative pagan truth but in its own principles of negation: in other words, error, evil, and heresy. In fact, Tasso shapes the chivalric values that had been recently re-established in humanistic terms precisely in this way – that is, as negative, erroneous, or at least inadequate. Obviously, this is the point of view of only one of the codes, although it is of course the ideologically privileged (representing the point of view of God, the Christians, and Goffredo) and historically victorious code. For this reason, only pagan characters affirm the heroic ideals of virtue and honour. They make their statements with proud boldness and without any religious or supernatural slant, pagan or otherwise – for example, Argante (VI, 8; X, 37]), Solimano (IX, 99; X, 24; XIX, 41]), and Ismeno (X, 20]): ‘Let everyone here below employ his strength and his wit to make his way among disasters and evils: for often it comes to pass that the brave man and wise is for himself the smith of his own good fortune’ (X, 20).4 Even Satan’s description of the rebellion of the fallen angels against the Christian God refers to these ideals. He exalts the ‘valor primiero’ (ancient valour), the ‘virtute’ (virtue), and the ‘invitto ardire’ (unconquerable daring) that animated that noble and unfortunate enterprise (IV, 15]). These are statements in which motifs typical of a historically defined system of values return: the myth of the homo faber, the antagonism of fortune and manly virtue. They are also statements we expect in vain from the Christians, not because there are no great heroes among the ranks of the crusaders but because their action is inspired (or ought to be) by motives and ideals within which the individual humanistic dimension, when not entirely absent, is subordinated to the ends of a collective mission of faith. For the Christian warriors, chivalric ideals are always accompanied by a superior principle

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without which there is no legitimate hope of victory. While Clorinda, disputing her king Aladino’s use of Ismeno’s magic arts, makes the invitation saying, ‘Let us knights deal only by the sword: this is our art and in this alone may you trust,’5 Goffredo reminds his forgetful knights that ‘[t]he Turks, the Persians, Antioch (a noble list, redoubtable both for the names and for the deeds) – they were not at all our doing, but Heaven’s gift, and marvellous victories they were’ (I, 26).6 Above all it is important to emphasize that the conflict between these two codes begins at the same moment as the narrative action itself, so that this conflict legitimately presents itself as a privileged key for interpreting the poem. Divine power elevates Goffredo di Buglione to the position of supreme leader of the crusading army (I, 11]). This process of hierarchical subordination has many consequences, both on the level of the immediate narrative events and on the ethical and ideological level. Divine intervention determines the sharp political and moral distinction between Goffredo and the ‘errant companions’ whom he is required to reunify in the name of the Christian military goal. At the same time, it marks the end of the coexistence of different codes and the repression of all other codes, considered deviant and pagan, by the one that Goffredo embodies. In other words, it marks the abolition of tolerance towards anyone who is other or different. It is clear that the military encounter between pagans and Christians, read in terms of a conflict between codes, closely follows the supernatural events (recalled in canto IV) understood as the authoritarian imposition of God’s law on Satan’s freedom. This encounter also echoes the battle of Goffredo and Peter the Hermit,7 the representatives of the repressive Christian code, against the erotic straying of Rinaldo and Tancredi and the aberrant behaviour of other crusaders. Once a hierarchy of levels has been established, privileging the Christian goal, the dispersive impulses of individual, earthly ideals are reduced to ‘error’ (hence the ‘errant companions’). From this point on, the Christian knights who give in to these impulses are identified conceptually with the pagan enemies. A series of stylistic traits centred on the motif of ‘bestiality’ begins to unite characters from different spheres who are all deviant to some extent. For Satan and the infernal monsters, bestiality is a distinctive bodily trait; for Argante, Solimano, and the pagans in general, it emphasizes a physical and behavioural tendency towards wild ferocity that is expressed particularly in animalistic similes. Rinaldo, when he falls victim to his mad love for Armida, loses the trappings of civilization that characterize the heroic servant of the faith and

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is reduced to pure animalism by his overwhelming passion: ‘He wanders among the beasts and among the trees, a hermit lover except when he is with her’ (XVI, 26).8 The common motif of exile involves the same three sets of characters (with Solimano in place of Argante), all victims of an inevitable destiny of marginalization and repression: God banished Satan a long time ago from the ‘starry quires.’ (IV, 10) The Christians recently drove out Solimano from his realm. (IX, 4) Goffredo now banishes Rinaldo from the Christian camp after Gernando is killed. (V, 59])

We should note that the distribution of the conflict across three distinct spheres is not casual. Instead it is part of the general development of the action of the repressive Christian code, intolerant of diversity, in the context of the whole poem. This task is configured as a dynamic process of reducing the various to the single, the discordant to the choral, dispersion to concentration, and it takes place on three different levels: 1 as the eternal condemnation of the angels who rebelled against divine law; 2 as the historical defeat of the infidels at the hands of the crusaders; 3 as the political subordination of Goffredo’s ‘errant companions’ to his rule. What is more, this distinction is set up from the first stanza of the poem onward (that is, it occurs in a position of strong semantic emphasis), with three symmetrical oppositions: 1 ‘heaven’ against ‘hell’; 2 the ‘armi pietose’ (reverent armies) against the ‘popol misto’ (combined peoples); 3 the ‘captain’ against the ‘errant companions.’ It is possible to hypothesize more concrete links between this narrative design and the contemporary historical situation. As Tasso wrote, Catholic orthodoxy was engaged in a battle on two fronts: against infidels outside Europe and against heretics inside Europe. Though such an analogy between poetic and historical situations is hard to verify,9 it does suggest

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the extent to which the Liberata was painfully in step with the events of its time, an aspect of the work that has too often been neglected. If it is a matter of conflicting codes, as I believe, then it is strongly rooted in lateRenaissance Italian society, within the crisis of humanist values that had supported Ariosto’s reformation of the chivalric genre. The new ideological system expressed itself in a literary code characterized (according to De Sanctis’s admirable formulation) by ‘individualism, that force of initiative that makes every knight a free man, who finds his limits within himself, that is to say in the laws of love and honour, which he obeys voluntarily.’10 In the climate of the Catholic restoration, a repressive, integralistic urge makes itself strongly felt. This progressively raises suspicions about the dialectic of values (expressed in the Furioso as ‘variety’). It must now take into account the totalizing tendency that, ‘against the dispersion of energies and the variety of points of view proper to secular culture, tries to make certain unifying principles prevail and to lead all socially committed human activities back to them.’11 The action of Tasso’s poem reflects this process, organizing a series of oppositions within the text: universalism / pluralism, repression / tolerance, and authority / freedom. The Christian knights who try to escape the demands of this centripetal logic are automatically placed outside the orthodoxy and are thus ‘errant,’ a deliberately ambiguous term with a physical and a moral meaning, including both centrifugal movement and deviant behaviour. They move into the pagan terrain of the various and the different, splitting the cohesive body of Christian unity that Goffredo tries laboriously to reconstruct. Discord and division are the means by which the centrifugal and disruptive pagan forces affirm themselves in opposition to the forces of Christendom. They move from the One to the Many, from the choral to the discordant, from concentration to dispersion.12 The forces of evil, whether inside or outside the Christian camp, attempt to restore the condition of deviance that Goffredo’s investiture (a metaphorical sanctioning of the hegemony of the Christian code) abolished. For the crusader, anything outside the fight for the faith is understood as error. Thus, the forces of ‘evil’ (the ‘pagan’ forces) are now constructed as the constant temptation of the private goals of the chivalric and courtly code. Ideals such as martial valour, love, and honour are now condemned as incompatible with the legitimate aim of the crusader. The Christians conceive of the war as service and a mission, whereas the pagans understand it as individual affirmation, motivated by different reasons for each person (revenge for Solimano, glory for Argante,

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Aladino’s defence of his kingdom). In canto VI, Argante, frustrated with Aladino as he waits for help from his Egyptian allies, wants to challenge the Christian champions to a duel. His accusations stem from an individual, private interpretation of what is instead a clash of opposed religions, civilizations, and ideologies. Argante calls the war ‘questo tuo gran litigio’ (this great argument of yours [VI, 7]) and refuses to represent the king, calling himself a ‘privato cavalier, non tuo campione’ (a private knight, and not your champion [VI, 13]).13 In contrast, the attitude of the Christian Raimondo in his duel with Argante assumes the nature of a true ideological opposition. After having thrown his enemy from the saddle, Raimondo’s generous nature urges him to allow the pagan a second chance. But he refuses this noble impulse of chivalric conduct, reminding himself that ‘di publica causa è difensore’ (he is defender of the public cause [VII, 95]). It is similarly useful to compare the very different forms of authority of Goffredo and Aladino over their armies. Goffredo and the repressive code he embodies holds sway over all, as long as the code is unquestioned. Even Rinaldo, who will later radically betray these rules, against his will accepts the decision of his captain: Tornatene, – dicea – ch’a le vostr’ire non è loco opportuno o la stagione; Goffredo il vi comanda. – A questo dire Rinaldo si frenò, ch’altrui fu sprone, benché dentro ne frema, e in più d’un segno dimostri fuore il mal celato sdegno.

(III, 53)

‘Turn back (he said) for it is not the proper place or time for your cholers. Godfrey commands it of you.’ At this speech Rinaldo reined himself in, who had been a spur to the others, although he inwardly frets at it, and by more than one token shows outwardly his anger ill-concealed.

On the other hand, Aladino seems to be leader purely by chance. His warriors follow private not collective ideals, and so he exerts no cohesive force of unity through a common cause. Aladino represents neither faith nor higher principle, fighting rather a private battle in which the others do not feel invested. The behaviour of Clorinda and Argante reflects the exact opposite of the Christian example: e con messi iterati instando prega ed Argante e Clorinda a dar di volta.

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La fera coppia d’essequir ciò nega, ebra di sangue e cieca d’ira e stolta;

(IX, 94)

and insisting with repeated messengers, he prays both Argantes and Clorinda to turn back. The fierce couple are loth to execute that order, being drunk with blood and unreasoning with wrath.

These opposing ideologies of war provide a general indication of the conflicting codes represented by pagans and Christians. The following analysis aims to illustrate the fixed rules of definition by which these two opposed groups abide. The antithesis of unity and variety is visible as much at the level of enunciation (lexical and stylistic choice) as at the level of the enunciated (the return of recurrent themes). 2 The narrative action of the Gerusalemme liberata commences with a typical heavenly prologue. God gazes down on the earth where the crusaders are fighting beneath the walls of Jerusalem. For six years they have fought without success because of their internal divisions. The only Christian he recognizes as faithful to his will is Goffredo: ‘[W]ho longs to drive the wicked pagans from the holy city, and full of faith, of zeal, makes no account of any mortal glory, empire, treasure’ (I, 8).14 The behaviour of the other Christian princes is very different. They have forgotten the sacred objective that brought them together to Palestine and have scattered after private, earthly ideals. Baldovino ‘single-mindedly aspires to human grandeurs’ (I, 9).15 Tancredi holds ‘his life in scorn, so much a vain love torments and martyrs him’ (I, 9).16 Boemondo wants to give a new civic and religious order ‘to his new princedom of Antioch’ (I, 9). Lastly, Rinaldo shows no ‘lust for gold or for power ... but an immoderate burning thirst for honour’ (I, 9–10).17 As the only faithful interpreter of the spirit of the crusade, Goffredo is clearly contrasted with his companions, who fragment the common Christian goal by placing themselves, like the pagans, in pursuit of individual desire. In terms of terrestrial authority, Goffredo’s celestial investiture sanctions the moral split between him and his peers. It is important to note that his investiture is Tasso’s poetic invention, and it departs from his sources (the Christian chroniclers of the First Crusade, and William of Tyre, in particular) who agree that the crusaders remained divided under different commanders: ‘I here elect him: the other earthlings, formerly his companions, now will be his subordinates in the war’ (I, 12).18 Thereafter, the Christian goal becomes the only legitimate one, radically opposed to the other codes embodied by the ‘errant companions.’ Peter the Hermit also expresses the

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need for the hegemony of a single code, tracing ‘the reason for every delay and every quarrel ... to that governing authority that remains equal, as if weighed in the balance, among many men of various opinions’ (I, 30).19 2.1 Goffredo’s first official act after his investiture is to review the Christian troops, an epic topos par excellence. But Tasso’s version of the catalogue of the troops is significantly different from his Homeric and Virgilian sources. His description of the armies on parade focuses concretely on the restored unity of the Christian princes, who willingly accept submission to Goffredo and return to the fight with renewed vigour under his guidance. In this way, the variety of nations and the differences of their arms are annulled in a festive harmony. The distinctive traits of unity that characterize Goffredo’s review of the Christian troops20 acquire greater emphasis if we read them in the context of the similar scene in the pagan camp many cantos later. The review of the Egyptian army drawn up before the caliph (canto XVII) takes place in an opposing semantic field indicative of multiplicity, discord, and variety. Furthermore, even when a unifying collective moment emerges, it is in many ways a fictional unity artificially imposed by force in the midst of disorder and difference.21 Goffredo and Emireno’s parallel addresses to their troops before the final clash offer another point of comparison. Buglione tells his soldiers not to fear the huge crowd of enemies because ‘ill accorded among themselves they are poorly organized and entangle themselves in their own manoeuvrings. And few will be the number who strike a blow,’22 and that even the manly virtue of their captain can be worth little ‘in their so great confusion, and so turbulent and mingled?’ (XX, 17)23 He finally concludes his exhortation by reminding them of the direct, personal link that connects him to his soldiers, emphasizing at the same time Emireno’s absolute inability to establish a similar contact with his own army because of the enormous variety, confusion, and lack of cohesion that reigns within it: Mal noto è, credo, e mal conosce i sui, ed a pochi può dir: ‘Tu fosti, io fui’. Ma capitano i’ son di gente eletta: pugnammo un tempo e trionfammo insieme, e poscia un tempo a mio voler l’ho retta. Di chi di voi non so la patria o’l seme? quale spada m’è ignota? o qual saetta, benché per l’aria ancora sospesa treme,

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non saprei dir se franca o se d’Irlanda, e quale a punto il braccio è che la manda?

(XX, 17–18)

Little is he known (I am sure), and little he knows his own men: and so to few can he say – You were there, I was there. – But I am captain of a chosen people: one while we fought and made our triumph together, and then another while I have governed you at my discretion. For which of you do I not know his nation and his family? What sword is unknown to me? or for what arrow (though it hang yet trembling in the air) would I not know how to tell if it were Frankish or Irish, and even the very arm that sends it forth?

Goffredo thus asserts himself as the personal guarantor of the unitary principle within Christian difference. A little later it is Emireno’s turn. Straight away, we perceive the signs of a diversity that immediately foretells the outcome, already predetermined, of the final clash. Confirming Goffredo’s predictions, the Egyptian leader finds himself unable to address his troops directly. This is in part because of differences of languages (‘per interpreti or parla, or per se stesso, / mesce lodi e rampogne e pene e premi),’24 but it is also because those who cannot be reminded of common ideals must be flattered and persuaded in different, personalized ways.25 The two final verses in canto XX, 27, sum up the semantic essence of the scene: Così con arti varie, in vari suoni le varie genti a la battaglia alletta.

(XX, 27)26

So with various arts in various speeches he encourages his various troops to battle.

2.2 The Christian warriors Carlo and Ubaldo undertake their journey in canto XV in order to win back Rinaldo, lost in amorous straying with Armida, for the Christian cause. This quest provides the pretext for another review of the ‘infinite pagan peoples’ who inhabit the coasts of the Mediterranean from Asia to Gibraltar. This journey among the pagans is also emblematic of the Many and the One. The warriors, on board the little ship guided by Fortune, see passing before them the different regions, cities, and people that the providential voyage offers to their gaze along the way. When they reach the Pillars of Hercules, Ubaldo asks Fortune for information about the inhabitants of the

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‘mondo occulto’ (hidden world) that lies beyond, and on their laws and faith. He receives the following answer: ... Diverse bande diversi han riti ed abiti e favelle: altri adora le belve, altri la grande comune madre, il sole altri e le stelle; v’è chi d’abominevoli vivande le mense ingombra scelerate e felle. E’n somma ognun che’n qua da Calpe siede barbaro è di costume, empio di fede.

(XV, 28)

Divers groups have divers customs and dress and speech: some worship beasts, some the great universal Mother; others the sun and the stars; there is one that loads its wicked and cruel tables with abominable repast: and in sum, every place that sits between here and Calpe is barbarous in customs, impious in faith.

This world, which lives in ignorance of Christian truth and jealously preserves its independence, is not destined to stay in that condition for long. The proselytizing aims of the Christians are working against it, enacting the ‘totalizing tendency’ that is realized as typically ‘imperialist’ military and political action, in keeping with an ideology that does not coexist with what is different and so expects, as Satan says, ‘tutte al suo culto richiamar le genti’ (to call back all the peoples to His religion [IV, 12]). Thus Fortune reassures Ubaldo that, even in these dark regions, ‘the faith of Peter will be introduced there, and every civilizing art,’27 thanks to the courage of Columbus, which will permit Christian Europe to impose its faith, culture, and civilization upon the savage peoples. When the warriors come upon the ruins of Carthage, Tasso’s famous meditation is framed in a historical perspective more specific than a generic elegy about the transience of all things: Giace l’alta Cartago: a pena i segni de l’alte sue ruine il lido serba. Muoiono le città, muoiono i regni, copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba, e l’uom d’esser mortal par che si sdegni: oh nostra mente cupida e superba!

(XV, 20)

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Lofty Carthage lies full low: scarcely does the shore preserve the signs of her noble ruins. Cities perish, kingdoms perish; sand and grass cover their monuments and displays; and it seems that man would be restive at being mortal; oh our greedy and aspiring minds!

The logic of defeat that hangs over pagan diversity colours the reader’s understanding of these lines. Once the poet has established this defeat as necessary, he expresses his elegiac grief over it. Thus he hides his secret nostalgia for those values behind the awareness that they are inadequate. Tasso is aware that the pluralistic option leads to an uncertain fate. At the end of their voyage, Armida’s garden awaits the two crusaders. Here the point of view has changed radically, for it admits no ‘compromise,’ or only a weak one: the fact that this pagan place is isolated. The parrot’s song in praise of carpe diem at XVI, 15,28 representing the ideological key of the passage, ultimately says the same thing as the poet’s meditatio – life is brief – but it invites the reader to draw opposite conclusions. Here the point of view is reversed from Christian to pagan, consequently reversing the ideology, liberating the transgressive call to Epicureanism from the constraints of caution or compromise. 2.3 Armida’s dwelling, where Rinaldo is her love-slave, is the final stop along the journey. Guarding this spot, isolated from the civilized world, where the pagan condition still dominates unopposed (although not for much longer), is a monstrous pagan army: ‘[A] formidable host ... of warlike animals, varied in voice, varied in movement, varied in appearance’ (XV, 51).29 Variety of shape and monstrous appearance also characterized the demons called to Satan’s council, who ‘in various troops come running from all sides to the lofty portals’ (IV, 4).30 Leaving aside the obvious emphasis on grotesque physiognomy, the infernal powers provide an image of multiplicity and deformity that is very similar to that of the Egyptian troops and the infinite peoples who populate the Mediterranean. This is a real infernal army: Qui mille immonde Arpie vedresti e mille Centauri e Sfingi e pallide Gorgoni, molte e molte latrar voraci Scille, e fischiar Idre e sibilar Pitoni, e vomitar Chimere atre faville, e Polifemi orrendi e Gerioni; e in novi mostri, e non più intesi o visti, diversi aspetti in un confusi e misti.

(VI, 5)

Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity 147 Here might you see a thousand filthy Harpies and a thousand Centaurs and Sphinxes and pale Gorgons; a myriad ravenous Scyllas howling and Hydras hooting and Pythons hissing and Chimaeras belching forth black flames; and horrible Polyphemuses and Geryons; and in strange monstrosities, no elsewhere known or seen, diverse appearances confused and blended into one.

But Tasso’s representation of the infernal assembly offers other suggestive points of departure for critical reflection, particularly as regards some controversial themes in Satan’s speech. These themes bring up a central issue I have so far only marginally addressed. In recalling the events of his ancient defeat and the dangers of his current situation, Satan explicitly accuses God and the Christian forces of prevarication. Just as in heaven God banished the rebellious angels from the ‘stellati giri’ (starry quires) to the ‘abisso oscuro’ (gloomy abyss), the Christians on earth aim to extend their dominion over the entire world, to construct human society in their image and likeness without accepting a coexistence of different religions, mentalities, and customs.31 Faced with the new insult of the siege of Jerusalem, the infernal forces can remain inactive no longer (‘e soffrirem che forza ognor maggiore / il suo popol fedele in Asia prende? / e che Giudea soggioghi? ...’),32 nor can they passively accept the dictates of a God who allows no antagonists: Che sian gl’idoli nostri a terra sparsi? ch’i nostri altari il mondo a lui converta? ch’a lui sospesi i voti, a lui sol arsi siano gl’incensi, ed auro e mirra offerta? ch’ove a noi tempio non solea serrarsi, or via non resti a l’arti nostre aperta? che di tant’alme il solito tributo ne manchi, e in vòto regno alberghi Pluto?

(IV, 14)

That our idols be scattered on the ground? that the world convert our altars to Him? that for Him the trophies be hung up, for Him alone the incense burned, and gold and myrrh be offered? that where no temple was wont to be closed against us, now there should be no avenue open to our arts? that the customary tribute of so many souls be withdrawn, and Pluto have his dwelling in an empty kingdom?

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We ought to pause for a moment to consider the explosive potential that Tasso’s revision of this biblical story from Satan’s point of view represents for the system of values that govern the text. The precariousness of the supremacy of the Christian code bespeaks a serious questioning of the absolute certainty of these values. It is in light of the danger of such questioning that we should locate the simultaneous emphasis on the monstrous and repugnant in Tasso’s physical representation of Satan that distances itself from the words the poet puts in his devil’s mouth: it guards against the risks of the reader’s possible solidarity with him. What is being affirmed is that the separation of good and evil, of virtue and sin, is not a theological question but depends solely upon the outcome of a war: ‘Something, whatever it was, gave Him the victory; to us remained the glory of unconquerable daring’ (IV, 15).33 It is implemented as a law the victor imposes upon the vanquished: ‘Now He rules the stars according to his will, and we are to be adjudged as rebel souls’ (IV, 9).34 No higher principle has operated in favour of the Christian religion. The relegation of the defeated to the bowels of the earth ends up seeming, beyond metaphor, like the suffocation and repression by the victorious Christian code of the hedonistic and materialistic values embodied by the pagans. Satan’s tirade against Christian imperialism thus gives us a glimpse of a missed historical opportunity – which the poetic fiction reproposes as a present one – to subvert the dominant ethical–ideological system. It is here that its disturbing, disaggregating power lies. 2.4 Precisely because of the topicality of the terms with which it is reevoked, the memory of this conflict between heaven and hell cannot remain an inert, unquestioned bit of narrative that precedes the action. Rather, it must propose itself within that action again, under other forms, and with even greater drama, where the contrast between the codes appears most strongly, in the guise of both military conflict and political insubordination. That is what happens in canto IX when the fury Alecto invites Solimano to action. While Goffredo is laying waste to Asia, she rouses Solimano with a series of urgent questions, similar to those Satan brings before the infernal assembly. These renew with perfect symmetry the Sultan’s painful memory of the affront he has suffered and that he now wants to avenge: Dunque accesi tuguri e greggie e buoi gli alti trofei di Soliman saranno?

Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity 149 Così racquisti il regno? e così i tuoi oltraggi vendicar ti credi e’l danno? Ardisci, ardisci: entro a i ripari suoi di notte opprimi il barbaro tiranno.

(IX, 10)

Shall cottages burned and flocks and herds be then the mighty triumphs of Solyman? Do you regain your kingdom thus? And thus do you think to avenge your insults and losses? Be bold, be bold: within his defences by night assault the barbarian tyrant.

Goaded by pride, the pagan hero makes no delay and addresses a fiery speech to his Arab troops, inciting them to a nocturnal attack against the Christian camp ‘di mille furti pieno’ (filled with thousands of spoils [IX, 17]). The analogy with Satan’s speech is evident. He spoke of the thefts made by a predatory Christianity and of the tribute of souls owed to him. He exhorted his ‘people’ to fight to take back the Christians’ illgotten gains. We have passed from the memory of the biblical struggle to the current events of the historical, terrestrial battle. If my hypothesis about the symmetries of levels that regulate the development of the conflict among the tripartite antithetical codes is correct, then we need to document the eruption of the same centrifugal forces (embodied by Satan in the heavens, by Solimano on the earth) into an essentially political sphere, within the crusader army itself. 2.5 In canto VIII the crusader Argillano, tricked by a dream sent to him by the same Alecto, incites the Italian warriors against Goffredo, believing he has murdered Rinaldo. The argument is constructed around the urgent rhythm of rhetorical questions, whose patterns and topics by now have become familiar to the reader. Dunque un popolo barbaro e tiranno, che non prezza ragion, che fé non serba, che non fu mai di sangue e d’or satollo, ne terrà’l freno in bocca e’l giogo al collo?

(VIII, 63)

Shall then a barbarous and tyrannic people, that take no heed of reason, that keep no faith, that never have had enough of blood or of gold, maintain the bit in our mouths and the yoke on our necks?

There arise again here, now against Goffredo’s Frenchmen, the ritual accusations of repressive domination, lying, greed, and unfairness in

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dividing the spoils of war (VIII, 65]).35 We should note that the rebellion against Goffredo takes place in the name of values that, inasmuch as they fit into the semantic space connoted as ‘variety,’ are in fact pagan values. The rejection of repressive authority immediately configures itself as a rejection of the crusade, and thus of the collective religious ideal, and this creates a space for the same earthly aspirations to wealth and individual glory that previously set the centrifugal action of the ‘errant companions’ in motion: ‘[O]r shall we rather take ourselves far away from it, where the Euphrates swells? where on a fertile plain it nurtures and makes fruitful so many cities and fields for an unwarlike people – or rather, for us: they will be ours, I trust; nor will we hold our rule in common with the Franks’ (VIII, 69).36 This automatically breaks apart the Christian fellowship and maintains the distinctive specificity of various nations (we recognize the pagan connotations of variety here) within the unity forcibly imposed on the grounds of a common faith. 2.6 A similar case of rebellion against Goffredo takes place in canto XIII during the long drought that sorely tests the crusaders’ endurance. The waywardness (thirst for power, ambition, greed) against which Goffredo has carried out his repressive work comes to be attributed to him: Dunque37 stima costui che nulla importe che n’andiam noi, turba negletta, indegna, vili ed inutili alme, a dura morte, perch’ei lo scettro imperial mantegna? Or mira d’uom c’ha il titolo di pio providenza pietosa, animo umano: la salute de’ suoi porre in oblio per conservarsi onor dannoso e vano;

(XIII, 66–7)

Does this man think then that it matters naught that we, a worthless negligible rabble, common and unimportant souls, go on to our harsh death, so that he can maintain his royal sceptre? Now look at the humane spirit, the compassionate care of a man who is called the good; he forgets about the well-being of his men in order to preserve for himself a vain and destructive honour.

In perfect symmetry with the tripartite structure mentioned earlier, these tirades express the point of view of the centrifugal forces that resist the Christian project of standardization that removes any sign of difference:

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1 Satan rebels against God’s dictatorship; 2 Solimano’s Arabs fight Christian imperialism; 3 Italians, Swiss, and Englishmen contest the supremacy of Goffredo’s Frenchmen. 3 Thus far the textual analysis has shown how the text justifies a figurative reading of the military clash between Christians and pagans. The defeat of the pagans through the affirmation of the repressive Christian ideology includes the historical liquidation of the chivalric code that was still in force in the Orlando furioso. In Ariosto’s poem the distinction between Christians and pagans does not carry with it ideological contrast or moral problematics. ‘Great was the goodness of the knights of old!’38 exclaims the poet with affable surprise when Rinaldo proposes to Ferrau that they should defer their duel, and Ferrau in turn invites Rinaldo to share his horse to follow the fleeing Angelica. In the Gerusalemme liberata, instead, military victory for one side raises ideological questions, burdening the text with a specific contradiction, a ‘return’ of the repressed. The negation of the pagan code becomes the particular expressive channel through which the author’s emotional identification with the defeated pagans emerges in the narrative. In distancing himself from an ideology he recognizes as deviant, the poet entrusts it to the text in the form of the repressed that is capable, nonetheless, of appealing to the reader’s solidarity. This poetic compensation is not, however, sufficient to undermine the certainty of the norm that defines the historically victorious Christians. The very certainty of their victory, which guarantees obedience to the repressive requirements of Christian ideology, enables the poet to sympathize with the defeated pagans.39 In this way, an apparent paradox arises: the poetic triumph of the negative and deviant code is most manifest when the moral and ideological coordinates of the poem are at their strongest. We have before us a binary system of radically opposed values, a true ethical-religious Manichaeism that leaves no room for the positive affirmation of deviant contents. The well-known external pressures and private perplexities that influenced Tasso’s process of revision will emphasize this even more clearly in the transition from the Liberata to the Conquistata. In my view, this binary system clarifies the functional necessity within the poem of a motif such as magic, often at the centre of the critical debate about the Liberata.40 The difficulties in determining the cultural elements that historically define it does not prevent a clear understand-

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ing of its narrative role. Magic represents the most effective and meaningful of the text’s ‘devices of liberation’ (which Genot describes so perceptively)41 from the system of the ‘verisimilar’ that broadly conditions its predetermined structure. Along with Genot, we might say that within these ideological assumptions it is improbable that a crusader would be distracted from the liberation of freeing Jerusalem by his own private dreams of love and glory. This distraction is a function not of his own will but of external, superior powers that blind him. Thus we can consider magic a predictable and institutionally authorized device for the emancipation and expression of the repressed code. At the same time, it is also a symptom of the difficulty of escaping the chains of the dominant code. Only by marking the pagan values as deviant and abnormal on the ethical–ideological level, and by representing them as defeated on the historical-narrative level, does Tasso find a place for them in the poetic context of the Gerusalemme liberata. From this strategy stem the series of ‘precautions’42 that we find on the level of poetic forms and structures (the clear stylistic isolation of the idyll and lyric escapism; the poet’s direct intervention to prepare the reader for a marvellous or magical event; the frequent change of point of view: from Christians to pagans, from God to Satan). They mark the presence and the limits of the intervention of the ‘other’ language that challenges the predominant logic of the repressive code. The most obvious of these ‘precautions’ is the welcome to the reader at the beginning of the poem, where, according to tradition, the poet justifies his undertaking and the poetic principles that guide it: O Musa, tu che di caduchi allori non circondi la fronte in Elicona, ma su nel cielo infra i beati cori hai di stelle immortali aurea corona, tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori, tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona s’intesso fregi al ver, s’adorno in parte d’altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte. Sai che là corre il mondo ove più versi di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso, e che’l vero, condito in molli versi, i più schivi allettando ha persuaso. Così a l’egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi di soavi licor gli orli del vaso:

Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity 153 succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve, e da l’inganno suo vita riceve.

(I, 2–3)

Oh Muse, that do not wreathe your brow on Helicon with fading bays, but among the blessed choirs in Heaven above possess a golden crown of deathless stars: breathe into my breast celestial ardours, illuminate my song, and grant me pardon if with the truth I interweave embroiderings, if partly with pleasures other than yours I ornament my pages. You know that the world flocks there where feigning Parnassus most pours out her sweetness, and that the truth in fluent verses hidden has by its charm persuaded the most froward. So we present to the feverish child the rim of the glass sprinkled over with sweet liquids: he drinks deceived the bitter medicine and from his deception receives life.

These lines are witness to Tasso’s awareness of the powerful innovation of the Liberata, and it is for this reason that he adds the safeguard ‘e tu perdona / s’intesso fregi al ver.’ The lines also bespeak his desire to make his poem comply with the ethical and ideological institutions challenged by the nature of the poem itself. From this perspective, the relationship between the verisimilar and the marvellous, between pedagogy and hedonism, ought to be understood within the same repressive logic that regulates the conflict between Christians and pagans, ultimately calling into question the meaning of the lines above. In other words, it is not the ‘soavi licor’ (sweet liquids) that disguise a presumed intention of truth and teaching, but rather the ‘succhi amari’ (bitter medicine) and their ethical-pedagogical aims that by their presence permit the disjunctive action of the lyrical moments and the amorous parentheses, while at the same time neutralizing them. Furthermore, Tasso is extremely explicit (when the situation allows him to be) about the nature of the essentially political ‘precautions’ that should guide the interpreter of his poem’s allegory: ‘I will twist my neck like a hypocrite and show that I have had no other goal than to serve politics; and with this shield I will try to keep safe my loves and enchantments.’ 43 But most important to my argument are the stylistic and thematic demarcations intended to remind the reader of the status these moments have as excursus or parentheses, moments that can create a temporary suspension of the poem’s moral and ideological coordinates. Consequently, they also establish the external nature of this suspension with respect to the values deliberately advocated by the text. As Genot rightly notes, the presence of these phenomena is understood when

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readers are confronted with circumscribed freedom, which does not promote a process of disalienation but rather marks the narrow boundaries within which escape is possible. If it is true that the historical and ideological dominance of the repressive code results in the poetic triumph of the repressed code, that is, emotional identification with the defeated pagans, the opposite is also true. This identification is permissible only inasmuch as the final outcome of the holy war is never in doubt. In my opinion, it is precisely this conflict between ideology and identification that yields the glimpse of modernity in the Liberata that was intuited by Tasso’s contemporaries and by some modern exegetes. This conflict also generates the occasionally sensational reactions of praise and condemnation from Tasso’s readers. It is not coincidental that some have even spoken not just of a pre-baroque Tasso, but also of a preromantic Tasso. The poetry of Gerusalemme liberata is probably the first clear example in Italian literature of a conscious identification with the forces of evil, though it is nevertheless rejected at the level of ideology. It is the first great example of solidarity with the ‘pagan enemy.’44 4 How does this unresolved conflict work itself out on more specific formal levels? The most evident phenomenon is also the most disruptive to the unifying process of the ideological message, determining in some cases the dissolution of the frontal opposition of values required by the repressive code, in others the ambiguity of these values themselves. The story of Rinaldo and Armida falls into the former category. When they play flirtatiously with the mirror, their game becomes the mediator of a ‘narcissistic’ situation in which identity, even physical appearance, is confused. Rinaldo has laid down his arms; he has become effeminate in his dress and hairstyle; he offers himself as the obedient tool of the charms of the woman who sees in his face, as in a mirror, the reflected image of her own beauty. The ethical polarity that posits the Christian man as natural enemy of the pagan woman is annulled. L’uno di servitù, l’altra d’impero si gloria, ella in se stessa ed egli in lei. – Volgi, – dicea – deh volgi – il cavaliero – a me quegli occhi onde beata bèi, ché son, se tu no’l sai, ritratto vero de le bellezze tue gli incendi miei; la forma lor, la meraviglia a pieno più che cristallo tuo mostra il mio seno.

(XVI, 21)

Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity 155 The one of them glories in his servitude, the other in her power, she in herself and he in her. ‘Turn, oh turn to me those eyes (the knight was saying) by which in your happiness you make others happy; for (if you are not aware of it) my flames are the true portrait of your beauties; their shape, their marvellous qualities my breast sets forth in full, more than your mirror.’

The future liberator of Jerusalem, dominator of the passions, lies enslaved here in metaphorical chains of love. He is degraded in the complete annulment of his identity into the specular image of the pagan woman. He obediently abandons himself to a narcissistic game in which not only the opposed functional roles, Christian versus pagan, but even their distinct individualities resemble one another: Rinaldo is Armida and Armida is Rinaldo. In a situation where the repressive code is dormant, it is no longer so easy to recognize the other as different and inimical. Only the rediscovery of the provisionally suspended code, when Rinaldo is shamed by the sight of his companions who have come to free him, peremptorily restores the previously dissolved ethical opposition. This causes Rinaldo’s new and surprising toughness towards his desperate lover. Many readers have criticized this brusque metamorphosis, emphasizing the lack of psychological mediation and underlining Rinaldo’s rather inhuman impassivity compared with Armida’s real grief. She seems instead to find her truest dimension as a woman and her highest poetic expression in her sorrow. But it is necessary to understand the need for Rinaldo’s attitude in concrete terms. At the moment that he rouses himself from the alien condition into which he has fallen, he quickly reverts into the unassailable champion of the repressive code, as his role as Christian warrior requires. He can therefore ignore the agony of his lover, who is again merely the pagan enemy, and he would like to sneak furtively away. Only at Ubaldo’s suggestion, and in the name of the ra-tional experience he proposes, can Rinaldo be convinced to listen to Armida: ‘[W]hat man is stronger than you if by seeing and hearing the Sirens you accustom yourself to overmaster them? So reason makes herself the pacific queen of your senses and refines herself’ (XVI, 41).45 Since Rinaldo’s redemption is essentially the confirmation of the single Christian ideal against all others, it must necessarily refuse the rules of the courtly-chivalric code. The refusal is so drastic it seems like a fundamental lack of humanity: ‘Then she seeks to grasp his hand or cloak, suppliant in gesture; and he steps back; he struggles and overcomes; Love

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finds the entrance closed, and tears the exit’ (XVI, 51).46 If some feeling of pity moves him, ‘yet he represses that tender affection within him, and as far as he can composes his looks, and pretends’ (XVI, 52).47 Earlier, Goffredo had also felt himself shaken by ‘pietoso affetto’ (the passion of pity [IV, 65]), but had resisted and politely but firmly denied Armida any help, provoking the surprised reactions of his companions: ‘If she does not get aid from Godfrey now, surely a raging tigress was his nurse and among rugged mountains the forbidding rock ridge brought him forth, or the wave that shatters itself and froths in the sea: cruel man, that distresses and destroys such beauty’ (IV, 77).48 With a very different aggressiveness, but in a similar way, Armida now assails Rinaldo, who would not allow himself to be moved by her extreme attempt to stop him: ‘Sophia did not give birth to you, and you are not born of the blood of the Azzi; the raging ocean wave and frozen Caucasus gave birth to you, and the dugs of the Hyrcanian tigress gave you milk’ (XVI, 57).49 Just as Goffredo reaffirmed the priority of the Christian cause (IV, 69]), promising his future help after the successful outcome of their undertaking, Rinaldo also promises help (XVI, 54]), and he will recall this commitment and fulfil his promise at the end of the war (XX, 122]).50 This recollection of ‘courtly’ values takes place once the Christian codes have been restored, after the resolution of the conflict. The same courtly code, here subordinated to the higher ends of the Christian mission but not emptied of all positive values, reappears in the same episode, this time with a decidedly negative significance. After Goffredo’s refusal, his younger brother, Eustazio, ‘in whom the flame of pity and love is hotter,’51 comes forward to demand the chance to intervene immediately to help Armida. He claims that he acts in the name of chivalric duty, that ‘consideration that our order is bound to give aid to damsels’ (IV, 80).52 Contravening this duty would result in infamy and shame ‘in France, or wheresoever courtesy is prized’53 and would render the title of knight null and void. It is no coincidence that this affirmation of courtly, chivalric ideals comes from a character who makes himself their spokesman only to disguise his own less noble intentions, as Tasso makes abundantly clear: ‘[W]ith such ornamented fabling seeks to hide under a different zeal his mind inflamed; and the others too pretend desire of honour in that which is desire of love’ (V, 7).54 The ‘courtesy’ that Eustazio uses to hide his yearnings for love here represents a debased and negative code. In general, the characters who voice such demands are in some way discredited – this is one of the censorial devices that aims to reduce the risk of the reader’s solidarity with these values. Such characters exhibit pagan – if not downright infernal – preferences. As regards

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a Christian like Eustazio, he shares with the other errant knights a greater degree of autonomy and is less bound by respect for collective ideals: ‘[We] that are soldiers of fortune, without any personal charges and less restricted by regulations than are the rest’ (IV, 79).55 The story of Rinaldo and Armida is not the only one that demonstrates an ambiguous identification of these two opposed value systems. Other sections in the text suggest the intimate links between the two. For example, we might consider the other love stories of the poem. Erotic intrigues between members of the opposed camps are frequent (Tancredi loves Clorinda, Erminia in turn loves Tancredi). Precisely because these loves are ‘crossed,’ they are destined to remain unsatisfied: though there is a brief period of contact between Rinaldo and Armida, their love also remains unfulfilled. The logic of the codes in the Liberata exhibits a profound tendency towards identification on the one hand, resisted on the other by the repressive demands of ideology. At least in some cases, a similar logic might be said to justify the frequency of motifs such as disguise and conversion that are symptomatic of this hidden desire to experience the other. Even at the more specifically formal–lexical level, it is possible to grasp the signs of this close correspondence, revealed by the presence of identifying stylemes. Sofronia’s shy and modest manner does not make her completely unlike Armida. An unbridgeable distance between Christian modesty and chastity and pagan lasciviousness and impiety nonetheless separates the two female characters. The representation of these characters plays on a subtle interweaving of identity and antithesis, corresponding to the roles of these two women, roles analogous in terms of function but opposed in their aims. Like Armida, Sofronia arouses a blinding passion in her lover Olindo because of her bashful and inevitably appealing beauty, but unlike Armida, who asks her lover to abandon the holy war, Sofronia takes advantage of this love to lead the Christian into a common martyrdom for the faith. It is only a different degree of awareness of her own charm that distinguishes Sofronia, ‘admired by all and giving them not a glance,’56 ‘lowered her eyes, she walked along wrapped in her veil,’57 from Armida, who ‘praised and desired ... passes among the lustful troops; and she is aware of it’58 while she artfully holds ‘her closekept gaze ... concentrated within itself.’59 The complete superimposition of the two characters takes place when we least expect it, disguised in the hymn to the rose sung by the parrot in Armida’s garden: – Deh mira – egli cantò – spuntar la rosa dal verde suo modesta e verginella,

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che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa, quanto si mostra men, tanto è più bella. Ecco poi nudo il sen già baldanzosa dispiega; ecco poi langue e non par quella, quella non par che desiata inanti fu da mille donzelle e mille amanti.

(XVI, 14)

Ah see (he sang) shamefast and virginal the rose break forth from her green foliage, still half revealed and half hidden, how the less she shows herself, so much the lovelier she is. At first with audacity, lo, she displays her naked breast; then lo, she languishes, and seems not the same; the same she does not seem that was before desired by a thousand maidens and a thousand lovers.

Sofronia, too, is ‘ritrosa beltà’ and ‘vergine ... di già matura / verginità’ (a maiden ... her maidenhood fully ripe), and although she ‘hides her great merits ... and steals away from the praises and glances of admirers, alone and unsolicited,’60 she nevertheless has the courage to go out among the crowd and challenge Aladino’s rage ‘con onesta baldanza’ (with manners modest and spirited). In the case of Armida, ‘languishing’ reappears a little further on in canto XVI – an attitude typical of her amorous arts (‘langue per vezzo’ [languishing under his caress] stanza 18) – and still later we encounter her ‘thousands of lovers’ (46), who represent those who would constantly court her. Passing from Armida and Sofronia, consider next the pair of Armida and Erminia. Here simulation is the trait that links the two characters, while their goals distinguish them from one another. In both cases, the dialectics of being and appearing govern Tasso’s representation. Looking down from a high tower at the enemy army that includes her beloved Tancredi, Erminia is constrained by the presence of the pagan king Aladino to repress her emotion and to feign hatred of the Christian prince: ‘[S]he ... hides beneath the mask of hatred a different passion’ (III, 19).61 Armida is encouraged by her uncle, Idraote, to spread the seed of discord and jealousy among the Christians through the refined art of simulation: ‘Your overmuch boldness veil with maidenly modesty, and make of the truth a mantle for your lying’ (IV, 25).62 On the formal level, we find a repertory of rhetorical devices based on antithesis and oxymoron linking the destinies of the two women, both victims of an amorous passion that can never be realized, though for different reasons. Both women find themselves in the contradictory posi-

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tion of ‘nemica amante’ (loving enemy) (Erminia, VI, 84; Armida, XIV, 68; XIX, 77; XX, 66]), just as both dream of healing the wounds of love with other, mortal wounds (Erminia, VI, 85; Armida, XX, 125]). The repetition of these rhetorical devices proves the objective convergence of the opposed spheres of good and evil, of Christian and pagan, of divine and demonic. This is the constitutional ambiguity on which Tasso’s poetic system bases its equilibrium, to such an extent that it almost does not allow us to distinguish the sinner Armida from the virtuous Sofronia. The confusion and co-identification of opposites in the Liberata certainly represents less a generalized reality than a tendency and a potential threat. The conflict between ideology and emotional identification plays a fundamental role in this phenomenon, evident above all at the level of the form of the content. The system of antithesis based on a rigid Manichaean ideology risks dissolving at any moment in its concrete poetic expression, subjected as it is to disruptive impulses by the profound solidarity of the poet Tasso with the pagan code, a code that the Christian Tasso rejects as negative and deviant.63

7 Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict

1 In the Gerusalemme liberata’s opening stanzas, which serve as its protasis, invocation, and dedication, Tasso gathers together a group of characters whose heterogeneous composition deserves emphasis: Canto l’arme pietose e’l capitano che ’l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo. Molto egli oprò co ’l senno e con la mano, molto soffrì nel glorioso acquisto; e in van l’Inferno vi s’oppose, e in vano s’armò d’Asia e di Libia il popol misto. Il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i santi segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti. O Musa, tu che di caduchi allori non circondi la fronte in Elicona, ma su nel cielo infra i beati cori hai di stelle immortali aurea corona, tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori, tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona s’intesso fregi al ver, s’adorno in parte d’altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte. Sai che là corre il mondo ove più versi di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso, e che ’l vero, condito in molli versi, i più schivi allettando ha persuaso. Così a l’egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve,

Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest e da l’inganno suo vita riceve. Tu, magnanimo Alfonso, il qual ritogli al furor di fortuna e guidi in porto me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli e fra l’onde agitato e quasi absorto, queste mie carte in lieta fronte accogli, che quasi in voto a te sacrate i’ porto. Forse un dì fia che la presaga penna osi scriver di te quel ch’or n’accenna. È ben ragion, s’egli averrà ch’in pace il buon popol di Cristo unqua si veda, e con navi e cavalli al fero Trace cerchi ritòr la grande ingiusta preda, ch’ a te lo scettro in terra o, se ti piace, l’alto imperio de’ mari a te conceda. Emulo di Goffredo, i nostri carmi intanto ascolta, e t’apparecchia a l’armi.

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(I, 1–5)

I sing the reverent armies and the captain who liberated Christ’s great sepulchre. Much he wrought with his wit and with his hand; much he suffered in the glorious conquest. And vainly Hell opposed herself to it, and vainly the combined peoples of Asia and of Libya took up arms. Heaven granted him favour and brought back under the holy standards his wandering companions. O Muse, that do not wreathe your brow on Helicon with fading bays, but among the blessed choirs in Heaven above possess a golden crown of deathless stars: breathe into my breast celestial ardours, illuminate my song, and grant me pardon if with the truth I interweave embroiderings, if partly with pleasures other than yours I ornament my pages. You know that the world flocks there where feigning Parnassus most pours out her sweetnesses, and that the truth in fluent verses hidden has by its charm persuaded the most froward. So we present to the feverish child the rim of the glass sprinkled over with sweet liquids: he drinks deceived the bitter medicine and from his deception receives life. You, magnanimous Alfonso, who recover from Fortune’s fury and guide to port myself a wandering pilgrim tossed among the reefs and amid the waves, and almost overwhelmed; receive with cheerful countenance these my pages that I bring as an offering consecrated to you. Perhaps one day it will be that my prophesying pen may dare to write of you what today it hints.

