Read Why Read the Classics? Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics? (11 page)
From what I have said it might be thought that the journeys of all the main protagonists
end
up converging on Paris. But this does not happen: the majority of the most famous champions are absent from this collective epic episode. Only the giant mass of Rodomonte towers above the mêlée here. Where on earth are all the others?
It has to be said that the poem’s space also contains another centre of gravity, a negative centre though, a trap, a kind of vortex which swallows up the principal characters one by one: the wizard Atlante’s magic castle. Atlante’s magic delights in architectural illusions: already in canto 4 it raises a castle entirely made out of steel in the hilltops of the Pyrenees, only to have it dissolve again into nothing; between canti 12 and 22 we see arise, not far from the Channel coast, a castle which is an empty vortex, in which all the images of the poem are refracted.
Orlando himself, while pursuing Angelica, happens to fall victim to its spell, a pattern which is repeated in almost identical terms for each of these gallant knights: he sees his beloved being carried off, pursues her captor, enters a mysterious palace, and wanders aimlessly through halls and deserted corridors. In other words, the palace is devoid of what they seek, and is populated only by those in pursuit.
Those wandering through loggias and passageways, rummaging beneath tapestries and canopies are the most famous of Christian and Moorish knights: they have all been lured into the castle by the vision of a beloved woman, or an enemy who is just out of reach, or a stolen horse, or a lost object. And now they can no longer leave those walls: if one of them tries to leave, he hears someone calling him back, turns round and the apparition he has sought in vain is there, the damsel in distress he has to save has appeared at a window, imploring his help. Atlante has created this kingdom of illusion; if life is always varied, unpredictable, and changing, illusion is monotonous, hammering away at the same obsession. Desire is a race towards the void, Atlanta’s spell concentrates all unsatisfied desires within
the enclosure of a labyrinth, but does not alter the rules that govern men’s movements in the open spaces of the poem and the world.
Astolfo also ends up in the palace pursuing — or thinking he is pursuing — a young peasant who has stolen his horse Rabicano. But there is no spell that will work on Astolfo. He possesses a magic book which explains everything about that kind of castle. He goes straight to the marble stone on the threshold: all he has to do is to lift it and the castle will go up in smoke. But just at that moment he is joined by a crowd of knights: nearly all of them are his friends, but instead of welcoming him, they stand in front of him as though wanting to run him through with their swords. What has happened? The wizard Atlante, defending himself in dire straits, has resorted to a last magic spell: he has made Astolfo appear to the various prisoners of the castle as the last person they had been pursuing when each of them entered the palace. But all Astolfo has to do is to sound his horn to dispel both the magician and his magic along with the victims of his spells. The castle, a cobweb of dreams, desires and jealousies, dissolves: that is to say, it ceases to be a space outside ourselves, with gates, stairways and walls, and recedes inside our minds, into the labyrinth of our thoughts. Atlante then restores to the characters that he had kidnapped free rein through the ways of the poem. Atlante or Ariosto? In fact the castle turns out to be a crafty structural device for the narrator, who because of the physical impossibility of developing simultaneously a large number of parallel plots, feels the need to remove characters from the action for the duration of a number of canti, setting aside a number of cards in order to continue his game and to bring them out at the appropriate moment. The magician who wants to delay the fulfilment of destiny and the poet-tactician who alternately multiplies and reduces the threads of the characters he deploys on the field, now grouping them together, now dispersing them, blend into one another until they are inseparable.
The forty-sixth and last canto opens with the list of a crowd of people who constitute the public for whom Ariosto thought he was writing his poem. This is the real dedication of the
Furioso
, much more so than the obligatory nod in the direction of his patron Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, the ‘generosa erculea prole’ (noble descendant of Hercules) to whom the poem is addressed, at the opening of the first canto. The boat of the poem is now coming into harbour, and waiting for him there on the pier are the most beautiful and noble women of the Italian cities along with their knights, poets and intellectuals. What Ariosto gives us here is nothing short of a roll-call
of names and brief profiles of his friends and contemporaries: it is a definition of his ideal literary public, as well as an image of a model society. Through a kind of structural reversal, the poem steps out of itself and examines itself through the eyes of its readers, defining itself through this roll-call of those to whom it is addressed. And in turn it is the poem which acts as a definition or emblem for the society of present and future readers, for the entirety of people who will participate in its game and who will recognise themselves in it.
