Italian Literary Icons

by Gian-Paolo Biasin

Overview

Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature, Gian-Paolo Biasin explores a series of challenges posited for literary criticism by the success of semiotics, testing theoretical concepts not so much on theoretical grounds as in their practical application to literary texts from the high Romantic lyric of Ugo Foscolo to the postmodern, cosmicomic tales of Italo Calvino.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611761
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #22
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.50(d)

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Italian Literary Icons

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By Gian-Paolo Biasin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06632-5

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CHAPTER 1

In the Primordial Origin of Evening

In a memorable essay entitled "Romantic Space," the late Francesco Arcangeli wrote: "In my opinion one ought to risk a definition of Romanticism, and I believe that, as for any other art movement, the only criterion must necessarily be to try to define what Romanticism has given that is newer in comparision to preceding epochs and movements."

Arcangeli proposes an interpretation of Romanticism that is no longer centered upon the commonly accepted Latin and French line of Géricault and Delacroix. Instead, he turns to a Nordic and British line featuring Constable and Turner because it expresses a new spatiality of the pictorial image, which reflects a new relationship between conscience and universe. It is an image that

appears as something unseizable and ambiguously definable within a space no longer delimited by perspective [i.e., from the given, traditional perspective]. This might seem nebulous at first, but actually I believe it is not, and it is clear that in that visual effect, in that particular spatiality, there are implied the Sehnsucht, the fluctuating of world appearances for the Romantic eye, man's breaking away from every preceding certitude. ... No one had so radically destroyed Renaissance space and any idea of a concluded form as Turner did. (p. 9)

This destruction of Renaissance space is obtained in oil paintings and watercolors that suggest "the primordial origin or the end of things," a tension that is very different from the "linear simplifications" of John Flaxman, William Blake, and (in part) Jean Auguste Ingres. In fact, these simplifications always "lead one to retrace the beginning of classical art, that is, the beginning of an institutionalized and substantially well-known civilization, rather than the primordial origin of a life that is presumed to be anterior to civilization, as happens in the true Romantics." Arcangeli insists: "if one does not keep in mind the distinction between beginning (arché) and origin (primordio), which is in my opinion fundamental, one ends by confusing an archeology, however modern it may be, with an equally modern invention of life" (p. 10). As Arcangeli points out, the difference is truly fundamental, especially when considering the consequences of such an approach:

Romantic space, close [and] remote, placed at an undefined distance, is not the space of an intellectual conscience, or it is so only implicitly; it is a space that can risk inquiry into, and intuition by images of, the immensity of a universe that is no longer centered in man because, at the same time, it presupposes an inner exploration that knows no boundaries, (pp. 10–11)

From the start, Arcangeli deals with this inner exploration (an exploration also examined by Giuliano Briganti, who rightly speaks of a "psychological revolution"), and defines it as "the discovery of a limitlessness unknown by traditional psychology." He then draws an extremely significant conclusion: namely that in the dialogue between inner limitlessness and the immensity of the universe, what cannot find a place is "the human body as an ideal body or a protagonist, ... the measure of the universe in its imagined, but no longer verifiable, proportions." In a peremptory tone reminiscent of Pirandello's Mattia Pascal (and of Northrop Frye), Arcangeli continues:

Copernicus opened up a whole dimension that destroys such an ideal condition. Man as the measure of things is an ancient illusion, which inertia and pride can still drag along, but which has substantially crumbled after that astronomical, but terribly human, revolution. After Copernicus it can be said that the conscience-universe relationship is our measure of things, (p. 11)

In nineteenth-century England, "the minimal quantity of man vis-à-vis the universe (at least on a physical level), his minimal scale vis-à-vis the cosmic dimension, are systematically taken for the first time as themes of painting" (p. 12). Arcangeli registers the initial glimmerings of such a conception in certain Danubian painters of the sixteenth century, such as Albrecht Altdorfer, and in Pieter Brueghel, but especially in Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Rembrandt van Rijn, both of whom are the true precursors of Turner, because in them "the terms of conscience and universe do not work any longer along a 'self-centered' balance, but as appearances suspended on the brink of the unknowable" (p. 17). Thus it becomes "legitimate" to speak about Turner's "informal" painting (p. 18) — and here "informal" would also seem to define twentieth-century painting by, say, Jackson Pollock, much better than the equivalent American term "abstract expressionism."