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Reason there is (if it should happen that ever the good people of Christ find themselves at peace, and with ships and horses seek to recapture from the fierce Thracian his vast illicit spoils) that to you the sceptre on land be granted, or if it please you the exalted rule of the seas. Meanwhile emulous of Godfrey listen to my song and prepare yourself to arms.

Three pairings are presented here, belonging to different symbolic registers, but ordered by the same symmetry: the captain and the errant companions; the doctor and the sick child; the patron prince and the shipwrecked poet. This link between pairs allows us to think of these characters in relation to their paradigmatic opposition. They embody a potential conflict of roles (authority versus dependence) and between selfhoods (a ‘strong’ identity opposed to a ‘weak’ one). This opposition is rooted in Tasso’s psychic ambivalence about embarking upon his most ‘lofty enterprise.’ The characters seem like true masks for a subject torn between the self-awareness of the creator-maker, master of letters, and his perception of individual historical experience as a journey through illness and error. This psychic split gives rise to a division in the act of narration. We can distinguish a poetic ‘I’ (the formal consciousness that guarantees the text’s unity and views the text as a means of redemption), and a historic ‘I’ (the phantoms of an existential condition of fragility and division that obsessively resurface in the poem). It is worth taking some time to consider the groups of characters separately. 2 The success of Tasso’s poetic enterprise is based on the achievement of an identity that conceptually links the poem’s maker to the prestigious figures of the captain, the doctor, and the patron, which possess both an ‘art’ and a ‘virtue.’ The poet enjoys an even greater virtual prestige, deriving from Tasso’s conception of poetry’s extreme importance in the sphere of human acts directed towards the common good.1 Tasso assumes the historic mandate, decisive for his destiny as a poet, of creating a modern heroic and Christian epic, and unites this project with the worthy undertaking that Providence entrusts to Goffredo di Buglione. Together they embody the structural theme of conquest proclaimed in the title.2 The captain has the task of liberating the holy city; the poet must construct its religious epic. Notably, the sole autobiographical reference in the Liberata occurs in these opening stanzas and assimilates the poet’s own personal sufferings to the text’s fundamental thematic movement.3 Tasso wishes that Alfonso, ‘imitator of Godfrey,’ would in-

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tervene to save him from his distressing wandering, guiding him to the calm of the port, just as the captain leads his ‘wandering companions’ back beneath the sacred standards, the sign of the Cross. The convention of courtly homage does not make the process of identification directed towards Alfonso any less real. He is the work’s historical addressee, but metaphorically also the mask of the subject hoping for his own ‘strong’ realization through the poetic product. In terms of the dialectics of identification, the figure of the lord is just as much part of the poet-subject as the figure of the wanderer with whom Tasso identifies himself in this autobiographical allusion. The poet contrasts two antithetical selves, polarized in these characters, which inscribe the conflict in the historical relationship of dependence. Thus the Liberata comes into being as the itinerary from the weak and fragmented identity of the wanderer to the authoritative and solid identity of the lord and master. Tasso conceives of the poem as an instrument of self-awareness and legitimation, a vital means of combating that which threatens to shatter the soundness of his identity. The pride of a poet who identifies himself as both legislator and demiurge and who reawakens the humanist myth of the poet as divine creator, at the same moment that this myth is declining in the late Renaissance, anchors his self on the side of the law. Tasso is the master who both delights and teaches, the doctor able to prepare a higher salvation for himself and others through his work. The privilege of authority legitimized as power to which the poet aspires links these figures of mastery and lends them an emblematic value.4 In offering the poem to his patron, Tasso is staking his claim to institutionally supported warrant. Artistic success represents salvation from shipwreck, the end of the voyage, and the triumph of an identity definitively removed from Fortune’s claim. 3 Images of alterity run parallel to these figures of self-awareness throughout the Liberata. Even scattered throughout the narrative, these images revive from a distance the ghosts of the conflict that opens the poem. Forms of subjectivity that privilege the institutional channels of metaphor and simile frequently interrupt the close-knit weave of epic narration. This process appears all the more symptomatic because of the contradiction that gives it prominence: Tasso, an indomitably subjective author, sentences himself to silence as a voice and self-annihilation as a presence to comply with his epic project. In other words, he gives up the opportunity to carve out that niche for the ‘I’ that allowed Ariosto, within the freer narrative frame of the romance, to mediate

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within the conventional setting of the canto’s proem. Ariosto’s narrator spoke in the first person with the intention of leading the reader out of the fictive situation and into the historical, contemporary situation, where the themes of autobiography play a large part. This repressed subjectivity first re-emerges (leaving aside for the moment its objectivization in characters, plot, and semantic structure) in the rich repertory of similes related to the thematics of the poem’s beginning and to a state of weakness, unease, and bewilderment. Let us briefly review the other places in the poem where the same characters reappear: – The invalid: ‘As sometimes the sick man who encounters in a dream a dragon or tall chimera girt with flame’ (XIII, 44); ‘and seems like an invalid for whom a life-giving draught refreshes her parched internal regions’ (XIII, 79); ‘As an invalid or madman sometimes sees disquieting visions in his fitful slumbers’ (XX, 105).5 – The wanderer: ‘[N]or ever traveller enters there, unless astray, but passes at a distance, and points to it with his finger’ (XIII, 3); ‘so that the traveller has much ado to find out safety or shelter in the tempests of that shifting countryside’ (XVII, 1).6 – The child:7 ‘As an innocent child has not the courage to look where he has a foreboding of strange spirits, or as in shadowy night he is afraid, imagining monsters and prodigies still’ (XIII, 18).8 The obsessive images of the wandering traveller and the sick child are the protagonists of the figural movement that, from the first stanzas of the poem onward, traverses and creates a dialectic within the epic space. They allow the poet to establish the alternative thematic structure of error, which constitutes the true counterpoint to the dominant theme of conquest. Retracing the places where it emerges means giving voice to a discourse that does not remain anchored to a marginalized subjectivity but acquires greater weight and autonomy in the poem’s semantic economy, profoundly influencing its equilibrium and structural organization. 4 More than any other document, the so-called Canzone al Metauro (‘O del grand’Apennino ...’), probably composed in the summer of 1578 while Tasso was a guest at the court of Urbino, exemplifies the poet’s attitude towards his own biography. It contains the same process of doubling previously noted. The poem is a brief, retrospective journey along the sad stages of Tasso’s own human experience. The subject here is the

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historical ‘I’ who is Fortune’s ‘trastullo e segno’ (plaything and target) and who searches for security in the shadow of the ‘alta Quercia’ (the ‘tall Oak’ was the heraldic emblem of Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere). Defender of the exiled (‘in aspro esiglio’) and the wanderer (‘fugace peregrino’), the lord and master is called upon to reconstitute the prematurely lost parental image.9 On the other hand, this traumatic deprivation is redeemed by the solemn way the poetic ‘I’ turns his sentence into a privilege, heroically assuming his vocation of solitude and suffering: ‘a me versato il mio dolor sia tutto’ (may all my pain be poured into me). 10 The canzone thus turns out to be balanced on the tension produced by the sudden emergence of autobiographical pathos (after the encomiastic opening and in the course of a traditional courtly theme such as that of protest against hostile fortune) and by its equally rapid channelling into the eloquent forms of a historically original ‘rhetoric of the passions.’ But it is more important to me to identify the place where this comparison of a strong and a weak extreme takes place than how it does so. This is in fact a summary of Tasso’s relation to authority. This relationship not only constitutes a fundamental biographical experience but also sets up the sphere in which Tasso’s imaginary most frequently springs to life. The institution of the princely court shows its reassuring and benign face, as it always does when Tasso sees it as guarantor of his typically regressive salvation from his deviant destiny of ‘error’: L’ombra sacra, ospital, ch’altrui non niega al suo fresco gentil riposo e sede, entro al più denso mi raccoglia e chiuda ...

(11–13)

Let the sacred, hospitable shade, that denies neither kind rest nor a place to others in its coolness, gather me up and enclose me in its thickest part ...

The obligations of courtly homage certainly do not fully explain these lines. They fail to account for Tasso’s need for identification that drives him to uphold the law that he believes correspondingly excludes him. Nevertheless, the narrative action of the Liberata belies the possibility of a one-sided approach and the optimistic ideology that seems to characterize the presence of the law. In the Christian imperialism that limits the spaces of freedom (IX, 17),11 marginalizes the exiled Solimano and the ‘wandering women,’ Erminia and Armida, and judges deviant desire (the monsters) as guilty, Tasso paints the sternly authoritarian face of

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the institution. This ambivalence defines the demands of the law as responsible for setting up the thematic dissension and generating the antagonistic figures of the poem’s opening. 5 A discussion that even marginally addresses the thorny problem of the relationship between an author’s biography and his writing must specify the methodological assumptions that inform it. Tasso’s life, with its romantic overtones and pathological characteristics, could not help but inspire sometimes brilliant but more often simply ingenious interpretations, both of which are almost always arbitrary. From these untrustworthy suppositions arose the romantic myth of Tasso the ‘persecuted genius’ in the intuitions of great artists such as Montaigne, Goethe, Leopardi, and Baudelaire. These artists, who believed that agony was a condition for poetry, projected onto Tasso’s suffering an image of themselves. Positivist scholars’ investigations of the relations between genius and madness elicited a great deal of interest in Tasso’s exceptional personality, but with the result (implicit in the aims of such an operation) of reducing his biography to a clinical case and his work to a mere document.12 Idealist criticism’s programmatic lack of interest in the author’s psychological portrait sanctioned a healthy reaction to this indiscriminate use of biographical information. This has not prevented particularly shrewd critics (especially Caretti and Getto) from recognizing Tasso’s biography as necessary to understanding his work and advancing enlightening suggestions from that perspective, even as they condemn traditionally inappropriate methods and excessive psychological emphases. But it is still true that the caution of the idealists has effectively resulted in the censorship of the biography-poetry nexus, which seems all the more pertinent and decisive in relation to an absolutely exemplary historical experience such as Tasso’s. If today it seems possible to reconsider biography and its relationship to the Liberata in a new and more rigorous light, we owe this to psychoanalysis. But here too we need to make distinctions. It is not a question of looking at the literary work by going back over the old, essentially reductive and prevaricatory path with better psychological tools. A biographical approach that mechanically transfers its results back into the text finishes by impoverishing its contents, placing them in the limbo of a few abstract categories that need not apply specifically to them and that could fundamentally apply to anything and everything. A certain kind of psychoanalytic methodology has accustomed us to practices that almost always end up by flattening the semantic complexity of the work

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and the historical density that enriches it, while emphasizing a number of stock elementary symbols that are sometimes too generic even to be incorrect: ‘One can certainly attain the circumscribed space and the pre-established level of such meanings from a concrete text, but only by means of an act of abstraction that annuls its concreteness and ends by providing predictably uniform results, whatever the case.’13 Although it is certainly more refined, a practice that aims to identify a language capable of discussing an author’s life and work ‘without splitting itself, without even spreading itself out, with a single, simple trait,’ seems no more credible, since abolishing the distance between the terms in play does not resolve the difficulties of their ‘enigmatic conjunction.’14 In my view, we must conceive of the unconscious as knowable through its linguistic manifestations in order to understand such a relationship correctly, recalling the principle that Freudian psychoanalysis is as much about semiology as psychology. In this sense, biographical information can be read as a symptom and every behaviour can assume the status of a text. A homogeneous relationship develops between, on the one hand, symptoms tout court, or behaviours understood as symptoms, and, on the other, texts in the full literary sense. Here the essential prerequisite is an awareness that reading the works as if they were symptoms is still nevertheless provisory, reductive, and a means to an end. It could be conceived as a means to an end (biographical knowledge) if that were in fact the ultimate aim of the operation. But since our goal is interpretation of the text, we need exactly the opposite. The abovementioned uniformities between semiotic manifestations of the unconscious, literary and non-literary, can only serve as counter-proofs, not without historical interest, to the critical argument I suggest, which depends on proofs that emerge directly from the analysis of the work. 6 Respect for the principle of authority governs Tasso’s role as a courtier.15 For him, everything is worked out within the closed horizon of the court; in exchange for his deference, Tasso believes he has the right to protection, honour, and glory. It is the court that identifies and defines his singularity, situating it within a rigid system of obligations and privileges. When he does not receive what he regards as adequate recognition of these privileges, or when he is not rewarded with success and compliments quickly enough, it is within the court that he looks for evidence of hostility. Where he cannot find even the hint of some human responsibility, he blames this hostility on an anonymous and inscrutable Fortune, which he must bear as an unjust persecution. This leads to the theme of

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the author’s own victimization. Tasso’s generic accusations and obstinate complaints may lead one to suspect his narcissistic desire to flaunt his own exemplary unhappiness, as if he were a protagonist in his poem.16 Yet it is true that Tasso’s sense of exposure to an external hostility allows him to economize on suffering, or at least to save himself a degree of in-depth intellectual analysis, since it protects the ‘I’ from more serious internal conflicts and consolidates its precarious integrity, gathering its energies and activating its defence mechanisms. Tasso himself candidly betrays this knowledge: ‘Now how can I excuse myself for having done a disservice to so high, so brave, so courteous, so kind a lord, if not by throwing back all the blame onto the defects of others and the malice of my fortune and the necessity that is the tyrant of men; leaving my own will not only lightened, but relieved and unburdened of every blame and every suspicion of blame?’17 With the entrance onto the scene of the lord and master, who bears the insignia of the father-God representing the law, the main character of the persecution story appears. Conscious selfrepression or censorship prevents Tasso from recognizing Alfonso’s direct responsibility, except with the necessary precautions. Instead, he prefers to shift him into the role of arbitrator of the contest between the ‘I’ and its detractors. Alfonso is a father who certainly too often is seduced by the accusations of rival brothers in the absence of his innocent son, but who is still the earthly image of the heavenly Father: ‘[P]rinces on earth are God’s ministers, and images and simulacra of his power.’18 For that reason, he must be obeyed and venerated ‘con somma riverenza’ (with greatest reverence), however he may dispense punishments and prizes, and the most serious errors among those we commit are ‘those by which the majesty of princes is offended.’19 But with this attitude Tasso simply lays claim to the norm that declares him guilty. He is constrained to defend himself against this same accusation of rebellion against his prince-father, and his imprisonment in the hospital of Sant’Anna seems to him similar in cruelty to the sentence that used to be inflicted on parricides: ‘And certainly the parricides who, sewn into a leather sack with a fox and a rooster, are thrown into the sea, so that while they breathe they cannot get air for themselves, and while they are tossed by the waves they may not purge themselves, and while they are exposed on the shore they may not rest on earth; parricides, I say, have little to envy in my sufferings.’20 This forced simile betrays Tasso’s perception of the real nature of his crime, which, however, constantly borrows its vocabulary from this infantile subjection to the law of the father: ‘fallo’ (fault), ‘purga’ (purging), ‘emenda’ (cor-

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rection). Outside his relationship with the prince and the court’s limited horizon, Tasso finds only exclusion and a literal lack of substance: ‘[A]nd I am driven out by the citizens, not of Naples or Ferrara, but of the whole world; so that I alone may not say what all others are permitted to say, that is that I am a citizen of a specific country; excluded not only by civil laws, but by those of the people and the nature of God; deprived of all friendship, conversation, commerce, of the knowledge of all things, all enjoyments, all comforts; rejected by all the graces, and in every time and place equally mocked and abominated.’21 The sickness itself, which in time explodes into Tasso’s persecution mania, in many ways represents the other face of his unconditional reverence. We can trace a version of this same tragic outlet for his dependence and passivity, in which a powerful need for punishment is satisfied, in other psychological manifestations of Tasso’s relationship with paternal figures. This is the only way to explain his spontaneous requests to be examined and judged by authorities, be they ecclesiastical (the Inquisitorial tribunal to which he submits his doubts regarding his own Catholic orthodoxy on two occasions, in 1575 in Bologna and in 1577 in Ferrara) or literary (the Roman group of revisers who judged his compliance with rules derived from Aristotelian poetics). Tasso constantly evokes the paternal figure to carry out the role of interdiction, since, when he is not its victim, he seems to regret its absence. As a result, even though it is Alfonso who condemns him to imprisonment, it is Tasso himself who demands condemnation from an Inquisition he sees as not severe enough.22 Moreover, the poet himself willingly threatens his poem’s existence by giving credence to those who ask for cuts, changes, and the suppression of whole episodes. He continually collaborates with the authority that persecutes him, providing it with a function and a right that he is later continually tempted to deny. Thus, two complementary and opposing factors feed Tasso’s desire for the poem’s legitimation: his awareness of the work’s artistic novelty and moral audacity paradoxically demands the sanction of a tribunal whose authority he does not recognize. The game of partial admission followed by the immediate retraction of his ‘Lutheran’ inclinations is played out in the same way. He delegates the responsibility for condemnation to an external authority as a way of expelling his anguish. For this reason he is not satisfied by the ecclesiastical tribunal’s interlocutory sentence. He demands a declaration of guilt just as he demands confirmation of his own artistic uncertainties from his Roman readers. Naturally, this does not prevent him

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from often declaring his irritation with and his protest against the Roman revision, ‘voluta e disvoluta, sollecitata e respinta’ (wanted and unwanted, requested and rejected).23 But rather than eliminate it by a simple act of will, he prefers to examine ways of getting around it, asking his censors to corroborate the alibi designed to circumvent the very institution they represent: ‘Messer Flaminio notes something that I did well: that there is no love in my poem with a happy ending (and certainly it is so), and may this be enough to make them tolerate these parts.’ 24 Alongside the need for judgment and submission, the need to escape the limiting norms of the law asserts itself with equal urgency. Tasso’s ‘libertarian’ decisions work through an internal negation of this conformism, and so they retain the traces of something anomalous and clandestine. Giovanni Getto rightly situates the dominant biographical motif of the journey in this context.25 The travels that mark Tasso’s existence often occur for external reasons or practical necessities, but they nevertheless cannot be reduced to the motivations that Tasso’s biography from time to time provides. More than journeys, they are flights and pilgrimages, and they testify to a restlessness that turns Tasso’s faith in his privileged relationship with power into unease and suspicion. Just like the expedients and alibis of writing, the journey represents for Tasso, according to Getto, the attempt to free himself from that ‘institutional reality in which his existence appears to be entirely enclosed and regulated’ (10). It provides the illusion of escaping the prison of a preconstructed role, the ‘gates,’ the ‘marked lines,’ and the ‘prescribed signs’ of a codified literary canon. It is no coincidence that his flight from court inevitably returns to the court, just as the deviating thrust of his writing tends to be reabsorbed into the dictates of the academy. Tasso’s restless wanderings among the courts of Italy represent so many repetitions of the original trauma of his exile from his Neapolitan home. The autobiographical figure of the wanderer consolidates into the young Tasso’s destiny of being condemned to flight, instability, and the loss of a concrete and affective situation that would lend him a different identity. Physical movement is linked to a mobility that is above all psychological, and that pushes Tasso to exaggerate the contradictions of his own subaltern and rootless condition, sometimes setting them up as dramatic alternatives (free or imprisoned, slave or master).26 The poet’s wanderings almost always seem to represent a regressive search for a happy port. They represent a ‘return’ that aims to restore the fullness of life he lost through the early experience of his mother’s

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death and his father’s exile. His frequent trips to Naples result sometimes from his search for a ‘shelter’ from ‘fortune’s fickleness’ and the ‘variability of current times’ and sometimes from his desire to regain something due him (his mother’s properties claimed by his relatives, his father’s assets confiscated by the tax authorities after he was exiled) that would restore him to a position of independence and security. Ferrara itself, once lost, immediately becomes for him the site of a mythic return to his origins: ‘I departed not only banished but voluntarily from Ferrara; a place where I was if not born, then at least reborn, and where now not only has need constrained me, but the very great desire that I had to kiss the hands of His Lordship, and to regain some part of his grace on the occasion of his marriage has pushed me to return.’27 This psychological condition tends to establish itself in Tasso’s imaginary according to a dialectic of subtractions and recovery that develops a constant push towards acquisition and its establishment. In Tasso’s eyes, existential experience takes on the nature of a progressive series of deprivations (of his home, of those he loves, of wealth, of freedom), which degenerates into the symptoms of an impoverished identity threatened by sickness. The famous letter in which Tasso claims to be haunted by a demonic spirit strikingly documents the pathologically obsessive theme of subtraction as it had developed by 1585.28 There is a mysterious force that attacks his possessions (money, clothes, and food) but only in order to attack immediately afterwards and more insidiously his intellectual lucidity (memory loss), his moral and psychological foundations: ‘So that I cannot defend anything but my will from my enemies or from the devil’;29 the certainties of his faith: ‘But God knows that I was never before a wizard or a Lutheran’;30 and finally the very tools and products of the writing to which the recluse’s troubled identity clings most tenaciously. Either his enemies’ plotting aims to shut him out from the favour of the powerful, or the latter’s own betrayal (his lord; the church, ‘non madre, ma matrigna’ [not mother, but stepmother])31 denies him his right to happiness and refuses him the longed-for reconciliation: ‘Who will be so cruel as to want to separate me from either womb?’32 In all these cases we see the childhood trauma of exclusion replicated, the compulsive return along the path of perpetually renewed exile. The great epic theme of conquest (which is more properly a reconquest of the original homeland of Christianity now in the hands of the infidels) and the hope of its consolidation in a lasting acquisition removed from the uncertainties of fate reveal the outlines of these psychological impli-

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cations. But the young poet’s declaration of his intentions at the time of his choice of profession also shows us details of his psyche. A passage from the Dedica ai lettori of his Rinaldo betrays the deep connection of poetic and biographical themes on the basis of their common imagery: ‘I dared to set myself this undertaking, even though I knew it would not please my father, who because of his long life and the many and varied dealings that have passed through his hands, knowing fortune’s fickleness and the variability of current times, would have wished that I might have kept to more grounded studies, with which I might have been able to acquire more than he acquired with his poetry and much more than he did by serving as postmaster to princes, which then he lost through the malice of his fate, and has still not been able to recover: so that with such firm support as I had in the knowledge of law, I should not then have to encounter those troubles that he has sometimes encountered.’33 We can already discern Tasso’s choice of poetry in his goal of acquiring glory (shortly afterwards he affirms his ‘desiderio di farsi conoscere’ [desire to make himself known]),34 which he was destined to realize through his contradictory identification with his father. Although opting for a poetic career is an explicit infraction of paternal law (‘non sarebbe per piacere a mio padre’ [it would not please my father]), it is evident that violating this prohibition represents his means of greater identification with his father. This expresses itself concretely not only in Tasso’s choice of profession but also in the recovery of Bernardo’s form of artistic expression; Rinaldo is very much a traditional chivalric romance. In this fictive split, Torquato’s ambition is to compensate for his father’s defeat (‘ristorare i danni’ [recover the losses]) and to establish his right to recognition from the world by asserting his own authority as a poet. This is why his poetry takes shape from the beginning (with increasing awareness, as we shall see) as a means of identification and redemption, an alternative to the safer path of legal studies but equally directed towards acquisition, consolidation, and recovery. Tasso will later show himself to have completely internalized this paternal image, almost prophetically fitted to his own destiny. Fortune’s malice and men’s hostility, the cause of his father’s suffering, are also constant threats to the internal unity that Tasso painfully reconquers through heroic projection onto his characters and, more generally, through the elevated practice of writing itself, of looking into the narcissistic mirror of Armida. The sense of a loss that requires him to engage in recovery and compensation leaves an appreciable imprint on Tasso’s imaginary. This loss emerges with greatest force in those of his writings that approach auto-

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biography. From his verses and letters there emerges a sense of estrangement and deprivation that cannot assert itself historically as a crisis of identity or as intellectual dissidence but remains contained within the limits of private misfortune.35 The pathological results of his condition undoubtedly belong to a sphere of investigation that lies beyond our interests. But Tasso’s particular relationship to the act of writing demonstrates a subtle and close-knit weave of symptomatic attitudes. In Tasso’s lyric verses, which permit a more immediate subjectivity, the images of ‘weak’ identifications (the invalid, the wanderer, the castaway) are filtered through Tasso’s ongoing critique of Petrarchan poetic conventions. This condition of dispossession sparks an assiduous search for constancy within nature’s metamorphoses and fortune’s changes.36 The extreme end point of this subtraction of identity is the constitutive attitude of Tasso’s madrigals. The subject likens itself to ‘defenceless and violated’ (‘inerme e oltraggiata’) turtle doves, doves, and deer, and finally disappears even as a corporeal essence, reducing itself to voice and music.37 This is quite the opposite of a Pan-like feeling of dominion over nature. Even if Tasso represents a world potentially reduced to pure subjectivity where the poetic ‘I’ expands indefinitely in the form of reflection (mirrors, stagnant waters), or in the extension of the self in a more aerial and unpredictable being (birds), to the point of total disembodiment (the echo), this world is made up of indefinable experiences and unattainable objects, such as the Lady, that appear only as images reflected in the mirror. If we examine this attitude in the light of psychology and biography, Tasso’s acute consciousness of otherness, whether suffered as exclusion or assumed as a defence, becomes strongly evident. In the Liberata, such typically Tassian themes as masks, dissimulation, and disguise in their double valence of mimetic desire (e.g., Erminia, who puts on Clorinda’s clothes, envying her her freedom of action [VI, 18]) and the desire for self-annihilation (e.g., Clorinda, who cancels out her identity in the night, putting on her black armour [XII, 18]) frequently stem from this sense of otherness. Tasso himself was no stranger to the disguises of literary tradition.38 His role playing seems to express, beyond the rhetorical convention that legitimates it, an ambiguous feeling of estrangement. Thus in the Dialoghi, he assumes the trappings of an anonymous Neapolitan Stranger,39 and in the famous opening of one of the dialogues, ‘Il padre di famiglia’ (again the paternal figure), he represents himself as a wandering pilgrim who searches for a safe port as the storm brews: ‘It was in the season in which the vintner usually presses the wine from the mature grapes and in

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which the trees may be seen in some places stripped of fruit, when I, riding between Novara and Vercelli in the clothes of an unknown pilgrim, seeing that the air was already beginning to darken and that everything around was encircled by clouds and almost saturated with rain, began to prod my horse more strongly.’40 The tensions and ambivalences created by the problem of identity enliven the autobiographical subjectivity in Tasso’s writings. Where Tasso speaks of himself in his verses and letters – of the misfortune that made him an invalid, a wanderer, and a castaway – the refined rhetorical orchestration of his writing and the prestige that such an exercise confers invariably belie him, restoring to light the face thrown into shadow by his psychic split. Through the Sant’Anna letters and the Dialoghi (which were, not coincidentally, written mostly during the period of his imprisonment), Tasso wants to give the world the image of an able and learned man of letters, fully master of his intellectual and expressive powers. The reality of being excluded actually lends power to the ideal image of the lord and master. Not only does the prisoner devote himself to the effort of philosophical reflection, or rather to a disconcerting display of doctrine in the context of his condition, but he also shows himself willing to delegate the burden of proof of his sanity to his virtuoso eloquence. In this way, he deludes himself that he has cancelled or at least attenuated the concrete reality of his faults in regard to power. He continues to designate this problem generically as ‘error.’ He often seems to want to forget it, since the more he speaks of it, the less he clarifies its nature, inconclusively assigning responsibility for it to sickness, guilt, and destiny. The letter he sent to Cardinal Albano from Sant’Anna (23 May 1581) recalls an episode from the life of Sophocles. Called into court in his nineties by his children, who wanted to have him declared incompetent so that they could make use of his property, the great tragedian proved his lucidity to the judges by reciting an excerpt from Oedipus at Colonus, which he was composing at the time: ‘And if I, who am similar to him in unhappiness, shall be able to persuade Your Most Reverend Lordship (whom I trust must be no less sincere a judge) that I am not mad, whenever it may be, I will enjoy recounting my past miseries.’41 Tasso not only conceives of this story as a concrete exercise of survival and redemption but also invites the cardinal to read two recently composed dialogues (‘Of Nobility’ and ‘Of Dignity’), almost as if verification of his intellectual identity might be equal to an absolution from guilt. Thus Tasso invests writing with enormous compensatory power. It becomes the means of legitimation for an identity threatened by the

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tyrannical law of the prince-father. With time, the link between the pride of the author and the survival of the man becomes even stronger. Malevolent critics, hostile men of letters, and insufficiently enthusiastic supporters become, tout court, enemies making attempts on his life: ‘I am in such a state that men cannot show themselves to be enemies of my praises without also showing themselves to be enemies of my health.’42 In the last part of his life, when Tasso is free though still tormented by his wanderings, his dominant desire will be to publish a correct and complete edition of his works. This also expresses a desire for wholeness, since it requires gathering together his letters from their various addressees and bringing together in a single printing his scattered verses, almost as if they were disiecta membra to be reunified. Writing remains the only stable abode that saves the subject from exclusion, journeying, and madness: ‘This life, whose end I feel myself to be nearing, is still one of wandering; and yet my old desire to print my compositions is fixed within my soul.’43 Steadfastly carried out in increasingly difficult circumstances through all the years of his imprisonment, writing represents Tasso’s attempt to ennoble himself in the eyes of the world and to claim greatness as a poet. It is his means of recomposing into a whole the image of himself that is shattered by the destructive forces of his illness. 7 Tasso’s theoretical speculation moves within a series of antitheses that he can resolve into a dialectic only with great effort and will power, sometimes required to shore up reason’s uncertain efforts. By involving himself as author, he sacrifices some of his argument’s logical clarity, but he also guarantees the impetus necessary to overcome moments of doubt. This phenomenon appears very clearly in the three books of the Discorsi dell’arte poetica, where the subjects he examines bear the signs of a seemingly irreconcilable symmetrical division. The aim of poetry appears to hang in the balance between benefit and delight (book I); the subject of heroic poems involves a choice between the believable and the marvellous (book II); and finally, the literary tradition offers two possibilities for the form of heroic poems, unity or variety (book III). Rather than analyse the development of Tasso’s argument as a whole in the Discorsi, I believe it will be more useful to provide an example of the method he follows. I will examine the last of these questions – Tasso’s treatment of unity and variety in epic plots – because of the prominence the subject assumes in the late-Renaissance debate on the poem as a literary genre, and because of the psychological and ideological implications it has for the poet-creator.44

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Trying to mark out his own path to the epic poem, Tasso departs from the obligatory comparison with the work of his great predecessor, Ariosto. Since he regards the Furioso as the outstanding model of the variety that his new poem must reduce to remain within the canons of Aristotelian unity, Tasso finds himself supporting two potentially opposed theses: variety is indispensable since it is a primary form of delight; nevertheless, it constitutes a threat to the existence of the poem since it tends to break up the unitary forces painstakingly brought together in order to compose it. The poetic goal of variety is undoubtedly to be followed, not only to indulge ‘il gusto isvogliato’ (the jaded taste)45 of modern readers, but for what we might consider an ontological reason.46 In the famous passage that sets up the analogical correlation between the poem and the world,47 Tasso states the need for variety, and assumes it as a value insofar as it assimilates the formal structure of the poem to the constitutive principle of the universe. If creation is ‘this marvellous domain of God that we call the world,’ an example in aeternum of order imposed within chaos, of unity affirmed within variety, the heroic poem imitates the world not only in terms of its content but also in its forms, since the same principles that govern nature govern art.48 Since the unified world nevertheless is varied in the forms of its phenomena, the poem as its mirror shares in this variety. As is immediately clear, the difficulties lie in the moment of transition from the model to its practical realization. The criterion of multiplicity inevitably brings with it the risk of indeterminacy, and it is the subjective will of the creator alone that defines the border between the virtually infinite variety of the cosmos and the necessarily limited whole of the poem.49 Durling notes all the holes and contradictions in Tasso’s arbitrary solution, which he entrusts to exclusively subjective and psychological canons. Unity and variety are principles held in reciprocal tension. Thus the unity for which the poet ultimately aims represents a difficult conquest, a hard-won prize born of continual comparison with the opposed principle that exploits the intellectual and psychic resources of its underlying creator: Ma questa varietà sì fatta tanto sarà più meravigliosa, quanto recherà seco più di malagevolezza e quasi di impossibilità, non potendo qualità contrarie ritrovarsi insieme, se non eminentemente come nel cielo, o almeno rintuzzate come ne gli elementi [...] È certo assai agevol cosa e di niuna industria il far che ’n molte e separate azioni nasca gran varietà di accidenti; ma che l’istessa varietà in una sola azione si trovi ‘hoc opus, hic labor est.’ In quella

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che nasce da la moltitudine de le favole per se stessa, arte o ingegno alcuno del poeta non si conosce, e può essere a’ dotti e agl’indotti comune; questa in tutto da l’artificio del poeta depende, e conseguita da lui solo si riconosce, né può da mediocre ingegno essere conseguita: quella tanto meno diletterà, quanto sarà più confusa e meno intelligibile; questa, per l’ordine e per la legatura de le sue parti, non solo sarà più chiara e più distinta, ma porterà molto maggior novità e meraviglia. But such a variety will be so much the more marvellous as it brings with it a measure of difficulty, almost of impossibility, since contrary qualities cannot coexist except in their fullness as in the heavens, or at least blunted as in the elements [...] It is indeed an easy and artless thing to get a great variety of incidents in many separate actions; but to get an equal variety in one sole action, ‘hoc opus, hic labor est.’ In the variety that arises of itself from a multitude of fables, we perceive no art or talent of the poet: both the learned and the unlearned may chance on it. But the variety I speak of depends entirely on the poet’s skill, and is evidently achieved by him alone, and cannot be by a mediocre talent. That kind, as it is more confused and unintelligible, will give less delight; this kind with its ordered and interrelated parts will not only be clearer and more distinct, but will afford more novelty and wonder.50

Extreme artifice thus coincides with supreme subjectivity, so that the work thrives on the edge of failure from the moment of its formal inception. The dangers intrinsic to accepting the criterion of multiplicity, inherent to an aesthetic choice, are exorcized by Tasso on a primarily psychological level, where the poet’s difficulties are protagonists, rather than his positive solutions. This is the case for the fears of indeterminacy, and similarly for the worries connected to ‘distracting the mind’ and ‘hindering the work’ that emerge in a passage from the youthful Discorsi dell’arte poetica: ‘However, since diverse purposes distract the mind and hinder labour, he who sets himself a single goal will work more effectively than the imitator of a multitude of actions.’51 This passage is most interesting when compared with the later version in the Discorsi del poema eroico, where the omission of the sentence implicating the subjective sphere appears symptomatic: ‘[S]ince diverse purposes distract the mind and hinder labour.’52 Durling, who has underlined the importance of the omission, advances the hypothesis of conscious selfcensorship. In fact, this censorship strikes at the too-open admission of the threat to the psychic wholeness of the subject giving order and ratio-

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nality to the poetic material, a risk that Tasso sees as connected to his own creative experience. The difficulty he has to solve is that excessive variety ‘impedisce l’operazione dell’animo’ (impedes the operation of the mind) because it panders to its many-sided nature: ‘[S]ince our human constitution contains natures quite unlike each other, necessarily one same thing does not always please it, but sometimes one thing, sometimes another satisfies now one, now another of its aspects. Since variety is thus delightful to human nature, it might be said that much greater delight can be found in a multiple than in a unified fable.’53 By its nature, the epic poet’s work hangs in a difficult balance between the sensual delight it achieves thanks to variety, and the psychic and intellectual disorientation it potentially instigates because of variety. The work’s very vitality depends upon a deadly risk. Tasso’s Christian epic survives artistically, bringing success and compensation to its creator, to the extent that the unitary ideology embodied by the captain manages to control the centrifugal and dispersive forces of his wandering companions. The companions, working for their own autonomous ends, tend to create stories of their own, and thus texts of their own (‘se più saranno le favole, l’una de le quali da l’altre non dependa, più saranno conseguentemente i poemi’)54 in the name of the variety that Tasso begins to perceive as genuinely ideological. In the Furioso, variety brought the author’s fantastic invention to fruition and simultaneously sanctioned the behavioural freedom of his characters. In the Liberata, the same variety becomes a threat. It represents an attack on the author’s poetic success, as well as guilt, sin, and ‘error’ for his characters. For the poem to survive, and for the crusaders to conquer Jerusalem, they must affirm the One. In eliminating the variety of the plot, Tasso also abolishes the plurality of values that constitutes the ideological legacy of the ‘romance’ genre.55 It is no coincidence that the Liberata closes the era of the chivalric poem. Two opposed functions manifest the author’s presence, where text and characters converge. There is the poet-legislator, the external narrator of events who ensures the unity and rationality of the text. There is also the poet-character, who represents himself on the scene of variety and dispersal. The self-awareness that accompanies Tasso’s process of poetic composition and that exercises an even greater power over his revisions of his work expresses itself in this split. The poet continues to think of himself as having to triumph over threats, whether internal or external, to his creative subjectivity’s work of synthesis. As Durling puts it, Tasso recreates the curious portrait of a hypothetical poet tempted by

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an ever-increasing variety, by a maximum increment of delight, while nevertheless wanting an arbitrary and external norm to define its limits for him (204). He constructs variety as the enemy to be exorcized, the negating principle without which, nonetheless, the text could not even come into being. It functions in the poem in exactly the same way as Armida’s ‘mortali dolcezze’ (lethal charms) – as a site of pleasure despite being a site of negation – or rather as a site of pleasure because it is a site of negation: ‘All the variety of the poem then will derive from its means and its obstacles, which can be different and of many kinds, almost of many natures, without destroying the unity of the fable, if the principle on which the means depend is one and the end to which they are directed is one.’56 The creative process, like the narrative mise-en-scène, is calibrated within a subtle dialectic of unity and variety, where the space left for centrifugal tendencies must verge on, but not cross, the border beyond which the subject’s psychic integrity would be compromised. The end result – noted again by Durling (208) – must be not a distraction but a challenge that the poet overcomes in ordering both his creative activity and his artistic product. In this sense, Satan’s temptations are genuine threats to the poetic project, and Armida’s song is literally a ‘siren song.’57 Tasso’s method of investigation and his solutions in the third book of the Discorsi del poema eroico renew the uncertainties and contradictions of the two preceding books. There Tasso also faces a choice between seemingly incompatible options: the useful and the delightful, the believable and the marvellous. Once more, dialectical acrobatics allow him to find an escape route and to mediate where compromise seemed logically impracticable. The paradox repeated here is certainly not a symptom of an escapist tendency or, worse, of a desire for reconciliation at all costs. Rather, it represents another dramatic expression of a commitment so extreme that it is willing to risk fatal harm to the psyche. Tasso’s effort to defend the need for variety within the unity of the heroic poem led him to distinguish between goals. The poet must pursue both unity and variety, but on condition that he subordinate one to the other in hierarchical order. Faced with the similar conflicts between the useful and the delightful, the believable and the marvellous, Tasso proceeds in just the same way, devaluing one of the objectives and making it into a means to the other.58 Tasso’s subordination of one term to the other is the arbitrary solution he provides to their irreconcilability. He will pursue one of his two objectives as secondary, utilized and legitimized by the other, but he is no more able to renounce its survival than its necessary degra-

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dation. Using the same conceptual manoeuvre that enabled him to save a place for variety, Tasso saves another for the marvellous and the delightful. 8 If we return to the poem’s opening, we find more than the place where our analysis began. Instead, we find confirmation of the mechanism described above in the relationship that links the rapid synthesis of poetics enunciated in those opening stanzas to the Liberata’s structural organization. The compromise that founds Tasso’s poem rests on the careful weighing of antithetical elements. In order for the ‘bitter’ to produce its salutary effects, it must leave the maximum amount of space for the allurements of the ‘sweet’ that counteract it. In order for the poem to realize itself as a whole in the name of Christian reason it must pay its dues to multiplicity. This is all the more necessary as the latter appears as negative, the evil to be overcome, the deviant experience to be redeemed in relation to the ultimate goal. Variety is at the heart of the ‘sweet’ and the ‘embroiderings,’ and it is here that ideological-moral dimension and narrative necessity actually meet. Since variety is born ‘da’ mezzi e da gli impedimenti’ (from means and impediments), it is, as Guido Baldassarri remarks, ‘the recognition of the necessity, within the structures of the epic poem, of a “delaying” function, so to speak, to which the interweaving of narrative events itself is entrusted by way of a momentary suspension of the obligatory conclusion of the “tale” and whose repression leads to the unravelling of the “knot.”’59 This ‘unravelling of the knot’ is the poet’s task, just as, in a parallel fashion, the ‘discharging of his vow’ is the captain’s task.60 The condition of conquest for both paradoxically lies in what it opposes: only by exorcizing the seductive negativity of variety is the conscious choice of unity possible. As a result, it is necessary – and this is the alibi that makes the poem’s very existence possible – to give literal voice and space to the monsters that populate the earth, where the human being is like a sick child, an overwhelmed castaway, or a wandering pilgrim. This is precisely the state of weakness and subordination that is meaningfully dramatized in the poem’s opening stanzas, and in which Tasso himself takes part because of his awareness of the innate contradiction of his own role as a poet. In fact, he asks pardon for being a poet (‘grant me pardon if with the truth I interweave embroiderings ...’). As François Ducros notes, Tasso is actually constrained, in the interests of the moral and gnoseological goal he sets himself, to make use of an instrument that he, like the Counter-Reformation Aristotelians, mistrusts.61 His

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objective is the ‘truth,’ while poetic language by its nature functions through ‘embroiderings’ – it works with the instruments of seduction identified with ‘variety’ and the ‘marvellous.’ Moreover, while the edifying theme of the triumph of the forces of good over those of evil may inspire those intellectual and spiritual pleasures that are consonant with truth, the poetic text, for its part, procures ‘other,’ sensual and deceptive, pleasures. On the brink of his most lofty enterprise, Tasso makes explicit the contradiction that marks his artistic personality: ‘the greatest rhetorician of an era of rhetoricians, the writer who makes the most complex use of all the artistic elaborations of writing, is also he who throws the greatest shadow, the greatest discredit over the tool he uses.’62 But immediately after this declaration of impotence, he activates his usual device, triggering the opposite valence, the other term of the opposition that is always latent. Condemnation flips over into the pride that lies beneath it, since if the poet’s vocation is to sing the truth with this language, then its inadequacy becomes a virtue, its weakness a strength because ‘this means that one may hope for good from bad, truth from lies, and the spiritual from the sensual.’63 9 This long route through various important aspects of Tasso’s biography and artistic meditations has brought us back to where we began, at the poem’s threshold. The opening stanzas represent a privileged vantage point because they function as a hinge between what lies before and outside the text and what lies within it. In this space, from different points of origin, the elements of Tasso’s history, biography, psychology, and culture, elaborated in structures of meaning, come together. Analysing these elements is necessary in order to re-examine the characters who open the poem, and it reassures us that we will find more there than the emblems of rhetorical convention and ritual obedience to a genre. These figures gain depth and consistency to the extent that they express a conflict at work in all of Tasso’s writing, and one that finds its most complex articulation in his poem. Rather than satisfying ourselves with noting their direct re-emergences, we shall now look for their presence at deeper levels, by (a) observing the role and behaviour of the poem’s protagonists and (b) describing the thematic oppositions generated by their textual dynamic. 9.1 Committed to the goal of conquest, Tasso as a subject perceives the textual space as the trajectory from one pole to another of his divided identity. What the narrative renders as movement and sequence is

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expressed in dynamic terms as the ambivalent relationship that the opposed figures embody. The epic hero pursues his private conquest of identity within the larger movement that involves ideological and religious alignments. He has before him the model of the captain, doctor, and lord, and at his side the spectre of the invalid, wanderer, and castaway. According to the narrator’s dialectic of identification, he may realize himself as master of events or victim of Fortune. From this perspective, the three major Christian heroes of the Liberata represent the point of convergence of this dynamic within the text. This is why the poem’s structural semantic values cluster with greatest density around their different ethical constitutions. I would like to begin with Tancredi, the most difficult to define, since he stands halfway between the other two heroes. He lacks both the static, monolithic nature of the epic hero, Goffredo, and the capacity for metamorphosis of the young hero, Rinaldo, who alone follows the complete trajectory of the alternative identities.64 Compared to Rinaldo, Tancredi is less radical and more bewildered in his choices, despite his tendency to be attracted into the space of deviance. His lack of any substantive evolution makes him in some ways symmetrical to Goffredo, since Tancredi’s precariousness is as stable a factor as the captain’s resoluteness. Nevertheless, Tancredi remains the Christian hero most resistant to integration into the epic norm since, although he is incapable of spectacular transgression, neither is he amenable to the expiation to which Peter the Hermit exhorts him (XII, 86–8). Unlike Rinaldo, he is as a result unable to vanquish the diabolical apparitions that make Saron’s wood inaccessible to the Christians. Absence constantly characterizes his behaviour: from the ‘distraction’ that makes him fail in his task as Christian champion (blinded by Clorinda’s apparition, in the challenge with Argante he allows another crusader, the young and impetuous Ottone Visconti, to take his place), to his being forced to renounce the continuation of the duel postponed by dusk (this time the elderly Raimondo takes his place), to his voluntary marginalization from the conclusive act of the war (during the taking of Jerusalem he slips away from the battlefield to settle his private score with Argante). It is a circle that closes perfectly on his absence and seals his essential extraneousness to collective ideals. Always outside the mass conflicts, he prefers, in love as in war, to duel (with Argante, Rambaldo, and Clorinda). To defend this privileged relationship with his enemy he is even prepared to use his arms against one of his companions (III, 30–1). It is thus no surprise that this character, so reluctant to make a decisive

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choice between the Christian epic code and the pagan romance code, should prove susceptible to the blandishments that attract him to the side of weakness. We see him most often not as the brave hero Erminia describes to us (II, 17–20) but as absent, dumbfounded (III, 23; VI, 27– 8), fainting (XII, 83; XIX, 28), or an invalid at the mercy of infantile hallucinations (XIII, 44). His ambiguities, which lack the explosive force of Rinaldo’s transgressions, do not even share the latter’s status as necessary stages towards the goal of grace. His are more venial but also probably more enduring ‘errors,’ which, while they remove the individual from the unanimous movement of the Christian collectivity, do not win him over to the side of the defeated. As a result, his identity as a character always remains dangerously suspended at the border between two codes and two masks. 9.2 Unlike Tancredi’s odyssey, Rinaldo’s is a genuine, literal one, in which the hero – predestined to atonement as much as to transgression – assumes the task of driving back below ground the monsters of desire that he, above all others, has helped to raise up.65 Under the symbolic sign of the labyrinth that encloses him, he follows the winding path of his search for identity, divided as he is between the model of Christian reason embodied by Goffredo and the snares of an alternative pagan universe. His wanderings among the seductions of the varied and the different, a genuine itinerary through the centrifugal plurality of desire, dangerously threaten to subtract him from the orbit of his Christian destiny. This mortal peril is just as necessary for the character as for the poet who creates him, and links him to his own destiny, since it is the possibility of defeat that definitively consolidates Rinaldo’s unstable identity:66 Qual più forte di te, se le sirene vedendo ed ascoltando a vincer t’usi? Così ragion pacifica reina de’ sensi fassi, e se medesma affina.