[1974]
Octaves from Ariosto
On this, the 500th anniversary of Ariosto’s birth, I have been asked what the
Orlando Furioso
has meant for me. But saying where, how and how much my predilection for this poem has left traces in my writings would force me to go back to work already done, whereas the Ariostan spirit for me has always meant thrusting forward, not turning back. In any case, I feel that such evidence of my predilection is so obvious that the reader will find it unaided. I prefer to use the opportunity to go through the poem again, and to attempt to select a personal anthology of octaves, guided both by memory and by chance reading.
The quintessence of Ariosto’s spirit lies for me in the lines which introduce a new adventure. On several occasions, this situation is signalled by a boat approaching a riverbank on which the hero happens to be (9.9):
Con gli occhi cerca or questo lato or quello
lungo le ripe il paladin, se vede
(quando né pesce egli non è, né augello)
come abbia a por ne l’altra ripa il piede:
et ecco a sé venir vede un battello
,
su le cui poppe una donzella siede
,
che di voler a lui venir fa segno;
né lascia poi ch’arrivi a terra il legno
.
(The knight was searching with his eyes the whole riverbank to find some way (since he was neither fish nor bird) to cross to the opposite bank, when suddenly he saw a boat coming towards him, with a woman sitting at its stem gesturing that she wanted to come to him, but without letting the boat reach the bank.)
A study which I would like to have carried out, and which, if I do not manage it, someone else can do in my place, concerns this situation: a seashore or riverbank, a person on the bank, a boat a little way off, bringing news or an encounter which will initiate the new adventure. (Sometimes the situation is reversed: the hero is on the boat and the encounter is with someone on land.) A survey of the passages which contain similar situations would culminate with an ottava of purely verbal abstraction that amounts almost to a limerick (30.10):
Quindi partito venne ad una terra
Zizera detta, che siede alio stretto
di Zibeltarro, o vuoi Zibelterra
,
che l’uno o l’altro nome le vien detto;
ove una barca che sciogliea da terra
vide piena di gente da diletto
che solazzando all’aura mattutina
,
gía per la tranquillissima marina
.
(Leaving this place, he came to a land known as Algeçiras, which lies at the Straits of Gibraltar, or if you prefer Gibalterre, since both names are used of the place; there he saw a boat setting sail, full of people bent on relaxation, enjoying the morning breeze and cutting through the calmest of seas.)
This brings me to another research topic I would like to investigate, but which has already been studied: place-names in the
Furioso
, which always carry with them a hint of the nonsensical. It is above all English place-names that supply the verbal material with which Ariosto most enjoys playing, thus qualifying him for the title of the earliest Anglophile in Italian literature. In particular one could illustrate how names with exotic sounds set in motion a mechanism of exotic images. For instance, in the heraldic puzzles of canto 10 we find visions like those in the style of Raymond Roussel (10.81):
Il falcon che sul nido i vanni inchina
,
porta Raimondo, il conte di Devonia
.
Il giallo e il negro ha quel di Vigorina;
il can quel d’Erba; un orso quel d’Osonia
.
La croce che là vedi cristallina
,
è del ricco prelato di Battonia
.
Vedi nel bigio una spezzata sedia:
è del duca Ariman di Sormosedia
.
(The falcon lowering its wings over the nest is worn by Raymond, Count of Devon. The or and sable crest belongs to the Earl of Winchester; the dog to the Earl of Derby; the bear to the Earl of Oxford. The crystalline cross you see there is that of the rich Bishop of Bath. And that broken chair you see against the grey background belongs to Duke Hariman of Somerset.)