According to Arcangeli, the preeminence and novelty of British painting in the nineteenth century can be explained as well in relation to a whole milieu, a whole cultural climate, that finds poetic expression in the work of William Wordsworth. Two poems in particular are cited: "To the Cuckoo," in which the cuckoo is no longer a bird but "an invisible thing,/ a voice, a mystery" ("an ambiguous, undefined, spatially unrelated image, like an aerolite traveling in space," p. 13), and "The Solitary Reaper," in which the song of the girl from the Hebrides can express both "old, unhappy, far-off things,/ and battles long ago," and "some more humble lay,/ familiar matter of to-day." In Arcangeli's view,

Romantic art's meaning as a meaning for life is clarified here, in the polarity between a "here and now" in which the whole poetics of "moderate" Romanticism is declared (from Wordsworth to Constable to Manzoni) and the unreachable "beyond" of what is spatially or temporally remote, what causes Coleridge's, Shelley's, and Turner's Sehnsucht. It is the same polarity between present, daily anguish and the echoing of past, fallen ages to be found in Leopardi's "La sera del di di festa" (p. 14).

Hence the tremendous power of innovation and discovery to be found in the "extreme" Romantic painting: "What did Turner do, with his 'vortex-like' space, but throw the appearances of the world at an infinite distance" (p. 21) and "remeasure man vis-à-vis the immensity enveloping him?" (p. 12). The most conclusive and persuasive example given by Arcangeli is Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, painted by Turner in 1812, in which "the huge, cosmic storm seems to overcome the tension of the hero's will." In analyzing this painting, "one can never sufficiently stress the shocking reversal of the historical theme," especially if one compares it with Napoleon crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1800, in which "the protagonist overcomes a humiliated nature," and Napoleon, the "great Latin and still humanistic hero," is a "living embodiment of neo-classic, not Romantic civilization and, let us say, 'will'" (p. 21).

I shall not enter here into the details of the polite polemic formulated by Arcangeli against the will-oriented notion of Romantic art held by Giulio Carlo Argan and the modernistic line of Pierre Francastel because this polemic, however necessary it may be, is of no immediate interest to the literary critic, and above all because it seems to me that the "reading of the forms" of pictorial works — a reading made by Arcangeli in order to arrive at "the history of meanings" (p. 20) — is better suited to my interests than an idealist approach based on general, philosophical concepts from which particular interpretations are then derived.

In any case, in Arcangeli's essay there are some features that should be noted:

(1) The introduction of the criterion of novelty, which in the field of literary criticism can be made to correspond to the concept of innovation (never merely aesthetic, but also historical, in terms of the first audience's "horizon of expectation") and the concept of modernity, which is intended as a "radical renewal." The introduction of such a criterion is a salutary reaction against a tendency, present even in literary criticism, to consider a definition of Romanticism as impossible or useless (the work of Mario Praz is as good an example of this as any).

(2) A remarkable proposal in the field of historiography concerning the definition of Romanticism as a new relationship between conscience and universe. In painting, this is revealed through a nonanthropocentric perspective, which can also be applied to literature. Among the most important corollaries of this definition are: (a) a clear-cut distinction between Romanticism (the poetics of "the natural sublime," reflecting a concern with the primordial origin of life) and Neoclassicism (the "poetics of the statue," reflecting a concern with the beginning of civilization), which nevertheless respects the coexistence of both continuity (tramando) and the dialectical relationship; (b) the positing of a line from Caravaggio to Rembrandt to Turner to abstract expressionism that is very revealing, at least for me, when considering the nature of modern art.

(3) An extremely coherent methodological approach, which can be viewed a posteriori as a true, ante litteram semiotic insight, of the type represented in France by Jean-Louis Schefer and Louis Marin and recently outlined in Italy by Cesare Segre.

Starting from Arcangeli's historiographic proposal, I believe that the new relationship between conscience and universe can and actually should be taken as paradigmatic for a definition of literary Romanticism. Something similar has already occurred in American criticism, for beyond the often harsh polemics that divide them, critics like Arthur Lovejoy, Rene Welleck, Morse Peckham, Earl Wasserman, M. H. Abrams, and Northrop Frye have all formulated interpretations of Romanticism in which a central role is played by the new conception, no longer mechanistic but organicistic, of the universe. This conception on the one hand differentiates Romanticism from the Enlightenment, while on the other it constitutes the link between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. In fact, organicism derives from and is tied to the various eighteenth-century poetics of the sublime (Anthony Shaftesbury, Edmund Burke, A. G. Baumgarten, harking back to Longinus) and of the primitive (Jean Jacques Rousseau, but above all Vico).