(XVI, 41)67

What man is stronger than you if by seeing and hearing the Sirens you accustom yourself to overmaster them? So reason makes herself the pacific queen of your senses and refines herself.

Here it is Ubaldo, one of Rinaldo’s two liberators, who addresses him, exhorting him to listen to Armida’s plea. He can assert this principle

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with authority because his wisdom derives precisely from his experience with multiplicity: Veduti Ubaldo in giovenezza e cerchi vari costumi avea, vari paesi, peregrinando da i più freddi cerchi del nostro mondo a gli Etiopi accesi, e come uom che virtute e senno merchi, le favelle, l’usanze e i riti appresi; poscia in matura età da Guelfo accolto fu tra’ compagni, e caro a lui fu molto.

(XIV, 28)

Ubaldo in his youth had seen and sought out various manners of men, various countries, travelling from the coldest zones of our world to the sunburnt Ethiopians, and (as a man who made virtue and knowledge his business) he learnt their speech, their customs and usages; then in mature age he was received by Guelph among his train, and was much valued by him.

Ubaldo repeats the parabola of an odyssey fundamentally consonant with the poet’s initial desire: he moves from his youthful state as a wandering pilgrim to the mature tutelage of authority. The aspiration towards the law, embodied in the series of paternal images, establishes the point of arrival for an existential adventure that ultimately refuses to risk the self further by shattering into the plurality of many-sided desire. 9.3 This aspiration is almost always connected to Goffredo, to whom the role of guarantor of the Christian norm fundamentally falls. The captain contains within himself the functional qualities of the other two paternal figures, the doctor and the prince, who do not have a voice in the narrative. Thus it is Goffredo who awakens his companions’ ‘slumbering virtue’ (halfway, one might say, between the doctor and the poet: ‘ciò ch’alma generosa alletta e punge, / ciò che può risvegliar virtù sopita, / tutto par che ritrovi, e in efficace / modo l’adorna sì che sforza e piace’);68 he who protects the weak (XVIII, 50), gives shelter to the exiled (IV, 36), and above all unifies the companions who have scattered in ‘error’ under the sign of the Christian cross. Recalling the structural antithesis on that the Liberata is founded and that supports the theoretical framework of the Discorsi, we could say that Goffredo is the representative par excellence of the unity that opposes variety, which

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his companions personify as much as the pagans. A series of homogeneous oppositions that extend across the entire semantic space of the poem, articulating it according to different thematic directives, goes back to this fundamental antithesis. 10 We can identify the first of these variants in the paths of the three Christian protagonists: the concepts of norm and error broadly outline the different logic that governs Goffredo’s and Rinaldo’s itineraries. The two divergent paths trace the text’s different possible aims. Goffredo expresses the will for epic realization, within which we recognize the author’s potential identity. Rinaldo’s path instead invests the traditional space of the wanderer with new meaning: it is the ‘sign of the imbalance in which the old chivalric ethos of the Adventurers finds itself in a world that is reorganizing itself according to a new convention,’ that is, Goffredo’s code (Derla 485). In fact, ‘the old chivalric practice is demonized in a cultural context defined by a higher moral and civil ideal,’ the new heroic ethos with respect to which Tasso defines that practice as an archaic model of feudal origin and represents it as a regressive code, reusable only as the product of wrongdoing (ibid.). A technical meaning and the moral-ideological connotation that defines how the historical subject prefers to represent itself intersect in the concept of ‘errancy.’ This seems even more important if we note the series of unpredictable identifications it sets in motion: the autobiographical figure of the castaway, who is ‘almost overwhelmed’ (I.4.4) and asks to be saved ‘from Fortune’s fury’ (I.4.1). This same figure unites conceptually with the great figures of the excluded, the exiled, and the wanderer, all of which belong to the pagan sphere. We can include Rinaldo in this sphere after he is driven out of the Christian camp (canto V), and, lost in dreams of glory and pagan love, returns to an outmoded chivalric code of errancy. The poem’s sympathy for a genuine pagan like Solimano is even more transgressive. Dispossessed of his throne and driven out of his realm, he renews his complaints against hostile Fortune with each new defeat, with a spirit of defiance that seems like the flip side of the pathetic and victimized emphasis of the Canzone al Metauro: ... Girisi pur Fortuna o buona o rea, come è là su prescritto, che non ha sovra me ragione alcuna e non mi vedrà mai se non invitto.

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Prima dal corso distornar la luna e le stelle potrà, che dal diritto torcere un sol mio passo ...

(X, 24)

Let Fortune turn herself for good or ill, as it is ordained up above; for she holds no sway over me, and will never see me anything but unconquered. Sooner will she have power to turn the moon and the stars from their courses, than to turn one step of mine from the direct road ...

On the last link of this chain of identification we find the Arabians, who ‘are no steady dwellers in fixed abodes; perpetual pilgrims, their practice is to carry with them their shelters and their wandering villages,’69 and above all, Satan exiled from the kingdom of light by the oppressive Christian God’s decree: Tartarei numi, di seder più degni là sovra il sole, ond’è l’origin vostra, che meco già da i più felici regni spinse il gran caso in questa orribil chiostra, gli antichi altrui sospetti e i feri sdegni noti son troppo, e l’alta impresa nostra; or Colui regge a suo voler le stelle, e noi siam giudicate alme rubelle. Ed in vece del dì sereno e puro, de l’aureo sol, de gli stellati giri, n’ha qui rinchiusi in questo abisso oscuro, né vuol ch’al primo onor per noi s’aspiri;

(IV, 9–10)

Godheads of Tartarus, worthy rather of a seat up there beyond the sun whence is your origin, ye who ere now along with me the great mischance drove from the most blissful regions into this dreadful circle: too well known are the long-standing envy and savage wrath of that Other, and our lofty enterprise. Now He rules the stars according to His will, and we are to be adjudged as rebel souls. And in the stead of Day serene and pure, of the golden Sun, of the starry quires, He has shut us here in this gloomy abyss; nor does He will that we should aspire again to our former honour.

These characters share the two fundamental themes of Satan’s claims: contesting an authority legitimated only by victory and for this reason

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denounced as arbitrary, and the memory of an original catastrophe, the Edenic nostalgia for a happy homeland coincident with the childsubject’s freedom and omnipotence, lost in the trauma of a cosmic conflict. Tasso’s biography has something to tell us here. 10.1 Another of Goffredo’s qualities that confirm him as the champion of unity is his clarity in making choices. The same can be said of his ability to go forward by the straight way without questioning himself, although doubt does assail him from time to time (IV, 65; XIII, 50), materially affecting his political conduct or military action. In relation to the figurative canon of ‘error,’ we might define him as the open enemy of the labyrinth, of the erratic movement that fascinates the sinning hero Rinaldo, luring him into the false and twisted paths offered by desire. Goffredo really expresses the negation-repression of error, not its dialectical defeat, since he deliberately places himself beyond desire in a fixed state and in a perfectly uniform, circumscribed space: ‘sazio del mondo i piacer frali sprezza’ (satiated with this world, [he] despises its frail pleasures). But this means that he must also represent the repressive dues exacted by the will for conquest. Struck in battle by an arrow fired by Clorinda, Goffredo does not hesitate to take drastic action in order to cut off at the root the evil lurking in hidden recesses: e la via più vicina e più spedita a la cura di lui vuol che si prenda, scoprasi ogni latebra a la ferita e largamente si risechi e fenda.

(XI, 69)

and desires them to take the nearest and readiest way for his treatment, to lay open every corner of the wound and cut and trim at will.

The episode does not appear so marginal if we read it in the light of another, ideologically more explicit, episode (Carlo and Ubaldo’s selfcontrol in the face of the seductions of Armida’s garden), linked to it by verbal echoes: E se di tal dolcezza entro trasfusa parte penetra onde il desio germoglie, tosto ragion ne l’arme sue rinchiusa sterpa e riseca le nascenti voglie.

(XV, 66)

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And if some particle of such sweetness, carried within, makes penetration, at which desire begins to germinate, straightway reason, enclosed within her armour, cuts off and roots up the burgeoning acts of will.

Goffredo’s surgical act, which recalls once again his identity as captaindoctor, essentially replicates in material terms the repressive function of Christian reason, which is cautious and thus militantly inured against venturing forth into unknown lands where it would have to risk its integrity. In his refusal to confront the other, Goffredo shows how far he is from Rinaldo. The rationality he embodies seems a necessary form of defence, and his very self-containment is the premise for the imperialist abolition of the ‘various.’ The fear is that of giving in to variety, and thereby fragmenting the self. 10.2 Suspicious of the varied mobility of the affections, Goffredo is the rigid censor of every uncontrolled insurgency of human nature in which centrifugal and dispersive desire manifests itself. Faithful to their model, the representatives of the Christian code are champions of impassiveness: the motionless face and calm soul that Goffredo opposes to Armida’s changeable disguises (V, 62–3) are echoed in Carlo and Ubaldo’s constancy (‘va quella coppia, e rigida e costante / se stessa indura a i vezzi del piacere’)70 and in Rinaldo’s recovered self-control (‘l’uomo spietato / pur un segno non dié di mente umana. / Forse cambiò color? Forse al mio duolo / bagnò almen gli occhi o sparse un sospir solo?’).71 Not a trace appears on their faces of the psychic range between the amorous, Petrarchan extremes of fire and ice, a range that represents the external sign of the instability and plurality of behaviours that distinguish those in the throes of desire. From this perspective, a new and symptomatic importance accrues to Tasso’s definition of God as the ‘immutabil mente’ (immutable Mind [IX, 1]) that determines the features of an unattainable model to which all human experience (not just its most vulnerable representatives) seems antithetical. The site of metamorphosis and of the provisional, this experience expresses a psychology founded on the mobility of affections and a way of thinking open to contradiction. We can nonetheless understand how, to judge from God’s sublime point of view, the conceptual borders of the various can expand indefinitely, to the point of including all human space. This process affects the pagan sphere first and foremost, since it is the bearer of the deviant ideology (‘la fé pagana è incerta e leve, / e mal securo pegno’),72 and women, inasmuch as they are the primary objective of sinful desire (‘Femina è

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cosa garrula e fallace: / vole e disvole; è folle uom che se ’n fida’).73 But it then seeks to encompass earthly experience in its totality: ‘[I]n a changeable and volatile world it often is constancy to change one’s mind’ (V, 3).74 Pronounced with the value of a general truth and expressed in the paradoxical form typical of the baroque conceit, this sceptical vision of the world acknowledges the profound solidarity that metonymically links the (pagan) part to the whole (world). 10.3 But let us focus our attention once again on the characters. The behaviour of some of the Christians seems marked by a watchful fear of the dissipation and dispersal of identity. This fear triggers the repressive attitude that takes the form of virginal modesty in Sofronia (‘raccolse gli occhi, andò nel vel ristretta),’75 while in Tancredi it manifests itself as a strenuous effort of concentration that attempts to counter his deviant bent. He too, is raccolto in sé (drawn into himself [VI, 47; XIX, 11]), in sé ristretto (concentrated in himself [XIII, 33]), in order to react to what lies outside himself and makes him a slave to alterity: ‘He sees Tancredi holding his life in scorn, so much a vain love torments and martyrs him’ (I, 9).76 Identical behaviour characterizes him during the three major tests of which he is protagonist. After the tragic epilogue of his duel with Clorinda he makes an appeal to the forces of psychic unity: ‘He did not die outright; rather he summoned up for the moment all his powers and set them to guard his heart’ (XII, 68).77 After his vain challenge to the apparitions of the wood, he gathers his scattered faculties of reason: ‘And having come to the chief commander, when he had somewhat collected his faculties and composed his mind, he began ...’ (XIII, 47).78 During his twofold duel with Argante, Tancredi represents virtue in opposition to the fury of his adversary.79 Even the different fencing techniques of the two opponents underline the circumspect approach of the Christian, who is perhaps less fearful of his opponent than of his own vulnerability. Argante, on the other hand, is a river in flood, an overwhelming force of nature (VI, 46), who does not spare himself in the slightest, governed as he is by a drive towards death that expands into an excess of vital commitment and an uncontrolled waste of his energies. Argante is not an isolated case, however: on the whole pagan side there are symmetrical signs of such expansive and wasteful dispositions.80 For example, this is responsible for Armida’s variety of attitudes and appearances, which are not only intrinsic to her art as a sorceress but also aimed towards exercising her womanly charm (IV, 87; IV, 93; XIX, 70). Yet the profound links connecting the offering of oneself, the

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multiplication of phenomena (i.e., the specific meanings derived from variety), and psychic impoverishment become clear if we look at them from the point of view of the self-fashioning of subjective identity. Such are the effects that Armida creates in the victims of her charm: Ma mentre dolce parla e dolce ride, e di doppia dolcezza inebria i sensi, quasi dal petto lor l’alma divide, non prima usata a quei diletti immensi.

(IV, 92)

But while she sweetly speaks and sweetly laughs and makes their senses drunk with a double sweetness, she almost separates from their breasts their souls, not grown accustomed before to those immoderate pleasures.

In the very moment in which the subject recognizes its utmost freedom at the culmination of the experience of love, it risks its integrity, threatened by the overpowering action of shattering forces, which cancel the unifying efforts of reason. 10.4 Rejecting movement towards disintegration implies affirming an element of rigid firmness, of manly hardness that opposes itself to everything soft, regressive, and feminine that the surrender to desire suggests. This opposition fixes the coordinates of the character of Clorinda. Her identity is balanced on the contradiction of being a woman and a pagan, and her rejection, despite her identity, of the sweetness of love’s pleasures. Clorinda brings the weight of qualities inherited from a long tradition of women warriors to the semantic interweaving of the poem, since her destiny as a character is fulfilled in the very moment in which this genetic conflict, between feminine and male components, between softness and rigour, between nudity and armour, explodes tragically, exposing the impossibility of a reconciliation. She who represses desire – in her pagan militancy – must consequently repress her own feminine nature in favour of a hardness that concretely negates it, hiding it beneath repressive armour. Clorinda always appears on the poetic scene hidden, as if negated by her cuirass, and each timely fall of her helmet in the heat of battle is an openly symbolic event that prefigures the act of her definitive revelation.81 But her helmet is not her only mask. Her face, composed according to the usual canons, betrays no weaknesses: ‘She armoured her countenance in pride, and it pleased her to keep it severe; and though severe it

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was pleasing’ (II, 39).82 This double protective layer of helmet and face closely recalls what Christian reason ‘ne l’arme sue rinchiusa’ (enclosed within her armour) imposes on the spirit of characters who, though still enemies for a time, Clorinda already unknowingly is going to meet as brothers. In her obstinate defence she rejects the distinctive trait of nudity that characterizes the pagan condition. In the semantic system of the Liberata, nudity signals defenceless exposure to illusion and true loss of reason.83 Clorinda’s character thus foregrounds, with greater strength and peremptoriness than any other, the crucial problem of identity around which they all revolve. This is because the conflict constrains her and progressively urges her to reveal herself despite the tenacious protection of her armour, and because she is positioned on the boundary that separates the two armies, crossing it with tragic results.84 These fundamental elements fully justify the emphasis of the motif of the ‘quest’ in the dramatic crescendo of Clorinda’s death. Breaking the rules of the chivalric code, but remaining faithful to her ambiguous nature, Clorinda refuses to reveal her identity to Tancredi: ‘Indarno chiedi / quel c’ho per uso di non far palese.’85 This refusal does not simply carry out a necessary narrative condition (without her refusal to answer, the misunderstanding and tragic outcome would not occur) but seems to be dictated by the deep logic that governs her character. It gives the apparently casual action an unforeseen meaning: it is the refusal of someone unaware of her own history until a few hours earlier and who only now tragically prepares to learn of her destiny. More generally, in the light of this final episode we can invest all the character’s textual prehistory with a consistent meaning, removed from the domain of arbitrariness and poetic convention. Clorinda’s strenuous defence of namelessness seals a path marked from the beginning by the oppositions of black and white, light and darkness. Her very birth is a miracle. She is born white from a black mother and comes from a Christian island in the heart of pagan Africa. These are the premonitory signs of an unknown fate that will lead, by way of a series of equally miraculous rescues (from wild beasts [XII, 30]; from the waves [XII, 35]), to a last and highest salvation. But no less symbolic than her prehistory, narrated by the elderly Arsete, is the character’s story, her present existence within the text. Clorinda always appears to Tancredi in terms of height, light, and purity, which, dazzling him, reassert rather than diminish the distance and the impossibility of contact between the two. This dialectic sets the scene for the final act’s violent chromatic contrasts: the black armour behind which Clorinda defends her anonymity, the shadows in which the tragedy unfolds, the light of the dawn in which she converts to Christianity and dies.

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We might first understand these meanings from the traditional perspective of the biblical conflict between the darkness of sin and the light of grace,86 but the text equally justifies seeing them within the frame of an opposite logic. Let us try to reread these ambiguous signs in another sense. The baring of Clorinda’s blond hair during the battle (III, 21) now appears to us, rather than a stage on the path towards celestial light, as the unforeseen revelation of an element of femininity and thus of desire snatched from an identity that steadfastly hides itself behind the darkness of armour, shadows, and silence. Moreover, the state of nudity, which allows Tancredi to recognize Clorinda and permits her subsequent conversion, draws the character back to the pagan side in the same moment that she definitively leaves it. The acquisition of faith coincides contradictorily with the baring of the body in its most concretely feminine and sensual dimension: the ‘bel sen’ (lovely breast), the ‘mammelle’ (breasts), and the ‘vergine trafitta’ (the pierced maiden [XII, 64–5]). It is no coincidence that here Tasso’s language reaches the peak of its ambiguity. This liberation from her cuirass is an ambiguous act par excellence, just as Clorinda’s return to her origins is for her. It means the recovery of a forgotten faith, but at the same time the recognition of her own repudiated nature. The sign that distinguishes her character (she appears to us closed up in her metallic case or distanced as an angelic vision) is always the absence of her body and the repression of her sex. The entire episode of her death takes place in this literal ‘duplicity’ of language: the edifying message and exemplary value of Clorinda’s Christian death ‘cover’ the emergence of another, opposing meaning, which disturbs the scene’s transparency and cracks its solidity.87 The identity released from its armour to eternal grace reacquires its repressed physicality and reveals desire. Therefore, we should shift the episode’s emphasis onto the tension of languages that builds it up in a crescendo of dramatic pathos, rather than onto the final fulfilment that sublimates it in Clorinda’s words of peace. Her Christian death ensures the neutralization of this explosive discovery of her body, but it does not cancel out the antagonistic tension of a language within which two contradictory meanings align themselves: the conquest of Christian identity and the pagan identification of desire. 11 I have deliberately left this episode of Clorinda until last. In this section of the text the ‘structure of contradiction’ that asserts itself in Tasso’s poem with the force and transparency of an exemplary historical necessity makes itself felt most strongly. The model of ‘compromise for-

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mation’ shows itself at work here, carving out historically concrete contradictions within the language of the poem, contradictions that all refer back to the Liberata’s structural conflict between Christian ideology and identification with the pagan. This model brings with it an unconscious logic that escapes the elementary principle of non-contradiction, since it asserts and negates at the same time, meaning one thing and its opposite simultaneously. As Francesco Orlando has pointed out, the work of art that takes such a model as its distinctive expressive code differs from the work of pure ideology precisely in this: ‘only the latter can limit itself to a rational, flat and exclusive choice between two intentions or two opposing currents or two forces or, above all, two meanings; only within it can it be right and obvious that error and the enemy, etc., do not have a voice.’88 One might say that Tasso’s poem does nothing else than to give a voice to the enemy (Satan, the pagans, Rinaldo as a sinner) and creates solidarity with those ideological contents (what I have called the secular humanist code) that it claims to be determined to eliminate. Clearly this does not authorize a reductive and simplistic reversal of the literal meaning of the discourse. Rather, it recalls our attention to the ambiguity that constitutes that meaning as twofold and contradictory. The image of Tasso that emerges most often is anchored to an irreducible opposition in which the subject’s efforts to constitute himself as self-aware must continually take into account a counteracting demand to which all his writing bears witness. The Liberata, in particular (we have examined it here from the point of view of the role and action of its characters), realizes itself and asserts its founding values through a continual comparison with the Other that puts into question its very survival. ‘In the end, or from the beginning, one knows very well who is right and who is wrong. But when enough space is left to the wrong intention to allow it perhaps a half success, and to inflict on it no more than a half failure, logic demands that we cannot harbour doubts as to the limited nature of the success or failure of the opposite intention, which is in the right.’89 It will be noted that the Freudian model radically questions certain assumptions about so-called classical reason. This kind of rationality not only collides with the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction but is also extraneous to a conciliatory vision of the opposed elements, which remain separate and incompatible. Clorinda’s story expresses that vision of overcoming difference, with the character’s physical death declaring the extinction of the conflict without any real Aufhebung (overcoming). It is a question of difference, and at most of hierarchy among the meanings in play.

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So why should we speak of Rinaldo as the dialectical hero, and how do we explain the elimination of one code by another that assumes the unmistakable form of military triumph? Effectively, this movement seems to belong more to the surface structure, without managing to affect the deeper articulation of contents that remain irreconcilable. There is a dynamic in the Liberata, but it is what we might call a stalled dynamic (the same one that is reflected in the impasses of Tasso the theorist). It is only in the events of the poem that the reasons and claims of the defeated are overcome. In fact, the defeated exercise an enduring power of attraction throughout the poem, and the possible integration of opposed values from a higher point of view is a part more of the text’s intentions than of its reality. Orlando once again emphasizes that ‘success and failure, in the literary representation of a conflict, can mean different things according to whether one refers to the order of values proposed for identification or to that of the events imagined in the narration’ (12). For Tasso’s poem it is not a question of simply inverting ‘the positive and negative signs between values and events,’ which would be a dialectic, if an inverted one, but rather of pointing out, in the historically defined figure of ‘compromise,’ the impossibility of a truly progressive solution.

8 Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation

The era of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, as construed through its political and moral treatises and many of its literary masterpieces, is generally held to be the age of ‘dissimulation,’ just as in art it was the age of shadows and chiaroscuro. But it was a darkness leading towards the light and, ultimately, towards the truth (one need only think of the magnificent works of Caravaggio and Rembrandt). One of the most astute of contemporary observers, Michel de Montaigne, wrote that ‘dissimulation may be counted among the most notable qualities of this century.’1 Neither virtue nor defect, dissimulation was viewed by many as a quality often devoid of moral connotations. Herein lies a crucial point, for, precisely because it formed the very basis of morality in the seventeenth century, dissimulation cannot be approached in a moralistic key. Posited by classical philosophers from Aristotle to Cicero as an ethical and political category, and remodulated in Christian terms by St Thomas Aquinas, the concept of dissimulation found in the culture of the Ancien régime its own unique and highly specific interpretation. In the age of absolutism it became the key to the art of governing among princes (as taught by Machiavelli), but also a tactic for survival among persecuted groups (political or religious minorities) moving in a universe overshadowed by the violence of institutionalized powers. In this period, which saw the ascent of a monarchical church as well as the rise of the modern state, it is not surprising that the individual tended to conceal those aspects of his private thoughts and affairs that might expose him to the risk of coercive intervention. A complete dissociation between substance and appearance, between outward and inward reality, came to be theorized as a legitimate model of behaviour; thus,

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assuming a mask and acting with duplicity or in secret were accepted as necessary expedients when they were not overtly praised. Historiographers, beginning with Cantimori in his Eretici italiani del cinquecento (1939), have begun to re-evaluate from this perspective actions and attitudes that in the past were summarily dismissed as signs of the utter moral corruption of an age. Thus, the ‘honest dissimulation’ of political and religious minorities can now be viewed as a subtle technique for exercising political opposition rather than as an act of passive renunciation or acquiescent conformism. Once we accept this view, the moral issue that the age presents is one of the margin of liberty that the single individual could win for himself vis-à-vis the ruling powers, or, more exactly, in counterpoise to the weight of authoritarian institutions and ideologies that sought to control, codify, and normalize all behaviour and action. In this way anarchic or eccentric forms of behaviour could coexist with a flawless outward conformity before social conventions and the arbitrary power of the state. The history of the art of dissimulation is the history of a deep moral dilemma, one that played an important role in the formation of modern thought and ethics in western Europe. In Italy, in particular, the intellectual saw in this period a part of his destiny decided by his effort to maintain a delicate balance between the safeguarding of his liberty of conscience and the practice of a double truth. In the religious realm, particularly in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, this attitude of hidden resistance found its moral justification in the concept of prudence, which became the keystone of the ethical system of the Counter-Reformation. Prudence was indeed raised to the rank of a sovereign virtue by the Church of Rome, and in this period came to be associated with the somewhat more dubious virtues of reticence, silence, and duplicity. The behaviour of those who exercised power and those who were constrained to defer to power often converged and mirrored one another like the pieces in a game of chess. According to Paolo Sarpi, the great chronicler of the Catholic council, that powerful prince Pope Paul III maintained that ‘among all the virtues none evoked greater respect than the art of dissimulation’ (Istoria I, 120). Sarpi, for his part, as befitted a subject who deferred to the mask of power, responded: ‘I wear a mask, and indeed must do so, for without it no one could live safely in Italy.’2 The most radical expedient of all was the flight into madness, whether the mask of lunacy assumed out of self-defence by Tommaso Campanella, or the very real mental derangement suffered by Torquato Tasso and utilized by political institutions as a pretext for his internment.

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On the European stage, the Muse of literature produced her own immortal figures of madness: Don Quixote, who refuses to accept dissimulation and seeks stubbornly to live only in a world of truth, is a visionary and a madman; Alceste, who refuses to conform to the conventions of the royal court, is a neurotic misanthrope. Indeed, chivalric epic provided a singular case: in this genre over which the Muse seems to have cast a spell of obscurity, first the hero goes mad (Orlando in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso), then the author (Tasso), and finally the reader himself (Cervantes’s Don Quixote). In this essay I argue that an entire system of dissimulation underlies the conception and the very structure of the Gerusalemme liberata. The dilemma of the poet, whose art involves the use of dissimulation, is presented clearly by Tasso in the protasis of his epic poem, where he reflects upon the distinction between truth and fiction and the poet’s conflicted task of providing instruction and purveying delight. The same theme then reappears in symbolic form as Tasso skilfully weaves into his poem his complex motifs of pretence, deception, and disguise.3 Thus dissimulation – the disguising of physical appearances, feelings, or intentions – plays a central role in the Liberata because Tasso’s text was born as a discourse on dissimulation. O Musa, tu che di caduchi allori non circondi la fronte in Elicona, ma su nel cielo infra i beati cori hai di stelle immortali aurea corona, tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori, tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona s’intesso fregi al ver, s’adorno in parte d’altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte. Sai che là corre il mondo ove più versi di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso, e che ’l vero condito in molli versi, i più schivi allettando ha persuaso. Così a l’egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve, e da l’inganno suo vita riceve.

(I, 2–3)

O Muse, that do not wreathe your brow on Helicon with fading bays, but among the blessed choirs in Heaven above possess a golden crown of

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deathless stars: breathe into my breast celestial ardours, illuminate my song, and grant me pardon if with the truth I interweave embroiderings, if partly with pleasures other than yours I ornament my pages. You know that the world flocks there where feigning Parnassus most pours out her sweetnesses, and that the truth in fluent verses hidden has by its charm persuaded the most froward. So we present to the feverish child the rim of the glass sprinkled over with sweet liquids: he drinks deceived the bitter medicine and from his deception receives life.

The Lucretian source of these verses, De rerum natura 1.936–42, was very familiar to theorists of poetry in the Counter-Reformation, torn between instruction and delight.4 Tasso announces the didactic aim of his work – to bring spiritual relief to the reader – although the charm of his chosen vehicle masks this purpose. Here he does not suggest merely the mingling of poetic alchemies, as in the Horatian miscere utile dulci, but a hierarchical relationship of ‘above’ and ‘below,’ of ‘within’ and ‘without.’ On a different semantic register, the simile of the glass from which the child drinks expresses intentions that are already declared in the complementary metaphor of the ‘embroiderings’ that interweave the discourse of historic and religious truth with other pleasures in the pages of his Christian epic. Tasso was quite aware of his forced compromise, the ‘textual error’ lying at the heart of his poem, and he accepted it almost as a challenge. His Muse, no longer a mere passive source of inspiration, now becomes the duplicitous accomplice of the poet, who apologizes in advance for his deviation from the norm. This error, and its dissimulation, pertain to the structure of compromise that underlies the whole Liberata, a poem ideologically balanced between Christian orthodoxy – that is, the direct path leading to Jerusalem – and the ‘pagan’ temptations that block the pilgrim’s progress, transforming it into a dangerous labyrinth. This is a compromise between the poet’s will to epic unity and his fascination with dispersive romance variety. Thus, the hero of the Liberata, in order to reach the Christian temple, must perforce pass through the ‘pagan’ garden of Armida. What kind of operation was Tasso performing when he wrote this proem? Was he celebrating the authority of Counter-Reformation didacticism, or rather using it as a safe conduct to admit the irrational into his poem? In an epoch where dissimulation was accepted and cultivated at court, in politics, and in religion, Tasso was tormented by his perception of his own poem as the legitimation of an act of deceit. He himself must

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have wondered whether his poetry actually represented the dishonest dissimulation of Armida ‘who wraps falsehood in the mantle of truth’ (Liberata IV, 25), or the innocent pretence of Erminia, ‘who hides beneath a mantle of hate’ her love for her people’s enemy, Tancredi (III, 19).5 On this crucial point the question of aesthetics merges into a political issue, which would be debated during the entire course of the century and in Italy would culminate in the ambiguous synthesis of Torquato Accetto, a contemporary of the more illustrious Baltasar Gracián. The rhetorical oxymoron in Tasso’s poetics is reflected in the paradox of a ‘dissimulation which is honesty,’ as it is described in the title of Accetto’s treatise of 1641, Della dissimulazione onesta. The purpose of this text was to find a balance between two apparently antithetical states: pretence (in the sense of the mask, veil, or concealment) and virtue. This was possible, according to Accetto, because between the extremes of an ignoble falsehood and a naive and artless innocence lay a third dimension; that is, an intermediate moral condition (I would call it a borderline territory) that lies somewhere between truth and falsehood and where dissimulation could be found at work: ‘dissimulation being nothing other than a veil composed of honest shadows and violent precautions, from which one does not make falsehood, but one gives the truth some rest’ (42). The quintessentially defensive strategy in an age of religious and monarchical absolutism, dissimulation represented the new historical form of Virtue fighting against Fortune: ‘still sometimes one is allowed to change one’s cloak in order to dress in accordance with the season of Fortune, with the intention not of doing, but of not suffering harm’ (44). We are certainly not dealing here with an ethical system made for saints and heroes, but with one suited to the times, as even Giordano Bruno, who went to the stake for his beliefs, observed in his Spaccio: ‘a studied Dissimulation ... is the handmaiden to Prudence and shield of the Truth’ (II, 305). Veil, mantle, shield: one of our aims here is to follow the rhetoric of dissimulation that is woven into the Liberata as it relates to certain crucial turning points in the life of its author. In Tasso, artistic form and forms of behaviour converge in a historically remarkable synthesis, for beneath the rhetoric of dissimulation (beneath the veil, the mantle, and the shield) Tasso has masked not only one of the leitmotifs of his epic, as it is expressed through his most important characters, but also his own internal struggle as an artist in the face of the restrictions imposed by the authoritarian institutions of his time. One of the most crucial

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phases in the writing of the Liberata, where literary concerns and political cautions merged, occurred during 1575–6, when his text was nearing completion. At this point Tasso sought to impose an allegorical superstructure on his poem in order to resolve the internal contradictions in his work. In the struggle with his critics (described in his so-called Lettere poetiche), the poet tries to legitimate the most controversial sections of his poem with allegorical interpretations, in particular those passages in which he surrendered himself to the seductive charm of romance marvels and erotic episodes. When the Roman reviewers chosen by the poet himself to judge the orthodoxy of his work attacked these episodes, Tasso, more and more anxious about the ‘rigour of the times’ and fearful of ‘giving an opportunity to the priests’ (Lettere I, 111), turned to allegory to defend his work. As early as October 1575 he wrote to his friend and patron Scipione Gonzaga, ‘I judged then that the marvellous would be held more tolerable because it would be thought to hide beneath it some good and holy allegory’ (Lettere I, 114). And when the controversy over his work was unleashed, he declared that he would use allegory as a shield against his critics, a point to which he would often return in his letters: ‘I will twist my neck like a hypocrite, and show that I have had no other goal than to serve politics; and with this shield I will try to keep safe the love stories and enchantments’ (Lettere I, 179). The most striking coincidence in dates was that which marked Tasso’s decision to veil his poem in allegory and, almost simultaneously, his pathetic attempt to assume a more suitable attitude of dissimulation in his daily life at court, as expressed in two letters which he wrote in May 1576: ‘I want to begin to live and behave as a courtier in all things and for all purposes, and to pay heed to all those appearances to which until now I have not given particular regard’ (Lettere I, 173); ‘I will dissimulate and I wish to learn this skill well’ (Lettere I, 173). These were the years in which Tasso’s inner conflict and his difficulties at the Este court reached their climax, resulting in the poet’s presumed madness and his subsequent imprisonment in the Hospital of Sant’Anna in 1579. At this point he lost all control over the fate of his manuscript, which was published without his permission by unscrupulous editors, to whom posterity is nonetheless indebted for the ‘involuntary’ masterpiece that we know as Gerusalemme liberata, while only the drastically revised and artistically flat and colourless later version of the Gerusalemme conquistata would be published with the author’s blessing. The most excruciating period in Tasso’s life was the second half of the

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1570s, when he revised his poem, seeking to save some of its most audaciously beautiful passages while sacrificing others to Aristotelian and Counter-Reformation orthodoxy. At the same time he was secretly in touch with other courts, seeking to negotiate some means of escape from his difficult position at Ferrara. As a poet assailed by doubts regarding his art, Tasso created the circumstances for his own artistic auto-da-fé by convoking the jury of critics to judge the orthodoxy of his work, while as a Christian wracked by doubts about his religious faith in the same period, he voluntarily subjected himself twice to examination before the fearsome tribunal of the Inquisition. Such openly avowed scruples clashed with the norms at court, where, in the two generations preceding Tasso, heresy but also the practice of Nicodemism had been widespread among intellectuals such as Celio Calcagnini, Antonio Musa Brasavola, Giorgio Siculo, and Marcello Palingenio. Like the Pharisee Nicodemus, who only went to visit Jesus at night, those dissenting from the Church of Rome often kept their true convictions secret and outwardly showed devotion to the Catholic faith.6 The actual motives for the decision of Alfonso d’Este to incarcerate the troublesome poet – whose ‘melancholy’ and ‘frenetic humour’ fed the romantic myth of the mad genius – were political in nature. The Duke had been forced to send his own mother, Renée of France, away from court for fear that her Calvinist sympathies would arouse the wrath of the Pope. Tasso’s religious scruples threatened to draw suspicion once again upon the court of Ferrara and provide the Pope with an excuse to wield his expansionist ambitions in a moment when the Duke, with no direct heirs, had no wish to invite a power struggle. In this climate of increasing suspicion and diplomatic manoeuvring, the poet exhibited his internal anxieties in his (real or imaginary) wandering from court to court, suing in vain for the protection of the powerful while at the same time dreaming of an escape from his irresolution, with prison looming as perhaps the only possible end to his journey. To Tasso, however, the prince’s court always represented a choice with no real alternatives. The autobiographical traveller described in his dialogue ‘Il padre di famiglia’ (written in 1580 during the poet’s imprisonment in Sant’Anna), who rides from Novara to Vercelli ‘dressed as an anonymous pilgrim’ (thus introducing the theme of the disguise) in order to escape ‘the wrath of Princes and Fate’ is actually a courtier fleeing from one court (Urbino) to another court (Turin) in search of peace and safety (Dialoghi II, 1, 337). And the courtier can conceive of no refuge from the anger of one prince except the protection of an-

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other, Carlo Emanuele di Savoia. For his part, Tasso the artist casts his dream of liberty in the mythical past of the golden age (celebrated in his pastoral Aminta) or in the utopian space of Arcadian life (longed for in Liberata VII). The fact is, however, that the pastoral fable was not really an escape from the court because it obeyed the cultural commands of the Duke and was played (July 1573) on a courtly stage by courtiers disguised as shepherds: nothing could be more conventional than the ideal of escaping conventions by fleeing to Arcadia. The deprecation of honour, the source of all corruption, as expressed in a famous chorus of Aminta (‘O bella età dell’oro ... ’: ‘Oh beautiful Golden Age’), fell all too easily from the lips of courtiers who, according to Tasso’s dialogue ‘Il Malpiglio,’ are a congregation of men gathered for reasons of honour.7 In this dialogue, written in 1585, Tasso, masked under the alien guise of the Neapolitan Stranger, directly confronted the theme of the court. Before entering into the heart of this work, with its searing biographical implications, I would like to dwell briefly on a controversial testimony that comes from within the same Ferrarese court and from a man of letters of the generation preceding Tasso’s. This ‘letterato’ is Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, well known not only as an author of novellas and a theorist of ‘romance’ but also – and it is this aspect that concerns us – as a writer of tragedies and of a treatise on the court. In this double guise, Giraldi staged dissimulation on the one hand as the art of tyrannical government, and on the other as the defensive strategy of the courtier who, far from cultivating the wilful Castiglionian ambition to be instructor of his prince, manoeuvres skilfully between servile deference towards his lord and envy of his peers. Situated at the centre of both texts is the scene of power, the court and its secret chambers. Only the two points of view change: the authoritarian one of the tyrant in the tragedy Orbecche, and the subaltern one of the courtly servant in The Man of Court. As Riccardo Bruscagli has observed in his Stagioni della civiltà estense, the Orbecche, a Ferrarese tragedy of 1543, is the theatrical representation of the dilemma raised in chapter XVIII of Machiavelli’s Prince: how faith must be kept by princes (127–60). The acts of inhuman cruelty by a king and father, Sulmone, who massacres his daughter and grandchildren for honour’s sake, are constantly justified by theories on the simulation of faith as part of the art of governance: ‘Will I be blamed for it? What blame can a King receive for a thing he might do, when all his works are covered by the royal mantle?’ (act III, scene 3, lines 64–7). The place where the arcana imperii are celebrated is the private and

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inaccessible chamber of the tyrant (where simulation rules ‘as in its own residence’), which Giraldi then removes from its secrecy and transports onto the theatrical stage. Tasso’s epic, too, has admirably depicted this relationship between the stage of the court and the secret rooms where power acts in silence; and that power is so much more ‘absolute,’ free from limiting conditions, as it is farther and farther withdrawn into a remote distance: ‘The castle glows as does the lofty stage in a decorated theatre amid festivities at night; and in a section high up Armida is seated, where (without being seen) she both hears and sees’ (Liberata VII, 36).8 The perspective in Giraldi’s treatise, The Man of Court (1569), as I said before, is reversed ‘from below’: servitude is the true condition of the modern courtier. He will always fear being deceived ‘by the great simulations and the many fictions that are everywhere in the courts’ (L’uomo di corte 60); his prudence must be practised on two fronts: against those ‘malicious ones who conceal the soul of a fox under the white wool of an ermine and the mind of a rapacious wolf under the hide of a simple sheep,’ and ‘those who conceal hatred under the mantle of love, from whom one can scarcely defend himself, even with the eyes of Argus and the sight of a lynx’ (62). Against such hypocrites, it is legitimate to feign ‘because simulation for one’s own defence and not for deceit is not a vice but is judged a type of prudence by the best judges, and it is often the cause of much good’; and it is well to stay alert ‘so that you may not inadvertently swallow the mortal hook beneath the sweet bait of a happy and friendly face’ (64). Here Giraldi speaks about courtly envy, with probably autobiographical reference to his loss of favour with Alfonso II, which he principally attributed to the intrigues of his disciple Giovan Battista Pigna, who took his place as secretary to the Duke and forced him into exile; that same Pigna at whose death Tasso stepped in to succeed in his duty as Historian of the Court. Regarding the question of dissimulation towards the prince, of particular interest is a passage that regards the same mortifying subalternity of the intellectual that we will hear re-echoing in the reflections of Tasso. Giraldi recounts that when he came to court, called by Alfonso II, ‘seeing that he was composing Latin epigrams excellently,’ he held back from composing them himself because ‘he ought not to want to compete with him in this’ (73–4), and he cites the case of a knight famous in arms, his contemporary Girolamo Brasavola, who, having to joust with Don Ercole, the son of the Duke, was constrained to dissimulate his skills in the various tournaments of the court. Precisely in following the historical parabola that goes from Castigli-

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one’s optimistic model of self-fashioning and of fashioning the prince to the contemporary self-defensive models of ‘dissimulation,’ the dialogue ‘Il Malpiglio,’ as I have said, shows striking coincidences with Giraldi’s text. In writing at twenty years’ distance about the same Este court, Tasso revives, this time in full agreement, dialogue with Giraldi, who had previously been one of his polemical interlocutors in the Discorsi dell’arte poetica. Faced with the dominating envy of the courts, he realizes in fact that the favour of the prince and the favour of the courtiers represent ‘two ends ... disjoined,’ and thus are mutually exclusive; but he does not see any other solution besides the fragile, compromising precept ‘Teach the courtier to conceal rather than to appear’ (‘Il Malpiglio’ 557), since the virtues that acquire the grace of princes generate inevitably the envy of one’s peers. Among the Castiglionian virtues of the courtier, Tasso therefore chooses, and in fact makes absolute, the one that must be possessed completely and perfectly: and this is prudence, or, rather, the art of dissimulation, obviously an ‘honest’ dissimulation: ‘The superiority of wit must rather be covered with modesty than shown off with proud appearance’ (557). We seem to intuit here a dramatic autobiographical experience, which is in a certain way related to that suffered by Giraldi. At a time when ‘feigning is one of the greatest virtues’ (560), the brilliant intellectual, the prestigious artist, is not only deprived of a political voice because, having lost the function of instructor to the prince, he has exclusively to serve him: ‘the prudence of the courtier consists in carrying out the orders of the prince ... and many times it is unbecoming that he spy out the reasons for which he is commanded, or that he should wish to know more than is proper for him’ (557). He also has to seek out his grace as an absolute value ‘because princes on earth are ministers of God and images and simulacra of his power’ (Lettere I, 299). But he is also deprived of a poetic voice, which is his own reason for living and his own proper key to success, because he is obliged to dissimulate both his skills and his wit; to diminish one’s own merits becomes the supreme rule of behaviour at court, in order not to lose the favour of the prince or to arouse the envy of the courtiers. Castiglione himself declared that the courtier should not flaunt his own abilities in order not to fall into affettazione, thus invoking an aesthetic norm. But here we are considering something else entirely – namely, to hide, to conceal, and to diminish one’s peculiar merit on account of an unavoidable political necessity. And in any case there is no plausible reply to the basic contradiction that runs through the whole of Tasso’s treatise: what does it mean that the court is a congregation of

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men gathered for honour’s sake, when whatever excellence in arms (remember Giraldi’s example of Brasavola?), in sciences, and in letters must be dissimulated? Let us return now to the text of the Liberata. Many of the characters of Tasso’s poem can be divided into two groups based on the ‘honest’ and the ‘dishonest’ use of dissimulation, although we should recall that this distinction, or the analogous one between simulation and dissimulation, is never explicitly acknowledged by the poet. This opposition would be brought to linguistic consciousness only much later by Torquato Accetto: ‘Dissimulation is the skill of not showing things as they are. One simulates what one is not, and dissimulates what one is’ (Della dissimulazione onesta 50–1). Thus, to simulate is to pretend, to lie, to deceive, while to dissimulate is neutral, implying merely the act of concealing or omitting the truth. Intellectuals and writers were already using this implied distinction in the first half of the sixteenth century to separate the aggressive (or ‘dishonest’) and the defensive (or ‘honest’) use of (dis)simulation. We may briefly evoke here the famous statements by Machiavelli on the fox and the lion, on ‘knowing how to colour well’ one’s intentions and ‘to be a grand simulator and dissimulator,’ on the difference between possessing qualities and showing them, because ‘everyone sees what you appear to be, and few sense what you really are’ (The Prince, cap. XVIII); and recall, on the contrary, some of Ariosto’s feminine characters, such as Bradamante, Olimpia, and Isabella, who practised an ‘honest dissimulation,’ leaving to the poet the task of legitimizing their behaviour: Quantunque il simular sia le più volte ripreso, e dia di mala mente indici, si truova pur in molte cose e molte aver fatti evidenti benefici, e danni e biasmi e morti aver già tolte, che non conversiam sempre con gli amici in questa assai più oscura che serena vita mortal, tutta d’invidia piena.

(IV, 1)

Though dissimulation is most of the time censured and gives signs of a wicked mind, it is yet found to have caused clear benefits in many, many affairs and indeed to have prevented injuries and reproaches and deaths, because we do not always deal with our friends in this much-more-darkthan-light mortal life, all full of envy.

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We should recall, in fact, that dissimulation was an attitude employed by both the powerful and the opposers of power. Thus, persecuted minorities themselves embraced such rules officially conceived to guide the actions of princes, both lay and religious. Particularly significant was the use of dissimulation made by heretics who justified their outward formal orthodoxy as a defence of their internal liberty and personal faith. As far as politics is concerned, it is worth noting that in his Discourses Machiavelli himself reversed the formula of his Prince and praised Brutus, the defender of Roman republican freedom, for feigning madness in order to gain ‘more manoeuvring space in his struggle to suppress the king and liberate his country’ (Discorsi 364). Tommaso Campanella was probably alluding to Machiavelli’s unarmed prophets when he wrote, ‘wise men without power are constrained to speak, act, and live like madmen.’9 Tarquinio il superbo (1634), a treatise composed by Virgilio Malvezzi, a contemporary of Accetto, represents an apology for honest dissimulation that echoes Machiavelli’s Discourses. In Malvezzi’s work, of the two opposing the tyrant Tarquin, Turnus the lion-hearted fails in his task, while the cunning Brutus simulates madness and wins in the end.10 In Italy, the progress of the sixteenth century saw the disappearance of all hopes of political and religious liberty, leaving men with a dramatic choice between two alternatives: the sterile opposition of the unarmed prophet, and the cunning patience of the revolutionary who masks himself until the proper moment for action – with all the risks that such behaviour may involve, since outward conformity often ends by corrupting the conscience instead of protecting it. Machiavelli’s fox and lion were thus progressively replaced by a different bestiary, one reinterpreting in a political key the admonition of the Evangelist to be ‘prudent as the serpent and candid as the dove’ (Matt. 10. 16). In the Liberata most of the negative uses of dissimulation are embodied in the figure of Armida, who manipulates her weapons of seduction and sorcery to achieve a single end – that of drawing the crusaders, and in particular their leader Goffredo, away from their holy mission and into the trap of Venus (and she justifies it in terms of a raison d’état: ‘For the Faith, for the Fatherland, all is permitted’ [IV, 26]).11 Next to Armida we may place such minor characters as the pagan Alete and the Christian Eustazio. In their speeches we hear, curiously enough, echoes of the same metaphors that Tasso used to describe his poetics of dissimulation: in Alete’s words the soavi licor of eloquent flattery that is as enticing as sweet poison, and in Eustazio’s the deceptive mantle that veils his real intentions.