Talking of unusual rhymes, I cannot omit canto 32 stanza 63, in which Bradamante moves from the world of African place-names to the winter storms which envelop the Queen of Iceland’s castle. In a poem which generally has a stable climate like the
Furioso
, this episode — which opens with the most dramatic drop in temperature found in the space of a single octave — stands out for its rainy atmosphere:
Leva al fin gli occhi, e vede il sol che ‘l tergo
avea mostrato alie città di Boceo
,
e poi s’era attuffato, come il mergo
,
in grembo alia nutrice oltr’a Marocco:
e se disegna che la frasca albergo
le dia ne’ campi, fa pensier di sciocco;
che soffia un vento freddo, e l’aria grieve
pioggia la notte le minaccia o nieve
.
(Finally she looks up and sees that the sun has now gone behind King Bocchus’ Mauritanian cities, and then plunged itself, like some diving bird, into the bosom of the all-nourishing sea beyond Morocco; but if she thinks that she will find shelter enough sleeping out in the open brushwood, this is a foolish thought: for a cold wind is blowing, and the air is heavy, threatening rain or snow by nightfall.)
The most complicated metaphor belongs, I would say, to the register of Petrarchan love-lyric, but Ariosto injects into it all his need for dynamic motion, so that this ottava seems to me to hold the record for maximum spatial dislocation in describing a character’s feelings:
Ma di che debbo lamentarmi, ahi lassa
,
fuor che del mio desire irrazionale?
ch’alto mi leva, e sí nell’aria passa
,
ch’arriva in pane ove s’abbrucia l’ale;
poi non potendo sostener, mi lassa
dal ciel cader: né qui finisce il male;
che le rimette, e di nuovo arde: ond’io
non ho mai fine al precipizio mio
.
(But alas, what should I blame except my irrational desire? It lifts me so aloft, and flies so high in the sky that it reaches the sphere of fire which scorches its wings; then unable to bear me up, it drops me from the sky. But this is not the end of my ordeal, for it sprouts wings anew, and is burned again, so there is never any end to my rise and fall.)
I have not yet exemplified an erotic ottava, but the most outstanding examples are all too well known; and if I wanted to choose something less predictable, I would end up fixing on something rather heavy. The truth is that in the most sexually charged moments Ariosto, a true inhabitant of the Po valley, loses his touch and the tension goes. Even in the episode with the most subtle erotic effects, the canto of Fiordispina and Ricciardetto (canto 25), the finesse resides more in the story and its overall frisson than in any isolated stanza. The best I can do is to cite a proliferation of limbs intertwined like something in a Japanese print:
Non con piú nodi i flessuosi acanti
le colonne circondano e le travi
,
di quelli con che noi legammo stretti
e colli e fianchi e braccia e gambe e petti
.
(Winding acanthus never surrounded columns and rafters with more knots than those with which we tightly bound our necks and sides and arms and legs and breasts.)
The truly erotic moment for Ariosto is not so much one of fulfilment as one of anticipation, of initial trepidation, of foreplay. That is when he reaches the heights. The undressing of Alcina is very famous but never fails to leave the reader breathless (7.28):
ben che né gonna né faldiglia avesse;
che venne awolta in un leggier zendado
che sopra una camicia ella si messe
,
bianca e suttil nel piú escellente grado
.
Come Ruggier abbracciò lei, gli cesse
il manto; e restò il vel suttile e rado
,
che non copria dinanzi né di dietro
,
piú che le rose o i gigli un chiaro vetro
.
(but she wore no skirt or petticoat; instead she came clothed in a light silk wrap which she had put over a shift that was white and transparent and of the highest quality. As soon as Ruggiero embraced her, her wrap came off, and she was left in the thin, see-through shift which offered no more covering either in front or behind than clear glass does to roses or lilies.)
The female nude preferred by Ariosto has none of the Renaissance fondness for exuberance: it could easily be part of the present taste for adolescent physiques, with their hint of cold whiteness. I would say that the movement of the octave approaches the nude like a lens going over a miniature but then departing, leaving everything rather vague. Staying with the most obvious examples, in that mixture of landscape and nude study that is the Olimpia episode, it is the landscape which wins out over the naked body (11.68):