In Giovanni Macchia's words, which singularly echo Arcangeli's, "it is a fact that in Italy the great Romantic poetry was written by the 'classicists.' This classicism had nothing to do with the classicism of the eighteenth century. It was itself a part of a current of vital exaltation that seemed to bring man back to the sources of life. The modern discovery of classicism was made by the Romantics." For the moment, let us accept the organicistic conception (which is homologous to Arcangeli's historiographic proposal) as a valid hypothesis as far as Italian literature is concerned, a hypothesis we will later verify through some basic texts by Ugo Foscolo. As Glauco Cambon and Gustavo Costa have demonstrated, Foscolo was deeply influenced by the eighteenth-century poetics of the sublime and the primitive (Longinus, Vico). Macchia even unified these poetics when he wrote: "those who, like Foscolo, in defending Greek mythology defended a supernatural degree of imagination, which Christendom had not been able to destroy, asserted a form of primitive sublime." hasten to add that this primitive sublime should be intended, as far as Foscolo is concerned, not so much or not only as the revival of a concern with beginnings, but as a return to the consideration of a primordial origin.

Meanwhile, it is necessary to comment upon Arcangeli's methodological approach. I have said that Arcangeli has had a semiotic insight ante litteram; in fact, he pursues a reading of the forms of some works from which a history of meanings is derived. Of course, Arcangeli is not at all concerned with problems of semiotic theory, as Emile Benveniste or Boris Uspensky are. Rather, his concern is a practical one, and in his perspective-oriented analysis, he considers a painting as an "epistemological space."

Let us then read a semiotic critic like Cesare Segre, keeping Arcangeli in mind: "The movement of sight not only inserts temporality into spatial co-presence, but establishes the meaning of the work by instituting its overall significance." Furthermore, by ordering the content of the work into a "chain that can be enunciated verbally," the analyses of perspective and iconology "snatch the painting from its simultaneity and give it a discursive duration" (p. 135). In other words (and here Segre completes Benveniste), a verbal narration transposes an iconic representation through "processes of figurative syntax achieved in the representation itself" (p. 136), but "only the globality of discourse assigns their qualifications to the elements. In any case, even the word 'discourse' is used metaphorically. It is more exact to speak of perspective, because it is perspective that institutes and supports the syntax of the image" (p. 137). In fact (and here, while Segre is commenting upon Uspensky, in my view he is also confirming Arcangeli's insight), perspective is "a relational system homologous to a given conception of the world," because "it is vision that precedes and causes concepts, not vice versa" (pp. 137 and 142).

Indeed, Arcangeli's itinerary of perspective to verbalization to conceptuality seems to be at the core of the contemporary debate on the semiotic nature of painting. Let us briefly go over this itinerary, revealing what remained implicit in the art critic's discourse.

It is perspective that allows the reading of David's Napoleon crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass as a celebration of the hero. In this painting, Napoleon is physically handsome, and possessed of all the attributes of leadership. He is both realistic and idealized as he stands out on his horse in the foreground. The boulders of the Alps literally are his pedestal (according to the iconological code of Renaissance condottieri, not only in painting, as for example in the works of Paolo Uccello, but also and above all in the sculpture of such artists as Andrea del Verrocchio; indeed, here the neoclassic poetics of the statue find a brilliant confirmation). It is a pedestal because the majestic horse's hind hoofs stand on the rock; it is also a pedestal because on that very rock is freshly carved the name of the hero, "Bonaparte," a name much more clearly visible than those of his historical predecessors. One, "Karolus Magnus," is badly eroded, while the other, "Hannibal," is almost completely illegible. The hero's cloak and imperious index finger stand out on top — above the snow-capped peaks, which are lower in the background — and spur on the soldiers and artillerymen who are laboring up the slope in the middle distance. The date of the painting (1800) and the title, with its precise onomastic and geographic data, confirm the referentiality of the work and confer further authority upon its laudatory representation of the hero.

Now let us look at the "shocking reversal of the historical theme" brought about by Turner in Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. Already the title is a key for the reading. It is the syntactical element bringing the pictorial aspects together, and as such is indispensable for an understanding of them in their referentiality. The title shifts the attention from history to nature ("Snowstorm") and relegates the historical character ("Hannibal") to the subtitle. Furthermore, this character is not shown in his triumphant individuality but is united with, if not confused amidst, an anonymous mass ("and his Army"). If we remember the date of the work (1812) and the historical events that are associated with it (the Russian campaign), it seems clear that Turner is directing his polemical discourse against David, literally hooking on to the pictorial text of 1800 (the "Hannibal" that is so faintly etched on Napoleon's rock-pedestal) in order to achieve a diminutio antiaulica of the leader and to warn him about the alternating fortunes of human destinies. In fact, Arcangeli says that "Turner already thinks like Tolstoi" (p. 21).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Illustrations, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Introduction. Taffy's Beavers, pg. 1
• One. In the Primordial Origin of Evening, pg. 18
• Two. Fieramosca's Challenge, pg. 48
• Three. Sicilian Epiphanies, pg. 78
• Four. The Red or the Black, pg. 115
• Five. The Laboratory and the Labyrinth, pg. 143
• Six. 4/3πr3, pg. 166
• Index, pg. 191