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The episode of Argante and Alete, who are sent by the king of Egypt to investigate Goffredo’s war strategies, allows the author to present yet another variation on the theme of dissimulation, for Argante is rude and threatening but genuine, while Alete is diplomatic and eloquent.12 In creating these two complementary characters, Tasso probably sought to embody the two components of Machiavelli’s animal symbolism, the fox and the lion, which, skilfully alternated, constituted the instruments for the political success of the prince. Alete’s flattering words to Goffredo hide the true, menacing substance of his message, while the poet introduces once again the metaphor of liquids: ‘Then he began, and rivers of eloquence sweeter than honey issued from his mouth’ (II, 61).13 Goffredo remains unmoved by Alete’s honeyed words, however, just as later he will prove impervious to the seductive wiles of Armida. And yet the character closest to Goffredo, his younger brother Eustazio, falls victim to the charms of the sorceress and leaves the army to follow her, thus unknowingly aiding her plan to divert precious forces from the siege of Jerusalem. To mislead his brother, Eustazio would mask his departure under the guise of chivalric duty, claiming that the very first priority of a knight ‘in France, or wheresoever courtesy is prized,’ is to rescue ladies in distress. Tasso comments, ‘and with such ornamented fabling he seeks to hide under a different zeal his mind inflamed; and the others too pretend desire of honour in that which is desire of love’ (V, 7),14 thus pointing out that the noble reasons of ‘courtesy,’ invoked by Eustazio for his purposes of dissimulation, have no other effect than to discredit the very canons of chivalry (in the context of the religious and epic ideology of the Liberata) and to confirm the moral and even artistic superiority of Christian pietas.15 The figure of Armida marks the entrance of Eros as the art of seduction into Italian poetry: Armida represents Eros in all of its aspects, with its unpredictable mutations and contradictions. Actually, Tasso has invented a figure quite different from Virgil’s Dido or the various Medeas of classical antiquity. Neither Dido nor Medea was a temptress, whereas Armida plays this role in the Liberata from the beginning. Her political strategy is made up of a cunning verbal simulation (her false words form a mantle and a veil disguising her true intentions) that is not different from her erotic seduction, conceived as a teasing game of ostentation (nudity) and feigned reluctance (covering), and played as an illusionistic transparency behind her mantles and veils. Such was indeed the task that her uncle, the aged pagan sorcerer Idraote, has charged her with:

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Vanne al campo nemico: ivi s’impieghi ogn’arte feminil ch’amore alletti. Bagna di pianto e fa’ melati i preghi, tronca e confondi co’ sospiri i detti: beltà dolente e miserabil pieghi al tuo volere i più ostinati petti. Vela il soverchio ardir con la vergogna, e fa’ manto del vero alla menzogna.

(IV, 25)

Go to the enemy camp: there make use of every feminine art that entices to love. Bathe your entreaties in tears and make them honied; cut off your words and mingle them with sighs. A grieving and piteous beauty may work the most obdurate breasts to your will. Your overmuch boldness veil with maidenly modesty, and make of the truth a mantle for your lying.

Next to this strategy of concealment Tasso linked the complementary strategy of ‘tessere’ or weaving (‘Weave the web that I show you all laid out’ [IV, 24]):16 a plot to be inserted on a warp that is already prepared. This image evokes the ancient tradition of the romance, where all treachery springs from Ganelon’s plotting (e.g., ‘Ganelon had arranged the plot on the loom that the Lombard king was now to weave’ [Ariosto’s Cinque canti III, 4]). The extended sections of the Liberata describing Armida’s machinations in the Christian camp (IV, 28–96; V, 60–85) represent the expression in narrative form of this image of weaving a tapestry. The lady’s fascination draws on a game of veils and cloaks (the visible that is covered, the hidden that is revealed) that not only awakens the desire of men without satisfying it but hinders the perception of her true identity, transforming it in a mere succession of appearances. The protean nature of her being is that of the baroque universe itself, split between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’: Armida can assume an endless variety of identities, metamorphosing herself according to circumstances and the person she addresses: Usa ogn’arte la donna, onde sia colto ne la sua rete alcun novello amante; né con tutti, né sempre un stesso volto serba, ma cangia a tempo atti e sembiante. Or tien pudica il guardo in sé raccolto, or lo rivolge cupido e vagante:

Torquato Tasso la sferza in quegli, il freno adopra in questi, come lor vede in amar lenti o presti.

209

(IV, 87)

The lady uses every art by which any new lover may be caught in her net; nor does she keep the same countenance for all, nor at all times, but changes her looks and acts to suit the moment. Now she keeps her gaze at home shamefast, now sends it abroad wanton and wandering. On these she uses the bridle, on those the whip, as she sees that they are forward or slow in loving.

It is interesting to note that such behaviour matches the techniques of artes amatoriae that were being codified in the sixteenth century in a feminine version of the strategies of dissimulation (or sprezzatura) utilized by gentlemen at court to win the grace of the prince. Armida’s strategy, which consists in providing the briefest glimpse of her charms, in fact echoes Ovid’s advice to the puellae in his Ars amatoria (III, 307– 10): uncover yourselves discreetly to keep the desire of your lover alive, and initiate him only gradually into the secrets of your most intimate beauties (La Penna 43–55). Considering that Armida applies her own seductive techniques to a military strategy, we should remember that in this very epoch the art of dissimulation also came to be included among the arts of war. In fact, Arte della guerra is the title of another famous work by Machiavelli. It is therefore curious, but hardly surprising, to find that the military strategy of Goffredo, which mainly resorts to the formally codified poliorcetics (i.e., the art of the siege), or the celebrated fencing duel between Tancredi and Argante, are techniques not fundamentally different from Armida’s erotic dissimulation.17 However, Armida adds to her weapons of seduction those of sorcery, another, much more dangerous, game of illusions. Armida is the conscious artificer of transformation and change, at once a Circe who transforms others (cf. VI, 86, and X, 66) and a Proteus who transforms herself (‘She attempted a thousand arts and, like a new Proteus, appeared before him in a thousand shapes’ [V, 63]).18 The enchanter transforms reality, but the Tassian character, misled by a game of appearances, perceives this re-creation negatively as illusion, inconsistency, and, ultimately, deceit, as in Goffredo’s sceptical statement, ‘for in a changeable and volatile world it often is constancy to change one’s mind’ (V, 3).19

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In the sixteenth canto, when we find Armida in her labyrinthine palace and enchanted garden, where Rinaldo is her prisoner of love, the sorceress’s outward behaviour takes the form of a casual naturalness (or sprezzatura) that masks the most studied calculation. Armida is seen in her usual languid attitude as she at once veils and exposes her nudity unwittingly offered to the covetous eyes of the beholder. But soon Tasso introduces a new element, for the character’s identity is mirrored in the environment that she has created around her. Her enchanted garden embodies the typically mannerist aemulatio of art and nature, an emulation that characterizes the erotic scenario of canto XVI where ‘the art that makes it all is nowhere revealed’: Stimi (sì misto il culto è co ’l negletto) sol naturali e gli ornamenti e i siti. Di natura arte par che per diletto l’imitatrice sua scherzando imiti.

(XVI, 10)

You would judge (so mingled is negligence with care) both the grounds and their improvements only natural. It seems an art of nature that for her own pleasure playfully imitates her imitator.

The reader perceives that in this enchanted garden nature is only a mask, and, indeed, the more Eden-like the garden the greater its falsehood. According to the principle of affectation, the very existence and seeming innocence of nature hint paradoxically at the presence of magical artifices and deception.20 At the same time, the garden is entirely real, because nature in Tasso’s universe is itself eternally changeable, always shifting between reality and appearance in a game of illusions. The boundaries between art and nature are mobile because, while art may imitate nature, it is also capable of surpassing nature, and nature on occasion seems to imitate art. Thus, the garden represents a hybrid world where those boundaries are constantly shifting. While it is true that art appears to reveal all of its technique with utter candour, this is actually an illusion, the better to hide its craft, because the highest art is that which succeeds best in dissimulating itself.21 That the most perfect imitation of nature is the fruit of Armida’s dark magic signifies that the process can be carried to a dangerous extreme, but this does not change the nature of the process that Tasso had in mind: that the magic of Armida is and works like art. Tasso was probably inspired here by Ovid (‘nature knows how ingeniously to imitate art’),22 and surely by his own experience of Renais-

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sance gardens: built around the palaces and the villas of the wealthy and powerful, these magnificent gardens, with their refined trompe l’oeil effects, had a lasting influence on the taste of the European aristocracy. In Tasso’s treatment of Armida and her arts, both an aesthetic ideal and a canon of behaviour can be found closely entwined, both descending from the same principle of dissimulation. The combination of artifice and naturalness (‘so mingled is negligence with care’) defined the aesthetic ideal of the age of mannerism, although its roots go back to the theories of eloquence set forth by the Greek author of On the Sublime: ‘Art is in fact perfect when it appears to be nature, and for its part nature has realized its goal when it contains in itself concealed art.’23 In the ‘Malpiglio’ the dissimulation of one’s innermost qualities is also presented as a technique of seduction at court, since a virtue that allows itself only to be glimpsed stimulates the desire in others to see it more fully: ‘One can perform this concealment of oneself with some shrewdness, by which the little part that one shows may engender desire for that which one hides, and produce a certain supposition and opinion in men and in the prince himself that beneath is concealed something rare and singular and perfect’ (557–8). And it is to Tasso that Accetto again will largely make reference in his chapter XIX: ‘often it is a virtue above virtue to dissimulate virtue not with a veil of vice, but by not manifesting all of virtue’s dazzling rays, in order not to offend eyes made infirm by envy and by the fear of others’ (75). Two further points made by Accetto in his treatise are particularly remarkable in this light: the link between dissimulation and ostentation, two attitudes that appear to be opposites but turn out to be complementary, because the character who builds up a mask hides himself in order better to appear what he likes to be;24 and the implicit religious reference to a post-mortem where all the masks will fall off and the pure and naked truth will triumph. This, I believe, is the ideological base for the founding baroque antithesis of ‘being’ and ‘appearing.’ The result is a sort of aesthetics of mourning committed to these chilling and yet fascinating statements: ‘If one but considers nature in so many other earthly works, one recognizes that beauty is nothing other than a noble dissimulation ... and one will find that the rose appears beautiful because at first sight it conceals through dissimulation that it is such a fleeting thing ... and even though one is wont to say that mortal beauty does not appear to be an earthly thing, when one then considers the truth of the matter, it is indeed nothing else but a cadaver dissimulated by the favour of youth’ (54–5).

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We may now consider the obverse side of dissimulation, namely its function as a shield against arbitrary power. Aiming to represent the positive aspects of dissimulation, Tasso created as a counterpart to Armida the beautiful and pathetic figure of Erminia, who has to resort to ‘innocent deception’ (VI, 88) in order to survive within her contradictory condition of enemy/lover (‘nemica amante’): a Muslim princess, she was made prisoner by Tancredi, but, treated with the utmost consideration, gradually fell in love with her captor. When she is released, however, she is forced by her origins and her faith to serve the infidel’s cause. In a famous scene in canto III, inspired by a passage from the third book of Homer’s Iliad, from a high tower of besieged Jerusalem Erminia points out to the pagan king Aladino the most illustrious warriors of the Christian army. When she finally sees Tancredi, she must conceal her true feelings, simulating hatred and a thirst for revenge: ‘nasconde / sotto il manto dell’odio altro desio’ (hides beneath the mantle of hatred a different passion [VII, 19]).25 In Erminia’s case the metaphor of the manto works with such energy that the rhetoric of language soon shifts into a rhetoric of action. Not only does the heroine dissimulate her true nature by ‘weaving’ and ‘covering’ her words: she must on occasion disguise her person in order not to be recognized by her enemies. First, she dons her friend Clorinda’s armour (‘I want to feign myself Clorinda; and under cover of her image, I am sure of departing’ [VI, 87]).26 She later wears the humble clothing of a shepherdess when, intercepted in her attempt to bring aid to the wounded Tancredi, she takes refuge among some shepherds in an ancient forest (VII, 6 ff). Thus, Erminia in her mantle of disguise is forced to incarnate at first the epic genre and then the pastoral genre, while she actually represents the perfect heroine of the sentimental romance, a literary form that was soon to make its appearance in Europe. She lives in a literal split between ‘above’ and ‘below,’ between ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ reality – that is, divided between the person she would like to be and the various masks that she is constrained to wear. During the late-sixteenth century, when a rigid social hierarchy emphasized the importance of exteriority, clothing – the surface appearance that disguises the body – assumed an overriding importance because of its symbolic function. To clothe oneself (vestire) is understood above all as a mode of covering (ri-vestire) and disguising oneself (tra-vestire); while, conversely, nudity was seen as the removing of a mask, the uncovering of deceit. Such indeed is the scope of every form of psychology: to uncover what is buried within.

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Is it not, we may ask, the greater psychological depth of the characters of the Liberata with respect to the tradition (and to the Furioso itself) that creates a breach between the exterior and the interior and thereby foreshadows the modern novel? The psychological interiorization, the subjective introspection of ‘novelistic’ characters in European literature find some of their roots in Tasso, paradoxically favoured by the Aristotelian and Counter-Reformation restraints that had the effect of expanding subjective spaces and thus transforming the external limit of the ‘Other’ into an internal psychological barrier (see the Hamlet-like Tancredi confronting the phantoms of his own unconscious in the enchanted wood of canto XIII). A stranger within the epic world, Erminia foreshadows the end of chivalric ideals, founded on the heroic affirmation of the ego, and the birth of the modern psychological novel, founded instead upon the strenuous control of the heart’s passions.27 And she is not alone: Clorinda as well, the powerful woman warrior, conceals her femininity beneath a breastplate that she lays down only at the moment of her death. The armour emphasizes that dialectic of covering and uncovering that pertains, in Tasso, to the theme of the clothing and the mantle. It too carries out various and opposing functions: the sumptuous robes and ritual dressings of Goffredo, the hero of Catholic restoration, are not only the mantle of kingship but also the signs of a spiritual and political mission that does not allow indulgence towards human affections and individual sentiment. The clothing designs for him a role and represents a mission. To ‘divest’ himself of it, as happens only once in the poem (XI, 54 ff), is an infraction, a failure to fulfil his investiture, the divine tutelage symbolized by the regal mantle that makes him a Christian Aeneas. His impenetrability to the flatteries of Eros, the impassive expression under which he dissimulates his inner anxieties, is the body armour of reason (‘reason enclosed within her armour’ [XV, 66]);28 conversely, for Clorinda the armour is the censure of desire, the repression of the body and, specifically, of femininity that discloses itself only upon death. When Tancredi by tragic error kills his beloved, who has disguised herself beneath a body armour as black as the night in which the duel takes place, he releases from beneath the covering of iron that misunderstood love that so far has expressed itself as hate and warlike aggression. The necessity of dissimulation requires the jealous safekeeping of the heart’s secrets, of the interior’s intimacy that is the only residence of the truth (for – as Castiglione had already said – ‘there are so many dark turns in our souls and so many recesses, that it is not possible for human

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discernment to know the simulations that are latent there’ [Cortegiano II, 29]). The encounter between Erminia and Vafrino – Tancredi’s squire who, an expert in oriental languages and customs, has introduced himself into the Egyptian camp under false pretences in order to detect the enemy’s manoeuvres – is all a game of reciprocal unmasking. Both are dissimulators for good purposes: she recognizes him dressed as an Arab (XIX, 80); he recognizes in her the violent passion that cannot be hidden (‘Love is an ill thing to hide’ [XIX, 96]).29 It will be worthwhile, before continuing with Erminia, to focus on this male character, or, more precisely, on his name, which is a typical ‘talking name’: it derives from the Latin vafer, which means tricky, clever, alert, and it demonstrates that Tasso was well aware of the religious polemics concerning the so-called vafritia that had divided the world of reformed Europe (opposing Luther, and then Calvin, to Erasmus) in relation to the moral legitimacy of the Nicodemist dissimulation practised by those who, like Vafrino, were operating ‘in partibus infidelium.’30 The fascination of the first great modern psychological novel, La princesse de Clèves (1678), consists above all in the stubborn and even heroic dissimulation of the heart’s most sincere affections, the only possible form of truth in courtly society, because ‘si vous voulez juger sur les apparences en ce lieu-ci [...], vous serez toujours trompée: ce qui paroit n’est presque jamais la vérité.’ (If you want to judge based on appearances in this place ..., you’ll always be tricked. That which appears is almost never the truth). Madame de Lafayette reacts against a literature of pure sentiments that is ingenuous and pastoral in order to substitute for it another kind of literature filled with subtle and mazelike inhibitions (Macchia 193–207). With Tasso, the traditional obstacles that kept characters from freely realizing their passions had already begun to find their place inside the conscience. It is the conscience that, unable or unwilling to destroy the obstacle, excavates its own depths and creates the dissimulating character: the discipline of the heart, with time and according to circumstances, would require a true askesis of doubleness. And one thinks about how Madame de Lafayette’s revolutionary novel, a century later, will be regarded in its turn as a model to be violated by Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1780): the defensive strategy of virtue (Erminia/Mademoiselle de Clèves) is opposed by the aggressive strategy of seduction (Armida/Madame de Merteuil). But let’s bear in mind Castiglione’s allusion to the recesses and secret places of the heart.31 It’s not by chance that this interior depth of Tasso’s characters expresses itself in a special liking of the poet of the

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Liberata for a landscape of tomblike images, of abysses and labyrinths, caverns and chasms, grottoes and sepulchres, from which the pagan forces of Eros, those passions suffocated by a triumphant Christian and Western rationality, re-emerge on the surface or irrepressibly cry out from the depths. These are ‘the abysses of the heart,’ because, as Baltasar Gracián will say, ‘a heart without secrecy is like an open letter. Secrets can remain deep where there is depth, since there exist vast spaces and capacious inlets where really important things remain sunken.’32 The recurrent conflict between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ that Tasso’s characters historically inaugurate and that will permeate the great European novel relates to an alternative between the gaze of the other (literally, in-vidia), which dominates and regulates comportment in society, and one’s own gaze, which investigates the most intimate and secret truths in which the character can finally, unconditionally, recognize himself. No one can inquire into the truth that is buried in the secret chamber of another’s conscience (Tancredi realizes that ‘the thought of mortals lies hidden in a place too dark and inward’ [V, 41]).33 Only God in the Liberata is endowed with a revealing glance (‘that vision that spies out human passions in their most secret inner part’ [I, 8]).34 Transporting this theology to his epic story, Tasso creates characters who, like Erminia and Armida, are literally hounded, besieged by the gaze of others – a gaze, however, that remains necessarily in error. Then again, the heart’s epiphany is deferred to the end of one’s life. Brutus casts off the mask of the madman in the very last scene; Accetto delays until Judgment Day the moment in which all the masks will eventually fall off (chapter XXII). Tasso’s epic dream is, not by accident, the recovery of a hidden truth, initially sought in deceitful labyrinths and finally discovered in the Christian temple, closed and consecrated within the tomb.

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Notes

Introduction 1 The selections from Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo presented in this volume, chosen to highlight the generic/modal problem of epic and romance, do not reveal the extent to which Zatti goes on to tease out the ideological content of this formal opposition in successive chapters that treat the Furioso from the respective points of view of psychological representation; use versus exchange value; and court culture. In other words, taken in its entirety, this study, as much as L’uniforme cristiano, reveals the overdetermined signifying possibilities of early-modern narrative formations. 2 The use of Bloom, by now more than familiar in the American context, should be seen within an Italian critical context where it is both unusual and provocative. As in the use of psychoanalytical categories throughout his work, Zatti insists on their usefulness for the understanding of textual, rather than mental, structures. 3 This is one of the few points on which I disagree to some extent with Zatti, since I would argue that the ‘darkness’ that he, along with other critics, relegates to the Cinque canti, finds expression, though less direct, in the Furioso itself. 4 Zatti thus comes, via Orlando, to a mode of textualized psychoanalysis, comparable but also alternative to Lacanian readings as articulated in both the French and North American contexts. Compare the readings of Ferguson. 5 In general the multiplicity of the pagans prevents them from being categorized as racially specific – their only common bond is the negation of Christianity. However, race becomes a critical category in the one, paradigmatic case of an overt conversion from pagan to Christian, namely in the story of

218 Notes to pages 11–14 Clorinda, the white daughter of black parents. Zatti 1998 was one of the first anthologies of criticism to introduce the question of alterity in the early modern period into the Italian scholarly context. 1. The Furioso between Epos and Romance 1 For a discussion of this crisis in its specific historical context, I refer the reader to the fundamental essay by Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Fortuna e sfortuna del Boiardo nel Cinquecento.’ 2 Pio Rajna, Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso (1975). 3 I allude to the famous letter of 4 July 1512, to Gian Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in which Ariosto speaks of ‘un mio libro al quale già molti dì (continuando la inventione del conte Matheo Maria Boiardo) io dedi principio’ (a book of mine which I began these many days past, following the invention of Count Matheo Maria Boiardo). In Lettere, letter 12. 4 Emilio Bigi confirms this point with particular force in his commentary to the Furioso. 5 Here are some classics of this sort of criticism: Gianfranco Contini, ‘Come lavorava l’Ariosto’ (1937); Cesare Segre, ‘Storia interna dell’Orlando furioso’; Emilio Bigi, ‘Appunti sulla lingua e sulla metrica del Furioso’ ; Luigi Blasucci, ‘Osservazioni sulla struttura metrica del Furioso’ and ‘Nota sul Furioso.’ 6 In my view this is the case for the most ambitious and serious work of this sort, Giuseppe Dalla Palma’s Le strutture narrative dell’ Orlando furioso. I share Remo Ceserani’s reservations and appreciation for Dalla Palma in ‘Due modelli culturali e narrativi nell’Orlando furioso.’ More interesting, albeit less technical, is Leonzio Pampaloni’s ‘Per un’analisi narrativa del Furioso.’ See also his introduction and commentary to the scholastic edition of Orlando furioso. 7 I refer to the famous essay that influenced more than three decades of Ariosto studies: Benedetto Croce, Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille . 8 I must make due exception here for recent American criticism, which, since the 1970s, has dedicated much lively and penetrating attention to Ariosto, as witnessed by the impressive quantity of titles gathered by Robert Rodini and Salvatore Di Maria in Ludovico Ariosto: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1956–1980), where they laudably complete the work of Giuseppe Fatini, Bibliografia della critica ariostea (1510–1956). I allude here to the following works: Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic; Donald S. CarneRoss, ‘The One and the Many: A Reading of the Orlando furioso’; Albert Russell Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance; Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando furioso; and

Notes to pages 14–16 219

9

10

11 12

Dennis Looney, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. There are no more than the glimpses of metanarrative moments in Boiardo, who barely indulges in this sort of irony. Cf II, 17, 38: ‘Or lasciamo costor tutti da parte, / ché nel presente è detto a bastanza, / però che il conte Orlando e Brandimarte / mi fa bisogno di condurli in Franza, / acciocché queste istorie che son sparte, / siano raccolte insieme a una sustanza; / poi seguiremo un fatto tanto degno / quanto abbia libro alcuno in suo contegno’ (But let us put them all aside: / I’ve talked of them enough for now, / And Brandimart and Count Orlando / Force me to transfer them to France, / So that these stories, now so scattered, / May be united, may be gathered. / Then we’ll continue these events / As bold as any book contains). From this perspective, Luigi Pulci is more interesting. At the end of Morgante, the poet adds an exuberant burst of writing that he says was induced by the material and his protagonist’s behaviour: ‘Ben so che spesso, come già Morgante, / lasciato ho forse troppo andar la mazza; / ma dove sia poi giudice bastante, / materia c’è da camera e da piazza; / ed avvien che chi usa con gigante, / convien che se n’appicchi qualche sprazza, / sì ch’io ho fatto con altro battaglio / a mosca cieca o talvolta a sonaglio’ (I know that often, as Morgante did, / I maybe whirled my club a bit too much; / but a good judge will tell that what is fit / for private rooms is also fit for alleys; / besides, if with a giant long you stay, / you’re bound to learn a tiny bit from him: / a different clapper I have had to wield, / now playing blindman’s buff or striking shield [XXVIII, 142]). Here the intertwining of narrator-text-character is expressed again as an isolated fact and in the analogical form of a simile (‘come già Morgante’); we are not yet at the point of that direct interference and even impertinence of the character in conditioning the plans of the narrator and the itineraries of the poem that we will see brought into play by Ariosto. Among the authors of the chivalric tradition, Pulci most generously introduces into his tale suggestions of narrative self-consciousness, precisely because of his culturally anomalous position, which favours ironic distance. In Ariosto this will give way to a dominant tendency of the tale: the thematization of the formal processes of the romance. Riccardo Bruscagli, Stagioni della civiltà estense (19–20), develops these ideas along lines expressed earlier by Eduardo Saccone, Il soggetto del Furioso (101). On this topic, I refer the reader to the classic treatment by Erich Koehler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfischen Epik, in particular chapter 3. ‘Ecco quei che le carte empion di sogni / Lancilotto, Tristano e gli altri erranti, / ove conven che ’l vulgo errante agogni’ (Here too are those who

220 Notes to page 16 fill out books with dreams: / Lancelot, Tristram, and the other knights / whose wand’rings lead the common folk astray [Triumphus Cupidinis, I, 3, 79– 81]). The fortune of these verses, widely imitated throughout the cinquecento, is linked to the problem of the addressee that they put into question and that is no small part of the antichivalric polemic in its various phases. I recall here, as extremes of a parabola, the anonymous epic Troiano, mentioned by Dionisotti (‘Fortuna e sfortuna del Boiardo’ 228), because of its great editorial fortune throughout the century: ‘Qui non è chi le carte empie di sogni, / per cui conven che ’l vulgo errante agogni’ (There is no one here who fills the pages with dreams for whom the erring folk must have desire [I, 4]), and the Gerusalemme liberata, where, with more elegiac nostalgia, Tasso makes himself the liquidator of the chivalric tales: ‘Taccia Argo i Mini, e taccia Artù que’ suoi / erranti, che di sogni empion le carte’ (Let Argus be silent about the Minyans, and Arthur be silent about his errant knights, that fill the pages with dreams [I, 52]). The distinction between educated and illiterate audiences is one of the attacks by classicists against the Furioso during the debate between supporters of epos and supporters of romance (we need only recall Trissino’s contemptuous line: ‘col Furioso suo, che piace al vulgo’ (with his Furioso that pleases the common folk [Italia liberata dai Goti, libro XXIV, v. 1289]). The expression ‘ambages pulcerrimae’ (in reference to the splendid adventures of King Arthur) is from Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia I, x, 2. 13 See Bernard Weinberg, ‘The Quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso,’ in A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, II: 954–1073. For an update on the argument, see D. Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic. 14 As regards ‘legatura,’ for example, Giraldi Cinzio talks about entrelacement as a ‘meraviglioso artificio’ (marvellous artifice) made necessary by the principle of composition of multiple action. Writers of romances ‘in questo loro troncar le cose, conducono il lettore a tal termine, prima che le tronchino, che gli lasciano nell’animo un ardente desiderio di tornare a ritrovarle: il che è cagione che tutto il poema loro sia letto, rimanendo sempre le principali materie imperfette insino al compimento dell’opera’ (by cutting things off as they do, lead the reader to such a point, before cutting them off, that they leave him with a burning desire to come back and find them again: this is the reason that he reads all the poem, since the main subjects always remain incomplete until the work’s end). But at this point, he proposes a compromise (that which he himself practices in the Ercole [Modena 1557]), which is conciliatory towards the critics of entrelacement: ‘Egli è vero che s’altri si desse a comporre le azioni di un uomo solo, si potrebbe continuare un canto con l’altro senza rompere le materie e tralasciarle per ripigliarle poi e seguirle di

Notes to pages 16–17

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novo. Perché pigliandosi per fondamento dell’opera sua uno solo uomo, e scrivendo le sue azioni, non ha bisogno di lasciarle per parlare delle azioni di un altro, se non in quanto avvenisse che altra persona anco in quella istessa azione si mescolasse. E forse è più lodevole modo di legar questo, che non è il primo, che abbiam detto, perché quella vaghezza che si cerca d’indurre da tali compositori, con la variazione delle azioni di molti, si può ella con vari modi acconciamente indurre nel poema, che contenga molte azioni di un solo e così levare la sazietà al lettore di sempre leggere una medesima cosa’ (It is true that if someone were to set himself to composing the actions of a single man, one could continue one canto after another without breaking up the subjects and abandoning them to take them up again and follow them once more. Because taking as fundamental to his work a single man, and writing his actions, he does not need to leave them to speak of the actions of another, if not inasmuch as it may happen that another person becomes involved in that same action. And perhaps this is a more praiseworthy way to link things than the first of which I spoke, since that enjoyment that such composers seek to create, with the variation of the actions of many, can be fittingly produced in a poem that contains many actions of a single person and so relieves the reader who is satiated by reading the same thing). In Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi 47–8. 15 Torquato Tasso, ‘Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme liberata,’ in Scritti sull’arte poetica 72. In the judgment that precedes this statement, Tasso recognizes that ‘Ariosto s’assomigliò agli epici molto più de gli altri che avevano scritto inanzi’ (Ariosto resembled the epic poets much more than the others who wrote before him). 16 General bibliography on this theme is vast. For a summary and discussion, see Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance, who, as well as recalling the earlier fundamental studies by Ferdinand Lot and Jean Frappier, makes some reference to Ariosto’s use of this technique typical of the medieval romance, connected, in his view, to the rhetorical principle of digression. Among the studies that discuss more specifically the use of entrelacement in the Furioso, see: Pio Rajna, Le fonti; Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet ; Giovan Battista Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico dai cantari al Furioso; Leonzio Pampaloni, ‘Per un’analisi narrativa’; Daniela Del Corno Branca, L’Orlando furioso e il romanzo cavalleresco medievale; C.P. Brand, ‘L’entrelacement nell’Orlando furioso’; Elissa Weaver, ‘Lettura dell’intreccio dell’Orlando furioso: Il caso delle tre pazzie d’amore’ (translated in Ariosto Today); and Giuseppe Dalla Palma, Le strutture narrative. 17 Despite the centrality of the theme, few studies specifically dedicated to it exist among the rich bibliography of Ariosto studies. The most useful

222 Notes to pages 17–21

18

19

20

21

22

remains Riccardo Bruscagli, ‘“Ventura” e “inchiesta” fra Boiardo e Ariosto,’ in Stagioni della civiltà estense. See also: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; Erich Koehler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfischen Epik; William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative; Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, chapters 7–8; Aurelio Roncaglia, ‘Nascita e sviluppo della narrativa cavalleresca nella Francia medievale’; Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 298–304 and 445–82. Cf ‘venire a fine del desire’ (to come to the end of his desire [V, 23]); ‘dar fine al disio’ (to put an end to his desire [X, 13]); ‘condurre a fine l’appetito’ (to bring to an end his ... appetite [XIII, 21]); ‘al fin trarre l’impresa’ (brought the adventure to an end [XV, 91]); ‘cogliere il frutto del desire’ (plucked the fruit of her desire [XXI, 55]); ‘terminar l’impresa’ (to end his affair, [XXVII, 42]). There are still problems with dating some of these works. In his essay ‘Entrée d’Espagne, Spagna, Rotta di Roncisvalle,’ Carlo Dionisotti shifts the date of the Entrée to the mid-fourteenth century and the fourteenth-century date fixed by Michele Catalano for the Spagna to the following century. In setting about the work of textual verification of my hypotheses, I am indebted to the illuminating chapter on Ariosto (‘The Errors of Romance’) by Patricia Parker in her Inescapable Romance (16–53), from whose suggestions I have in part developed my analyses. Inserted within a broader investigation of the romance tradition, Parker’s study emphasizes how Ariosto’s precocious historical consciousness posits several problems inherent in the nature of narrative fiction that he articulates between his digressive tendency and the desire for textual closure. But their use was much more limited. See, for example, Boiardo, who only uses, with a certain degree of frequency, the variant sturbare/disturbare: I, 3, 74; I, 22, 57; I, 23, 38; I, 25, 54; II, 20, 53; III, 5, 5; so too Agostini: IV, 6, 21; IV, 9, 31; IV, 9, 117; and Cieco da Ferrara: IX, 97; Pulci frequently uses the periphrasis guastare/rompere il disegno: I, 11; XXIV, 96; XXIV, 170. What is missing is Ariosto’s metanarrative practice of simulating the intervention of a character in the levels of the narration. Some examples can be found in Ariosto’s immediate predecessors: for example, Boiardo: ‘Già molto tempo m’han tenuto a bada / Morgana, Alcina e le incantazioni, / né ve ho mostrato un bel colpo di spada, / e pieno il cel de lancie e de tronconi; / or conviene che il mondo a terra vada’ (Morgan, Alcina, magic spells / have kept me occupied some time: / I’ve not described one sword swung well / Or spears and shafts that fill the sky. / Now heaven has to touch the ground [II, 14, 1]); ‘Ma non posso contarla in questo ponto, / perché Brunello assai me dà che fare’ (But now I can’t nar-

Notes to pages 21–6

23 24

25 26

27

28

223

rate those things – / Brunell is work enough for me [II, 16, 1]). Strictly speaking, then, this is not ‘an absolutely new process’ for Ariosto, as Del Corno Branca asserts (L’Orlando furioso e il romanzo 43), but, as usual, a matter of the structural emphasizing of certain commonplace devices. Cf Eugenio Donato, ‘“Per selve e boscherecci labirinti”: Desire and Narrative Structure in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.’ The loss and rediscovery of the narrative thread constitute another typical rhetorical expedient of the interlaced tale: ‘Era tanto la mente mia legata / dal bel cantar dinanzi, ch’io trascorsi / alquanto fuor della via prima usata; / ora dell’error commesso mi rimorsi’ (So fully conquered this my mind has been / by what I’ve sung till now, I’ve somewhat veered / off the familiar pathway of my tale: / I much regret the error I have made [Morgante, XX, 2]); ‘or veritate ed anco affezione, / me ha tratto alquanto de la strata mia; / ma torno adesso ... ’ (Now, truth – and also sentiment – Have led me through this small digression / But I’ll return [Innamorato, II, 23, 8]); ‘ma di ciò non pigliati amiratione / s’io esco alquanto de la strata mia’ (but do not be astonished by this, if I depart somewhat from my path [Agostini, Quarto libro, I, 50]). Inescapable Romance 33–4. Criticizing the multiplicity of romance and the breaks created by entrelacement, the Aristotelian Antonio Minturno points out in his Arte poetica that Ariosto could have taken two poems – what is more, epic poems – from the subjects of the Furioso. These would correspond to the two Homeric archetypes. One would be founded on the Iliadic Orlando, whose dispute with Rinaldo for Angelica with its consequent distancing from the war follows the pattern of Achilles. The other would celebrate the illustrious enterprises of the Odyssean Ruggiero, whose cycle of adventures includes an island paradise with its tempting sorceress, the encounter with a marine monster, a shipwreck, and a complicated final revelation that, through recognition, leads to marriage with the chaste and faithful Bradamante. Cf Boiardo’s Innamorato: ‘Non vedi tu lo error che te desvia, / e tanto contra a Dio te fa fallare?’ (Don’t you see sin entices you, / and makes you disobey your God? [I, 1, 30]). Giraldi Cinzio sees this kind of structure of ‘error’ as necessary. Following the example of Virgil with regard to Homer, he legitimates the ‘deviations’ of modern writers of romances: ‘potevano i buoni scrittori, calpestando la medesima via, per la quale erano camminati i più antichi, torcersi alquanto dal viaggio fatto da loro e lasciando talora le orme co’ propri lor passi andarsi in Elicona’ (good writers, treading the same path upon which the most ancient ones walked, could depart from the route they took and, some-

224 Notes to pages 26–34

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36

times leaving behind their footprints, make their own way to Helicon [Discorso 50]). Remo Ceserani relates this motif to the mythological figure of Hercules at the crossroads (‘Due modelli culturali’ 494–500), and draws interesting ideological and cultural implications from it. See Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinische Mittelalter, chapter 7. ‘sì offeso sono, / che sin che col suo mal non gli dimostro / quanto abbia fatto error, non gli perdono ...’ ‘non men son fuor di me, che fosse Orlando; / e non son men di lui di scusa degno’ (XXX, 4). ‘drew the sword of his wrath on all of you without making any distinction’ (XXIX, 3). Daniel Javitch, ‘Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando furioso,’ correctly distinguishes two types of interruption of the story in the Furioso: one in which the narration is suspended at the end of the canto and taken up again, as normal, in the following canto; the other that falls at any point whatsoever in the canto without concern for immediately taking it up again. Concentrating his attention on the latter, which eludes motivations of suspense, Javitch observes that it frustrates one’s desire for continuity, subjecting the reader to the same experience of disappointed expectations that plagues the characters in the different stories: ‘The deprivation experienced by the reader when Ariosto prematurely interrupts his engrossing narratives is meant to duplicate the similar experience that so often besets various characters in his poem’ (78). Durling also provides a very fine analysis of this episode (114). Boiardo uses it only rarely for the postponement of action (cf Innamorato I, 12, 25, and II, 3, 20), with the single exception of I, 21, 37: ‘Ma nel presente io voglio differire / il fin di questa pugna sì rubesta’ (I’ll save, however, to tell later / The end of this severe encounter). Only slightly more widespread in the learned tradition is the use of serbare/riserbare as a form of farewell (Morgante XXI, 172; Innamorato III, 2, 60; Mambriano XVIII, 99, and XXXI, 100), also present in this sense, moreover, in the Furioso: ‘Quel che seguì tra questi duo superbi / vo’ che per l’altro canto si riserbi’ (What followed between these two proud men, I wish to reserve for another canto [I, 81]) (cf also XXV, 80, and XLIII, 199). She falls from her horse and is not spoken of again: ‘Quanto, Signore, ad Angelica accada / dopo ch’uscì di man del pazzo a tempo; / e come a ritornare in sua contrada / trovasse e buon naviglio e miglior tempo, / e de l’India a Medor desse lo scettro, / forse altri canterà con miglior plettro’ (All that happened to Angelica, My Lord, after she got out of the hands of the

Notes to pages 34–7 225

37 38

39

40

41 42

43

madman in time, and how she found good ship and better weather for returning to her own country, and gave to Medoro the sceptre of India, perhaps some other will sing to a better lyre [XXX, 16]). Cf Saccone, Il soggetto del Furioso 242 ff; Parker, Inescapable Romance 34; and David Quint, ‘The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo’s Poem.’ ‘Avea il Signor, che tutto intende e vede, / rivelato al santissimo eremita, / che Ruggier da quel dì ch’ebbe la fede, / dovea sette anni, e non più, stare in vita; / che per la morte che sua donna diede / a Pinabel, ch’a lui fia attribuita, / saria, e per quella ancor di Bertolagi, / morto dai Maganzesi empi e malvagi’ (The Lord, who knows and sees everything, had revealed to the holy hermit that from the day when he received the Faith, Ruggiero was to be alive seven years and no more, that for the death his lady inflicted on Pinabello, which will be charged to him, and also for that of Bertolagi, he would be killed by the pitiless Maganzese [XLI, 61]). In ‘The Figure of Atlante,’ Quint supports this thesis, seeing in Atlante a symbolic surrogate for Boiardo, with whom Ariosto had to compete for control of his poem. Destroying the old sorcerer and his palace would therefore be the equivalent of removing Boiardo’s presence from a narrative that orients itself in a more clearly epic direction precisely thanks to its overcoming of the ‘open-ended narrative of the earlier poem’ (81). Ludovico Dolce identified the Aeneid as a fundamental model for Ariosto in his “Brieve Dimostrazione,” published as an appendix to the Gioliti edition of the Furioso of 1542. On Dolce’s commentary, see D. Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, chapter 3. Cf Brand, L’entrelacement 527 ff. In fact, in the first and second versions of the Furioso, in forty cantos, the destruction of the palace fell exactly at the centre of the poem (canto XX), as Quint reminds us (‘The Figure of Atlante’ 80). ‘S’una sarà la favola, uno sarà il fine, se più e diverse saranno le favole, più e diversi saranno i fini; ma quanto meglio opera chi riguarda ad un sol fine che chi diversi fini si propone, nascendo dalla diversità de’ fini distrazione nell’animo ed impedimento nell’operare, tanto meglio operarà l’imitator d’una sola favola che l’imitatore di molte azioni. Aggiungo che dalla moltitudine delle favole nasce l’indeterminazione, e può questo progresso andare in infinito, senza che le sia dall’arte prefisso o circoscritto termine alcuno’ (If the plot is single, his purpose will be single; if there are many and diverse plots, there will be many and diverse purposes. However, since diverse purposes distract the mind and hinder labour, he who sets himself a single goal will work more effectively than the imitator of a multitude of actions. I add that multiple plots cause confusion, which could go on and on forever if art

226 Notes to pages 37–45 did not set and prescribe limits). In Torquato Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica, libro II, p. 24. Trans. Lawrence F. Rhu, The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory (119). 44 For these last considerations, I refer the reader to Ascoli’s Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony. 2. The Quest: Considerations on the Form of the Furioso 1 Carne-Ross, ‘The One and the Many,’ part II, p. 20. This study, originally planned as a book, was published only partially. A first essay was published in Arion in 1966; a second came out in the same journal ten years later. My quotations, where not otherwise indicated, are taken from this second part. 2 ‘Perhaps his nerve simply failed him. Under its familiar romance trappings, the Furioso is a distinctly subversive poem and he may have lacked the courage to carry his highly original conception through to its logical conclusion’ (204). 3 ‘The mistake, which is radical and disastrous, is to graft on to an open-structured poem a closed-structure ending’ (205). 4 See C. Segre, ‘Leon Battista Alberti e Ludovico Ariosto,’ in Esperienze ariostesche 85–95; G. Ferroni, ‘L’Ariosto e la concezione umanistica della follia,’ in Ludovico Ariosto: Convegno Internationale 73–92; C. Ossola, ‘Métaphore et inventaire de la folie dans la letterature italienne du XVI siècle,’ in Folie et déraison à la Renaissance 171–96; D. Quint, ‘Astolfo’s Voyage to the Moon,’ in Yale Italian Studies (now partly modified in Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature. Versions of the Source 82–92); M. Santoro, ‘La sequenza lunare nel Furioso: Una società allo specchio,’ in L’anello d’Angelica 105–32; G. Savarese, ‘Lo spazio dell’“impostura”: Il Furioso e la Luna,’ in Il Furioso e la cultura del Rinascimento 71–89; A. Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony 264–304. 5 On this subject, Segre speaks of ‘sottile parallelismo antagonistico’ (subtle antagonistic parallelism [Esperienze ariostesche 23]), and Saccone observes that ‘l’Ercole del titolo genera i due eroi, le cui traiettorie sono insieme analoghe ed opposte’ (The Hercules of the title generates the two heroes, whose trajectories are both analogous and opposed [Il soggetto 217]). 6 See Alberto Casadei, La strategia delle varianti and Il percorso del Furioso. 7 W.W. Ryding discusses this frequently in his Structure in Medieval Narrative, which focuses on the forms of French narrative of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but also pays attention to their later evolution through Ariosto and Tasso. 8 In the Roman d’Enéas, a twelfth-century French poem, Virgil’s story takes on the form of a diptych with two distinct cycles of adventures. The first culmi-

Notes to pages 45–9 227

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10 11 12

13

nates in the passion of Aeneas and Dido, when Love separates the hero from his destiny as founder of the Latin race; the second concludes with his love for Lavinia, in which Love and Fate come together in harmonious agreement. The two parts are separated by the descent to the underworld, which functions as the hinge between the two cycles, concluding the first and setting the second in motion (cf Ryding 40). On this point, the reader will recall that Ariosto’s Orlando, also drawn into the abyss of madness, sees his spirit wandering in an ‘inferno’ (XXIII, 128]). The point of arrival of this structural topos is indicated by canto XIII of the Gerusalemme liberata, to the extent that (as Ezio Raimondi argues in Poesia come retorica 96–123), the enchanted wood where the crusaders carry out a sort of catabasis necessary for the resolution of the Christian crisis parallels the grove visited by Aeneas in Aeneid VI. In Tasso the infernal experience is completely internalized, since the wood gives voice and substance to the phantoms of guilt that spring from the depths of the individual psyche. Even the sky, furrowed by the hippogriff, and the sea, beaten by tempests, are typical places of ‘error’: ‘Tre dì e tre notti andammo errando ne le / minacciose onde per camino obliquo’ (Three days and three nights we kept wandering on a crooked course in the menacing waves [XVII, 27]). These spaces are therefore topologically like the wood (cf E. Donato, ‘“Per selve e boscherecci labirinti,”’ 19 and 32, n1). Cf Segre, Esperienze ariostesche 93–4. ‘now to this side now to that ... to right and left and low and high ... he sought everywhere ... he searched.’ ‘In my chapter on Cantos I–VIII, I drew attention to the importance of the phrase di qua di là, and its doublet, di su di giù. First used in Canto I, of Angelica’s wheeling flight (girare, aggirare) in the forest, they occur throughout the poem, often describing a circular motion. Frequently associated with the Quest, either pursuit or flight, they normally point to a quickening of poetic interest, a sign that the action, however inconsequential, is in some way thematic. Evidence of design is carefully concealed in the Furioso, but when we come on di qua di là, or somewhat less frequently di su di giù, it almost always means that Ariosto is up to something’ (Carne-Ross, ‘The One and the Many’ 153). Ariosto’s text presents numerous variants of adverbial phrases of location (alto e basso, dentro e dintorno, quinci e quindi). I believe it is appropriate to make use of Carne-Ross’s suggestion in a broader sphere. In the first Furioso (1516), the beginning of the ‘amorosa inchiesta’ was immediately followed by the episode of Atlante’s palace. In the third edition (1532), Ariosto inserted the episode of Olimpia. Although from the point of view of Orlando’s quête it represents a first mistaken stop, in compensation it

228 Notes to page 49 reinforces the theme of the quest by giving resonance to the leitmotif of ‘circular motion’ in circumstances (such as the reawakening of the abandoned woman) that, apparently less justified by the context, make the choice to include it much more meaningful: Né desta né dormendo, ella la mano per Bireno abbracciar stese, ma invano. Nessuno trova: a sé la man ritira: di nuovo tenta, e pur nessuno truova. Di qua l’un braccio, e di là l’altro gira; or l’una, or l’altra gamba; e nulla giova ...

