Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode

by Patricia A. Parker

Overview

Defining "romance" as a form that simultaneously seeks and postpones a particular end, revelation, or object, Patricia Parker interprets its implications and transformations in the works of four major poets—Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, and Keats. In placing the texts within their literary and historical contexts, Professor Parker provides at once a literary history of romance as genre, a fresh reading of individual poems, and an exploration of the continuing romance of figurative language itself.

Originally published in 1979.

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:	9780691627960
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1386
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.40(d)

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Inescapable Romance

Studies in the Poetics of a Mode

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By Patricia A. Parker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06398-0

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CHAPTER 1

Ariosto

"Ne point errer est chose au-dessus de mes forces."

La Fontaine

Ariosto and the "Errors" of Romance

At the beginning of the final canto of the Orlando furioso, before the long review of friends waiting to congratulate him on the completion of his labors, Ariosto employs one of the oldest of literary topoi — the poetic voyage — to identify his entire poem as a kind of "erring":

Or, se mi mostra la mia carta il vero,
non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto;
sì che nel Iito 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 Iito aperto.
(XLVI. 1. 1-8)

The stanza provides, in miniature, a perfect example of the difficulty of knowing just how to take this omnipresent narrator and his frequent comments on the conduct of his narrative. Its "errar sempre" could be the real anxiety the repetition of "veggo" suggests, or it could be just another instance of the famous sorriso dell'Ariosto, a sly pretense of anxiety in a writer whose ability to bring together his many separate stories is as little in doubt as the fact that each page turned ("carta" conveniently meaning both "page" and "chart") brings reader and author steadily closer to the book's inevitable end. The possibility of both these readings, or the tension between them, is probably more revealing than either reading by itself. But the image of "error" for a poem which adopts the "materia" of the "cavallieri erranti" and presents itself as a long poetic wandering is in itself a central revelation and suggests a way of looking at the Furioso and its interpretation.

The importance of "error" in Ariosto has been remarked by virtually all of his readers, from Renaissance Aristotelians, for whom his choice of the digressive romance form was an aberration from the higher path of epic, to a modern critic who finds in the different senses of "errare" and "errore" a suggestion of Ariosto's relation to the theme of "the One and the Many." To understand how this play upon the notion of error might suggest an interpretation of this long and complex poem, we must first turn to the criticism of the Orlando furioso which most clearly judged its "errors" in both senses — as Ariosto's deviation from the epic norm, and as the sin of its weak-willed, errant knights. Raffaello Ramat and others have indicated the catalogue of complaints against Ariosto's poem which grew, both in Italy and in France, as Aristotle's Poetics became increasingly the bible of narrative form: its title was misleading in a poem that dealt at least as much with Ruggiero as with Orlando; its language did not meet the standards set by Bembo; its narration, far from being Aristotle's "single action," was frequently interrupted by digressive episodes; its indulgence, finally, in the fabulous material of the romattzi disqualified it from the true epic dignity of the Iliad and the Aeneid, both founded upon serious historical events.

Its irregular mixing of different genres was, it seems, its most obvious departure from the Aristotelian norm, but this structural criticism — of a poem in its form as "errant" as its characters — was inextricably tied to "error" in the moral sense as well. The concept of a hierarchy of genres in Cinquecento Italy was very much related to other hierarchies, social and moral. For Antonio Minturno in the Arte poetica of 1564, not the least of the "Errori degli scrittori de' Romanzi" was the writer's erring in imitation of his own subject, a weakness of poetic will which might gain popularity with the "vulgo" but which inevitably led the poet away from the nobler path of epic:

Vesp. Che monta, che non vi sia quella, ma un' altra dagli Oltramontani trovata, e dagl'Italiani illustrata, e fatta piu bella, purché al mondo piaccia, e da lui si vegga meravigliosamente accettata e ricevuta?

Min. Del vulgo io non mi meraviglio, il quale spesse volte accetta quelle cose, che non conosce; e, poiché una volta l'ha con molto suo piacere accettate, sempre le ritiene, e favorisce; né se migliori di quelle poi le si presentino, volentieri le riceve: sì può l'opinione saldamente nella mente umana impressa. Ma non posso non prender meraviglia grandissima, che si trovino alcuni scienziati ... i quali (per quel, che se n'intende) confessino già ne'Romanzi non esser la forma e la regola, che tennero Omero e Virgilio, e dovervisi tenere Aristotele ed Orazio comandarono, e nondimeno s'ingegnino di questo errore difendere: anzi, perciocché tal composizione comprende i fatti de' Cavalieri erranti, affermino ostinatamente, non pur la Virgiliana ed Omerica maniera di poetare non convenirle; ma esserle richiesto, ch'ella anco errante sia, passando di una in altra materia, e varie cose in un fascio stringendo.