(X, 20–1)

Neither awake nor asleep, she stretched out her hand to embrace Bireno, but in vain. She finds no one; she draws back her hand; she tries again; and still she finds no one. She turns one arm here, the other there, now one leg, now the other; and nothing helps ... The phenomenon proves to be not in the least gratuitous considering that, even in Orlando’s later fight with the sea monster to whom Olimpia was to be fed, ‘circular motion’ is attributed to the vain attempts of the monster to free itself from the anchor that Orlando thrust into its jaws: ‘salta di qua di là, s’aggira intorno, / si colca e lieva, e non può uscir d’impaccio; / ... / con mille guizzi e mille strane ruote / segue la fune, e scior non se ne puote’ ([As a bull] leaps here and there, turns around, kneels and rears and cannot free himself from torment ... [the orc] follows the rope with a thousand struggles and a thousand strange circles and cannot release herself [XI, 42]). There is a slight hint of circular motion in the Dantean model of Inferno XII, 22–4: ‘Qual è quel toro che si slaccia in quella / c’ha ricevuto già ’l colpo mortale, / che gir non sa, ma qua e là saltella’ (As a bull that breaks loose in the moment when it has received the mortal blow, and cannot go, but plunges this way and that). In the Innamorato, Ariosto’s more immediate model, there is no such hint: ‘Mugia saltando e cerca uscir de impaccio: / al primo salto fu gionto nel laccio’ (It roars and leaps, but it’s no use: / The monster’s first hop trips a noose [I, 9, 21]). Ariosto for his part does not hesitate to mark the narrative symmetries of his poem, even on the stylistic level, when he has Ruggiero mounted on the hippogriff anticipate Orlando’s feat: L’orca, che vede sotto le grandi ale l’ombra di qua e di là correr su l’onda, lascia la preda certa litorale,

Notes to page 49 e quella vana segue furibonda: dietro quella si volve e si raggira. Ruggier giù cala, e spessi colpi tira.

229

(X, 102)

The orc, that sees the shadow under the great wings running here and there over the sea, leaves the sure prey on the shore and in rage follows that delusive one, turning and circling behind it. Ruggiero comes down and strikes frequent blows. Ruggiero himself is destined to become a victim of ‘circular motion’ later when Angelica, whom he is hurrying to possess after having freed her, dissolves into nothing, thanks to her magic ring: Ruggier pur d’ogn’intorno riguardava, e s’aggirava a cerco come un matto ...

(XI, 7)

Ruggiero, however, was looking in all directions and turning himself in circles like a madman ... Così dicendo, intorno alla fontana brancolando n’andava come cieco. Oh quante volte abbracciò l’aria vana, sperando la donzella abbracciar seco! ...

(XI, 9)

So saying, he went groping around the spring like a blind man. Oh how many times he embraced the empty air, hoping to embrace the maiden with it ... See Carne-Ross’s analysis (1976) 157–8. 14 Here are some examples, almost all limited to the ‘high cultural’ branch of the genre, to demonstrate how the frequency of the formula is connected to its status as a fixed stereotype that never crosses the limits of a codified sphere of application. Deriving from the repertory of classical epic (cf Aeneid V, 441–2; IX, 57–8; XI, 766–7; XII, 557–8), the image serves to describe the movements of the true quête (specifically, of a person or object; generically, of adventure), or the motions of battle (the search for an adversary in the multitude of combatants, or, during a duel, the search for a gap in the defences of the antagonist): – Tavola ritonda, chapter XII: ‘E andando in tale maniera cercando assai di lui,

230 Notes to page 49

–

–

–

–

–

non ne truova né trasegna né novella niuna, avvegna non di meno che l’andavano cercando tutti i suoi baroni e cavalieri di quello reame, chi in qua e chi in làe, in ogni guisa’ (133). (Thus she [Queen Eliabella] went searching hard for him [King Meliadus], but found neither trace nor news. All the barons and knights of the realm went searching no less hard than she, some here, some there, in every way). Trans. Shaver, p. 30. Spagna, XIII, 23: ‘In qua, in là, in giù, in su, da parte / chi me’ sapea col brando s’arostava’ (Here, there, down, up, to the side, he who knew better protected himself with his sword). Morgante, XIX, 81: ‘Margutte in giù e ’n su, di qua, di là / dell’acqua va cercando il me’ che può’ (Margutte up and down, and here and there, / to find some water did the best he could). Orlando innamorato, II, 3, 5: ‘Di qua, di là, da fronte e da le spalle, / quasi in un tempo col brando l’assalle’ (From side to side, in front, behind – / Almost at once – he whirls his sword). Quinto libro of Nicolò degli Agostini, 2, 70: ‘chi qua, chi là, pel campo a furia gia / getando hor questo, hor quel giù da l’arcione’ (One here, one there passed through the field in fury, knocking down now this one, now another from the saddle). Mambriano, XXXVII, 9: ‘Rinaldo allora di sotto e di sopra / si mette in fretta andar cercando il tutto’ (Rinaldo then began hurriedly to search through everything below and above).

In the Furioso we find an original use of this formula (in line with Ariosto’s ironic technique of playing with the genre’s structural elements rather than abandoning them) that increases its statistical incidence and resolutely extends its area of semantic application. 15 ‘Gli 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). 16 ‘Some ... for love, some for honours, some in seeking riches’ (XXXIV, 85). 17 In the Satires we find a sort of domestic version of the quest. Ariosto elaborates a passionate defence of his private space, claiming his own existential choices as a personal and specific form of ‘madness’ (cf II, 148–52). From here it is but a brief step to the quest. Unlike those who are curious about the world – Degli uomini son varii gli appetiti: a chi piace la chierca, a chi la spada, a chi la patria, a chi li strani liti. Chi vuole andare a torno, a torno vada:

Notes to pages 49–50 231 vegga Inghelterra, Ongheria, Francia e Spagna; Men’s appetites are various. The tonsure pleases one man, while the sword befits another. Some love their homeland, while others delight in foreign shores. Let him wander who desires to wander. Let him see England, Hungary, France, and Spain. – the poet is content to limit his own experience to near and familiar spaces (hence his refusal to follow Cardinal Ippolito to Hungary), leaving him with an entirely mental quest and the freedom to wander without borders over geographical maps: a me piace abitar la mia contrada. Visto ho Toscana, Lombardia, Romagna, quel monte che divide e quel che serra Italia, e un mar e l’altro che la bagna. Questo mi basta: il resto de la terra, senza mai pagar l’oste, andrò cercando con Ptolomeo, sia il mondo in pace o in guerra; e tutto il mar, senza far voti quando lampeggi il ciel, sicuro in su le carte verrò, più che sui legni, volteggiando.

(III, 52–66)

I am content to live in my native land. I have seen Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Romagna, and the mountain range that divides Italy, and the one that locks her in, and both the seas that wash her. And that is quite enough for me. Without ever paying an innkeeper, I will go exploring the rest of the earth with Ptolemy, whether the world be at peace or else at war. Without ever making vows when the heavens flash with lightning, I will go bounding over all the seas, more secure aboard my maps than aboard ships. Distant spaces and dangerous voyages are evoked here only to be exorcized. Nevertheless, destiny was already preparing for Ariosto the perils of the wooded and wild Garfagnana, which would transform the paper forest of the Furioso into the reality of a ‘rincrescevol labirinto’ (noisome labyrinth [Satire IV, 171]). 18 The following scholars have studied Dante’s presence in the Furioso: Cesare Segre, ‘Un repertorio linguistico e stilistico’; Luigi Blasucci, ‘La Commedia come fonte linguistica e stilistica del Furioso’; Carlo Ossola, ‘Dantismi metrici nel Furioso.’ In the particular case of the ‘courtly formulas’ that interests us

232 Notes to pages 50–1 here, it should be observed that Ariosto’s borrowings from Dante almost always stem from a deliberate and conscious intention: we need only recall the programmatic opening line (Purgatorio, XIV, 109–10]): ‘Le donne e’ cavalier, li affanni e li agi / che ne ’nvogliava amore e cortesia’ (The ladies, the knights, the arms, the loves, the courtesies, the bold exploits). Ariosto’s parodic replacement of Francesca with Lidia, who commits the sin of amorous ingratitude, testifies to Ariosto’s particular attention to Dante. If one can effectively think of Dante as one of the filters through which Ariosto retrieves the courtly tradition, we should not be surprised by the notable results of the critical investigations into this aspect of the Furioso, which have been particularly fruitful in examining questions of style. Circular motion represents the typical case in which ‘Dante’s phrasing, in its pure rhythmicsyntactical impostation, becomes for Ariosto a recurrent narrative styleme’ (Blasucci 131), as the detailed list of Ariostesque variants on Inferno V, 43, demonstrates: ‘Di qua di là, di giù di su smarrita / surge la turba ...’ (To this side and that and up and down the bewildered throng surges [XX, 90]); ‘chi su, chi giù, chi qua, chi là travia’ (one up, one down, one here, one there goes astray [XXIV, 2]); ‘Di qua, di là, di su di giù discorre / per tutta Francia ... ’ (Here and there, up and down, he runs through all France [XXIV, 14]); ‘di qua di là, di su di giù si volve’ (Here and there, up and down he turns [Cinque canti III, 54]). The lexical repertory accumulated around the movement of the quest also provides these correspondences: ‘gli par colei, per cui la notte e il giorno / cercato Francia avea dentro e dintorno’ (she seems her for whom night and day he had searched France inside and outside [XII, 5]); and ‘e senza frutto alcun tutto quel giorno / cercò di su di giù, dentro e dintorno’ (and fruitlessly all that day he sought up stairs and down, inside and out [XXII, 15]). Compare these to Purgatorio XXVIII, 1: ‘Vago già di cercar dentro e dintorno’ (Eager now to search within and round), which here too rhymes with ‘day’ or ‘giorno’ (Blasucci 124); while the ‘larghe ruote’ (large circles) with which the hippogriff descends in flight (IV, 24, and VI, 19) are borrowed from Dante’s Geryon: ‘e disse: Gerion, moviti omai: / le rote larghe, e lo scender sia poco; / pensa la nova soma che tu hai’ (then he said ‘Geryon, move on now; let your circles be wide, and your descending slow: remember the new burden that you have’ [Inferno XVII, 98]). 19 ‘ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra!’ (I, 7). 20 ‘Orlando, poi che quattro volte e sei / tutto cercato ebbe il palazzo strano ...’ (XII, 13). 21 In Tasso the meanings of the term are equally complex. In the first instance, the quest is the Christian one that has as its aim the liberation of Jerusalem, identified with the crusade and religious values. Thus, while Ariosto laicized

Notes to page 51 233 the movement of the quête in fragmenting it among different individual aims, Tasso recovers its collective and unitary religious dimension. This approach comes to coincide with the very consciousness of the heroic genre, since Goffredo’s divine investiture is ideally associated with the no less divine investiture of the poet who sings it. Tasso’s privileged term is not that of the quest (inchiesta) but that of acquisition (acquisto): (‘molto soffrì nel glorioso acquisto’ [much he suffered in the glorious conquest] Liberata I, 1; see also XX, 19 and 90), a term that is no less commonly employed by Ariosto. In fact, in Furioso XVII, 74, he expressly chooses it to designate the crusade, to which the poet exhorts the Christian peoples who are instead sinfully engaged in dividing up Italy: ‘Voi, gente ispana, e voi, gente di Francia, / volgete altrove, e voi, Svizzeri, il piede, / e voi, Tedeschi, a far più degno acquisto; / che quanto qui cercate è già di Cristo’ (You, Spanish people, and you, people of France, and you Switzers, and you, Germans, turn your feet elsewhere to make more worthy conquest, for all you seek here already belongs to Christ). The common rhyme acquisto/Cristo in Tasso and Ariosto, and, in the latter, the predictable return of the technical verb cercare, should be noted. Inchiesta is maintained by Tasso only in its traditional meaning of search (already present with this meaning in the Rinaldo, the chivalric poem he wrote as a young man: cf I, 50, and III, 21): the search for Rinaldo, enslaved by Armida (‘Amici, dura e faticosa inchiesta seguite’ [My friends, you are pursuing a hard and difficult quest] Liberata XIV, 35); and the search for the fainting and wounded Tancredi after his final duel with Argante (‘Seguian molti altri la medesima inchiesta, / ma ritrovarlo avien che lor succeda’ [Many others were following the same quest, but it happens that it falls to them to find him] XIX, 116). So too does circular motion appear in the classic description of the duel: ‘Quegli con larghe rote aggira i passi / stretto ne l’arme, e colpi accenna e finge; ... / Di qua di là si volge ...’ (The one wheels about in wide circles, poised behind his weapons, and feigns blows and feints; leaps here and there [Liberata VII, 38–9]). Tasso completes the transformation underway in the Furioso. Rinaldo, returning back across the Mediterranean on Fortune’s boat after liberating Armida, ‘or lo stato del campo, or il costume / di varie genti investigando intende’ (Now he is intent on making out the nature of the countryside, now the customs of the various peoples [Liberata XVII, 55]). Vafrino is charged with a spying mission in the Egyptian camp, and his quête, marked by the typical expressive formulas, assumes the full character of intellectual investigation: ‘Di qua di là sollecito s’aggira / per le vie, per le piazze e per le tende ... / spia gli occulti disegni e parte intende’ (Hither and thither he wanders observantly among the streets, the parade grounds and the tents ... he spies out their hidden

234 Notes to pages 51–3

22 23

24

25

designs and partially learns them [Liberata XIX, 60]). In general, one must say that Tasso’s quest is by now an entirely intellectualized movement, a veritable cognitive drama, which is often coloured by erotic and transgressive meanings. This is the case in the straining, which is not only physical, to penetrate the mysteries of the wood enchanted by demons (Liberata XIII, 37), and the eye’s straining to discern Armida’s intimate beauties (Liberata IV, 31– 2). ‘e certo da ragion si dipartiva; / che per una o per due che trovi ree, / che cento buone sien creder si dee’ (XXVII, 122). Pampaloni talks about ‘ethical experimentation’ in relation to the novella of Astolfo and Jocondo in his commentary on the Orlando furioso (230). The distinction between opinion and experience as a principle of knowledge goes back to the humanist culture of the quattrocento and its Platonic matrix, in, for example, Leon Battista Alberti, Della famiglia, libro III, 290. And it progressively assumes the open conflict that is registered in Ariosto’s device of the quest and is radicalized in the Machiavellian dichotomy between imagination and effective reality (The Prince, chapter 15). Ariosto even brings the scientific achievements and geographical discoveries of his time back to the archaic sphere of the quête. A polemical intent is evident in his description of the discovery of firearms in the modern age as a material rediscovery. The research was suggested by the devil himself, who, with his malign denunciation, put a German necromancer on the right track, so that Orlando’s reconsignment of Cimosco’s arquebus to the bottom of the ocean was to no avail (XI, 22–3). God behaved similarly, but for benign ends, in keeping the route to the Americas hidden until the modern age (XV, 24), giving Columbus’s ‘new Argonauts’ the glory of the attempt to ‘ritrovar nuove terre e nuovo mondo’ (find new lands and a new world [XV, 22]). In these passages the lexicon of the language of the investigatory quest (inchiesta) appears: the term proper enters Ariosto’s language only later, when Ruggiero’s analogous gesture of burying at the bottom of a well another weapon that is reprehensible from the point of view of chivalric ethics, the enchanted shield, causes the other knights to search, this time in vain: ‘Poi che di voce in voce si fe’ questa / strana aventura in tutto il mondo nota, / molti guerrieri si missero all’inchiesta / e di parte vicina e di remota’ (When, going from tongue to tongue, this strange adventure was made known in all the world, many warriors from parts near and distant set themselves to the search [XXII, 94]). See the comments of Alberti’s Lionardo, Della famiglia book III, 290: ‘io ora dimando, ora rispondo difendendo il contrario di quello che gli altri dicono ... altre volte mi piglio diletto a ogni sua sentenza contrastare ...’ (now I ques-

Notes to pages 53–5 235

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

tion, now I answer defending the contrary of what the other says ... at other times I take delight in opposing everything he says) and Castiglione in his Risposta al Valdes: ‘Dico che a noi altri ancora è nota la maniera accademica dello scrivere in dialogo e sappiamo che il costume de’ platonici era sempre contraddire e non affermar mai cosa alcuna’ (I say that to us the academic way of writing in dialogue is still very familiar and we know that the practice of Plato’s followers was always to contradict and never to affirm anything). ‘Lascián – disse Jocondo – queste ingrate, / e proviam se son l’altre così molli’ (XXVIII, 45). The archetype remains, not by chance, Orlando’s ‘amorous quest.’ He also departs incognito, disguised beneath black armour: ‘Quivi il tutto cercò ... / non spiò sol per Francia e suo distretto, / ma per Uvernia e per Guascogna ancora / ... e cercò da Provenza alla Bretagna / e da Picardi ai termini di Spagna’ (He sought everywhere in that place ... he searched not merely in France and her vicinity but he looked in Auvergne and also in Gascony ... and he hunted from Provence to Brittany and from the Picards to the bounds of Spain [IX, 6]); see also XII, 4. ‘In disguise they travelled through Italy, France, the land of the Flemings and of the English’ (XXVIII, 48). ‘and however many fair cheeks they saw, they found them all courteous at their solicitations’ (XXVIII, 48). ‘he got an answer the reverse of what he expected’ (XXVIII, 6). ‘and sees what would be hard to believe for anybody who heard it’ (XXVIII, 33). ‘trovò tutto il contrario al suo pensiero / in questa parte il re de’ saracini’ (XV, 8). ‘Oh di quante battaglie il fin successe / diverso a quel che si credette inante’ (X, 54). Cf Mario Santoro, ‘La prova del “nappo” e la cognizione ariostesca del reale.’ This is a classic example of contamination of sources (cf Rajna, Le fonti 496– 503), since Ariosto inserts into the general Breton frame (in Tristan we are told that the sorceress Morgan had sent a magic horn to her brother Arthur to convince him of Guinevere’s infidelity, but the horn was accidentally taken to the court of Mark of Cornwall where it unmasked Iseult’s infidelity) a story modelled on the classical myth of Cephalus and Procris. Ariosto had in mind as much the Ovidian version (Metamorphoses VII, 690 ff) as its adaptation for the stage by Niccolò da Correggio, which was performed in Ferrara on 22 January 1487 to great acclaim. In the first Don Quixote, Cervantes inserted the novella El curioso impertinente

236 Notes to pages 55–8

37 38

39 40

41 42 43

(chapters 33–5), set in sixteenth-century Florence, which contaminates the two stories in Ariosto of the host and the judge (also expressly recalled in the text). The protagonist, who not by chance is called Anselmo, induces his dearest friend, Lotario, to court his very virtuous wife, Camilla, to test her fidelity, with tragic consequences for all. Concentrating all attention on the psychological nucleus of the novella, Cervantes reveals himself to have intuited perfectly the pathological nature of the desire that disguises itself behind the husband’s wish to know, and develops his story by bringing to the foreground that which in Ariosto’s more synthetic text remains hidden: the obsession with self-injury, the perverse desire for that which one fears. On Cervantes’s use of Ariosto, see Maxime Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne. Recherches sur l’influence du Roland furieux. See also Thomas N. Hart, Cervantes and Ariosto: Renewing Fiction. ‘E tu fosti a cercar poco avveduto / quel che tu avresti non trovar voluto’ (XLIII, 47). The distinction is in chapter XXXVIII of In Praise of Folly. Already in chapter XXIX, however, Erasmus sets up a discussion of the dangers of a ‘perversa prudentia’ (wrong foreseeing) that is much madder than true madness because, in stripping away the masks of illusion to arrive at the heart of the truth, it in fact destroys reciprocal tolerance. Ferroni has examined both chapters, relating them to the episode of the chalice and indicating the root of Rinaldo’s wisdom in Erasmus’s ‘nihil ultra sortem sapere velle’ (in no way to desire to know one’s ultimate fate), ‘L’Ariosto e la concezione umanistica’ 78. ‘Sia vero o falso che Ginevra tolto /s’abbia il suo amante, io non riguardo a questo’ (IV, 64). Even Anselmo’s internal turmoil takes the form of circular motion: ‘E sopra ogni mestizia che l’opprima, / e che l’afflitta mente aggiri e arruoti, / è ’l saper come, vinta d’avarizia, / per prezzo abbia a lasciar sua pudicizia’ (Above every other sadness that weighs him down and that whirls about and grinds his afflicted spirit, is the knowledge that, conquered by avarice, she is going to abandon her chastity for money [XLIII, 89]). ‘tocca e vede / quel di ch’avuto avea tanto desire’ (XXV, 67). ‘trovò con man la veritade espressa’ (XXV, 65). To demonstrate the self-conscious awareness of the fundamental vanity of the aventure, Koehler quotes Calogrenant’s words in Chrétien’s Yvain: ‘Je suis, ce voiz, uns chevaliers / qui quier ce que trover ne puis; / assez ai quis et rien ne truis’ (lines 358–60) (I, as you see, am a knight / seeking what I cannot find; / I’ve sought long and yet find nothing. [Trans. Kibler, p. 17]). Koehler also quotes Dinadan’s similar remarks in a late prose version of Tristan: ‘Je suis un

Notes to pages 58–9 237

44 45 46 47 48

chevalier errant qui ciascun jor voiz aventures querant et le sens du monde; mes point n’en puis trouver’ (113) (I am a knight errant who seeks out adventure and the meaning of life every day. But I can’t find it). ‘God has forbidden such certainty more than he did the Tree of Life to our first father’ (XLIII, 7). ‘my wish to seek beyond the bounds within which one’s wife should be examined’ (XLIII, 45). Thus Tiresias in Oedipus Rex: ‘How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be / When there is no help in truth!’ (vv 316–17). ‘metter saria mille contra uno a giuoco; / che perder si può molto, e acquistar poco’ (XLIII, 66). There are numerous examples of this dialectic throughout the Furioso. Here I will limit myself to quoting the political ones: ‘poco guadagno et infinito danno / riporteran d’Italia ... ’ (they ... will bring back from Italy little gain and boundless damage) – the prophecy of the French invasions, XXXIII, 10; ‘che poco saggio si può dir colui / che perde il suo per acquistar l’altrui’ (he can be thought not very wise who loses his own to gain that of another) – King Sobrino’s intervention at the assembly of the pagan leaders to convince Agramante to retreat, XXXVIII, 52; ‘Vincendo voi, poco acquistar potete, / ma non perder già poco, se perdete’ (If you win, you can gain little; but can lose by no means little if you lose) – analogous advice from Brandimarte to Agramante before the duel of Lampedusa, XLI, 40. The choice of these examples serves the parallelism with Machiavelli that is introduced shortly afterwards: in effect, there is a broad convergence with Il principe (chapter 3: ‘E chi non governerà bene questa parte, perderà presto quello che arà acquistato’ (And whoever does not conduct this policy well will soon lose what he has acquired); chapter 12: ‘come intervenne di poi a Vailà, dove, in una giornata, perderono quello che in ottocento anni, con tanta fatica, avevano acquistato’ (as then happened at Vailà: there they lost in one day what they had acquired with such trouble in eight hundred years); and with the Discorsi: II, 25, ‘Vedesi pertanto, quanto gli uomini s’ingannano [...] nel pigliare de’ partiti; e come molte volte credono guadagnare una cosa, e la perdono’ (This shows how apt men are to decide themselves [...] in deciding upon what course they are to take, and how frequently they lose where they had confidently hoped to win); II, 30, ‘Vedesi ancora, per questo, ogni dì, miracolose perdite e miracolosi acquisti. Perché, dove gli uomini hanno poca virtù, la fortuna mostra assai la potenza sua’ (In consequence of this we daily see remarkable losses, and still more wonderful conquests; for where men have but little wisdom and valour, Fortune more signally displays her power). I realize that the argument outlined briefly here would merit much

238 Notes to page 59 more detailed treatment, but analyses of this kind are unfortunately lacking even in the specific bibliography. Much criticism is too intent on reconstructing biographical relations and overt intertextual connections and too little committed to gathering the thematic analogies that emerge clearly despite differences in language and expressive contexts. See, however, Giovan Battista Salinari, ‘Ariosto fra Machiavelli e Erasmo’; Giorgio Padoan, ‘Il Furioso e la crisi del Rinascimento’; and Charles D. Klopp, ‘The Centaur and the Magpie: Ariosto and Machiavelli’s Prince.’ 49 ‘And what sign of madness is clearer than losing oneself through desire for another?’ (XXIV, 1). 50 These themes characterize the Cortegiano: ‘Lo esser voi gratissimo universalmente alle donne è bono argomento che sappiate tutti e modi per li quali s’acquista la lor grazia’ (The fact that you enjoy such universal favour with women is good evidence that you know all the ways by which that favour is gained [III, 61]); and ‘Non son di poca importanzia tutte quelle condizioni che giovano al guadagnar la grazia del principe, il che è necessario, come avevamo detto, prima che ’l cortegiano se avventuri a volergli insegnar la virtù’ (None are of little importance that serve to gain the prince’s favour, which is necessary [as we have said] before the Courtier may venture to try to teach him virtue [IV, 25]). 51 We find the dialectic of acquiring/keeping/losing that inspires The Prince from start to finish already formulated in Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori, which announces the work (10 December 1513): ‘uno opuscolo De principatibus, dove io mi profondo quanto io posso nelle cogitazioni di questo subbietto, disputando che cosa è principato, di quale spetie sono, come e’ s’acquistono, come e’ si mantengono, perché e’ si perdono’ (a work De principatibus, where I cogitate as deeply as I can on this subject, arguing about what a principality is, what kind they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost). To these ideal consonances between Castiglione and Machiavelli (but see also Guicciardini in his Ricordo 51: ‘E quanta pazzia è giucare a uno giuoco che si possa perdere più sanza comparazione che guadagnare!’ [And what madness it is to play a game where one can lose more without compensation that one can gain!]) should be added, or rather premised, the direct relation that Ariosto establishes with Bembo. Furioso XXIV, 1, represents an almost literal quotation from Bembo (cf Asolani I, 33, 51–2: ‘e veggio expresso / che per cercar altrui perdo me stesso’ ([and I see clearly that in searching for another I lose myself]). It should be noted that the first two versions of the Furioso sounded even closer to the passage from Bembo: ‘che, per cercar altrui, perder se stesso’ (who, in searching for what is another’s, loses himself).

Notes to pages 60–3

239

3. Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso 1 Cf Riccardo Bruscagli, ‘“Romanzo” ed “epos” dall’Ariosto al Tasso,’ in Il romanzo. Origine e sviluppo delle strutture narrative nella letteratura occidentale 65. 2 According to Pigna: ‘E perché d’erranti persone è tutto il poema, egli altresì errante è, in quanto che piglia e interdette infinite volte cose infinite e sempre con arte, perciò che se bene l’ordine Epico non osserva, non è che una sua regola non habbia’ (And because the whole poem is about errant people, he is equally errant, inasmuch as he takes and leaves infinite things infinite times, and always ingeniously, so that although he does not observe Epic order, he does still have a rule of his own [I romanzi, libro I, p. 56]). Ten years later, Minturno criticizes this point: ‘Ma non posso prender maraviglia grandissima, che si trovino alcuni scienziati, e ornati di buone lettere, e pieni d’alto ingegno; i quali, per quel che se n’intende, confessino già ne’ Romanzi non esser la forma, e la regola, che tennero Homero, e Virgilio, e dovervisi tenere Aristotele e Horatio commandarono; e nondimeno si ingegnino di questo errore difendere; anzi, percioche tal composizione comprende i fatti de’ Cavalieri erranti, affermino ostinatamente non pur la virgiliana e homerica maniera di poetare non convenirle: ma esserle richiesto, ch’ella anco errante sia, passando d’una in altra materia, e varie cose in un fascio stringendo’ (But I cannot be very astonished that we should find certain knowledgeable men of letters full of high intelligence, who, as far as they understand it, argue that in romances one no longer finds the form and rule that Homer and Virgil maintained; and that Aristotle and Horace prescribed; and nevertheless they strive to defend this error; in fact, since this form is about knights errant, they obstinately affirm not only that the Virgilian and Homeric manner of writing poetry is not suitable [for romances]; but that it is called for, in order that it be errant, passing from one style to another, and bundling different things up together in the same way [Arte poetica, libro I, p. 27]). 3 See the edition by C. Meredith-Jones, Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi ou chronique du pseudo-Turpin. 4 Cf A. Roncaglia, ‘Nascita e sviluppo della narrativa cavalleresca’ 242–3. 5 Bodel, Chanson de Saisnes, lines 9–10: ‘The stories from Brittany are empty and pleasing; / those from France are true, made manifest every day.’ Today the historical assessment of this contrast has changed, especially after Koehler’s studies on Arthurian romance. But it is a topos that continues throughout the Middle Ages, reaching the Renaissance heirs to epic in the wake of the famous Petrarchan verses of the Triumphus Cupidinis I, 3, 79–81. 6 Jauss, ‘Chanson de geste et Roman courtois.’

240 Notes to pages 63–6 7 Jauss stresses that the possibility that authors of Arthurian romance might claim a certain veracity for themselves is naturally not excluded; however, the truth of the romance cannot be found in the identification of sensus litteralis and sensus historicus. It resides solely in the sensus moralis of the tale and must be developed through the interpretation of the fabula (66). 8 Even in the Entrée d’Espagne, a fourteenth-century Franco-Venetian poem, the author claims to have found the autograph copy of Turpin’s history, the supposed source of the work (lines 10978–82). 9 Cf Ancroia I, 42: ‘Come dimostra Torpin nel suo dire’ (as Turpin demonstrates in his telling) and II, 22: ‘Come raconta Torpin mio autore’ (as my auctor Turpin recounts). 10 Cabani, Le forme del cantare 121. I acknowledge my debt to this useful study on the cantari. 11 ‘Il canterino possedeva infatti tutto un repertorio di formule parassitarie l’inserimento delle quali nella misura dell’endecasillabo era favourito da una netta cesura che, nel dividere il verso in un settenario più un quinario e viceversa, faceva sì che la narrazione effettiva passasse soltanto attraverso i primi emistichi, mentre gli altri avevano funzione esclusiva di riempitivi’ (The artist of the cantare in fact possessed a whole repertory of parasitical formulas whose insertion into the measure of the hendecasyllable was favoured by a clear caesura that, in dividing the line into seven and five syllables and vice versa, allowed the narration to effectively pass only through the first hemistiches, while the others had the exclusive function of being fillers [Silvano Nigro, ‘Luigi Pulci’ 26]). 12 Cabani, Le forme del cantare 134–5. 13 Cf William Nelson, Fact or Fiction, chapters 1 and 2. 14 G.B. Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico remains a useful starting place despite its rather modest results, which do not go beyond a mere list of these quotations. 15 ‘dice Turpin (che mi par meraviglia).’ 16 ‘Fammi Turpin meravigliar talvolta / se non ch’io veggo poi che e’ dice il vero, / quand’io ho questa istoria ben raccolta’ (XXVII, 257). 17 ‘Io chiamo qui Turpin mio testimonio: / trecentomila è questa schiera terza.’ 18 ‘[A]nd now I fear that, dazed as I am still, / I may not make it out of this one route.’ 19 ‘[H]e makes you touch the truth of the whole matter, / and the least falsehood never does he utter.’ 20 ‘[D]eep in a wood I was, unknown to me, / but now the rightful path I clearly see.’

Notes to pages 66–9 241 21 ‘How well I know that I must go on straight, / most careful the least falsehood to avoid, / because this story is a truthful one.’ 22 ‘If I but take a single step awry, / they croak at me, rebuke and reprimand.’ 23 Cieco da Ferrara also follows Boiardo’s lead. He jokingly describes Turpin as ‘scrittor famoso, il qual non scriveria / per tutto l’or del mondo una menzogna’ (the famous writer, who would never write a lie for all the gold in the world [Mambriano XLV, 122]), or the ‘autor che non suol mai scriver bugia’ (author who is never one to write lies [XXXVI, 73]). There are frequent insinuations of doubt: ‘scrive Turpin, se l’è vero io no ’l so’ (writes Turpin, I do not know if it is true [XXXIII, 90]), and ‘se Turpin non ciancia’ (if Turpin is not babbling [XXXIV, 96]). There is also an instance where a good-natured exercise in criticism of sources resolves itself by privileging the most fantastic and outlandish solution attributed to Turpino, left to the reader’s preference: ‘Tutti gli autori s’accordano insieme / che Galeano fu morto e sepolto ... / Turpin, volendo poi tal question solvere, / scrisse che colui s’era fatto in polvere. / Ma poi che ’l non è articolo di fede, / tenete quella parte che vi piace, / ché l’autor libramente vel concede’ (All the authors agree that Galeano was dead and buried ... Turpin, wanting to resolve the question, wrote that he had been reduced to dust ... But since it is not an article of faith, keep whatever part of it you like, which the author freely concedes to you [VIII, 36]). Agostini employs stereotypical formulas of doubt: ‘se Turpin non mente’ (if Turpin does not lie, [Continuazione dell’Orlando Innamorato IV, I, 24]), and ‘se Turpin non erra’ (if Turpin is not wrong [V, I, 80]), as well as using Turpin frequently for narrative transitions: ‘lasciamo andar el nano al suo camino / che qui narrar di lui non fa mestiero / perché su ciò non parla più Turpino / sì che tornar conviemmi al buon Ruggiero’ (let us leave the dwarf to carry on along his path, since here it is not appropriate to tell of him, since Turpin does not talk of him any more, so I ought to return to good Ruggiero [IV, I, 28]), and ‘ma pur quel c’ho detto scrive Turpino / e lascia qui Rinaldo paladino’ (but Turpin also writes what I have said, and leaves the paladin Rinaldo here [IV, IV, 3]). 24 Cf Cabani, Le forme del cantare 189. 25 The distinction between the functions of the narrator goes back, famously, to Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, chapter 5. 26 The Furioso is the expression of a medievalizing romance, representing the parodic liquidator according to Hegel. But the way in which it uses narrative devices, which will later characterize the modern novel, is singular. The topos of the fictive source, or the rediscovered manuscript, was to enjoy great favour in romantic literature, influenced by the first great modern novel,

242 Notes to pages 69–71 Don Quixote, which clearly shows its genetic links to the Furioso. Ariosto’s poem had extraordinary success in Spain, translated into Castilian by Jeronimo de Urrea, (Anversa 1549), by Hernando de Alcocer (Toledo 1550) and by Diego Vazquez de Contreras (Madrid 1585). On this issue, see also M. Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne. Cervantes’s romance pretends to be the translation of an Arab original by the pen of the historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. Through the pretext of the ‘source,’ the second narrator is able to assume the attitude of either a neutral reporter or a critical interlocutor who contests or limits affirmations not his own, creating a play of mirrored references with extraordinarily humorous effects. Although Cide Hamete shares with Turpin the system of veracity and improbability, he complicates it further by being an Arab. Thus, while he appears truthful and believable as a historian, as an infidel he is unworthy of trust a priori. It is also extremely interesting that the duplicity of the narrator has a correlative in the complementary couple of the protagonists, who oscillate similarly, between the poles of madness and wisdom (Don Quixote), and credulity and common sense (Sancho Panza). Cf Letizia Bianchi, ‘Verdadera istoria e novelas nella prima parte del Quijote.’ Like Orlando, Ariosto’s narrator is simultaneously wise and mad, and the work is the fruit no less of this intermittent madness than of the ‘errors’ that inevitably come with it. 27 Scruples of intellectual credibility, not of a moral kind, had made Boiardo distance himself from Turpin, as when he tells of the monster Orrilo who reattaches his limbs cut off by the knights Grifone and Aquilante: ‘Se a quei baron parea la cosa nova, / quale è incontrata, a dir non è bisogno. / Ché, avenga che Turpin a ciò me mova, / io stesso a racontarla mi vergogno’ (That what occurred was something new / to those knights, I don’t need to say, / And though Turpino is my source, / I feel embarrassed telling you [Innamorato III, II, 54]). Turpin is the source of shame in the Cinque canti, too: ‘D’una fontana similmente tocca, / ch’a ridirla le guance mi fa rosse’ (He also mentions a freshwater fountain which makes my cheeks blush to repeat it [Cinque canti IV, 88]). 28 Ariosto uses this same playful tactic for the apparently forced insertion of the antifeminist story of the wicked Gabrina, first reaffirming his scruples about the truth: ‘Ella era tale, e come imposto fummi / da chi può in me, non preterisco il vero’ (Such she was; and as it was laid on me by her who has power over me, I do not avoid the truth [XXII, 2]). He then takes refuge in the source’s pseudo-justification: ‘che l’ordinata istoria così vuole’ (because my story as put in order so asks [XXII, 3]). Modern commentators tend to explain the ‘imposition’ not as an authoritarian intervention by the powerful (behind which might be hidden some reference to events in Ferrara) but as

Notes to pages 71–2 243 obedience to artistic exigencies. (Ariosto’s gesture towards the ‘ordinata istoria’ seems to confirm this artistic motivation.) 29 This is a device destined to enjoy great favour in the development of the modern novel. But in the novel the dominant concern in an invitation to skip a section is the reader’s boredom rather than moral reactions. In Manzoni there are at least three authorial interventions of this type: in the famous digression on love in novels (‘Il lettore che lo sa potrà saltare alcune pagine per riprendere il filo della storia: e per me lo consiglio di far così: giacché le parole che mi sento sulla punta della penna sono tali da annoiarlo, o anche da fargli venir la muffa al naso’ [The reader who knows this can skip some pages to take up the thread of the story again later. And from my point of view, I advise him to do so, since the words that I sense on the tip of my pen are such as may bore him, or even make his nose grow mouldy], Fermo e Lucia, cap. I, tomo II: ‘Digressione: La Signora’); in the noless-famous presentation of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo (‘Intorno a questo personaggio bisogna assolutamente che noi spendiamo quattro parole: chi non si curasse di sentirle, e avesse però voglia d’andare avanti nella storia, salti addirittura al capitolo seguente’ [It is essential that we spend a few words on this character: let he who does not wish to hear them and yet would still wish to go ahead with the story skip directly to the following chapter], I promessi sposi, cap. XXII); and in the materials inserted as an appendix to the first rough draft (‘Il lettore che annoiato di questa nostra già lunga narrazione accessoria, conservasse ancora qualche curiosità di veder la fine della narrazione principale, salti il seguente capitolo’ [Let the reader who, bored by our already long digressive narration, may still maintain some curiosity to see the end of the main narration, skip the following chapter]). On Manzoni’s relation to Ariosto, see Renzo Negri, ‘Manzoni e Ariosto,’ though it is somewhat incomplete precisely as regards narrative techniques. G. Dalla Palma makes specific reference to the latter in a detailed note in Le strutture narrative 18–19. The Furioso’s fortune in England is well-documented (e.g., Walter Scott and his ‘chivalric’ passion); see Mario Praz, ‘Ariosto in Inghilterra.’ For the topos of inviting the reader not to read, we need only recall famous novels that show an awareness of Ariosto and were familiar to Manzoni, such as Tristram Shandy: ‘To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining part of this chapter; for I declare beforehand, ’tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive’ (book I, chapter 4); and Tom Jones: ‘In this light, then, or rather in this darkness, I would have the reader to consider these initial essays. And after this warning, if he shall be of opinion that he can find enough of serious in other parts of this history, he may pass over

244 Notes to pages 72–3 these, in which we profess to be laboriously dull, and begin the following books at the second chapter’ (book V, chapter 1). 30 The Boccaccesque atmosphere in which the novella takes place (the Lombardic setting and the syntactical movements of the opening, as well as, naturally, its obscene content) recalls the Decameron’s rubrics, expressly designed to allow readers to censor their own readings. 31 The purely subjective selection criterion for recounting Orlando’s acts of madness demonstrates the arbitrary nature of these choices, which Ariosto seeks to make appear forced: ‘Pazzia sarà, se le pazzie d’Orlando / prometto raccontarvi ad una ad una; / che tante e tante fur, ch’io non so quando / finir: ma ve n’andrò scegliendo alcuna / solenne et atta da narrar cantando, / e ch’all’istoria mi parrà oportuna; / né quella tacerò miracolosa, / che fu nei Pirenei sopra Tolosa’ (It will be a mad act to promise to recount to you one by one Orlando’s mad acts, which were so very many that I do not know when I should finish, but I shall merely go on choosing from them some that are striking and suited for telling in song and that seem to me fit for my story; nor shall I keep still about that marvellous one that happened in the Pyrenees near Toulouse [XXIX, 50]). 32 In ‘La metafora di testo,’ Guglielmo Gorni surprisingly forgets such a typical poet-weaver as Ariosto, in his historical reconstruction of Italian literature through Tasso. Usually of particular interest in his work is the integration of the narrative and metanarrative levels, bringing together the textual weaving of the author and the weaving of tricks and betrayals by certain characters, permitted by the semantic ambivalence of verbs such as ordire (to lay out threads in weaving) and tramare (to plot or scheme), enough to make one talk of a ‘Maganzese’ Ariosto. Here are examples of both types: (a) ‘ma perché varie fila a varie tele / uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo’ (But because I need various threads for various webs, all of which I know how to lay out like a weaver [II, 30]); ‘Ma tornando al lavor che vario ordisco’ (But returning to the work that like a weaver I lay out with variety [XXII, 3]); ‘Lungo sarà, se tutte in verso ordisco / le cose che gli fur quivi dimostre’ (It will take long if I weave into verse all the things that were shown him there [XXXIV, 81]); (b) ‘ma alcuna finzione, alcuno inganno / di tenerlo in speranza ordisce e trama’ (but she arranges and contrives some fiction, some deceit, to keep him in hope [I, 51]); ‘Lascian costui, che mentre all’altrui vita / ordisce inganno, il suo morir procura’ (Let us leave him, who, while he schemes deception against another’s life [III, 6]); ‘Rinaldo fe’ l’inganno tutto espresso, / ch’avea ordito a Ginevra Polinesso’ (Rinaldo made entirely plain the trick that Polinesso had planned against Ginevra [V, 85]); ‘e perché egli a seguire / non n’abbia, e a trubar la tela ordita’ (and that he might

Notes to pages 73–5 245 not be able to follow and to disorder the web we had laid out [XVIII, 83]). Naturally, the Cinque canti, constructed around the traditional plots of Ganelon, constitute a triumph of this semantic field: cf II, 9; III, 23; V, 14. The nexus ‘ordire-tramare’ returns in a more neutral sense in the Satires: ‘convenevole è ben ch’io ordisca e trami / di non patire alla vita disagio’ (It is proper that I lay the warp and weave the cloth so that I do not suffer discomfort during the one life ... [Satire III, 240–2]). 33 Rabelais is another sixteenth-century author who delights in dialogue with the reader, by turns good-natured and provocative. He jokes about the reliability of his own tale, which is entrusted to the authority of the chronicles of the giants, with the same kind of rationalist fun-making that Ariosto and Cervantes employ: ‘Je me doubte que ne croyez assurément ceste estranee natività. Si ne le croyez, je ne m’en socie, mais un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens, croit tousjours ce qu’on luy dict et qu’il trouve par escript. Est-ce contre nostre loy, nostre foy, contre raison, contre la Saincte Escripture? De ma part, je ne trouve rien escript es Bibles sainctes qui soit contre cela.’ In the prologue to Pantagruel, Rabelais makes claim for the credibility of the Chronicque Gargantuine and the status of truthful writer who ‘ne s’advint oncques de mentir, ou asseure chose que ne fuist veritable.’ He even goes so far as to invoke a curse upon himself ‘en cas que j’en mente en toute l’histoire d’un seul mot’ or upon his readers ‘en cas que vous ne croyez fermement tout ce que je vous racompteray en ceste presente Chronicque!’ (Oeuvres complètes 23–4, 169–70). 34 This duel gives Ariosto the occasion for a metaliterary game founded upon intertextual allusion. Here, he enters into a secret and ironic competition with a contemporary chivalric poet, with Turpin’s endorsement, overtaking the already redundant limits fixed by the author of the Mambriano: ‘e i troncon de le lancie andar sì in su, / scrive Turpin, se l’è vero io no ’l so, / che ben tre giorni sterno a tornar giù’ (and the shattered lances went so high up, writes Turpin, whether it is true I do not know that they took a good three days to come down, [XXXIII, 90]). We might also note that the seal of truth guaranteed for Ariosto by Turpin, ‘verace in questo loco’ (trustworthy in this place), escapes Cieco’s doubts: ‘se l’è vero io no ’l so’ (I do not know if it is true). 35 Galilei, Il saggiatore, para. 44. Writing in quite another vein, the sixteenthcentury commentator Simone Fornari appears to register Ariosto’s nods to Turpin quite uncritically: ‘Si comprende adunque per le raccontate cose, che l’Ariosto come in tutte quelle cose, che appartengono alla perfettion d’un sommo e egregio poeta, egli fu vigilantissimo così anchora in abbracciar materia che tenga del fondamento verace, non fu mica negligente. Et di

246 Notes to pages 75–8

36 37 38

39

40 41 42

qui viene, che tante volte cita Turpin Arcivescovo, il quale pienamente scrisse le croniche delle cose di Francia’ (One understands, therefore, through the things I have recounted, that just as Ariosto was extremely vigilant in all those things that relate to the perfection of a great and supreme poet, he also was in no way negligent in embracing subjects with a truthful basis. And from this it derives that he often quotes Archbishop Turpin, who wrote in great detail the chronicles of the events of France [Spositione sopra l’Orlando furioso, parte I, 77]); ‘Studiasi il poeta quanto più puote, di far parere se non vera, almen verisimile la sua istoria. Il perché spesse volte vi allega l’autorità di Turpino’ (The poet strives as much as he can to make his story seem, if not true, at least verisimilar. That is why he often makes recourse to Turpin’s authority [parte I, 654]). Cf Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, chapter 4. Galilei, Il saggiatore, para 6. ‘bensì preservare la purezza della zona da cui sono ricacciate; e non per severità, come ornamento superfluo, bensì per rigore indispensabile, come disturbo, evasione e mistificazione.’ ‘quella confusione tra zone di linguaggio che diventa confusione tra zone di pensiero, appena la logica di un certo linguaggio pretenda surrogare la logica ben altrimenti esigente di un certo pensiero.’ ‘rende ragione all’essenza fittizia della poesia nell’atto stesso di screditarla per allontanarla dal vero.’ Francesco Orlando, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana 91–3. The hippogriff’s genesis is entirely literary, so much so that the animal embodies Virgil’s adynaton ‘iungentur iam gryphes equis’ (May griffons mate with horses from now on [Eclogues VIII, 27]). Among the many possible sources indicated by commentators of Ariosto’s inventio, the Ovidian ones merit special attention because of the affinity of poetic Stimmung: the description of Pegasus (Metamorphoses IV, 785–6) and those of Calais and Zete (VI, 714–18). In the Metamorphoses realistic details are widely applied to the negligible aspects of a manifestly improbable whole. The paradoxical affirmations of the author also contribute to this effet du réel. Ovid often makes ironic comments both on the credibility of his stories taken from the mythological (I, 400; III, 31; VI, 561) and on the reliability of poets. Ovid’s own poem plays with this idea by negating itself, declaring its fictive and artful nature. Just as Ariosto regards his chivalric inheritance, so Ovid regards the universe of his own venerable mythological tradition with polite, ironic detachment, precisely as he would ‘literary’ material. On these problems, see G. Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione.

Notes to pages 79–82 247 43 ‘pascansi / in una stanza, che presso all’uscita, / d’orzo e di paglia sempre era fornita.’ 44 ‘fu provisto in un’altra al suo destriero / di buona biada, che gli fu a bastanza.’ 45 This movement from the false to the true (the confirmed belief of what is least plausible) is balanced by a sort of contrary movement (from the true to the false) that calls into question the apparently most uncontestable certainties of the communis opinio: ‘Non passa mese, che tre, quattro e sei / e talor diece notti, io non mi trovi / nudo abbracciato in quel piacer con lei / ch’all’amoroso ardor par che sì giovi’ (There does not pass a month in which three, four, six, and sometimes ten nights, I am not naked in her embraces in that pleasure which seems to help the fire of love [V, 38]). Both movements work together to overturn the criterion of plausibility and end up by playfully dissolving it, since what is clearly unfounded is held up as true, while what is apparently likely (amorous pleasure) is presented with reservation. 46 See also other agnostic incipit, applied without distinction to real events: ‘O vera o falsa che sia la nova, la do a Vostra Excellentia nel modo ch’io l’ho’ (Whether the news be true or false, I give it to Your Excellency in the way that I received it), letter to Duke Alfonso I from Castelnuovo Garfagnana, 22 June 1522, or to legendary ones, as from Capitolo XVI, 1–2: ‘O vero o falso che la fama suone, / io odo dir che l’orso ... ’ (Sound the rumour true or false, / I hear tell that the bear ...). 47 Turpin no longer appears in this passage as he does in its source in Boiardo, where he plays his role in the usual game of doubt: ‘Loro a diletto se posarno un poco / entro un bel letto adorno de cortine. / Già non so dir se fecero altro gioco, / ché testimonio non ne vide el fine; / ma pur scrive Turpin verace e giusto / che il pavaglion crollava intorno al fusto’ (And they lay down to sport awhile / Inside a splendid, curtained bed. / I cannot say what games they played, / For no one saw another thing. / Turpin – impartial, true – records / The tent collapsed around the pole [Innamorato III, I, 35]). 48 See also Cinque canti I, 91–2 for the competition of conjectures: ‘Alcuni imaginar ... Altri diceano, d’altra opinione ... Et altra cosa altri dicean ... ’ (Some imagined ... Others, of another persuasion, would say ... And others said other things ...’); as well as Innamorato II, 24, 34 for a similar uncertainty about the fate of a monk beaten by Rinaldo. The lack of information is blamed on Turpin’s silence: ‘Quel che ne fosse, non scrive Turpino, / et io più oltra ve ne so dir nulla’ (What happened, Turpin does not say, / And I know nothing more than that). 49 Parker observes that the counterposition of two conflicting poetic authori-

248 Notes to pages 82–4

50

51 52 53

54

ties (Ovid and Virgil on Dido’s morality; Horace and Homer on Penelope’s chastity), working against history and the most standard commonplaces passed on by great poetry, suggests the absence of an authorized and official version (Inescapable Romance 39–44). Discussing the adventurous tradition of Margutte’s death, Pulci offers the usual touch of philological humor in Morgante XIX, 152–5: ‘Di questo ognun s’accorda, ma del quando, / o prima o poi, c’è varie opinioni / e molti dubbi e gran disputazioni’ (On this they all seem to agree, but when – / whether before or later – we’re not sure, / and many doubts and arguments endure). Since Pulci’s main source, the Cantar d’Orlando, does not speak of it, a completely imaginary author of an imaginary work comes into play: ‘Alfamenonne, / che fece gli Statuti delle Donne’ (Alfamenonne, / And the book’s title is Statuti delle donne), whose Persian text has been ‘recast in pure Florentine,’ after having been through all the languages of Babel. Rajna, Le fonti 235. In a letter to Bernardo Tasso of September 1557, Sperone Speroni shrewdly noted that Ariosto behaves towards Boiardo like ‘Martano towards Grifone.’ Another well-known stanza comes to mind: ‘Forse era ver, ma non però credibile / a chi del senso suo fosse signore, / ma parve facilmente a lui possibile, / ch’era perduto in via più grave errore. / Quel che l’uom vede, Amor gli fa invisibile, / e l’invisibil fa vedere Amore. / Questo creduto fu; che ’l miser suole / dar facile credenza a quel che vuole’ (Perhaps it was true, but all the same not credible to one in command of his senses; but it seemed easily possible to him who was lost in a much more serious error. What a man sees, Love makes invisible to him, and Love makes him see the invisible. This was believed, for a wretched man gives easy belief to what he wishes [I, 56]). The divergence here is not only between true and false but also between the true and the probable. This stanza certainly directs a malicious irony towards the naive Sacripante, but the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘credible’ also relativizes the concept of verisimilitude. Popular opinion would find a no longer virginal Angelica more credible (even though this version is not fully credited either), while the besotted and foolish Sacripante finds the version Angelica asserts more likely (parve, errore, credere). The truth, whatever it may be, appears improbable from both points of view. See also: ‘Altra volta a battaglia erano stati / Mandricardo e Ruggier solo per questo; / e per che caso fossin distornati, / io no ’l dirò, che già v’è manifesto’ (Once before, Mandricardo and Ruggiero had been on the point of combat for this alone; and by what chance they were prevented I shall not tell, for it is already known to you, XXVI, 101), which implicitly refers back to Orlando innamorato, III, 6, 39ff.

Notes to pages 84–7 249 55 Pigna, I romanzi, p. 46. While Ariosto reduces Boiardo and all the preceding tradition to a Turpinesque fairy tale, he in turn will become the victim of this process himself. Pietro Aretino’s parodic Orlandino, published in Venice between the years 1540 and 1550, imputes to the ‘cronichista ignorante’ (the ignorant chronicler) and ‘historico ciarlone’ (jabbering historian) the error into which all his illustrious followers have fallen (Pulci, Boiardo, and the ‘divine’ Ariosto), falsifiers of a truth that he, the ‘gran Pietro Aretino,’ the author of the Marfisa, now jokingly intends to re-establish. Turpin’s unmasking translates here not into the setting aside of the romance genre in favour of epic but rather into the parodic overturning of its presumed truths, obtained by stripping the chivalric characters of their traditional virtues. 56 See in particular Dionisotti, ‘Fortuna e sfortuna del Boiardo’ 221–42. 57 Dionisotti also recalled that the canonical reuse of Petrarch’s lines in connection with the commonplace of the ‘shame’ of romances was a typical expression of the mistrust that developed with regard to the chivalric genre, which was increasingly marginalized in its ‘low’ and provincial popularity. An example is Agostini’s palinode on a contemporary subject (I successi bellici [Venezia 1521]), which the usual Petrarchesque formula had heralded in the continuation of the Innamorato (IV, X, 18). On this theme, see E. Baruzzo, Nicolò degli Agostini continuatore del Boiardo. 58 On this topic, see G. Petronio, ‘Variazioni su un proemio del Furioso’; Mario Santoro, ‘Non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto’; and especially Alberto Casadei, ‘L’esordio del canto XLVI del Furioso’ (largely rewritten in the volume La strategia delle varianti 105–49). I recommend Casadei’s work for its systematic investigation of the various aspects of Ariosto’s discourse and in particular for its detailed historical-biographical identification of the characters discussed. 59 This is an ironic variant of Astolfo’s more serious but equally sceptical warning to Ruggiero about Alcina’s snares: ‘Io te n’ho dato volentieri aviso; / non ch’io mi creda che debbia giovarte’ (I have gladly given you warning of it – not that I suppose it is going to profit you [VI, 53]). The reader as much as the character must confront the problem of ‘education by experience.’ 60 Significantly, this recalls expressions coined by Dante (Inferno III, 18; Purgatorio IV, 75, and VI, 45; Paradiso V, 8 ). Ascoli notes that the common people and the elite curiously seem to change roles, since it is the herd that adopts a sceptical attitude towards the surface of the discourse, while the enlightened reader is invited to take it as literary truth (Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony 156). 61 The introduction of an imaginary contradictor is a structural expedient of Ariosto’s Satires, developed for the most part during the same years as the second Furioso (cf C. Segre, ‘Struttura dialogica delle Satire ariostesche.’

250 Notes to pages 88–90 62 This is also the case for the golden wall that encircles Alcina’s realm: ‘Alcun dal mio parer qui si dilunga, / e dice ch’ell’è alchimia; e forse ch’erra; / et anco forse meglio di me intende: / a me par oro, poi che sì risplende’ (Somebody may here dissent from my opinion and say it is brass; and perhaps he is wrong and perhaps also he understands better than I; to me it seems gold because it is so shining [VI, 59]). Making space for differences of opinion is obviously an ironic concession, indulgently renouncing the author’s legitimation of a world born solely of his imagination. 63 Durling, The Figure of the Poet 121. Durling also notes that it is fundamentally a question of the same device applied to Ariosto’s oscillating and ambiguous attitude towards women. In fact, in the episode already addressed of the ‘enforced’ inclusion of Gabrina’s story, the poet, with Turpin as his accomplice, offers to make up for the affront by praising a hundred women in recompense for the mere one whom he denigrates. This clearly contradicts his view that women worthy of praise for their conjugal faithfulness are extremely rare (XXII, 1). Thus it follows that the poet makes amends by doing nothing less than falsifying the truth (153). 64 Ariosto is particularly fond of the theme of the falseness of poets. One may lie through flattery, as we have seen, and one may lie through omission. This second fault – the result of envy – has prevented male writers from adequately celebrating the merits of women: ‘e forse ascosi han lor debiti onori / l’invidia o il non saper degli scrittori’ (and perhaps the envy or the lack of knowledge of writers has concealed the honours they deserve [XX, 2]); ‘e questo, perché avuto hanno ai lor tempi / gli scrittor bugiardi, invidi et empi’ (and this because the writers of their times have been lying, envious, and wicked [XXXVII, 6]). 65 ‘Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna/de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el puote.’ 66 The Dantean reference also appears in Castiglione, in a discussion of dissimulation by courtiers. The ‘onesta mediocrità’ (decorous mean) suggested as a criterion of behaviour at court, as an effective ‘scudo contro la invidia’ (shield against envy), is also based on the norm of verisimilitude in speech, and on the rejection of those truths ‘che han faccie di menzogna’ (that have the appearance of falsehoods [Cortegiano book II, par. XLI]). 67 E. Bigi on XXVI, 22. But we should carefully consider all of Bigi’s comments on the passages relating to Turpin. The author’s eyewitness account also belongs to the character (in this case the traitor Pinabello): ‘Fu quel ch’io dico, e non v’aggiungo un pelo: / io ’l vidi, i’l so; né m’assicuro ancora / di dirlo altrui; che questa maraviglia / a falso più ch’a ver si rassimiglia’ (It was as I say, and I do not add to it a hair; I saw it, I know it, yet I do not feel sure

Notes to pages 90–4 251

68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80

81

of myself in telling it to someone else, for this marvel is more like falsehood than like truth [II, 54]). It is significant that Ariosto exploits a pair of expressions, one taken from the cantare tradition: ‘e non v’aggiungo un pelo’ (and I do not add to it a hair), and one of a Dantean flavour (cf Inferno XXVIII, 113–15), as evidence of a deceptive discourse. Cf Parker, Inescapable Romance 49. ‘che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice / e che Penelopea fu meretrice.’ ‘però che questo è un torre a la poesia quella autorità che da l’istoria le viene; da la qual ragione mossi, concludemmo dover l’argomento dell’epico sovra qualche istoria esser fondato.’ ‘mutare totalmente l’ultimo fine delle imprese ch’egli prende a trattare, o pur alcuni di quelli avvenimenti principali e più noti che già nella notizia del mondo sono ricevuti per veri.’ The passage is indebted to Tasso’s Discourses on the Heroic Poem, Book III. See Manzoni’s critique of this aspect of Ariosto’s discourse: Pensiero CXII in Opere inedite e rare 198. Quint, ‘Astolfo’s Voyage’ 407. Classicist poetics define the Furioso as such because of its structural anomalies: from Tasso’s ‘animal d’incerta natura’ to Voltaire’s ‘monstre admirable.’ Cf Parker, Inescapable Romance 48. Cf Dionisotti, ‘Fortuna e sfortuna’ 227–8. Ariosto demystifies precisely the kind of poetry that lays claim to epichistorical status – poetry that presents itself with encomiastic celebrations as politically engaged. He explicitly declares that it is vain, and indeed ‘menzogna’ (a lie). See Roncaglia, ‘Nascita e sviluppo della narrativa cavalleresca’ 244. Throughout Voltaire’s oscillating judgments on the Furioso, his ideological appreciation of this passage remains firm. On this point, Carducci, ‘Ariosto e il Voltaire,’ traces the evolution of Voltaire’s earliest assessments, in which he admires the poem but with some reservations, to those of his maturity, which are increasingly enthusiastic and extend to the whole of the Furioso. As a rule, the Gospel of St John indicates a sacrosanct and proverbial truth for Ariosto too: cf Satire IV, 34–6. On this image in the context of joking authentication, see once again Rabelais: ‘J’en parle comme saint Jehan de l’Apocalypse: Quod vidimus testamur’ (a previous version of the ‘Prologue’ to Pantagruel, ed. cit., p. 169). Cf Cinque canti III, 21–2, where the herb that ‘chi ne mangia fa ch’ognun gli crede’ (makes he who eats it believed by all), given by Alcina to Ganelon to aid his deceptions, is linked to what God showed Moses on Mt Sinai to regain the obedience of his rebellious people. In Don Quixote the Bible is also used

252 Notes to pages 94–7 (‘que no puede faltar un atomo en la verdad’) as evidence of nothing less than the existence of giants, in a context of authorial irony regarding Turpin (who, here too, never moves away from the truth) and characters from Ariosto (part II, chapter 1). Here the Bible is juxtaposed with chivalric romances: Ariosto’s and Cervantes’s supposedly innocent amusement prefigures, behind the occasional reassuring cautionary note (magic, madness), the massive rationalist attack that the Enlightenment will unleash upon that ancient book so full of fables. More generally we should note that, since the Bible is dangerously likened to a poetic lie, a pillar of the humanist defence of poetry is at risk: both the fact that the Bible itself makes use of allegorical language and metaphors and the argument that no human word can ever be adequate to express transcendental truths were used against accusations of falseness. Boccaccio puts forward these very theses in his Genealogia deorum gentilium I, XIV, chapter 13: Poetas non esse mendaces, referring significantly to St John as a writer of truths that have the appearance of lies. On this question, see Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony 288–91. 4. Tasso versus Ariosto 1 As is the case with Lanfranco Caretti’s well-known Ariosto e Tasso. While Spoerri’s Renaissance und Barock bei Ariost und Tasso, has some interesting analyses, especially of metre, it insists on rather dubious psychological categories (Ariosto’s sunny disposition, Tasso’s tormented nature). A study of greater depth that partially returns to this theme is Fubini’s fundamental study on enjambement in the Furioso and Liberata, collected in Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento 230–47. This work is limited to the metrical aspect of the comparison and is not a global evaluation of Tasso’s inheritance from Ariosto, as is our aim here. P. Larivaille’s ‘Le Tasse critique de l’Arioste,’ is limited to the narrow sphere of Tasso’s opinions as a theorist. 2 This expression is taken from Tasso’s so-called Lettere poetiche. 3 ‘Leggeva alcuni suoi canti al principe suo padrone; e quando egli cominciò a leggere, erano le camere piene di gentiluomini ascoltatori; ma nel fine, tutti erano spariti: da la qual cosa egli prese argumento che l’unità dell’azione fosse poco dilettevole per sua natura, non per difetto d’arte che egli avesse: perciò che egli l’aveva trattata in modo che l’arte non poteva riprendersi: e di questo non s’ingannava punto’ (He read some of his cantos to his patron the prince, and when he began to read, the rooms were full of gentlemen listening, but by the end, everyone had disappeared. From this, he took it that unity of action was not very enjoyable because of its nature; not that his art was defective, since he had carried it out in such a way that no one could find

Notes to pages 97–101

4 5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14

253

fault with his art. And he did not deceive himself in this at all). So writes the younger Tasso in the first pages of the ‘Apologia’ (Scritti sull’arte poetica 71). The episode is so emblematic of the impasses of the age that numerous sources refer to it: from the understandably reticent Bernardo himself in a letter of 1558 to Varchi, to that of Dolce in his premise ‘Ai lettori’ to the second edition of the Amadigi (Venice 1583). Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defences of Poetry 54–70. ‘E perché mio padre, il quale è morto nel sepolcro, si può dir vivo nel poema, chi cerca d’offender la sua poesia, procura dargli morte un’altra volta’ (‘Apologia’ 69). From Modena, 16 January 1577 (Lettere, vol. I, 245–6). The dossier could be enriched with further examples that reveal a consistent value of evidence through an attentive reading from this perspective, though still relatively significant in themselves. The ‘seminal’ nature of Ariosto’s work is already evident at the beginning of Tasso’s poetic career, if we are content to read as an instance of mimetic desire the narrative strategy (an authentic authorial quête) that drives the Rinaldo, Tasso’s early and strongly autobiographical romance. Rinaldo leaves on his quest because of ‘generous envy’ of Orlando’s exploits (cf I, 12–13). See Michael Sherberg, Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso. Although his intentions are different from mine, Ulrich Langer has carried out an exhaustive comparative analysis of the two texts in ‘Hypothetical Necessity and Fiction in the Early Renaissance’ (in particular 65–73). ‘E perché d’erranti persone è tutto il poema, egli altresì errante è, in quanto che piglia e intermette infinite volte cose infinite’ (56), in G.B. Pigna, I romanzi divisi in tre libri. Curtius discusses this in Europäische Literatur und Lateinische Mittelalter 138–41. The most illustrious precedent is obviously Purgatorio I, 1–3: ‘Per correre miglior acque alza le vele’ (To course over better waters [the little bark of my genius] now hoists her sails); and Paradiso II, 1–15: ‘O voi che siete in piccioletta barca [O you that are in your little bark). Chivalric epic had recently gone back to Dante’s model: see Morgante XXVIII, 140 (here, too, we find the narrator’s farewell) and Innamorato, II, XVII, 1–2. ‘Bisogna, prima ch’io vi narri il caso, / ch’un poco dal sentier dritto mi torca’ (VIII, 51); ‘Ma d’un parlar ne l’altro, ove son ito / sì lunge dal camin ch’io facea ora?’ (XVII, 80). For my whole commentary on the stanza, see chapter 1. So it is more Petrarchan than Dantesque: ‘Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio’ (My ship full of forgetful cargo sails [RVF, CLXXXIX, 1]). The topos has been studied in the work of one of Tasso’s contemporaries,

254 Notes to pages 101–3

15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

Giovan Battista Guarini (cf L. Avellini, ‘“Pelago” e “porto”: La corte e il cortegiano nell’epistolario del Guarini’). ‘What I owe you I can pay in part ... with labour in ink’ (I, 3). According to some commentators, the reference could also be to his beloved. ‘[H]e adores the great Sepulchre, and discharges his vow.’ Ariosto played maliciously with his terrestrial Muse on the motif of writing while he was temporarily sane, referring to the file that dulls the enamoured brain rather than ensuring formal perfection: ‘se da colei che tal quasi m’ha fatto, / che ’l poco ingegno ad or ad or mi lima, / me ne sarà però tanto concesso, / che mi basti a finir quanto ho promesso’ (if by her who has almost made me the same, who all the time files away my small ability, so much of it is still granted me as may suffice to finish what I have promised [Furioso I, 2]). Tasso for his part is dramatically conscious of working in a condition of error. The epic norm here seems to be reversed, since while the epic poet traditionally invokes the Muse by asking her for the gift of knowledge or memory that enables him to complete his work, in the proem to the Liberata we have, alongside the canonical invocation of the ‘celesti ardori’ (celestial ardours), the request for pardon for the textual error he is about to commit in weaving together ‘fregi’ (embroiderings) with the ‘vero’ (truth). The work thus announces itself as written at the invitation of the Muse. Another hint of the homology between the two levels, one thematic, the other biographical, is the lexical link between stanza 4: ‘il qual ritogli / dal furor di fortuna ... me peregrino errante’ (who recover from Fortune’s fury ... myself a wandering pilgrim); and stanza 5: ‘al ferro Trace / cerchi ritòr la grande ingiustizia preda’ (recapture from the fierce Thracian his vast illicit spoils). ‘[W]andering pilgrim’ (Cf Liberata XIII, 3; XVII, 1) and ‘feverish child’ (Cf Liberata I, 3; XIII, 18). Discorsi dell’arte poetica, book II, p. 24. I owe this observation to my friend Giuseppe Sangirardi; see his Boiardismo ariostesco. Discorsi del poema eroico 78. Tasso’s simile refers to the semantic evolution of the Greek word hyle, used in ancient times by Homer to indicate the ‘wood’ (cf Iliad XI, 155, and Odyssey XVII, 316), and therefore also the material that it provides. Hyle can be understood in the rhetorical sphere as signifying the indistinct nature, the raw material that still awaits the determination of form (eidos), as Longinus in his Sublime 13.4 and Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics 1094b12 attest. In the cosmogonic fantasies of Neoplatonism and fifteenthand sixteenth-century hermeticism, the wood is the metaphor for raw mate-

Notes to pages 103–4 255

24 25

26 27

rial searching for a form, that is, as Raimondi says, ‘il pullulare della vegetazione e del plasma originario’ (the teeming of vegetation and of primeval plasma); see his ‘Introduzione’ to Gerusalemme liberata, p. lv. That is, in order to satisfy the Aristotelian requirement for the integrity of the ‘fable.’ As he will say later in the Discorsi del poema eroico: ‘E per aventura chi l’Innamorato e ’l Furioso come un solo poema considerasse, gli potria parere la sua lunghezza soverchia anzi che no, e non atta ad esser contenuta in una simplice lezione da una mediocre memoria’ (Book III, p. 126). (Perhaps Orlando innamorato and Furioso regarded as a single poem will seem rather excessive in length and unlikely to be retained by a modest memory at a single reading [Discourses 65].) Tasso’s observation obviously recalls the oral narrative roots of the modern epic, understood as a text to be listened to rather than read. On this theme, see R. Bruscagli, ‘“Romanzo” ed “epos” dall’Ariosto al Tasso.’ Cf Dante Della Terza, ‘History and the Epic Discourse’ 40. It is not just a question of the obvious model of Angelica fleeing through the wood (Furioso I, 33) and then disguised as a shepherdess (Furioso XI, 2). See also the battle between Honour and Love that tears Erminia’s heart at the moment of deciding to carry out her nocturnal escapade in Liberata VI, 70–7: ‘e fan dubbia contesa entro al suo core / duo potenti nemici, Onore e Amore’ (within her heart a doubtful contest is waged between two powerful enemies, Honour and Love), which recalls similar irresolute moments of Ruggiero’s in Furioso XL, 66–8: ‘Potea in lui molto il coniugale amore, / ma vi potea più il debito e l’onore’ (Very strong in him was conjugal love, but stronger were obligation and honour), and of Bradamante’s in Furioso II, 65: ‘quinci l’onore e il debito le pesa, / quindi l’incalza l’amoroso foco’ (on one side honour and duty weigh on her; on the other, love’s fires urge her). For a surprising shift in the psychological situation, consider Erminia waiting impatiently for the return of the messenger she sent to the wounded Tancredi in Liberata VI, 102: ‘Ma ella intanto impaziente, a cui / troppo ogni indugio par noioso e greve, / numera fra se stesa i passi altrui / e pensa: “or giunge, or entra, or tornare deve.” / E già le sembra, e se ne duol, colui / men del solito assai spedito e leve. / Spingesi al fine inanti, e ’n parte ascende / onde comincia a discoprir le tende’ (But meanwhile impatiently she, to whom all delay seems far too burdensome and heavy, tells over to herself each step of the other, and thinks: ‘Now he is arriving, now entering, now he should be returning.’ And truly he seems to her [and she is sorry for it] much less expeditious and quick than usual. At last she spurs forward and gets up to a place from which she begins to make out the tents). Compare

256 Notes to pages 104–6

28

29 30 31 32 33 34

Erminia’s actions with Ruggiero’s amorous waiting for Alcina in Furioso, VII, 24–5: ‘Ad ogni picciol moto ch’egli udiva, / sperando che fosse ella, il capo alzava: / sentir credeasi, e spesso non sentiva; / poi del suo errore accorto sospirava. / Talvolta uscia del letto e l’usio apriva, / guatava fuori, e nulla vi trovava: / e maledì ben mille volte l’ora / che facea al trapassar tanta dimora. / Tra sé dicea sovente: “Or si parte ella” / e cominciava a noverare i passi / ch’esser potean de la sua stanza a quella / donde aspettando sta che Alcina passi; / e questi et altri, prima che la bella / donna vi sia, vani disegni fassi. / Teme di qualche impedimento spesso, / che tra il frutto e la man non gli sia messo’ (At every little movement he heard he raised his head, hoping it was she; he believed he heard and often he did not hear; then realizing his error he sighed. Sometimes he got out of bed and opened the door, looked out, and found nothing there; he cursed a thousand times the hour that was so slow in passing. Often he said to himself: ‘Now she is starting.’ And he began to count the steps there could be from his room to that from which he is waiting for Alcina to come; and he has these and other vain imaginings before the fair woman is there. He often fears some hindrance that may be put between his hand and the fruit). ‘potrà forse parere loro che negli errori d’Erminia e Tancredi io mi slarghi troppo da la favola.’ Letter to Scipione Gonzaga, 15 April 1575 (Lettere I: 64– 5). On this episode, see once again Della Terza, ‘History and the Epic Discourse’ 46: ‘By making Tancredi digress out of his pertinent zone of epic operation and by multiplying structures of interference along his path, Tasso enters the road travelled with masterly skill by Ludovico Ariosto’; and R. Bruscagli, ‘Il campo cristiano nella “Liberata”,’ in Stagioni della civiltà estense 193. ‘scacciar desia / de la santa città gli empi pagani’ and to bring back ‘sotto ai santi / segni i compagni erranti’ (I, 1). ‘ch’a le umane grandezze intento aspira.’ ‘la vita a sdegno, / tanto un suo vano amor l’ange e martira.’ ‘d’onor brame immoderate, ardenti.’ ‘gli occhi in giù volse, e in un sol punto e in una / vista mirò ciò ch’in sé il mondo aduna.’ The variety of the universe must be represented in the poem, just as must the system of necessity and correspondence that guarantees both the stability of the cosmos and the organic unity of the poem. The problem of variety and unity requires a logical order to be resolved, an iron-like Aristotelian dispositio, invoked by the poet to rule his work and to guarantee its coherence and stability, thus avoiding that ‘we destroy the whole.’ Read in the context of the late-sixteenth-century epistemological crisis, this position demonstrates

Notes to pages 106–10

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

257

Tasso’s troubled belief in the unitary perception of reality and its artistic reproducibility. G. Güntert, L’epos dell’ideologia regnante e il romanzo delle passioni 35. Extending the comparison to Ariosto, Güntert notes that he, unlike Tasso, feels himself to be ‘l’artefice, il tessitore, il musicista, più che il dio della sua creazione’ (the maker, the weaver, the musician, more than the god of his creation). Nor does he have ‘la suprema ambizione di ricondurre quanto è diverso o discordante a un disegno unico’ (the supreme ambition to bring back everything that is different or discordant into a single design). On the contrary, he congratulates himself on having expressed the most variety possible. ‘Altri in amar lo perde, altri in onori, / altri in cercar, scorrendo il mar, ricchezze’ (XXXIV, 85). Cf G. Baldassarri, ‘Inferno’ e ‘Cielo’ 56–7. ‘già non lasciammo i dolci pegni e ’l nido / ... / per acquistar di breve suono un grido / vulgare e posseder barbara terra’ (I, 22). ‘o si fermi o volto / sia l’impeto de l’armi in altro loco’ (I, 24). ‘rivolte e torte sono / contra quel fin che ’l donator dispose’ (I, 26). ‘Nor does any obstacle have power to turn his holy thoughts from the path that God is pointing out to him’ (V, 63). ‘perché torse / dal camin dritto le commesse insegne’ (Furioso XXXIV, 62). ‘adorar la gran tomba e sciorre il voto’ (I, 23). Cf also III, 70; V, 91. Cf Andrew J. Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance 198ff. ‘partendo dalle vestigie degli antichi scrittori e dalle regole d’Aristotele, ha molte e diverse azioni abbracciate.’ Discorsi dell’arte poetica, Book II, p. 22, trans. adapted from Rhu, p. 117. ‘Partire’ here obviously has the meaning of ‘to move away, to separate oneself.’ In this sense, the Discorsi del poema eroico, which replaces ‘partendo’ (departing) with ‘lasciando’ (leaving), is clearer (Book III, p. 126). This is a reference to the literary theory of Francesco Orlando elaborated in the Freudian triptych Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura. Aside from the less meaningful instance in Liberata XIX, 116. Cf Matteo Residori, ‘Il mago di Ascalona e gli spazi del romanzo nella Liberata.’ Cf David Quint, ‘La barca dell’avventura nell’epica rinascimentale.’ See particularly stanza 31: ‘cercar que’ salvatichi soggiorni’ (to search out those forest abodes), ‘la ventura imprenda’ (take up the adventure), ‘la gran selva orrenda / tentata fu ne’ tre seguenti giorni’ (on the three days following, the great dread wood was attempted); and stanza 37: ‘spia de la selva ogni secreto’

258 Notes to pages 110–12

51 52

53 54 55 56

57

58

59 60

61

(spies out every secret of the wood), ‘apparenze inusitate e strane’ (strange and unheard-of apparitions), ‘bosco ... inviluppato e fosco’ (the wood ... tangled and dark). Obviously bearing in mind the literary tradition on the subject of shadowy woods, from Lucan to Statius to Dante. A similarly paired couple, the warrior Rinaldo, and Peter, the man of religion who imposes the rite of purification upon him, will manage to triumph over the enchantments of Tasso’s wood (Liberata XVIII). Galilei, ‘Considerazioni al Tasso,’ in Scritti letterari 546. Cf Baldassarri, ‘Inferno’ e ‘Cielo’ 62. But not yet of grotesque monstrosity, as they will be in Tasso. Cf Cinque canti I, 7–8 and Liberata IV, 4–5. ‘Non accade ch’io narri e come e quando / (perché la cosa a tutto il mondo è piana) / e quante volte e in quanti modi Orlando, / con commune onta, offeso abbia Morgana’ (Cinque canti I, 13). See the similar statements of Tasso’s Satan: ‘gli antichi altrui sospetti e i feri sdegni / noti son troppo, e l’alta impresa nostra’ (too well-known are the long-standing envy and savage wrath of that Other, and our lofty enterprise [IV, 9]), and ‘Non più dessi a l’antiche andar pensando, / pensar dobbiamo a le presenti offese’ (We need not go on thinking of ancient wrongs, we ought to be thinking of our present injuries [IV, 12]). ‘Sia destin ciò ch’io voglio: altri disperso / se ’n vada errando, altri rimanga ucciso, / a ltri in cure d’amor lascive immerso / idol si faccia un dolce sguardo e un riso. / Sia il ferro incontra ’l suo rettor converso / da lo stuol ribellante e ’n sé diviso: / pèra il campo e ruini, e resti in tutto / ogni vestigio suo con lui distrutto’ (Let fate be that which I will; let one go wandering astray, another lie slain; let another, drowned in the lascivious concerns of love, make a sweet look and a laugh his idol; let the sword be turned against its ruler by an army rebellious and divided against itself. Let the camp perish and fall to ruin, and in sum let every trace be destroyed with it [IV, 17]). ‘che sia Orlando, sia Carlo, sia il lignaggio / di Francia, sia tutto l’Imperio spento; / e non rimanga segno né vestigi, / né pur si sappia dir: “Qui fu Parigi.”’ From Tasso’s more biblical perspective it becomes ‘l’uom vile e di vil fango in terra nato’ (Man, vile Man, and born on earth of vile mud [Liberata IV, 10]). ‘or Carlo suo figliuol l’Imperio regge, / e dà all’Europa e a tutto il mondo legge’ (Cinque canti I, 46). Cf Liberata IV, 9: ‘or Colui regge a suo voler le stelle, / e noi siam giudicate alme rubelle.’ ‘Puoi tu patir ... / puoi tu patir ch’or signoreggi molte / provincie, e freni ormai tutto ’l Ponente, / e che da l’Indo all’onde maure estreme / la terra e il mar al suo gran nome treme?’ (Cinque canti I, 47).

Notes to pages 112–14

259

62 On the basis of models of chivalric narrative used by Ariosto in the Cinque canti, Marina Beer maintains that they are not a continuation of the Furioso but part of a new, autonomous book (Romanzi di cavalleria 143–9). But see A. Casadei’s reservations in his ‘Alcune considerazioni sui Cinque canti.’ 63 We might think of the sedition against Goffredo and his Frenchmen, which disrupts the unity of the Christian camp in Liberata VIII, 72: ‘Lo sdegno, la follia, la scelerata / sete del sangue ognor più infuria e cresce; / e serpe quella peste e si dilata, / e de gli alberghi italici fuor n’esce, / e passa fra gli Elvezi, e vi s’apprende, / e di là poscia a gli Inghilesi tende’ (Folly, hatred, a sinful thirst for blood rages and increases every minute: and that pestilence spreads and swells and moves outside the Italian campsites and passes among the Swiss and catches hold of them, and then from there it makes its way to the English). This is also promoted in the Cinque canti II, 52 ff, as when Envy who appears to Ganelon in ‘nuove larve’ (new semblance), and again in the Liberata VIII, 59, when the fury Aletto sends a false provocative dream to the Italian soldier Argillano, and ‘gli s’appresenta / sotto orribili larve’ (shows herself to him in horrible shapes). 64 Cf Walter Moretti, L’ultimo Ariosto 31. Luigi Firpo had already provided a similar interpretation in his Introduzione to L. Ariosto, Cinque canti 14–16. In my view, the ambiguity of this interpretation consists in attributing the ‘epic’ atmosphere of the fragment not to the effects of an archaic regression towards the Carolingian and even Pulcian world but rather to a historically untimely prelude to the Counter-Reformation epic. Tasso’s reception is obviously something quite different, since he was interested in a darker and more epic Ariosto, and his critical reading might appear misleading. 65 According to the theory of ‘means’ and ‘impediments’ outlined in the third book of the Discorsi del poema eroico: ‘Tutta dunque la varietà del poema nascerà da’ mezzi e da gli impedimenti; i quali possono esser diversi e di molte maniere e quasi di molte nature, e non distruggeranno l’unità de la favola, nondimeno, s’uno sarà il principio dal quale i mezzi dependeranno, e uno il fine a cui sono dirizzati’ (All the variety of the poem then will derive from its means and its obstacles, which can be different and of many kinds, almost of many natures, without destroying the unity of the fable, if the principle on which the means depend is one and the end to which they are directed is one [148]). 5. The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto’s Cinque canti 1 C. Dionisotti’s studies ‘Per la data dei Cinque canti,’ ‘Appunti sui Cinque canti e sugli studi ariosteschi,’ and C. Segre’s ‘Studi sui Cinque canti,’ remain fundamental discussions of dating the Cinque canti. See also A. Casadei’s updates

260 Notes to pages 114–17

2 3 4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

and especially his new suggestion for the placement of the fragment in ‘Alcune considerazioni sui Cinque canti.’ Translator’s note: Ariosto refers to Charlemagne consistently as Carlo in the Cinque canti, rendered here with ‘Charles.’ Cf Albert R. Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony. ‘I’ll tell ... how Rugiero was betrayed – / The flower of earth – and murdered by / One who committed every crime: / That traitor from Maganza, Gan’ (Innamorato III, 1, 3). ‘Ruggiero was to be alive seven years and no more, that for the death his lady inflicted on Pinabello, which will be charged to him, and also for that of Bertolagi, he would be killed by the pitiless and malicious Maganzese’ (Furioso XLI, 61). E. Saccone, ‘Appunti per una definizione dei Cinque canti’ in Il soggetto del Furioso 132. Cf III, 19: ‘Queste parole et altre dicea Gano / per carità non già del suo signore; / ma di vietar che non gli andasse in mano / quella città studiava il traditore’ (Ganelon spoke these words and others, not, of course, out of love for his lord; the traitor was working to prevent the city from falling into Charles’s hands); and III, 67: ‘A danno lo dicea, non a profitto / di Carlo, il traditor; perché all’offesa / che di far in procinto ha il re d’Egitto, / non sia in Jerusalem tanta difesa’ (The traitor meant this to harm Charles, not to help him; he wanted Jerusalem to have that much less defence against the attack which the King of Egypt was preparing to make). Cf Furioso II, 30, and XXII, 3. ‘[Gano] per fornir alcun disegno / ch’in parte ordito, in parte avea nel petto, / finse aver voto ...’ (I, 67). ‘avea Alcina ordito / che capitasse Gano a questo lito’ (I, 82). Tutta avea Gano questa tela ordita, / che ’l Longobardo dovea tesser poi’ (II, 29). ‘[Gano] ... e mille al giorno, non che un tradimento, / ordito avria per conseguir suo intento’ (III, 4). ‘Gano, avendo già in ordine l’orsoio, / di sì gran tela apparecchiò la trama’ (III, 23). ‘Confusion’ is a motif that triumphs in the last canto: ‘La terra e il cielo è pien di voci orrende; / ma del confuso suon nulla s’intende’ (The earth and the sky are full of fearful voices; but nothing can be understood from the confused sound [V, 28]); ‘in gran confusion tornò quel grande / ordine, e non è più chi regga o guidi’ (that great military order turned to great confusion, and there is no one who commands or rules any longer [V, 55]); ‘le prime squadre subito e l’estreme / di qua e di là restar confuse insieme’ (In

Notes to pages 117–19 261

15 16

17

18 19 20

21

both armies, the first squadrons and the last were quickly mixed up together [V, 56]); ‘Con parole confuse gli rispose / Rinaldo, che di colera ardea tutto’ (Rinaldo answered him with confused words, for he was burning all over with rage [V, 70]). Cf R. Durling, ‘Ariosto’ in The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic 112–81. See Orlando innamorato, II, xxiii, 26–9, where he is the tyrannical ‘master of the witches,’ a role he assumes after having been transformed from the Platonic demiurge of the universe to the progenitor of the pagan gods (cf Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium, book 1, ‘Proem’). Thus writes Cesare Segre in his ‘Introduzione ai Cinque canti,’ in Ariosto, Opere minori 581. The expression happily synthesizes a geographical and metaphorical element: Ariosto contemplates the snowy peaks of the Himalayas (where the council of the evil fairies takes place), and the frozen plains around Prague; he ranges from the concrete reality of the inaccessible landscape of the Garfagnana (II, 19) to the foggy and inhospitable lands of the ‘duro Scita’ (hardened Scythia) (I, 1) or the ‘Cimerii bui’ (overcast Cimmerians) (I, 104). On the other hand, among the many images alluding to the dark events that take place in the Cinque canti there are two dominant ones pertaining to the moral atmosphere: the iciness of envy that materializes in the ‘frozen hand’ that touches Ganelon’s heart (I, 57), and his being ‘swollen’ with smoke and wind in the allegory of the traitor’s political ambition (I, 35). L. Caretti, ‘Storia dei Cinque canti,’ in Cinque canti, p. xv. In relation to L. Firpo, ‘Introduzione’ to Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque canti, p. 13. Suspicion and Envy alternate in realizing Alcina’s plot to penetrate into Ganelon’s heart and induce him to reopen the hostilities against the Franks. In painting the sinister picture of Suspicion, ‘the worst of all evils’ (II, 8), which insinuates itself into men’s hearts and finds sustenance and accommodation in the minds of tyrants, who are always afraid of falling victim to that terror that they themselves sow, Ariosto makes use of mostly Ciceronian sources: De officiis II, VII, 25 and Tusculanae disputationes V, XX, 58, which describe the foolish precautions and the wicked goals of ancient despots such as Dionysius of Syracuse, Phalaris of Agrigento, and Alexander of Pherae. In both cases it is a question of the abuse of power. Penticone, the son of the Lombard king Desiderio, tries to seduce the faithful wife of one of his captains, who has been taken prisoner by Orlando. Astolfo, who has taken a fancy to the beautiful and virtuous Cinzia, manages to take her away from her husband, his vassal, with a trick.

262 Notes to pages 119–20 22 See Remo Ceserani and Sergio Zatti, eds, Orlando furioso. 23 See L. Blasucci, ‘Riprese linguistico-stilistiche del Morgante nell’Orlando furioso.’ 24 For continuers like Nicolò degli Agostini and Raffaele da Verona, Morgante functions not only as an essential repertory of plots and events for reviving the tale but also as a linguistic and stylistic point of reference. 25 See the essays about Rinaldo in M. Santoro’s volume, Ariosto e il Rinascimento. 26 As Segre had already emphasized (‘Appunti sulle fonti dei Cinque canti,’ in Esperienze ariostesche 108), the Cinque canti essentially develop the events announced in cantare XXVIII of Morgante: the war against Unuldo in Aquitania (stanzas 72–3); the war against Desiderio (stanzas 74–7) with the battle of Vercelli (stanza 78); the war against the Hun Tassillone (stanzas 94–5) and against the Hungarians (96). 27 Ariosto’s debts to Lucan’s Pharsalia are numerous and certainly show a notable statistical increase over references to Lucan in the Furioso. In the last scene of Pharsalia, as in the unfinished Cinque canti, Lucan describes Caesar, abandoned by his troops and attempting to resist the assaults of the Egyptian army, defending a narrow bridge at the port of Alexandria, just like Charles, who is overturned from the bridge into the waters of the River Moldau by the disorderly throng of his fleeing men. In canto II, Charles imitated Caesar (Pharsalia III, 399–452), setting his frightened soldiers an example in cutting down the wood infested with demons near the besieged Prague; similarly, Caesar cut down the forest that grew near the besieged Marseilles. Ariosto had previously imitated Pharsalia II, 20–36, where Lucan shows the desperation of the Roman families at the thought of a new civil war, describing the similar reactions of the citizens of Paris at the eruption of a new cycle of wars (II, 36–7). There are also strong links to the work of Claudian, especially to In Rufinum, a brief poem with a prophetic apocalypse of the Roman Empire: just as Ganelon, through Orlando and Rinaldo’s jealousy, creates an Oriental and Nordic league of enemies of Christianity, so does Rufinus, a similarly traitorous figure, promote barbarian invasions out of hatred for Stilicho. On this double influence, see David Quint’s ‘Introduction’ to his translation of the Cinque canti. But Claudian had evoked the epochal crisis in his unfinished Gigantomachia, where he rewrites the mythical rebellion of the giants against the gods of Olympus as a barbarian revolt against the Roman Empire. Ariosto makes frequent allusions to this rebellion in similes, as we will see later. Finally, it is interesting to note that, once the traditional Islamic threat was relegated to the background, Ariosto identifies the new infidels, in whom geographical

Notes to pages 120–5 263

28

29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37

variety and religious heterodoxy merge, with the repeated appellation of ‘Barbarians’: I, 71; II, 98 (Prague is the ‘barbarous city’; III, 12; V, 8, 11, 12, 77). ‘[N]uova religione e disciplina / instituì, da ogn’altra diferente: / che, senza nominar marito o moglie, / tutti empiano sossopra le sue voglie. // E de li dieci giorni aveva usanza / di ragunarsi il populo gli sei, / femine e maschi tutti in una stanza, / confusamente i nobili e i plebei’ (She instituted a new religion and rule, different from any other, in which everyone might satisfy their desires without restraint, and without taking the name of husband or wife. And six days out of ten she had the custom of bringing all her people together in a mass, males and females, nobles and commoners, in one room [II, 110–11]). On the possible historical parallels, see particularly Luigi Firpo’s ‘Introduzione’ to his edition. ‘Questa è la santa nave ch’al ciel varca, / che Pietro tol da Roma, acciò ne l’onde / di stupri e simonie non si profonde.’ ‘But because the faith that tarries without doing works is said to be almost dead, let us strive to make your faith and mine more gracious unto God through good works’ (IV, 82). Cf V, 30: ‘narrò di Gano l’opera volpina’ (he told all about Ganelon’s foxy deeds). Hypocrisy and pretence are Ganelon’s typically courtier-like prerogatives: ‘sì ben con umil voce e falso ghigno / sapea finger bontade, et ogni sorte / usar d’ippocrisia, che chi i costumi / suoi non sapea, gli porria a’ piedi i lumi’ (He knew so well how to feign goodness, with a humble voice and a counterfeit smile, and to use every sort of hypocrisy, that anyone who did not know his ways would have lit candles at his feet [I, 36]). ‘[H]e pretended, and spread word that he had made a vow to go to the Holy Sepulchre, to the mountain of the Cross’ (I, 67). Nevertheless, Giorgio Padoan, ‘Il Furioso e la crisi del Rinascimento,’ Charles Klopp, ‘The Centaur and the Magpie,’ and S. La Monica, ‘Realtà storica e immaginario bellico ariostesco,’ have all affirmed, with different motivations and results, this specific influence on the Cinque canti. Cf C. Badini, ‘La “doppia morale” del Paladino-Re.’ In this sense Bianca’s attitude anticipates Olimipia’s (IX, 36 ff) and Drusilla’s (XXXVII, 59 ff) in the additions to the third edition of the Furioso. Quint, ‘Introduction’ 25. For example, in the additions of the 1532 edition: ‘Si vede per gli essempii di che piene / sono l’antiche e le moderne istorie ...’ (From the examples of which ancient and modern histories are full ... [XLV, 4]). This echoes Machiavelli: ‘Et ancora che di questi esempli ne siano piene l’antiche storie, non di manco io non mi voglio partire da questo esemplo fresco di papa Iulio II’

264 Notes to pages 125–30

38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48

49 50

(And although ancient histories are full of examples, nonetheless I do not wish to depart from this recent example of Pope Julius II [Il principe, chapter 13]). On the crisis of humanist exemplarity, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History, with chapters on Machiavelli and Tasso. E. Saccone, ‘Appunti’ 144. ‘But let us be silent, for it is always better to let the living be and to speak of ancient times’ (II, 5). ‘The noise of drums was not heard going about then as it is today’ (II, 41). But in the background there is also, obviously, the memory of Petrarch’s ‘Italia mia,’ lines 60–2. ‘Per questi merti la Bontà suprema / non solamente di quel grande impero / ha disegnato ch’abbia diadema / ch’ebbe Augusto, Traian, Marco e Severo; / ma d’ogni terra e quinci e quindi estrema, / che mai né al sol nè all’anno apre il sentiero; / e vuol che sotto a questo imperatore / solo un ovile sia, solo un pastore’ (For these merits, the Supreme Goodness has planned that he should have the crown not merely of that great empire which Augustus, Trajan, Marcus, and Severus had, but also in either direction of every farthest land that never opens a road to the sun or to the year; and it wishes that under this emperor there be one fold only, one shepherd [XV, 26]). On this point, it is worth remembering that the crisis of ‘courtly’ values and class solidarity, brought about by the advent of firearms, provokes in Ariosto a similar recourse to a demonic interpretation in his famous invective in the Furioso XI, 22–8. Cf G. Baldassarri, ‘Inferno’ e ‘Cielo’ 62. These effects of natural and cosmic disintegration also bear traces, in a broad sense, of Lucan’s epic. On the numerous images deriving from stoic cosmology that, in the Pharsalia, link the apocalypse of nature to the social order overturned by civil war, see M. Lapidge, ‘Lucan’s Imagery of Cosmic Dissolution.’ ‘quel dì che Lenno fu da la radice / svelta, e gettata con Cipro e con Delo / dai figli de la Terra incontra il cielo’ (I, 79). ‘Cotali in Delo esser doveano, quando / andava per l’Egeo l’isola errando’ (Such must the forests have appeared on Delos when the island went wandering through the Aegean [V, 53]). ‘sembra cader l’orrida Ercinia al basso, / che tutta a un tempo sia dal pie’ succisa’ (V, 54). ‘qual forse Italia udì quando divisa / fu dal monte Apennin quella gran costa / che sul Tifeo per soma eterna è imposta.’