"Error" is the operative word in this criticism, both as a structural fault and as the danger of a genre whose "endroits facheux," according to Madame de Sévigné, might well lead its younger readers astray. If the errant knights of romance were assimilated to the erring will as opposed to the reason, one of the "errori" of the romance form was its appeal to the senses, the counterpart in the hierarchy of the faculties to the "volgari" in the body politic. When Horace was added to Aristotle, Ariosto's error was to come too close to the dulce side of the famous Horatian dictum, to succumb to the attractions of diverting fable over the essential, if perhaps less interesting, moral kernel. The Orlando furioso was read more widely in France than its condemnation by the rules of Classicisme might suggest, but when the poem was condescended to, it was frequently as a mere "divertissement" from more serious concerns, a kind of "jolie péché."

One of the issues raised in the earliest Italian criticism of the poem was the question of whether Ariosto deviated from the Aristotelian epic norms through ignorance or was deliberately writing a different kind of poetry. The problem was, of course, where to fit a poem which was highly popular with a more than merely "vulgar" audience and filled with more epic conventions than the other romanzi. He clearly was writing a different kind of poem from that described by Aristotle, however hard his more enthusiastic readers might try to prove that the Furioso was as regular as the Iliad or the Aeneid. As early as 1554, Giambattista Pigna had argued that if Ariosto had deviated from the model set down by Virgil, it was because he was choosing another path to Helicon, a genre which was not inferior to epic on its own ground, but simply different. And through the century this voice was heard along with the more rigid Aristotelian condemnations.

Because the Orlando furioso appeared before the controversy over epic had begun in earnest, all of this criticism has necessarily something anachronistic about it. Precisely because it extends so variously the connotations of Ariosto's "errori," however, it provides a highly suggestive starting point for a reading both of Ariosto's poem in itself and of its place within poetic history. "Error" in the Furioso ranges from the diversions of chivalric adventure to the terrifying spectacle of Orlando's madness, from a pleasing "divertimento" to a willful deviation from epic and its single path. So insistent are Ariosto's own variations on "errare" and "errore" that they suggest not ignorance but rather a highly deliberate choice of romance and its aberrance, a choice whose implications turn a possible criticism of the poem into a perspective on the nature of all fictions. "Error" is not only a romance pun, sign of the interplay between mental and geographical "wandering"; it is also the concept which connects the diverse aspects of a long and complex poem. We shall proceed, therefore, by exploring what might be called the gradations of error in the Furioso, from the author's exploitation, and imitation, of the divagations of his errant knights; through the tension between a deviant narrative and the demands of closure; to the selva of allusions which reveal a pattern of "error" or deviation within literary history; and to the revelation, on the Moon, of the error of all poetic constructs or "authorized versions," including even those of Dante and of Virgil.

More than one modern reader has remarked the frequency with which the verb "errare" and its many variants occur throughout the Furioso. In the very first canto of the poem, when Orlando's expected possession of Angelica is interrupted by an unforeseen Saracen victory, the narrator comments, "Ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra!" (I. 7. 2), and one of the most important of the myriad senses of "error" through the rest of the poem is just such a failure of expectation, a misconception about future events. This kind of error seems to be the inevitable result of not knowing the plot in advance, somewhat like Malagigi in the so-called Cinque canti, or "five cantos," who does not share the author's or the reader's knowledge of the "Gran Consiglio delle fate" and therefore cannot know that he is calling on the infernal spirits in vain. The possibility of such a dual perspective reminds us at once of the archetypal locus of romance, the "selve e boscherecci labirinti" (XIII. 42. 4) in which the direct route is obscured. Daedalus, creator of the Cretan labyrinth in which even he might get lost, was not accidentally the mythical inventor of human flight, and this polarity in Ariosto's poem becomes the contrast between the earth-bound wandering of errant knights and the authorial hippogriff's-eye view.

This, however, is only one of the verb's fertile senses in a linguistic universe where "errare" can mean both "to wander" and "to err." Grifone's unreasonable attachment to the wicked Orrigille — "Grifone, I che non si può emendare, e il suo error vede"e (XVI. 4. 1-2) — provides an indication that error, in the moral sense, is a symptom of the Pauline wayward will (Rom. 7: 19), Petrarch's "io fallo e vedo il mio fallir." That Grifone's error is specifically that of love makes him one example among many of the furor which gives Ariosto's poem its title. More than one Renaissance commentator allegorized the Furioso's principal enchanter, Atlante, as "Amore," and its English translator, SirJohn Harington, described Atlante's "palazzo incantato" (XXII. 17. 1) as an "infinite laberinth" where "so many brave young men of great vallor, loose themselves in seeking their loves." Harington goes on to characterize such seeking as idolatry, and indeed there is perhaps no more terrifying Renaissance version of the idolon and its emptiness than the palace where each man pursues the phantom of his own desire, alone. The incarnation of this phantom in the first part of the poem is, of course, Angelica, the universal object of pursuit that Ariosto takes over from Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and makes into a symbol of the erotics of scarcity. When so elusive a "commodità" (XXIII. 108. 6) virtually squanders herself on the newcomer, Medoro, there remains from this anticlimax the overwhelming sense of an excess of desire with nowhere to go. Ariosto's version firmly takes over from Boiardo's at this point, and Orlando's love deepens into madness.