Notes to pages 130–2 265 51 ‘[P]oi, l’un con Durindana, e con la fera / Fusberta l’altro, i dui lumi di Francia, / a’ colpi, qual fece in Val Flegra Marte, / poneano in rotta e l’una e l’altra parte’ ([T]hen, the one with Durindana and the other with savage Fusberta, these two lights of France routed both sides, this one and that, with blows such as Mars struck in the Valley of Phlegra [V, 58]). 52 ‘gli duo cugini di lance proveduti / (che d’olmo l’un, l’altro l’avea di cerri)’ (V, 63). 53 ‘il cerro e l’olmo andò, come se stato / fosser di canne, in tronchi e in schegge rotto’ (V, 65). 54 ‘che di cerri sentia, d’olmi e di faggi’ (Furioso I, 33). 55 ‘[T]he common people, mixed together with the nobility’ (II, 121). 56 ‘[M]others mingled with some sons and brothers with sisters’ (II, 112). 57 ‘Deh! perchè quando, o figlia del re Oeta, / o d’Atene o di Media tu fuggisti, / deh! perché a far l’Italia nostra lieta / con sì gioconda usanza non venisti? / Ogni mente per te seria quieta, / senza cordoglio e senza pensier tristi; / e quella gelosia che sì tormenta / gli nostri cor, seria cacciata e spenta. / / Oh come, donne, miglior parte avreste / d’un dolce, almo piacer, che non avete! / Dove voi digiunate, e senza feste / fate vigilie in molta fame e sete, / tal satolle e sì fatte prendereste, / che grasse vi vedrei più che non sete. / Ma bene io stolto a porre in voi desire / da farvi, per gir là, da noi fuggire!’ (Alas! Aete’s daughter, why, when you fled from either Athens or from Media, why, oh why, did you not come to gladden our Italy with so merry a custom? Because of you, every mind would be tranquil, free of heartache and mournful thoughts; and that jealousy which so torments our hearts would be dispelled and extinguished. Oh ladies, how much better a portion of sweet, dear pleasure would you have then! Whereas now you fast and without feast days you keep vigils in great hunger and thirst, then you would take such full meals, so well prepared, that you would see yourselves plumper than you are now. But I am stupid indeed to instil desires in you that will make you flee from us to go there! [II, 113–14]). 58 Dolcino was head of the heretical sect of apostolic brothers who preached the church’s return to its evangelical origins and the sharing of goods and women. See Inferno XXVIII, 55–60. As far as Vespucci is concerned, the apocryphal text of the Mundus novus is particularly responsible for the topos, which would soon spread through the Old World, eliciting conflicting reactions of praise and condemnation, of the indigenous populations of America’s absence of laws and uncontrolled lasciviousness. Finally, as regards utopian literature, it is well-known that this flourished again in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the prospects of

266 Notes to pages 132–3

59 60 61

62

political reform and spiritual regeneration brought about by the encounter with the peoples of the New World. ‘A ciascun a bastanza, a ciascun troppo / era d’aver di se medesmo cura’ (V, 56). ‘Gano le ordì, ma al fin l’alta Virtute / fece in danno di lui tesser le tele’ (V, 14). In the Furioso the poet-demiurge, who is guarantor of the equilibrium of his moral universe, often assumes direct responsibility for distributing justice among the characters, letting the reader know in advance of the punishment of malefactors: for example, Pinabello: ‘Lasciàn costui, che mentre all’altrui vita / ordisce inganno, il suo morir procura’ (Let us leave him, who, while he schemes deception against another’s life, brings on his own death [III, 6]); Martano: ‘Lasciànlo andar; ch’io vi prometto certo, / che la mercede avrà secondo il merto’ (We may let him go, for I surely promise you he will have a reward according to his merits [XVII, 130]); and Gabrina and Odorico: ‘Così di par saranno ambi puniti: / ella de’ suoi commessi errori inanti, / egli di torne la difesa a torto; / né molto potrà andar che non sia morto’ (So both will be equally punished, she for her sins committed before, he for unjustly defending her; nor can he go far without being killed [XXIV, 42]). Cf I, 28: the fairies concoct their plan ‘contra le forze e gli animi arroganti / de’ paladini e cavallieri erranti’ (against the strength and arrogant spirits of paladins and errant knights); III, 14: ‘Era in quei cavallier tanta arroganza pei fortunati antichi lor successi, / che tutti in quella impresa, con baldanza / di restar vincitor, si sarian messi’ (These knights were so arrogant because of their past success and good fortune that they all would have joined in this enterprise, confident of victory); V, 12–13: ‘Ogni squadra de’ Barbari non manco / ivi quel giorno stata esser si crede, / che tutto insieme fosse il popul franco, / quanto ve n’era, chi a caval, chi a piede: / ma tal ardir e tal valor, tal anco / ordine avean questi altri, e tanta fede / nel suo signor, d’ingegno e di prudenza, / che ciascun valer quattro avea credenza. / / Ma poi sentir, che si trovar in fatto, / che pur troppo era un sol, non che a bastanza; / nè di quella battaglia ebbono il patto / che lor promesso avea lor arroganza: / e potea Carlo rimaner disfatto / se Dio, che salva ch’in lui pon speranza, / non gli avesse al bisogno proveduto / d’un improviso e non sperato aiuto’ (Each Barbarian battalion there that day is believed to have been no less numerous than the whole French army put together, those on horseback and those on foot; but the French had so much courage, so much valour, so much discipline, and so much faith in their lord’s intelligence and prudence that each believed himself to be worth four of the enemy. Afterward, however, they learned from experience that just one of the enemy was

Notes to pages 133–8 267 not only enough, but too much: and the battle did not follow the plan their arrogance had promised them. Charles could have been left undone had not God, who saves whoever puts his hopes in Him, provided for his needs with unexpected and unhoped-for aid). 63 ‘[U]ndercutting that majesty which is our Kingdom’s principal strength’ (I, 17). 64 ‘ma chi fa sua vendetta, oltra che offende / chi offeso l’ha, da molti si difende’ (I, 17). 6. Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity 1 Lanfranco Caretti, Ariosto e Tasso. All quotations of Caretti are taken from this edition. The section on Tasso had previously been published as the ‘Introduction’ to T. Tasso, Opere. 2 F. Orlando, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana 4. For Freud, all the manifestations of the unconscious, from dreams to symptoms, from lapsus to jokes, are ‘compromise formations.’ According to Orlando’s hypothesis, this model also characterizes the literary work. First identified in the distinctive form of ‘Freudian negation’ (cf Lettura freudiana della Phèdre), it provides the foundation of his theory in Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura and subsequent works. 3 Tasso often refers in his letters to the scandalized reaction of his contemporaries. Reactions of the majority of critics from his day until ours attest to the solidarity that readers of the Liberata feel for the defeated pagans (particularly for some of them, e.g., Solimano and Armida), as well as the limited poetic charm exerted by figures such as Goffredo or Peter the Hermit, whom readers generally judge negatively. In Lettura freudiana della Phèdre (18–23), Orlando renews and applies the concept of emotional identification in an original methodological context. 4 ‘ciascun qua giù le forze e’l senno impieghi / per avanzar fra le sciagure e i mali, / ché sovente adivien ch’l saggio e’l forte / fabro a se stesso è di beata sorte.’ 5 ‘trattiamo il ferro pur noi cavalieri: / quest’arte è nostra, e’n questa sol si speri’ (II, 51). 6 ‘Turchi, Persi, Antiochia (illustri son / e di nome magnifico e di cose) / opre nostre non già, ma del Ciel dono / furo, e vittorie fur meravigliose’ (I, 26). 7 The behaviour of these characters is often designated by a repertory of stylemes and verbal forms inherent in the language of repression. Some examples: reprimere (to repress) (II, 52; VI, 25; VII, 121); tenere a freno (to hold

268 Notes to pages 138–40 back) (III, 67; XVI, 62); and temprare (to curb) (IV, 83; VI, 2). (Translators’ note: we do not follow Nash, who renders temprare as ‘to harden,’ where the context clearly calls for an English verb such ‘to curb’). 8 ‘e tra le fere spazia e tra le piante, / se non quando è con lei, romito amante.’ 9 In his dedication of Rinaldo to Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Tasso already expresses an explicit awareness of the complementarity of the fight: Ma quando, il crin di tre corone cinto, v’avrem l’empia eresia domar già visto, e spinger pria, da santo amor sospinto, contra l’Egitto i principi di Cristo; onde il fiero Ottomano oppresso e vinto vi ceda a forza il suo mal fatto acquisto; cangiar la lira in tromba e’n maggior carme dir tenterò le vostre imprese e l’arme.

(I, 5)

But when, with your hair wrapped with three crowns, we will have already seen you subdue the impious heresy, and push forward, inspired by divine love, the princes of Christ against Egypt; whence the fierce Ottoman overcome and conquered may surrender to you under constraint his ill-gotten gains, exchanging my lyre for a trumpet and in a grander song I will try to speak of your undertakings and arms. 10 ‘[I]ndividualità, quella forza d’iniziativa che fa di ogni cavaliere l’uomo libero, che trova il suo limite in se stesso, cioè a dire nelle leggi dell’amore e dell’onore, a cui ubbidisce volontariamente’ (La letteratura italiana 492). In the terms in which De Sanctis defines the narrative action of the Furioso, we can see its radical antithesis to the Liberata: ‘The centripetal force is rather weak in this world of freedom and individual initiative; and either the angel Michael or a demon is required to drag the errant knights to Paris, where the battle is taking place. And they are to be found there only a couple of times, and only for one day; the next day they are once again chasing after the fantasies of their passions, drawn by love, revenge, and glory, and all longing for strange and marvellous adventures. Agramante’s undertaking itself is not religious or political, but rather also a great adventure, motivated by the desire for revenge’ (467, my emphasis). 11 A. Asor Rosa, La letteratura italiana 5,1, p. 27. 12 The clash of these equal, opposing forces in the hegemonic conflict also opposes two characters: Goffredo, executor of divine will, and Armida, the

Notes to pages 140–2 269 tool of the infernal powers. Armida is identified with the division that occurs within the close-knit Christian army. It is she whom a number of the crusaders follow as fugitives into the night, she who removes first Tancredi and then Rinaldo from the war. In a more positive way, she paradoxically represents a repressive principle of cohesion and unification, equal to Goffredo’s but to opposing ends, as we read in XIX, 74: ‘Così lor parla, e così avien che accordi / sotto giogo di ferro alme discordi’ (Thus she speaks to them, and thus it is that she can make accord among discordant souls, beneath her iron yoke). 13 Argante’s proud declarations of self-sufficiency (‘bastar credo a me stesso’ [it is enough to believe in myself]) and the rivalry that divides him from Solimano (‘era di Solimano emulo antico’ [he had long emulated Solimano]) give particular emphasis to the term ‘I’ and the functions of the subject. This is only underscored by the strophic detachment of himself from the ‘you’ of the other pagans: Voi da i disagi e da la fame indotti a darvi vinti a lungo andare sarete od a morirne qui, come codardi, quando d’Egitto pur l’aiuto tardi. Io per me non vuo’ già ch’ignobil morte i giorni miei d’oscuro oblio ricopra, né vuo’ ch’al novo dì fra queste porte l’alma luce del sol chiuso mi scopra.

(VI, 4–5)

In the long run, you will be persuaded by famine and privation to surrender to us in defeat; or to die with us here like cowards, if aid from Egypt be still slow in coming. For myself, I have no intention that an ignoble death should cover up my days in dark oblivion; nor do I mean the blessed light of the sun to find me shut within these gates tomorrow. 14 ‘scacciar desia / de la santa città gli empi pagani, / e pien di fé, di zelo, ogni mortale / gloria, imperio, tesor mette in non cale.’ 15 ‘a l’umane grandezze intento aspira.’ 16 ‘la vita a sdegno, / tanto un suo vano amor l’ange e martira.’ 17 ‘cupidigia ... d’oro o d’impero, / ma d’onor brame immoderate, ardenti.’ 18 ‘Io qui eleggo; e’l faran gli altri in terra, / già suoi compagni, or suoi ministri in guerra.’

270 Notes to page 143 19 ‘la cagion d’ogni indugio e d’ogni lite, / a quella autorità che, in molti e vari / d’opinion quasi librata, è pari.’ 20 The Normans ‘mille son di gravissima armatura, / sono altrettanti i cavalier seguenti, / di disciplina a i primi e di natura / e d’arme e di sembianza indifferenti’ (are a thousand, heavily armed; following them is an equal number of horsemen, no different from the first in nature and training, in weapons and appearance [I, 38]). The two bishops Guglielmo and Ademaro show Goffredo their divisions: ‘Da la città d’Orange e da i confini / quattrocento guerrier scelse il primiero; / ma guida quei di Poggio in guerra l’altro, / numero egual, né men ne l’alme scaltro’ (From the city of Orange and from its environs the former chose four hundred warriors; but the other is leading the men of Le Puy in battle, equal in number and no less skilful in war [I, 39]). The Flemish and the Dutch ‘gli uni e gli altri son mille, e tutti vanno / sotto un altro Roberto insieme a stuolo’ (the former and the latter make up a thousand, and they all go together in a band under another Robert [I, 44]). Gildippe and Odoardo represent another example of singular unity: ‘ne la guerra anco consorti’ (consorts still in the midst of war), whom the poet, intent on celebrating their ‘marvellous’ reciprocal fidelity, prophetically hopes will not be ‘disgiunti ancor che morti’ (put asunder even in death [I, 56]). As for the ‘adventurers’ that Dudone di Consa leads (‘perché duro / fu il giudicar di sangue e di virtute, / gli altri sopporsi a lui concordi furo, / ch’avea più cose fatte e più vedute’ [because it was hard to make the selection by breeding and by prowess, the rest had agreed to place themselves under him, who had seen more and done more] I, 53), their fate provides the historical precedent for the submission of the crusader army to the will of the best of them, Goffredo. A similar process of unification takes place for the Christian fleet to which ‘oltra quei c’ha Georgio armati e Marco / ne’ veneziani e liguri confini, / altri Inghilterra e Francia ed altri Olanda, / e la fertil Sicilia altri ne manda’ (besides those that George and Mark have armed in the Venetian and Ligurian territories, England and France send some, and Holland some, and fertile Sicily others [I, 79]). The competition of such different nations, often historically rivals, does not detract from the fact that ‘sono tutti insieme uniti / con saldissimi lacci in un volere’ (they are all bound together with the strongest ties into a single will [I, 80]). When the review of the troops is over and the moment to set off is at hand, ‘tosto sotto i suoi duci ogn’uom s’accoglie; / e l’ordinato essercito congiunto / tutte le sue bandiere al vento scioglie’ (quickly each man is gathered around his leader, and the army drawn up in formation looses all its banners to the wind [I, 72]), and the news spreads that ‘unito è il campo vincitor felice / che già s’è mosso e che non è chi’l tardi’ (the blessed invincible host is

Notes to pages 143–4 271

21

22 23 24 25 26

assembled, that now it is on the move, and that there is none who can slow it [I, 81]). First we read that the caliph ‘raccolta / già da varie provincie insieme avea / l’innumerabil oste a l’assemblea’ (had gathered together in assembly there a countless host from his several provinces [XVII, 2]). In Gaza there stands ‘sotto l’arme / mezzo il mondo raccolto’ (half the world assembled under arms). These verses suggest the idea of a chaotic, disordered army. What united such a great mass of peoples of different nationality, language, and customs is nothing but fear. Unlike the Christians, who are united by a common ideal of faith freely chosen, the pagans are united by the instrumentum regni (order of rule) of the caliph, who oppresses his subjects equally: ‘Sparsa in minuti regni Africa pave / tutta al suo nome e’l remoto Indo il cole, / e gli porge altri volontario aiuto / d’armate genti ed altri d’or tributo’ (All Africa [scattered into tiny princedoms] trembles at his name; and distant Indus does him honour. And one man proffers him voluntary aid with armed forces, and another tribute of gold [XVII, 8]). Among the ranks of soldiers reviewed, the third group above all draws our attention. Sent from a single city, Cairo, these soldiers ‘squadra non pare / ma un’oste immensa, e campi e lidi tiene; / non crederai ch’Egitto mieta ed are / per tanti, e pur da una città sua viene; / città, ch’a le provincie emula e pare, / mille cittadinanze in sé contiene’ ([A]ppears not a squadron but a boundless host, and occupies fields and shore. You would not believe that Egypt could plough and harvest for so many; and yet it comes from a single one of her cities – a city the rival and equal of her provinces, that contains citizens by the thousands [XVII, 17]). ‘discorde fra sé mal si raguna / e ne gli ordini suoi se stessa intrica, / e di chi pugni il numero fia poco’ (XX, 15). ‘in tanta loro / confusione e sì torbida e mista?’ (XX, 17). ‘[N]ow he speaks through interpreters, now by himself: he mingles praise and reproofs, and punishments and rewards’ (XX, 24). For example, ‘Talor dice ad alcun’ (One time he says to one man [XX, 24]); ‘Ad altri’ (to another [25]); ‘A molti’ (to many [27]). What is more, the immense Egyptian camp had already appeared to the Christian spy Vafrino as marked by the mixing of multitudes and discord: Vide tende infinite e ventillanti stendardi in cima azzurri e persi e gialli, e tante udì lingue discordi e tanti timpani e corni e barbari metalli e voci di cameli e d’elefanti,

272 Notes to pages 144–50 tra’l nitrir de’ magnanimi cavalli, che fra sé disse: ‘Qui l’Africa tutta translata viene e qui l’Asia è condutta.’

(XIX, 58)

He saw pavilions without number, and on their summits flags aflutter, azure and purple and gold, and heard so many discordant languages and so many drums and horns and barbarous brasses and voices of camels and elephants amid the neighing of the spirited steeds that he said to himself: ‘Here all Africa has been transported, and Asia marshalled here.’ 27 ‘la fé di Piero / fiavi introdotta ed ogni civil arte’ (XV, 29). 28 ‘Cogliam la rosa in su ’l mattino adorno / di questo dí, che tosto il seren perde; / cogliam d’amor la rosa: amiamo or quando / essersi puote riamato amando’ (Let us gather the rose in the brilliant morning of this day that loses its brightness so soon; let us gather the rose of love: now let us love when loving we can have our love returned [XVI, 15]). 29 ‘formidabile oste ... / di guerrieri animai, vari di voce, / vari di moto, vari di sembiante.’ 30 ‘in varie forme, concorron d’ogn’intorno a l’alte porte’ (IV, 4). 31 ‘Deh! non vedete omai com’egli tenti / tutte al suo culto richiamar le genti?’ (Ah, do you not see even now how He is trying to call back all the peoples to His religion? [IV, 12]) complains Lucifer, who has already recalled the outrage suffered by Christ’s violation of the realm of the shadows. ‘Ei venne e ruppe le tartaree porte, / e porre osò ne’ regni nostri il piede’ (He ... came and broke the gates of Hell and dared to set his foot in our principality). Christ takes away part of Satan’s booty of souls, those that ought to be his: ‘e trarne l’alme a noi dovute in sorte, / e riportarne al Ciel sì ricche prede, / vincitor trionfando, e in nostro scherno / l’insegne ivi spiegar del vinto Inferno’ ([A]nd to bear back to Heaven so rich a booty, a Victor proceeding in triumph, and in our scorn to display there the ensigns of conquered Hell [IV, 11]). 32 ‘[A]nd shall we suffer it that His faithful gather in Asia daily a greater power and that they bring Judea under the yoke?’ (IV, 13). 33 ‘Diede che si fosse a lui la vittoria: / rimase a noi d’invitto ardir la gloria’ (IV, 15). 34 ‘or Colui regge a suo voler le stelle, / e noi siam giudicate alme rubelle’ (IV, 9). 35 The example of preterition, ‘taccio ... taccio’ (I pass over in silence [VIII, 64–

Notes to pages 150–2 273

36

37

38 39 40 41

5]) has analogies in Satan’s speech: ‘Ma che rinovo i miei dolor parlando? / chi non ha già l’ingiurie nostre intese?’ (But why do I renew my sorrows by speaking? Who is there that has not thoroughly understood our wrongs? [IV, 12]). The same is true of the invitation to set aside ancient offences to think about how to avenge the latest and most serious one. Argillano says: ‘Tempo forse già fu che gravi e strane / ne potevan parer sì fatte offese; / quasi lievi or le passo: orrenda, immane / ferita leggierissime l’ha rese’ (Time was before, perhaps, that offences like these could strike us as heavy and strange: now I pass them by as trifles. A horrendous, a monstrous beastliness has rendered them most bearable [VIII, 66]). Satan had previously admonished: ‘Non più dessi a l’antiche andar pensando, / pensar dobbiamo a le presenti offese’ (We need not go on thinking of ancient wrongs, we ought to be thinking of our present injuries [IV, 12]). To complete the picture, finally, we get the memory and the reminder of ancient Italic virtue now subordinated to foreign and overpowering desires: ‘se la virtù che fredda langue / fosse ora in voi quanto dovrebbe ardente’ ([I]f the virtue that is coldly languishing were now as fiery in you as it ought to be [VIII, 70]) and ‘Io, io vorrei, se’l vostro altro valore, / quanto egli può, tanto voler osasse’ (I myself, I could wish (if your noble valour dared to desire as much as it is able [VIII, 71]). The seed of discord and rebellion propagates itself in the Christian camp, ‘e de gli alberghi italici fuor n’esce, / e passa fra gli Elvezi, e vi s’apprende, / e di là poscia a gli Inghilesi tende’ (and moves outside the Italian campsites and moves amongst the Swiss and catches hold of them, and then from there it makes its way to the English [VIII, 72]), establishing a common uprising of peoples against the French. ‘... o pur vorrem lontano / girne da lei, dove l’Eufrate inonda, / dove a popolo imbelle in fertil piano / tante ville e città nutre e feconda, / anzi a noi pur? Nostre saranno, io spero, /né co’ Franchi comune avrem l’impero.’ The adverb dunque (therefore), which appears in VIII, 63; IX, 10; XIII, 66, constitutes a further lexical clue to the tight connection that links these antirepressive tirades to one another. ‘Oh gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui’ (Furioso I, 22). I refer here to Francesco Orlando’s theory of literature as the ‘return of the repressed.’ In particular, see Sozzi, ‘Il magismo del Tasso’, and Raimondi, ‘Tra grammatica e magia.’ G. Genot, ‘L’écriture libératrice: le vraisemblable dans la Jérusalem délivrée du

274 Notes to pages 152–3 Tasse.’ The French critic uses the Liberata to test the functioning of the verisimilar and the opposite processes of opening and escape upon which some of the constitutive principles of the literary work are organized. According to Genot, the verisimilar represents the text’s system of reference to that which is beyond it – society, culture, ideology – and which is identifiable at the semiological level through a series of devices that justify, include, exclude, select, and restrict possible narratives. In any case, it is a question of relativizing the absolute in the text (42), which in Tasso’s case is based on the narrative material – the chronicle of the First Crusade written by Christian historians, and thus strongly biased from the ideological point of view – and on his historical situation as a cinquecento writer in a Catholic country reacting to the Reformation. Alongside these repressive processes, and opposed to them, are the devices of liberation and escape that tend towards a recovery of the autonomy of literary discourse, removing it from the principle of integration into another non-literary discourse (precisely that of the likely) that, as such, constitutes a factor of alienation. In Tasso’s case ‘nous avons un exemple assez rare de conscience critique accompagnant l’élaboration d’une œuvre qui présente tous les degrès de conformité et tous les modes d’évasion du vraisemblable, et qui a été ensuite significativement transformée en une autre plus respectueuse d’exigences que l’auteur avait métalittérairement faites siennes, mais que la littérature ... avait constamment trahies au cours de l’élaboration du texte’ (58). ([W]e have an unusual example of critical awareness that accompanies the elaboration of a work that displays all the degrees of conformity and all the ways of evasion from the verisimilar. Thereupon, this work has been significantly transformed into another work that is more respectful of the demands that the author has made his own in a metaliterary move, but that literature has constantly betrayed during the text’s creation.) 42 Genot, ‘L’écriture libératrice,’ links the function of these devices to that of oneiric censure, ‘car dans tous les cas on a à la fois absence et présence d’un élément masqué et décelé par cela même qui le masque, avec des processus d’évasion qui se rattachent, au niveau même de la nomenclature critique, au rêve. La censure joue en deux sens contraires, d’abord pour exclure un élément jugé “non conforme,” et puis, plus subtilement, pour effacer la lisibilité d’un inclusion problématique’ (48). ([B]ecause in any case we have at the same time absence and presence of the element which has been masked and concealed by the very one which has masked it through the processes of evasion that are linked, even in critical terms, to the dream. The censure plays in two contrary ways: first to exclude an element that is judged ‘not in con-

Notes to pages 153–7 275

43

44

45 46

47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

formity with,’ and then, more subtly, to erase the readability of a problematic inclusion.) ‘Farò il collo torto, e mostrerò ch’io non ho avuto altro fine che di servire al politico; e con questo scudo cercherò di assicurare ben bene gli amori e gli incanti’ (from a letter of June 1576 to Luca Scalabrino; Lettere, ed. Guasti, Vol. 1, p. 179). This letter to Scalabrino, no. 76 in Guasti’s edition, does not appear in Molinari’s edition of the Lettere poetiche. As far as the question of Tasso’s poetry as a precursor to romantic poetics is concerned, it is surely no coincidence that the second chapter of M. Praz’s book, The Romantic Agony, ‘The Metamorphoses of Satan,’ dedicated to the sudden but lasting explosion of the representation of the powers of evil in Western European art from romanticism on, opens with Tasso’s vision of the ‘infernal council.’ ‘Qual più forte di te, se le sirene / vedendo ed ascoltando a vincer t’usi? / così ragion pacifica reina / de’ sensi fassi, e se medesma affina.’ ‘Prendergli cerca allor la destra o’l manto, / supplichevole in atto, ed ei s’arretra, / resiste e vince; e in lui trova impedita / Amor l’entrata, il lagrimar l’uscita.’ ‘pur quel tenero affetto entro restringe, / e quanto può gli atti compone e infinge.’ ‘Se mercé da Goffredo or non impetra, / ben fu rabbiosa tigre a lui nutrice, / e’l produsse in aspr’alpe orrida pietra / o l’onda che nel mar si frange e spuma: / crudel, che tal beltà turba e consuma.’ ‘Né te Sofia produsse e non sei nato / de l’azio sangue tu; te l’onda insana / del mar produsse e’l Caucaso gelato, / e le mamme allattàr di tigre ircana.’ We might well think of Rinaldo as the emblematic character of the Liberata, since he runs the full gamut of the oppositions within which the poem’s action takes place: from his identification with Armida, which makes him a participant in the pagan bestiality and passionate nature, to his identification with Goffredo, which makes him the expression of supreme rationality and Christian repression. ‘in cui la face / di pietade e d’amor è più fervente.’ ‘dover, ch’a dar tenuto / è l’ordin nostro a le donzelle aiuto.’ ‘in Francia, o dove in pregio è cortesia’ (IV, 81). ‘con sì adorno inganno / cerca di ricoprir la mente accesa / sotto altro zelo; e gli altri anco d’onore / fingon desio quel ch’è desio d’amore.’ ‘guerrier siam di ventura, / senz’alcun proprio peso e meno astretti / a le leggi de gli altri.’ ‘mirata da ciascun passa, e non mira’ (II, 19).

276 Notes to pages 157–62 57 58 59 60

‘raccolse gli occhi, andò nel vel ristretta’ (II, 18). ‘lodata passa e vagheggiata ... / fra le cupide turbe, e se n’avede’ (IV, 33). ‘l’avaro sguardo in sé, raccolto’ (IV, 30). ‘asconde i suoi gran pregi, / e de’ vagheggiatori ella s’invola / a le lodi, a gli sguardi, inculta e sola’ (II, 14). 61 ‘nasconde / sotto il manto de l’odio altro desio.’ 62 ‘Vela il soverchio ardir con la vergogna, / e fa’ manto del vero a la menzogna.’ 63 In ‘Tasso e Dante,’ Della Terza perceptively identified the presence of these contradictory phenomena within the limited sphere of Tasso’s use of Dante. Since ‘the limits between the mysterious and the certain are dubious in Tasso, and the areas where the divine and the demonic function are not well distinguished ... the source in Dante, which is precise and clearly articulated at the original moment of its reception, consistent in its ramifications, is redirected along uncertain paths towards suggestive but obscure ends. It thus happens that a southern warrior, not without his own brawling brand of loyalty to the Christian cause, Argillano, is visited at dawn by the fury Alecto and so has a false dream from which he draws wild plans. But it also happens that, a few dawns later, Goffredo receives a visit from the dead Ugone in a dream and draws from it useful advice for the solution of the most difficult problems of the siege. So are morning dreams to be believed? Since Tasso’s soul appears to be receptive, even at the level of popular religion, to demonic tricks, there is no place in it for such absolute certainties. As often happens in Tasso’s understanding of Dante’s message, the latter reaches him only in fragments: the dreams of Tasso’s warriors are all Dantesque morning dreams, but they have lost the meaning of necessary veracity’ (400–1). 7. Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict 1 Tasso clearly articulates the subordination of medical art to the poetic in this brief character portrait: ‘E già l’antico Erotimo, che nacque / in riva al Po, s’adopra in sua [di Goffredo] salute, / il qual de l’erbe e de le nobil acque / ben conosceva ogni uso, ogni virtute; / caro a le muse ancor, ma si compiacque / ne la gloria minor de l’arti mute; / sol curò torre a morte i corpi frali, / e potea fra i nomi anco immortali’ (And old Erotimus then, who was born on the banks of the Po, busies himself about his healing: he who knew thoroughly every virtue, every use of herbs and sovereign waters. Dear he was to the Muses too, but contented himself with the lesser glory of the silent

Notes to pages 162–4 277

2

3 4

5

arts. His care was only to snatch from death frail bodies, and yet he had skill to make their names immortal [XI, 70]). As we know, Tasso had thought of the title Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered) or racquistata (reacquired), which then became the title of the final version he authorized. The poem’s first publisher, Angelo Ingegneri (Parma and Casalmaggiore, 1581) imposed the title of Gerusalemme liberata. Durling makes this point in The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic 209. It is significant that these characters recur together in different places in Tasso’s writing as representatives of an art. We note in the Dialoghi the presence of a captain, doctor, and orator (the latter obviously an alter ego of the poet as rhetorician and persuader): ‘Forestiero Napolitano [FN]: – Ma la medicina non è ella possente di risanar gli infermi?; Torquato Rangone [TR]: – È molte volte; FN: – È l’arte del navigare è possente di ridur le navi in porto, e quella del carattiere di guidare i carri e le carette con le persone salve a l’albergo desiderato? E la scienza de l’oratore può volgere e rivolgere gli animi in quella parte ove più gli piace?; TR: – Così avien spesse volte; FN: – E quella del capitano può espugnar le città e vincer gli esserciti?; TR: – Questa io stimo sia più di tutte l’altre possente.’ (Neapolitan Stranger [NS]: ‘But does not medicine have the power to cure the ill?’ Torquato Rangone [TR]: ‘Many times it does’ NS: ‘And does not the art of navigation possess the power to lead ships into port, and that of the driver to drive people safely to where they want to go in carts and carriages? And doesn’t the knowledge of the orator turn and twist hearts this way and that, wherever he likes?’ TR: ‘This often happens.’ NS: ‘And cannot that of the captain wipe out cities and triumph over armies?’ TR: ‘I say that this is the most powerful of all’) [‘Il Rangone overo de la pace,’ vol. II, book I, p. 532]). Among the letters, the one to Scipione Gonzaga of 15 April 1579 is particularly interesting, because of the biographical motif of authority in the guise of punitive law: ‘Le purghe dunque de’ buoni giudici, che a buon medico possono assomigliarsi, oprano nel corpo infermità non lente e micidiali, ma dolori grandi e di poca durata ... E tali erano quelle dimostrazioni che gli antichi capitani usavano contra i soldati, che avessero o lasciata l’ordinanza o rivolte le spalle al nemico’ (The purges of good judges, who can be like good doctors, do not cause slow, deadly infirmities in the body, but mighty, shortlived pains ... And such were those practices that the captains of old used against soldiers who had ignored orders or turned their backs on the enemy [I, 38]). ‘Qual l’infermo talor ch’in sogno scorge / drago o cinta di fiamme alta Chimera’; ‘ed inferma somiglia a cui vitale / succo le interne parti arse rin-

278 Notes to pages 164–7

6

7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15

fresca’; ‘Come vede talor torbidi sogni / ne’ brevi sonni suoi l’egro o l’insano.’ ‘né v’entra peregrin, se non smarrito, / ma lunge passa e la dimostra a dito’; ‘onde a gran pena / ritrova il peregrin riparo o scampo / ne le tempeste de l’instabil campo.’ Gathered together and conceptually opposed to those of the Dialoghi, in the poem Il mondo creato the figures of the invalid, wanderer, and child are the emblems of human misery: ‘Giova al nocchiero entro al securo porto / la nave ritener, se ’l vento e l’onda / spaventosa tempesta a lui minaccia, / ed armato Orion guerra gli indice. / E giova al peregrin volgendo il passo / fuggir la noia d’importuna pioggia, / e ricovrarsi in solitario albergo. / E giova a gli egri osservar de i giorni / giudici della vita e della morte’ (It is wise for the helmsman to hold back his ship within the safe harbour if wind and wave threaten him with a fearsome tempest, and armed Orion proclaims war on him. And it is wise for the wandering pilgrim to turn his steps to flee the nuisance of persistent rain, and shelter in a solitary refuge. And it is wise for the sick to observe the judgment days of life and of death [Secondo Giorno, lines 615–23]). ‘Qual semplice bambin mirar non osa / ove insolite larve abbia presenti, / o come pave ne la notte ombrosa, / imaginando pur mostri o portenti.’ Tasso’s mother, Porzia, had died in 1556, Bernardo in 1569. We might compare the subject’s frequent self-representations as an uprooted plant to the image of the protective oak tree: see Rime, vol. II: 73, 170, 171, 515, 797, 858, 1662 of the Solerti edition. Literary identification also plays a determinant role in this self-nobilizing: ‘Lasso! E seguii con mal sicure piante, / qual Ascanio o Camilla, il padre errante’ (Alas! And, like Ascanio or Camilla, I followed my wandering father with uncertain crying [lines 39–40]). ‘[Q]uasi un mar nel suo vorace seno / tutte de l’Asia ha le ricchezze absorte’ (that like a sea has swallowed up all the riches of Asia in its voracious breast). We may note a clue to this identification in the lexical connection absorte / absorto that links back to the autobiographical image of the poem’s opening (‘me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli / e fra l’onde agitato e quasi absorto’ [myself a wandering pilgrim tossed among the reefs and amid the waves, and almost overwhelmed]). Cf A. Solerti,Vita di Torquato Tasso I: 861–5. F. Orlando, Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura 22. J. Derrida, La scrittura e la differenza 219. G. Getto, Interpretazione del Tasso 12 ff, has emphatically underlined this point.

Notes to pages 167–70

279

16 ‘I miei nemici mi hanno fatto esempio di infelicità’ (My enemies have made me an example of unhappiness) (Letter to M. Cataneo, 30 December 1585 [II, 478]). 17 ‘Or come posso io scusarmi d’aver disservito così alto, così valoroso, così cortese, così benigno signore, se non rigettando tutta la colpa ne l’altrui difetto e ne la malignità de la mia fortuna e ne la necessità, ch’è tiranna de gli uomini; lasciandone la mia volontà non solo alleggerita, ma libera e scarica d’ogni colpa e d’ogni sospezion di colpa?’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579[I, 315]). 18 ‘i principi in terra sono ministri d’Iddio, e immagini e simulacri de la sua potenza’(Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579 [I, 299]). 19 ‘quelli da’ quali la maestà de’ principi viene offesa’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579 [I, 299]). 20 ‘E certo i parricidi che, cuciti in un cuoio con una volpe e con un gallo, sono gettati nel mare, in guisa che mentre spirano non possono a sé trar l’aria, e mentre sono da’ flutti agitati non si purgano ne l’onde, e mentre sono esposti sul lido non si riposano ne la terra; i parricidi, dico, poco hanno che invidiare le mie pene’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579 [I, 300]). 21 ‘e sono scacciato da la cittadinanza, non di Napoli o di Ferrara, ma del mondo tutto; sì che a me solo non è lecito dire ciò che a tutti è lecito, cioè d’esser cittadino de la terra; escluso non solo da le leggi civili, ma da quelle de le genti e de la natura d’Iddio; privo di tutte l’amicizie, di tutte le conversazioni, di tutti i commerci, de la cognizion di tutte le cose, di tutti i trattenimenti, di tutti i conforti; rigettato da tutte le grazie, e in ogni tempo e in ogni luogo egualmente schernito e abbominato’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579 [I, 299]). 22 In some letters Tasso complains of the superficiality of the judges’ examination when they put his doubts down to his ‘melancholy humour.’ 23 C. Varese, Torquato Tasso 104. He defines Tasso as ‘a mind that calculates the point between resignation and the possibility of asking for and avoiding constraint,’ capable of putting together a literary and intellectual strategy that allows him to respect and at the same time ‘get around the obtacles of the times, avoiding “giving the friars an opportunity.”’ The unknowingly premonitory image of prison expresses Tasso’s attitude of childish submission to the authority of models. From this also emerges his defensive intention and his intolerance of coercion: ‘Noi, in quella maniera ch i fanciulli ch’imparano a scrivere non ardiscono di stendere alcuna lettera fuor de le righe segnate, ci conterremo dentro a i segni prescrittici da chi più sa; e temendo ad ogni suono di sferza, con man tremante scriveremo i nostri versi (come alcun dice) puerili. Ma parmi udirvi ridere e dire: qual nova modestia

280 Notes to pages 170–1

24

25 26

27

28

è questa? Veggio che volete trarmi dal numero di coloro che debbono stare rinchiusi ne i cancelli grammaticali. Deh guardate c’amor non v’inganni! Pur io non ripugno (se così vi pare) d’uscirne; e sì come esorto voi a non vi ci serrare, così vi consiglio a non ve ne allontanare, né pur anche per ischerzo, più di quello che l’esempio de’ più laudati e ’l vostro giudicio vi dimostrerà esser convenevole; e forsi non fia se non prudente consiglio lo starci qualche tempo rinchiuso, per poter poi ir vagando più sicuramente’ (We, in the way that children learning how to write do not dare to extend any letter beyond the marked lines, will content ourselves with staying within the marks prescribed for us by those who know best; and, afraid at every sound of the whip, with a trembling hand we will write our [as some say] childish poems. But I seem to hear you laugh and say: what new modesty is this? I see that you want to subtract me from the number of those who must stay closed up within the grammatical gates. Well, be careful that love does not trick you! Though I do not disdain [if so it seems to you] to go out from them; and if I exhort you to not close us up within them, so I advise you not to distance yourself from them more than the example of those most praised and [whom] your judgment show you to be appropriate, not even for a joke; and perhaps it may be but prudent advice to stay closed up for a time, in order to be able to go wandering more safely later [Letter to Orazio Ariosto, 16 January 1577, I, 242–3]). ‘Nota una cosa messer Flaminio, la quale a bell’arte fu fatta da me: che non v’è quasi amore nel mio poema di felice fine (e certo è così), e che questo basta loro perché essi tolerino queste parti’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 24 April 1576 [I, 162]). G. Getto, Interpretazione del Tasso 8–10. Cf the letter to S. Gonzaga of 1576 about the possibility of Tasso’s establishing himself in Rome with Cardinal Medici: ‘e non mi sono vergognato di scoprirle il flusso e ’l riflusso de’ miei pensieri, e quella irresoluzione la quale è stata, e temo che non debba essere, la rovina di tutte le mie azioni’ (and I was not ashamed to reveal to him the ebb and flow of my thoughts, and the indecision that there has been, and that I fear may be the ruin of all my actions). ‘partii non solo scacciato ma volontario di Ferrara; luogo ove io era se non nato, almeno rinato, e dove ora non sol dal bisogno sono stato costretto a ritornare, ma sospinto anche da grandissimo desiderio ch’io aveva di baciare le mani a Sua Altezza, e di riacquistar ne l’occasion de le nozze alcuna parte de la sua grazia’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, 15 April 1579 [I, 322]). Letter to M. Cataneo, 30 December 1585 (II, 477–83).

Notes to pages 171–3 281 29 ‘Laonde io non posso difendere cosa alcuna da’ nemici o dal diavolo, se non la volontà’ (ibid., II, 478). 30 ‘Ma Iddio sa che non fu mai né mago né luterano giammai’ (ibid., II, 478). 31 Letter to Marquis G. Buoncompagno, 17 May 1580 (II, 84). 32 ‘chi sarà tanto crudele che da l’uno o da l’altro grembo voglia separarmi?’ (Letter to Don Oddi, September 1590 [V, 36]). 33 ‘osai di pormi a quest’impresa, ancorché sapessi che ciò non sarebbe stato per piacere a mio padre, il quale e per la lunga età, e per li molti e vari negozi che per le mani passati gli sono, conoscendo l’instabilità della fortuna e la varietà de’ tempi presenti, avrebbe desiderato che a più saldi studi mi fossi attenuto, co’ quali quello m’avessi io potuto acquistare che egli con la poesia, e molto più col correr de le poste in servigio de’ principi, avendo già acquistato, per la malignità de la sua sorte perdé, né ancora ha potuto ricuperare: sì ché avendo io un sì fermo appoggio com’è la scienza de le leggi, non dovessi poi incorrere in quegli incomodi, ne’ quali egli è alcuna volta incorso.’ 34 The importance that the theme of poetic fame assumes throughout Tasso’s life is well known. Caretti shows that this desire for glory asserts itself from the time of Rinaldo, finding its most congenial form in the chivalric genre, where by tradition it represents the theme that runs through the errant quête (Ariosto e Tasso 74). 35 Cf F. Fortini, ‘Gerusalemme liberata’ 209–15. 36 Among numerous possible examples, I recall madrigal 311, where Tasso’s attitude expresses itself in a paradoxical formulation: ‘Nave in mar, segno in torre, / ch’in alto è fisso e si rivolge intorno / a’ venti notte e giorno, / somiglia il mio pensiero, / e d’instabile augel costante arciero / e stella in cielo errante / par la costanza mia fatta incostante’ (My mind resembles a ship in the sea, a flag on a tower that is fixed on high and turns around in the wind, night and day, and my constancy made inconstant seems like the constant hunter of an inconstant bird and like a wandering star in the sky). But see also an extract from his letter to Cardinal Albano of 2 November 1578, in which the requirement for the authority invoked to fill the void created by the awareness of loss reappears: ‘Farò professione d’essere sua creatura: e in tal concetto supplico che per lo innanzi voglia ella tenermi e fare che da altri io sia tenuto, prendendo possessione di me e del mio libero arbitrio, del quale le do liberamente la signoria ... Vostra Signoria illustrissima, la quale, col peso de l’autorità che ha sopra di me, può fermare i moti de la mia mente, sempre che per incostanza o per follia vacillasse’ (I will profess to be your creature: and as such, I beg that for this reason you will wish to keep me

282 Notes to pages 173–5

37 38

39

40

41

42

43

44

and see that I be kept by others, taking possession of me and of my free will, whose control I give freely ... Your most illustrious Lordship, who, with the weight of authority that you have over me, can stop the motions of my mind, if at any time it should vacillate through inconstancy or folly [I, 283]). A. Daniele, ‘Anatomie tassesche’ 206. And he was familiar with real disguise, too, at least once. I allude to the famous episode of his visit to his sister Cornelia in Sorrento, which seems symptomatic. Having fled from the convent of San Francesco in Ferrara where he was under observation, Tasso arrived at his sister’s disguised as a wayfarer. Wanting to test her affection for him, he announced to her that Torquato was in grave danger of his life. On this episode, see E. Fenzi, ‘Il potere, la morte, l’amore. Note sull’Aminta,’ particularly 244–8. The absence of significant echoes in sixteenth-century dialogues underlines the singularity of Tasso’s practice, which ought rather to be related to its distant classical matrix. The foreign, anonymous character who acts as the author’s spokesman actually appears in some of Plato’s late dialogues. ‘Era ne la stagione che ’l vindemiatore suol premer da l’uve mature il vino e che gli arbori si veggono in alcun luogo spogliati de’ frutti, quand’io, ch’in abito di sconosciuto peregrino tra Novara e Vercelli cavalcava, veggendo che già l’aria cominciava ad annerare e che tutto intorno era cinto di nuvoli e quasi pregno di pioggia, cominciai a pungere più forte il cavallo.’ ‘E s’io, che ne l’infelicità gli sono simile, potrò ne l’istesso modo a Vostra Signoria reverendissima (che non confido che debba essere men sincero giudice) persuadere di non esser folle, quando che sia, mi gioverà di raccontare le mie passate infelicità’ (II, 120). ‘Io sono in uno stato, che gli uomini non si possono mostrar nemici de le mie lodi, che non si mostrino ancora nemici de la salute’ (Letter to S. Gonzaga, February-March 1587 [III, 165]). ‘Peregrinazione è ancora questa vita, de la quale per mio aviso già sono a l’estremo; e pur mi è fisso ne l’animo quel mio antico desiderio di stampar le mie composizioni’ (Letter to A. Costantini, 25 June 1590 [IV, 324]). It is well known that using the indications in Aristotle’s Poetics as a starting point to establish the norms and models of literary works constituted a fundamental chapter in classicist theoretical efforts, one that lasted for thirty years in the middle of the century. Their desire to restore the heroic forms of the classical poem contrasts with the anomalous experience of the modern chivalric romance, and with the strength and overwhelming success of a work like the Furioso. Above all, its extreme adaptability to the needs of the various and the fantastic and its bourgeois and ironic tones, which they judged inappropriate to a high poetic form, make its codification in Aristote-

Notes to pages 175–6 283

45 46 47 48

49

lian terms problematic. Those who had in mind the tales of Homer and Virgil and, on the basis of those prestigious models, struggled to define the structures of an ideal heroic world brought up to date with modern times, were obviously inclined to question the legitimacy of the Furioso. As we know, the stages of the debate are many and the positions varied. Nevertheless, within this complex panorama it is possible to distinguish two principal opposed blocks: on one side the intransigent Aristotelians (such as Minturno or Speroni), on the other the ‘Ferraresi’ (Giraldi Cinzio, Pigna), who were more open – and not just out of patriotism – to the arguments and merits gained on the field of modern experimentation. The question did not remain confined to the limits of an abstract theoretical debate. The road that leads to Tasso’s solution passes through Trissino’s failed Italia liberata dai Goti, the example of Giraldi himself in his Ercole, and the contradictions of Bernardo Tasso, who was constrained to change the form and framework of his Amadigi (originally conceived along the lines of the heroic epic) by the irritation that his public reading at the court of Prince Sanseverino provoked. T. Tasso, Discorsi del poema eroico II: 242. As Durling defines it in Figure of the Poet. I shall often consider his acute observations in the pages devoted here to Tasso the theorist. Discorsi dell’arte poetica (Scritti I: 41); trans. Rhu 130–1. The implicit analogy between the poet who creates his ‘little world’ and the ‘supreme Maker’ who creates the universe is fully worked out in Il mondo creato, a poem about the seven days of creation. There Tasso develops the analogies between human and divine art with the aim of praising God’s infinite ‘poetic’ creativity and lamenting, in comparison, the weakness of the human imagination. ‘Aggiungo che da la moltitudine nasce l’indeterminazione; e questo progresso potrebbe andare in infinito, senza che le sia da l’arte prefisso o circonscritto termine alcuno [...] Il poeta ch’una favola tratta, finita quella, è giunto al suo fine: chi più ne tesse, o quattro o sei o dieci ne potrà tessere, né più a questo numero che a quello è obligato. Non potrà aver dunque determinata certezza qual sia quel segno ove convenga fermarsi’ (I add that multiplicity produces indeterminacy, and this progression could go on ad infinitum, unless art fixed and prescribed limits [...] The poet who treats one fable fulfils his aim when it is finished, while if he interweaves more than one he may as well interweave four or six or ten: he is no more bound to this number than to that. He cannot therefore be certain of stopping at a suitable point, [Discorsi del poema eroico 228–9, trans. Cavalchini 67; in Scritti II, 228–9]).

284 Notes to pages 176–8 50 Discorsi del poema eroico 243–4 (my italics). Trans. Cavalchini 78–9; in Scritti II, 243–4). 51 ‘ma quanto meglio opera chi riguarda ad un sol fine che chi diversi fini si propone, nascendo da la diversità de’ fini distrazione nell’animo e impedimento nell’operare, tanto meglio operarà l’imitator d’una sola favola che l’imitatore di molte azioni’ (T. Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica I: 28. Trans. Rhu 119; in Scritti I, 28). 52 ‘nascendo da la diversità de’ fini distrazione ne l’animo e impedimento ne l’operare’ (Discorsi del poema eroica 243. Trans. Cavalchini 78; in Scritti II, 243). 53 ‘essendo la nostra umanità composta di nature assai fra loro diverse, è necessario che d’una istessa cosa sempre non si compiaccia, ma con la diversità procuri or a l’una, or a l’altra de le sue parti sodisfare; essendo dunque la varietà dilettevolissima a la nostra natura, potranno dire ch’assai maggior diletto si trovi ne la moltitudine che ne l’unità de la favola’ (Discorsi del poema eroico 241–2. Trans. Cavalchini 77; in Scritti II, 241–2). 54 ‘[I]f the fables [i.e., plots] are several, independent of each other, the poem will be several’ (Discorsi del poema eroico 229. Trans. Calvalchini 67; in Scritti II, 229). 55 It is truly startling to compare the passage on the poem as a microcosm to a passage from the dedication to Scipione Gonzaga of the dialogue ‘De la dignità’ (September 1581), where Tasso reasserts with the same obsessive insistence the need for the unity of the church. The centrifugal thrust of variety, which ought to be rejected on the level of artistic ideology because of its treacherous attractions, is the same that Tasso recognizes as operational in the heretical deviances within the church: ‘E benchè molti siano i rivi de l’operazioni, e molti i rami pieni de’ suoi fatti, e molti i raggi ch’ella [la chiesa] semina de la sua dottrina; uno nondimeno il fonte, uno il tronco fondato sovra tenacissima radice, uno il sole che sparge la chiarissima luce; e l’unità si conserva ne l’origine; ed un capo solamente regge molte membra: parte de le quali sono divise da questo corpo per l’eretica pravità; altre, per l’ottomana tirannide, la quale usurpa le più belle parti de l’oriente e del mezzogiorno. Ma Vostra Signoria reverendissima con gli altri può considerare i mezzi, co’ quali si possono ricongiungere; acciochè uno sia l’ovile e uno il pastore, sì come una è la fede e uno il battesimo’ (And although many are the streams of her operations and many the branches full of her affairs, and many the rays of her doctrine that she [the church] sows; nevertheless there is one source, one trunk founded on a most steadfast root, one sun which spreads the brightest light; and unity is preserved in the origin; and one head alone supports many limbs: parts of which are divided from this body

Notes to pages 178–80

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57

58 59

60 61

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by heretical wickedness; others by the Ottoman tyranny, which usurps the most beautiful parts of the Orient and the South. But Your most reverend Lordship with the others can consider the means by which they can be reconnected; so that there shall be one sheepfold and one shepherd, just as there is one faith and one baptism). ‘Tutta dunque la varietà nel poema nascerà da’ mezzi e da gli impedimenti: i quali possono esser diversi e di molte maniere e quasi di molte nature, e non distruggeranno l’unità dela favola, nondimeno, s’uno sarà il principio dal quale i mezzi dependeranno, ed uno il fine a cui sono dirizzati’ (Discorsi del poema eroico 252. Trans. Cavalchini 85; in Scritti II, 252). F. Fortini, ‘Gerusalemme liberata’ 213. It is worth quoting the whole passage because of its use for biography: ‘Le passioni amorose o le diaboliche potenze che disviano i cavalieri non sono che l’involontaria allegoria del sogno di dolcezza o d’angoscia, di orrore e di languore che disvia il poeta dalla costruzione del proprio monumento epico. E in realtà si potrebbe dire che, per il Tasso, volto al raggiungimento della poesia come “poema,” la lotta per conquistare Gerusalemme fa tutt’uno con la lotta per l’alloro poetico. All’interno del poema si rifrange quella contraddizione vitale per cui la felicità è il peccato, e quindi anche il canto è peccato: vedi il simbolico percorso dei due guerrieri verso Rinaldo, attraverso le tentazioni del giardino d’Armida; e tutto il sublime sedicesimo canto (le delizie di Armida e il ravvedersi di Rinaldo), che è un canto di sirene’ (The amorous passions or diabolical powers that lead the knights astray are simply the involuntary allegory of the dream of sweetness or anguish, of horror and languor that lead the poet astray from the construction of his own epic monument. And in reality, one might say that, for Tasso, who turned to the achievement of poetry as ‘poem,’ the battle to conquer Jerusalem is one with the fight for the poetic laurel. Within the poem the vital contradiction by which happiness is sin, and so the song, too, is sin is refracted: see the two warriors’ symbolic route towards Rinaldo, through the temptations of Armida’s garden; and the whole of the sublime sixteenth canto – Armida’s delights and Rinaldo’s repentance – a siren song [212–13; emphasis in original]). According to a codified technique of argumentation; see C. Perelman, ‘Argomentazione.’ G. Baldassarri, ‘Inferno’ e ‘Cielo’ 55. This problem lies at the centre of two letters, one to L. Scalabrino, of 2 June 1575 (I, 79–86), and one to S. Gonzaga, of 5 July 1575 (I, 94–6). Translator’s note: Zatti, like Tasso before him, is punning on the verb sciogliere, which is used in both these expressions in Italian. F. Ducros, ‘Au sujet de la rhétorique’ 72.

286 Notes to pages 181–3 62 A similar discourse is valid for the addressee, no less a participant in the contradictory nature of poetic communication. The reader recognizes his own state in that of the sick child: ‘The man who is prey to sin is like a sick child; he needs to be cured, but if he is in a state of weakness, one must make use of that weakness’ (Ducros 73). 63 Ducros 72. Placing himself in the extremely general perspective of the relationship between ‘La letteratura e l’irrazionale,’ Jean Starobinski emphasizes the theoretical alibi that regulates poetics inspired by the desire to miscere utile dulci, where the pleasure principle is able to stand up for its rights safe from the instructive objective that legitimates it. The rational project of the poet, who may well be sincerely animated by concern for the good ‘is destined to encounter the irrational, to confront it in every way. Why is it, if it is necessary to instruct, to spread what is useful, that one assumes that men are not already sufficiently brought around to the virtues and “positive” values, that they are not yet completely rational; and perhaps that they are seduced, lost, asleep ... If it is necessary to guide them towards reason, can one all of a sudden speak to them in the language of reason, which they will not understand? Is it not perhaps necessary to turn to images, to fictions, to perceptible seductions? To make irrational men rational, it is necessary, up to a certain point, to communicate with their own unreason, make use of their childish, naïve remarks. The lesson of wisdom, the revelation of the truth, must be administered like sweetened pills ...’ (6–7). 64 The reference is here to the dialectic on which Horkheimer and Adorno base their interpretation of the Homeric world: ‘The venerable cosmos of the meaningful Homeric world is shown to be the achievement of regulative reason, which destroys myth by virtue of the same rational order in which it reflects it’ (‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’ 44). In very different historical and cultural situations, Tasso’s Counter-Reformation perspective imposes upon his epic hero a somewhat similar task: to pass through nature, or desire, in order to exorcize the evil with which he associates it. 65 Cf Horkheimer and Adorno, ibid.: ‘[T]he knowledge which comprises his [Odysseus’s] identity and which enables him to survive, draws its content from experience of the multitudinous, from digression and salvation; and the knowing survivor is also the man who takes the greatest risks when death threatens, thus becoming strong and unyielding when life continues. That is the secret of the process between epic and myth; the self does not constitute the fixed antithesis to adventure, but in its rigidity molds itself only by way of that antithesis: being an entity only in the diversity of that which denies all unity’ (47). 66 The stanza does not appear in the second Bonnà edition on which Caretti’s

Notes to pages 183–9 287

67

68

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77

text is based. Caretti nevertheless preserves it in order to maintain what has become a traditional order. Tasso himself brought it back with some variation in the Conquistata (XIII, 43). L. Derla, ‘Sull’allegoria della Gerusalemme liberata’ 485. See also what Baldassarri (‘Inferno’ e ‘Cielo’) similarly notes: ‘it cannot be coincidence that in canto IV, the most obligatory, stock “adventure,” the one born of the chivalric obligation to aid defenceless maidens and the one that causes Eustazio to launch into a passionate speech (“Ah! Non sia ver, per Dio, che si ridica / in Francia o dove in pregio è cortesia, / che si fugga da noi rischio o fatica / per cagion così giusta e così pia.” [Ah, let it not be (for God’s sake) that it be reported in France, or wheresoever courtesy is prized, that peril or travail for cause so just and pious is shunned by us.] IV, 81), should be inscribed ab initio under the threatening sign of diabolical machinations’ (63). To show how the new code has arrived, Baldassarri gives the example of Tancredi’s rejection of the potential ‘adventure’ inside Armida’s castle (VII, 30); a traditional chivalric hero, such as Boiardo’s Orlando – irresistibly attracted ‘nel bel palagio de cristallo adorno’ (into the beautiful palace adorned with crystal) by the temptation to ‘vedere il fin di tanta meraviglia’ (see the end of so many marvels) (Orlando innamorato, book II, canto XXXI, stanza 46) – would not have shown a similar sense of responsibility. ‘[T]hat which allures and spurs the generous soul, that which has power to awaken slumbering virtue, it seems that he can find it all and adorn it effectively so that it compels and pleases’ (I, 19). ‘di soggiorno / certo non sono stabili abitanti: / peregrini perpetui usano intorno / trarne gli alberghi e le cittade erranti’ (XVII, 21). ‘[T]hat pair proceeds; and rigid and unswerving they harden themselves against the charms of pleasure’ (XVI, 17). ‘The heartless man gave not a single sign of human emotion. Did he change colour, perhaps? Did he at least for my sorrow bathe his eyes, perhaps, or drop a single sigh?’ (XVI, 57). ‘[T]he word of a pagan is uncertain and light, and a pledge of little surety’ (V, 78). ‘A woman is a deceitful and talkative thing: she wants and she wants not: foolish is the man who trusts himself to her’ (XIX, 84). ‘nel mondo mutabile e leggiero / costanza è spesso il variar pensiero.’ ‘She lowered her eyes, she walked along wrapped in her veil’ (II, 18). ‘vede Tancredi aver la vita a sdegno, / tanto un suo vano amor l’ange e martira.’ ‘Non morì già, ché sue virtuti accolse / tutte in quel punto e in guardia al cor le mise.’

288 Notes to pages 189–91 78 ‘E poi che giunto al sommo duce unìo / gli spirti alquanto e l’animo compose / incominciò ...’ 79 The relationship between Goffredo and Solimano is analogous: ‘Furor contra virtute or qui combatte / d’Asia in un picciol cerchio il grande impero’ (Rage against valour now here disputes in a narrow circle the mightly rule of Asia [IX, 50]). It echoes the famous Petrarchesque opposition (‘vertù contra furore / prenderà l’arme’ [virtue will take up arms against fury], RVF CXXVIII), with the shift of barbarian otherness from the north to the east. 80 We can compare Tancredi’s calculating (‘Non mai la vita, ove cagione onesta / del comun pro la chieda, altri risparmi, / ma né prodigo sia d’anima grande / uom degno; e tale è ben chi qui la spande’ [One never should be saving of his life where a valid reason of the common good demands it; but neither should the worthy man be prodigal of his great soul; and such indeed is he who expends it here], XIII, 34) to the wild and rampant fury of Solimano’s Arabians: ‘l’insano ardire e la licenza / di que’ barbari erranti è omai sì grande / ch’in guisa d’un diluvio intorno senza / alcun contrasto si dilata e spande’ (the licence and mad zeal of those nomadic barbarians is now so great that it swells and spreads all over like a flood, without any opposition, [V, 88]). 81 Although it is not a new literary motif (see R. Alhaique Pettinelli, ‘Tra il Boiardo e l’Ariosto: Il Cieco da Ferrara e Nicolò degli Agostini’), the falling of her helmet takes on a particular emphasis in Clorinda’s case because of the timely way in which the event accompanies her every epiphany well beyond the necessary function of revealing her sex (cf G. Getto, Nel mondo della Gerusalemme 131–2). Rather, it becomes part of the dialectic of identity and concealment that defines her character, to the extent of establishing itself as a genuine symbolic figure. 82 ‘armò d’orgoglio il volto e si compiacque / rigido farlo, e pur rigido piacque.’ 83 The pagans are bothered by the excessive weight of their arms even in battle (cf IX, 77; XI, 49; XVII, 18; XX, 16). And for the Christians laying down their arms always betrays their cause (cf IV, 81; XIV, 53). In its extreme effects, the link between nudity and deviance finds its representative in Ariosto’s Orlando, who strips off his military insignia at the moment in which his betrayal by love leads to genuine madness. None of Tasso’s characters suffers such radical consequences, but, one might say, that is precisely because of a more systematic nature of the relation between nudity and deviance, which appears to be symptomatic of a threat that is more real and impending the less it requires sensational manifestations (see, for example, how much the

Notes to pages 191–8 289

84

85 86

87

88 89

nudity of the Greek allies [I, 50–1] is constitutionally linked to their untrustworthiness and their tendency to betray [II, 71–2]). Even Goffredo’s rare exceptions to orthodoxy pass through similar signals: his choice of a lighter armour is due to a blameworthy desire for individual glory (XI, 20); his demonstration of courage and manly virtue in casting aside his heavy shield is punished by Clorinda’s arrow (XI, 53–4); his peremptory redemption is mediated by his recovery of repressive hardness (‘chiuso ne l’armi’ XI, 78). As the elderly Arsete reveals to us at the beginning of canto XII, Clorinda was born to the Christian faith and brought up pagan. Her conversion is thus first and foremost a ‘return to her origins.’ ‘Vainly you ask what I by custom do not make known’ (XII, 61). In this sense, the episode is closely linked to Rinaldo’s ‘conversion’ on the Mount of Olives (XVIII, 11–17). Here it is also a question of a return to the faith symbolically lost, one that takes place at the first light of dawn and is realized symbolically as the shedding of all that is dark, contaminated, and oppressive: the ‘caligine ... de la carne’ (darkness ... of the flesh [XVIII, 8]) of which Rinaldo purifies himself is the covering that separates him from Christian truth, just like the casing of Clorinda’s cuirass, which opens in the light of grace. The religious alibi also legitimates the insertion of another love story into the poem, that of Olindo and Sofronia, which nevertheless did not survive Tasso’s revision and was removed from the Conquistata. The Christian virgin also refuses love, and contact between the two lovers becomes possible only when their common death sentence liberates the language of desire (II, 33– 5). It is by no means coincidental that it should be Clorinda who intercedes for the two prisoners with Aladino, making her official entrance into the poem in this way. Orlando, Lettura freudiana del Misanthrope 11. Orlando, Lettura freudiana del Misanthrope 12.

8. Torquato Tasso: Epic in the Age of Dissimulation 1 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Del mentire’ in Saggi 2: 365. 2 Sarpi, in a letter to Jacques Gillot of 12 May 1609, in Lettere ai Gallicani 131. 3 For essential bibliography on dissimulation see: Ferruccio Ulivi, Il manierismo del Tasso e altri studi; Bortolo T. Sozzi, ‘Il Tasso e il “manierismo”’; Giovanna Scianatico, ‘Le Tasse et le manierisme.’ See also Francesco Erspamer, ‘Il pensiero debole di Torquato Tasso.’ 4 These verses recur in Scipione Ammirato, Giason Denores, and Sperone

290 Notes to pages 198–207

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

Speroni (see Weinberg, Trattati di poetica e di retorica del Cinquecento). Tasso may have read a version of this passage in his father’s poem Amadigi: ‘Come talor un medico, che vuole / gabbar l’infermo per fargli salute / celar l’amaro sotto il dolce suole, / acciocch’egli di ber non lo rifiute; / così sotto figmenti di parole, / di chimere da noi non conosciute, / danno i poeti molti documenti / al volgo ignaro, ed all’inferme menti’ (LI,1). Castiglione had already suggested the ‘health-bearing trick’ as a pedagogical principle for the courtier who wants to lead his prince down the rough road to virtue (Il libro del cortegiano IV, 10). ‘[E] fa’ manto del vero a la menzogna’ (IV, 25); ‘[E] nasconde / sotto il manto de l’odio’ (III, 19). For a fuller discusssion, see Adriano Prosperi, ‘L’eresia in città e a corte,’ in La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo (1441–1598). Dialoghi II/2, 545–65. The disguise of the courtier as a shepherd in the poetic fiction recalls another telling anecdote from Tasso’s life. In the summer of 1577 the poet slipped away from the convent of San Francesco, where the Duke was keeping him under surveillance, and managed to reach Sorrento, his native land. In yet another exercise in self-dissimulation, he decided to test the loyalty and affection of his sister Cornelia by arriving at her doorstep disguised as a pilgrim bearing the alarming news that her brother Torquato was in great danger of his life. She fainted and only revived when her brother threw off his mask and made himself known to her (see Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso I, 268 ff). ‘Splende il castel come in teatro adorno / suol fra notturne pompe altera scena; / ed in eccelsa parte Armida siede, / onde senz’esser vista e ode e vede’ (VII, 36). See ‘Esposizione del sonetto 13’ in Campanella, Tutte le poesie 64. See Malvezzi’s Il Tarquinio superbo in Scrittori politici dell’età barocca 899–938. ‘Per la fé, per la patria il tutto lice’ (IV, 27). One can capture antiphrastically the character of the man already in the etymology of the name: ‘A-lete’ means without hiding, without simulation. A suggestion for such a choice could have come to Tasso from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a work that circulated widely in the sixteenth century, in which the term philalethes recurs in opposition to simulators of words and actions (1127 a-b). ‘Cominciò poscia, e di sua bocca uscièno / più che mèl dolci d’eloquenza i fiumi’ (II, 61). ‘[E] con sì adorno inganno / cerca di ricoprir la mente accesa / sotto altro zelo; e gli altri anco d’onore / fingon desio quel ch’è desio d’amore’ (V, 7). The courtesy code distinguishing a precise narrative genre still carried posi-

Notes to pages 207–13

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

291

tive connotations in the ‘romanzo’ of Tasso’s father: ‘Che’ei ben sa, che difender le donzelle / da violenza d’uomo iniquo e rio, / di cui son l’arme sol lagrime belle, / officio è di guerrier cortese e pio’ (He knows very well that defending the damsels, whose weapons are only their beautiful tears, from the violence of the unjust and cruel man, is the duty of the courteous and pious knight [Amadigi LXXXIV, 39]). In Goffredo instead there has been a splitting of the two historically knitted values of courtesy and pietas. ‘Tessi la tela ch’io ti mostro ordita’ (IV, 24). See, respectively, XVIII, 62, and VI, 42. On this complementarity, see Jean Rousset, La letteratura dell’età barocca in Francia: Circe e il pavone 29–30. ‘Tentò ella mill’arti, e in mille forme / quasi Proteo novel gli apparse inanti’ (V, 63). ‘[C]hé nel mondo mutabile e leggiero / costanza è spesso il varïar pensiero’ (V, 3). See A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, chapter 4, ‘Tasso’ 179–209. In ‘“Celar l’arte,”’ Paolo D’Angelo retraces such a tradition along the double register of rhetorical and aesthetic doctrines. ‘Simulaverat artem / ingenio natura suo’ (Metamorphoses III 158–9). Longinus, Del sublime 261; see also Mario Praz, Il giardino dei sensi 111. Rousset, La letteratura 267–76. The roots of Erminia’s dissimulation are in Petrarca: ‘et così aven che l’animo ciascuna / sua passion sotto ’l contrario manto / ricopre con la vista or chiara or bruna’ (RVF 102.9–11). ‘[F]inger mi vuo’ Clorinda; e ricoperta / sotto l’imagin sua, d’uscir son certa’ (VI, 87). Accetto cites Erminia’s passion in chapter 14: ‘Come quest’arte può star tra gli amanti’ (Dissimulazione 66). But the discipline of controlling the passions with perfect dissimulation is described in Baltasar Gracián: for example, ‘Le passioni sono gli spiragli dell’animo. La saggezza più pratica consiste nel saper dissimulare: corre rischio di perder tutto chi gioca a carte scoperte. L’indugio del prudente gareggi con l’acume del perspicace: con chi ha occhi di lince, si usi l’inchiostro di seppia per nascondere il proprio intimo’ (The passions are gleams of the inner being. The most practical wisdom consists in knowing how to dissimulate. He who doesn’t play with his cards close to his vest runs the risk of losing everything. The prudent man’s caution should balance his sharpened wits. If you are dealing with someone whose eyes are as keen as the lynx’s, use squid’s ink to hide your innermost thoughts [Oracolo manuele e arte di prudenza 77]). ‘[T]osto ragion ne l’arme sue rinchiusa’ (XV, 66).

292 Notes to pages 214–15 29 ‘Mal amor si nasconde’ (XIX, 96). 30 On this theme, see Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo; Albano Biondi, ‘La giustificazione della simulazione nel cinquecento.’ 31 The source is in Cicero: ‘cum in animis hominum tantae latebrae sint et tanti recessi’ (Pro Marcello VII, 22). Cicero uses ‘latebra’ in a rhetorical sense, and for Gellius the ‘latebra scribendi’ are writings in code (see Noctes atticae XVII, 9). As Torquato Accetto notes, ‘Si conosceranno le cicatrici da ogni buon giudizio, e sarò scusato nel far uscir il mio libro in questo modo, quasi esangue, perché lo scriver della dissimulazione ha ricercato ch’io dissimulassi, e però si scemasse molto di quanto da principio ne scrissi’ (The scars will be revealed by every act of good judgment. And I will be excused for publishing my book in this way, without any blood in it, because writing about dissimulation required that I myself dissimulate. And therefore from its initial size the book has been greatly reduced [31–2]). 32 Gracián, Oracolo manuale 114. 33 ‘[C]hé ’n parte troppo cupa e troppo interna / il pensier de’ mortali occulto giace’ (V, 41). 34 ‘[C]on quel guardo suo ch’a dentro spia / nel più secreto lor gli affetti umani’ (I, 8).

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Index

Accetto, Torquato, 11, 199, 206, 211, 215, 291n27, 292n31 Achilles, 91 Adam and Eve, 12, 58 Adorno, Theodore A., 286nn64, 65 Aeneas, 90 Aeneid (Virgil), 24, 45 Agostini, Nicolò degli, 18, 36, 222n21, 230n14, 262n24 Alberti, Leon Battista, 59, 234n23 Alceste, 197 Alcocer, Hernando de, 242n26 Alcuin, 66 Alecto, 24 Alexander of Pherae, 261n20 Alhaique Pettinelli, Rosanna, 288n81 alterity, 3, 9, 11, 163 Altobello, 63 Ammirato, Scipione, 289n4 Ancroia, 240n9 Apuleius, 83 Aquinas, Thomas, 195 Aretino, Pietro, 249n55 Ariosto, Ludovico, as Ferrarese Homer, 97 Ariosto, Ludovico, works: Satires, 13, 119, 127, 230n17, 249n61, 251n80.

See also Cinque canti, Orlando furioso Ariosto, Orazio, 97 Aristotelians, 30, 75, 89, 109, 169, 181, 201, 213, 283n44 Aristotle, 16, 195, 239n2, 254n23, 282n44, 290n12 Arthurian legend, 15, 17, 34, 38, 45, 55, 63 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 1–12, 218n8, 226nn44, 4, 249n60, 252n81, 260n3 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 268n11 Auerbach, Erich, 1, 222n17 Aufhebung, 193 Augustus Caesar, 91 Avellini, L., 254n14 aventure, 15, 38, 39 Babel, 60, 117, 248n50 Badini, C., 263n34 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 38, 222n17 Baldassarri, Guido, 180, 257n37, 258n54, 264n45, 285n59, 287n67 Baruzzo, Elisabetta, 249n57 Baudelaire, Charles, 166 Beer, Marina, 259n62 Bembo, Pietro, 87, 238n51

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Index

Bianchi, Letizia, 242n26 Bible, the, 94, 252n81 Bigi, Emilio, 218n5, 250n67 Biondi, Albano, 292n30 Blasucci, Luigi, 218n5, 231n18, 262n23 Bloom, Harold, 2, 8, 96, 217n2 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1, 244n30, 252n81, 261n16 Bodel, Jean, 62, 239n5 Boiardo, Matteo Maria: as narrative artist, 18, 219n9, 224n35, 242n27, 249n55; as predecessor to Ariosto, 13–14, 32–3, 36, 62, 66, 103, 115, 222nn21, 22. See also Orlando innamorato Borromeo, Federigo, Cardinal, 243n29 Borsellino, Nino, 13 Bradamante, as legendary founder of Este dynasty, 8 Brand, C.P., 221n16, 225n41 Brasavola, Antonio Musa, 201, 203, 204 Breton cycle, 16, 62, 235n35 Bronzini, Giovan Battista, 221n16, 240n14 Bruno, Giordano, 199 Bruscagli, Riccardo, 5, 33, 202, 219n10, 222n17, 239n1, 255n25, 256n28 Brutus, 206, 215 Buoncompagno, G., 281n31 Cabani, Maria Cristina, 63, 240nn10, 12, 241n24 Calcagnini, Celio, 201 Calogrenant, 236n43 Calvin, John, 214 Calvino, Italo, 14

Campanella, Tommaso, 132, 196, 206, 290n9 Cantare d’Orlando, 64 cantari, 63, 64, 70, 73, 78, 79 Cantimori, Delio, 196 Caravaggio, 195 Carducci, Giosué, 251n79 Caretti, Lanfranco, 95, 135, 166, 252n1, 261n18, 267n1, 281n34 Carlo Emanuele di Savoia, 202 Carne-Ross, Donald S., 5, 39, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 218n8, 226n1, 227n12, 229n13 Carolingian literature, 16 Casadei, Alberto, 226n6, 249n58, 259nn62, 1 Cassirer, Ernst, 246n36 Castiglione, Baldassare, 59, 87, 124, 129, 202, 203, 204, 213, 214, 235n25, 238n50, 250n66, 290n4 catabasis, 45 Catalano, Michele, 222n19 Cataneo, Maurizio, 279n16, 281nn28–30 Catullus, 33 Cervantes, 1, 7, 11, 241–2n26, 245n33, 252n81 Cesarani, Remo, 5, 218n6, 224n29, 262n22 chanson de geste, 63, 118 Chanson de Roland, 45, 62 Charlemagne, 26, 110, 112 Charles V of France, 112, 129 Charles VIII of France, 18, 114 Chevalier, Maxime, 236n36, 242n26 Chrétien de Troyes, 17, 38, 45, 236n43 chronotope, 38 Cicero, 195, 261n20, 292n31 Cinque canti (Ariosto), 114–34; char-

Index acters: Alcina, 116, 119, 130, 251n81, 261n20; Astolfo, 119, 120, 130, 261n21; Avino, 115; Avolio, 115; Berlingiero, 115; Bianca, 118, 263n35; Cardorano, 124; Charles, 114, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 260n2, – as Caesar, 262n27; Cinzia, 261n21; Demogorgon, 117; Envy, 123, 261n20; Ganelon, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 132, 208, 245n32, 251n81, 261n17, 262n27; Gloricia, 116; Jove and the Giants, 130; Medea, 121, 130, 132; Orlando, 117, 122, 132, 262n27; Ottone, 115, 118; Penticone, 118, 122, 261n21; Riccardo, 132; Rinaldo, 117, 120, 122, 127, 130, 132, 262n27; Ruggiero, 115, 119, 120, 130, 132; Suspicion, 119, 123, 261n20 Circe, 209 Claudian, 262n27 Columbus, Christopher, 234n24 Constantini, Antonio, 282n43 contaminatio, 118 Contini, Gianfranco, 95, 218n5 Contreras, Diego Vasquez de, 242n26 Cornelia (Tasso’s sister), 282n38, 290n7 Counter-Reformation, 3, 5, 9, 137, 196, 198, 201, 213, 259n64, 286n64 Croce, Benedetto, 14, 40, 45, 218n7 crusaders, 2, 136, 274n41 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 224n30, 253n10 Dalla Palma, Giuseppe, 218n6, 221n16, 243n29 D’Angelo, Paolo, 291n21

309

Daniele, Antonio, 282n37 Dante, 1, 36, 49, 85, 87, 90, 109, 132, 220n12, 228n13, 231–2n18, 249n60, 250n66, 251n67, 253n10, 264n45, 276n60; contrappasso, 58; depiction of Ulysses, 58, 90, 131 Daria Malaguzzi Ariosto (the poet’s mother), 128 De Sanctis, Francesco, 40, 135, 140, 268n10 deferral, in narrative design, 20, 25, 30–2, 60 Del Corno Branca, Daniela, 221n16, 223n22 Della Rovere, Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino, 165 Della Terza, Dante, 255n26, 256n28, 276n63 Demogorgon, 8, 111 Denores, Giason, 289n4 Derla, Luigi, 185, 287n67 Derrida, Jacques, 278n14 desis, or complication of the narrative, 108 deviation in narrative design, 25–30 Di Maria, Salvatore, 218n8 Dido, 91, 207, 248n49 Dionisotti, Carlo, 5, 15, 218n1, 220n12, 222n20, 249nn56, 57, 251n77, 259n1 Dionysius of Syracuse, 261n20 dispositio, in narrative design, 68, 256n34 Dolce, Ludovico, 225n40 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 1, 2, 197, 235n36, 241–2n36, 251n81 Donato, Eugenio, 8, 223n23, 227n9 Ducros, François, 180, 286nn61–3

310

Index

Durling, Robert, 6, 7, 27, 28, 88, 178, 218n8, 221n16, 250n63, 261n15, 277n3, 283n46 Einhard, 66 Entrée d’Espagne, 17, 240n8 entrelacement (interlacing), 4, 9, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 30, 36, 42, 44, 60, 68, 117, 220n14; radical interlacing of the quests in Furioso, 19 Erasmus, 46, 57, 132, 214, 236n38 error, in narrative design, 19, 41, 100, 165 Erspamer, Francesco, 289n3 Este court, 204 Este family members: Alfonso I, 247n46; Alfonso II, 10, 99, 100, 101, 161, 168, 203; Borso, 126, 131; Ercole I, 126, 131; Ippolito, Cardinal, 231n17; Luigi, Cardinal, 268n9; Renée of France, 201 exempla, 42, 51, 54 fairies, 9, 36, 111 Fatini, Giuseppe, 218n8 Fenzi, E., 282n38 Ferguson, Margaret, 97, 217n4, 253n4 Ferroni, Giulio, 226n4, 236n38 Fichter, Andrew J., 257n44 fictio, 17 Fielding, Henry, 1 firearms, invective against, 264n44 Firpo, Luigi, 259n64, 261n19, 263n28 Fornari, Simone, 245n35 Fortini, Franco, 281n35, 285n57 Fregoso, Frederigo, 87 Freudian analysis, 109, 135, 167, 193, 257n46, 267n2; formation of compromise, 9, 136

Galileo, 7, 75, 76, 110, 245n35, 246n37, 258n53 Ganelon of Maganza, 111 Gellius, Aulus, 292n31 Genette, Gérard, 241n25 Genot, Gérard, 152, 153, 273n41, 274n42 Gerusalemme liberata (Torquato Tasso), characters: Ademaro, 270n20; Aladino, 138, 140, 141, 158, 212; Alecto, 148, 149, 276n63; Alete, 206, 207; Argante, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 182, 189, 207, 209, 269n13; Argillano, 149, 273n35, 276n63; Armida, 9, 109, 110, 138, 145, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 165, 172, 179, 183, 187, 188, 189, 199, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 215, 233–4n21, 267n3, 268n12, 275n50; Arsete, 191, 289n84; Baldovino, 104, 142; Boemondo, 142; Carlo, 144, 187, 188; Clorinda, 36, 104, 138, 141, 157, 173, 182, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 212, 213, 288n81, 289n83; Dudone di Consa, 270n20; Emireno, 143, 144; Erminia, 104, 157, 158, 159, 165, 173, 199, 212, 213, 214, 215, 255n27; Eustazio, 156, 206, 207; Fortune, 109, 144, 145, 182; Gildippe, 270n20; Goffredo, 9, 10, 50, 101, 102, 108, 129, 131, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 156, 162, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 206, 207, 209, 213, 233n21, 259n63, 267n3, 268–9n12, 275n50, 288n79; Guglielmo, 270n20; Idraote, 158, 207; Ismeno, 137, 138; Magus of Ascalona, 109; Normans, 270n20; Odoardo, 270n20; Olindo, 157,

Index 289n87; Ottone, 182; Peter the Hermit, 138, 143, 182, 258n52, 267n3; Raimondo, 141, 182; Rambaldo, 182; Rinaldo, 109, 110, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 154, 155, 157, 182, 183, 185, 188, 193, 194, 210, 258n52, 269n12, 275n50, 289n86; Satan, 108, 137, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 186, 193, 273n35; Sofronia, 157, 158, 159, 189, 289n87; Solimano, 137, 138, 139, 140, 148, 149, 165, 267n3, 288n79; Tancredi, 104, 138, 142, 157, 158, 182, 183, 189, 191, 192, 209, 212, 213, 215, 255n27, 269n12, 288n80; Ubaldo, 144, 145, 155, 183, 187, 188; Vafrino, 214, 271n26 Getto, Giovanni, 166, 170, 279n15, 280n25, 288n81 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 291n20 Ginzburg, Carlo, 292n30 Giraldi Cinzio, Giovambattista, 202, 203, 204, 223n28, 283n44; debate over epic vs romance, 16, 108, 220n14 Giraldi Cinzio, Giovambattista, works: Ercole, 220n14; Man of Court, 202; Orbecche, 202 Girard, René, 2 God, 136, 142, 188, 215; as author, 3, 105, 106, 108; as subject, 91 Goethe, 166 Gonzaga, Gian Francesco II, 218n3 Gonzaga, Scipione, 200, 256n28, 277n4, 279nn17–21, 280nn24, 26, 28, 284n55, 285n59 Gorni, Guglielmo, 244n32 Gracián, Baltasar, 215, 291n27, 292n32 Grail, search for, as topic of chivalric literature, 15, 18, 38

311

Guarini, Giovan Battista, 254n14 Guicciardini, Francesco, 238n51 Güntert, Georges, 106, 257n35 Hampton, Timothy, 264n38 Hart, Thomas N., 236n36 Hector, 91 Hegel, 241n26 Homer, 16, 61, 90, 93, 212, 239n2, 248n49, 254n23, 286n64 Horace, 46, 198, 239n2, 248n49 Horkheimer, Max H., 286nn64, 65 humanists, 65, 122 Hussites, 120 hyle, 254n23 Iliad (Homer), as model for Aeneid, 24 inchiesta, 39 Ingegneri, Angelo, 277n2 Inquisition, Roman, 169 inventio, 68, 69 Jameson, Fredric, 2–3 Jauss, Hans Robert, 63, 239n6, 240n7 Javitch, Daniel, 218n8, 220n13, 224n34, 225n40 Jerusalem, 3, 136, 141, 142, 147, 152, 155, 182, 198, 207, 232n21 Julius III, Pope, 264n37 Juno, 24 Klopp, Charles D., 238n48, 263n33 Koehler, Erich, 18, 219n11, 222n17, 236n43 La Monica, Stefano, 263n33 La Penna, Antonio, 209 Lacan, 217n4 Laclos, Pierre, 214

312

Index

Lafayette, Madame de, 214 Lancelot, 45 Langer, Ulrich, 253n8 Larivaille, Paul, 252n1 Leopardi, Giacomo, 166 Longinus, On the Sublime, 211, 254n23, 291n23 Looney, Dennis, 219n8 Lucan, 120, 262n27, 264n46 Lucretius, 198 lusis, or unravelling of the narrative design, 108, 180 Luther, Martin, 214 Lutheran inclinations in Tasso, 169, 281n30 Macchia, Giovanni, 214 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 59, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 134, 195, 205, 206, 207, 209, 234n23, 237n48, 238n51, 264n38 Malvezzi, Virgilio, 206, 290n10 Mambriano (Cieco da Ferrara), 18, 64, 222n21, 230n14, 241n23, 245n34 Manica, Raffaele, 32 Manzoni, Alessandro, 11, 91, 243n29, 251n73 Margutte, 248n50 Medea, 207 Medici, Lorenzo il Magnifico, 66 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 291n22 Milton, John, 1, 2, 9, 12 Minturno, Antonio, 223n26, 239n2, 283n44 Montaigne, Michel de, 166, 195, 289n1 More, Thomas, 132 Moretti, Walter, 259n64 Morgante (Pulci), 18, 64, 65, 66, 117, 120, 230n14

Muse(s), 161 Negri, Renzo, 243n29 Nelson, William, 240n13 Nero, 91 Niccolò da Coreggio, 235n35 Nicodemus, 201, 214 Odyssey (Homer), as model for Aeneid, 24 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 174 Oedipus complex, 96, 128, 130 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 237n46 Orlando, Francesco, 2, 9, 76, 77, 136, 193, 194, 217n4, 246n41, 257n46, 267n2, 273n39, 278n13, 289nn88, 89 Orlando furioso (Ariosto): locales of voyages, 42; locales of war, 42; ‘other,’ poem as embodiment of, 4 Orlando furioso, characters: Agramante, 23, 24, 36; Alcina, 32, 34, 86, 249n59, 256n27; Angelica, 20, 28, 31, 34, 39, 40, 48, 51, 57, 82, 84, 248n53, 255n27; Anselmo, 54, 58; Aquilante, 21, 34, 35; Ariodante, 21; Astolfo, 6, 13, 21, 25, 36, 42, 43, 47, 90, 249n59; Atlante, 21, 34, 41, 49, 227n13; Baiardo, 20, 84; Bradamante, 6, 20, 21, 27, 31, 34, 35, 44, 56, 204, 255n27; Brunello, 23; Charlemagne, 20; Cimosco, 127, 234n24; Clarice, 55; Dardinello, 21; Discord, 24, 25, 42; Doralice, 23, 44, 52; Drusilla, 263n35; Durlindana, 23, 42; Ferrau, 20, 58, 151; Fiammetta, 54, 71; Fiordispina, 56, 57; Frontino, 23; Gabrina, 19, 58, 242n28, 250n63, 266n61; Ginevra, 55; Gradasso, 23, 36, 84; Grifone

Index and Orrigille, 21, 34, 35; Isabella, 19, 28, 44, 52, 58, 81, 204; Jocondo (and Astolfo), 52, 53, 54, 55, 71; Logistilla, 32; Malagigi, 84; Mandricardo, 23, 36, 52, 74; Marfisa, 23, 36; Marganorre, 127; Martano, 266n61; Medoro, 33, 51; Melissa, 26, 35, 36; Merlin, 34; Odorico, 266n61; Olimpia, 57, 204, 227n13, 263n35; Orlando, 19, 26, 27, 28, 33, 37, 39, 40, 43, 47, 50, 72, 73, 82, 108, 197, 228n13, 234n24, 244n31, 288n83; Orrilo, 21, 34, – as figure for the Furioso, 103; Pinabello, 266n61; Ricciardetto, 57; Rinaldo, 20, 34, 42, 43, 44, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 84; Rodomonte, 23, 28, 29, 32, 36, 37, 42, 43, 51, 52, 53, 81, – as Turnus, 6, 36; Ruggiero, 6, 21, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 44, 74, 77, 86, 100, 228n13, 234n24, 249n59, 255– 6n27, – Ruggiero-BradamanteLeone episode, 21, 36, 37; Sacripante, 20, 23, 31, 248n53; St John, 8, 25, 43, 61, 74, 82, 89, 90, 92, 251n80; Senapo and the Harpies, 43; Sobrino, 36, 237n48; Turpin, 8; Zerbino, 19, 42, 52, 58 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 18, 83, 230n14, 242n27 Ossola, Carlo, 226n4, 231n18 ottava rima, 93 Ovid, 209, 210, 235n35, 246n42, 248n49 Padoan, Giorgio, 238n48, 263n33 palace, enchanted, 41, 79 Palingenio, Marcello, 201 Pampaloni, Leonzio, 218n6, 221n16, 234n23

313

Paradise Lost (Milton), 1 Parker, Patricia, 3, 5, 8, 24, 25, 34, 222n20, 247n49, 251n68 Paul III, Pope, 196 Pegasus, 246n42 Penelope, 91, 248n49 Perelman, C., 285n58 Petrarch, Francis, 16, 173, 188, 239n5, 249n57, 253n13, 264n42, 288n79, 291n25 Petronio, G., 249n58 Phalaris of Agrigento, 261n20 Pigna, Giambattista, 16, 84, 100, 108, 203, 239n2, 249n55, 253n9, 283n44 Pirandello, 22 Plato, 282n39 Politian, 33, 66 Porzia (Torquato Tasso’s mother), 278n9 Praz, Mario, 243n29, 291n23 Prosperi, Adriano, 290n6 Protestant reform, 8 Proteus, 209 Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, 62, 239n3 Pulci, 18, 36, 64, 66, 67, 68, 82, 219n9, 222n21, 248n50, 249n55 Quellenforschung, 95 querelle des femmes, 51 quest, 4, 6, 16, 17, 38–59, 104, 227, 232–4n21, 234n24; as epistemological search, 44; as circular motion, 49, – (in Dante), 232n18 Quint, David, 5, 7, 92, 123, 225nn37, 39, 42, 226n4, 251n74, 257n49, 262n27, 263n36 Rabelais, 245n33, 251n80 Raffaele da Verona, 262n24

314

Index

Raimondi, Ezio, 227n8, 255n23, 273n40 Rajna, Pio, 83, 218n2, 221n16, 235n35, 248n51 Reformation, the, 131, 274n41 Reggio, 128 Rembrandt, 195 Residori, Matteo, 257n48 Rhu, Lawrence F., 226n43, 257n45 Rinaldo, Cantare di, 64 Rodini, Robert, 218n8 romanzo (chivalric romance genre), 118 Rome, sack of, 8 Roncaglia, Aurelio, 222n17, 239n4, 251n78 Rosati, Gianpiero, 246n42 Rousset, Jean, 291n18 Rufinus, 262n27 Ryding, William W., 222n17, 226n7, 227n8 Saccone, Eduardo, 18, 225n37, 260n6, 264n39 Sangirardi, Giuseppe, 254n22 Santoro, Mario, 226n4, 235n34, 249n58, 262n25 Sarpi, Paolo, 289n2 Scalabrino, Luca, 275n43, 285n59 Scianatico, Giovanna, 289n3 science, 7 Segre, Cesare, 218n5, 226nn4, 5, 231n18, 249n61, 259n1, 261n17, 262n26 Sherberg, Michael, 253n7 Siculo, Giorgio, 201 Solerti, Angelo, 278nn9, 12, 290n7 Sophocles, 174 Sozzi, Bortolo T., 273n40, 289n3 Spagna, 18, 64, 230n14

Speroni, Sperone, 248n52, 283n44, 289n4 Spoerri, T., 252n1 Sterne, Laurence, 1 Stilicho, 262n27 Tarquin, 206 Tasso, Bernardo, 248n52, 253n3, 278n9, 283n44; Amadigi, 4, 97, 290n4, 291n15 Tasso, Torquato, 50, 91; as Dares who refused to fight Entellus, 98, 99; in the grips of a Manichean ideology, 159; in the hospital of Sant’Anna, 174, 200; on Sophocles in old age, 174 Tasso, Torquato, works: Aminta, 202; ‘Apologia in difesa della Gerusalemme liberata,’ 17, 96; Canzone al Metauro, 10, 164, 185; Dialoghi, 173, 174, 201, 277n4, 278n7; Discorsi dell’arte poetica, 7, 91, 96, 105, 107, 177, 184, 204, 283n47; Discorsi del poema eroico, 103, 107, 175, 177, 179, 251n72, 259n65, 283n45; Gerusalemme conquistata, 96, 151, 200, 277n2; Il mondo creato, 278n7; Lettere poetiche, 200; Il Malpiglio, 202, 204, 211; Il Padre di famiglia, 173; Rime, 278n9, 281n36; Rinaldo, 172, 233n21, 253n7, 281n34. See also Gerusalemme liberata Tavola ritonda, 17, 229n14 topoi (commonplaces), 13, 62, 90, 93, 101, 104, 253n14 Trissino, Giangiorgio, 220n12, 283n44; L’Italia liberata dai Goti, 96 Trojans, 24, 91 Turin, Court of, 201 Turnus, 206

Index

315

Turpin, 14, 60–94

Voltaire, 91, 93, 251n75

Uggieri il Danese, 83 Ulivi, Ferruccio, 289n3 Urbino, Court of, 164, 201 Urrea, Jeronimo de, 242n26

Weaver, Elissa, 221n16 Weinberg, Bernard, 220n13 William of Tyre, 142 woods, as thematic space, 41, 110, 131; Caledonian wood in Furioso, 17, 41; wood of Medea in Cinque canti, 8; wood of Orlando’s madness, 46; wood of Sharon in Liberata, 8

vanitas vanitatem, 46 Varchi, Benedetto, 253n3 Varese, Claudio, 279n23 variety, 14, 24, 184 ventura, 38, 104 Vespucci, Amerigo, 132, 265n58 Vettori, Francesco, 238n51 Vinaver, Eugène, 221n16 Virgil, 16, 36, 43, 61, 90, 93, 226n8, 229n14, 239n2, 246n42, 248n49

Yvain (Chrétien de Troyes), 236n43 Zatti, Sergio, 262n22; subject of introductory essay, 1–12 Zumthor, Paul, 38, 222n17