That Orlando's madness is also the result of a mistake in perception suggests yet another of the senses of "error" in the Furioso. Ariosto, like Spenser after him, often introduces the characters of his poem by the way in which they first appear to other characters, and the deceptive nature of appearance, and the errors it leads to, become part of the labyrinthine "selva oscura." Ruggiero is a pupil with almost no retention, and falls prey to the attractive seeming of Alcina's court despite the instructions given him by Astolfo. Bradamante, similarly instructed by Melissa, still believes the imago of Ruggiero to be the real one (XIII. 76). Even the angel Michele has to trust to appearances (XIV. 91), and if the "errore" of Norandino in judging too quickly by appearance is finally righted in the case of Grifone in canto XVIII, the more sinister "apparenza" of Pinabello (II. 30-76) prepares us for the darker world of the Cinque canti where the true story is almost impossible to perceive. The terrifying image of Orlando roaming the countryside in his madness unearths the despair just beneath the surface of the poem's delights, a wandering which is no longer an engaging diversion but the contrapasso of a crippling blindness:

Varii gli effetti son, ma la pazzia
è tutt'una però, che li fa uscire.
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. 1-5)

An "erring" which had seemed to be a form of looseness, even of flexibility, becomes instead the rigidity of an individual obsession, the final form of the labyrinth of desire.

The "nuovo error" of Atlante's palace (XXII. 17-20) seems to exempt at least the reader, who can look down as if upon a maze or hall of mirrors and see each character imprisoned within his own fixation. But not even the reader is always admitted to this privileged perception, and the suggestion in one canto opening that he has his Ganelon in the enchanters who work not with spirits but with simulation and fraud (VIII. 1) extends the problem of ineluctable error to the larger problem of "reading" outside the boundaries of the text. The exordia of Ariosto's poem open out the seemingly closed, and distanced, form of the romance onto a world which, by implication, is part of its "gran selva." However insistently literary, the Furioso retains at least this element of the oral fiction of Boiardo's poem, where the poet frequently addresses an audience pictured as present and participating in the performance by its response. Ariosto's sequel alternates slyly between the oral and the literary, and the reader who enjoys, as "lettor," a distanced view of the wandering of characters within a circumscribed text, may suddenly find himself addressed within that maze, and his own flexibility of movement denied.

Orlando's error, according to St. John in canto XXXIV, was to turn away "dal camin dritto le commesse insegne" (62. 6). And this metaphor of deviation gathers up another of the poem's "errors," the straying of the knights from duty into love, from loyalty to the epic agon of the Holy War into the "selva amorosa" of romance. So constant is the alternation between the two worlds — as, for example, in canto XVII, where the poet signals his departure from the epic siege at Paris to follow the more Odyssean exploits of Astolfo (XVII. 17. 1-2) — that we begin to suspect that one of the Furioso's subjects is the difference between epic and romance, that the "straying" noted by his Aristotelian critics was, generically, a deliberate one. Melissa, the spirit behind the single epic intent of bringing Ruggiero, like Aeneas, to a destined marriage, shows his future wife Bradamante the most direct route to this goal:

Tosto che spunti in del la prima luce,
piglierai meco la più dritta via
ch'al lucente castel d'acciai' conduce,
.............
t'insegnerò, poi che saren sul mare,
sì ben la via, che non potresti errare. —
(III. 63. 1-3, 7-8)

But when this direct path has been obstructed by the machinations of the old enchanter, Atlante, Bradamante's aimless wandering is deliberately contrasted with Melissa's superior knowledge and more steadfast purpose:

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. 1-4)

The powerful centrifugal force of such "error" makes the "dritta via" of epic virtually impossible, just as the multiplicity of claims on the knights' time makes it difficult to will one thing. The review of the Saracen army in canto XIII, though an obvious parallel to the review of Turnus' troops in the Aeneid, reveals instead the supreme difficulty of ordering "le diverse squadre e le nazioni/ ... errando senza guida propia" (XIII. 82. 5-6) and suggests why Tasso's return to Virgilian epic takes the form of a pointed correction of Ariosto's deviation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Inescapable Romance by Patricia A. Parker. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Abbreviation, pg. 1
• Introduction, pg. 3
• I. Ariosto, pg. 16
• II. Spenser, pg. 54
• III. Milton, pg. 114
• IV. Keats, pg. 159
• Epilogue, pg. 219
• Notes, pg. 245
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 273
• Index, pg. 283