Why Read the Classics? (10 page)

The millennium which is about to end has been the millennium of the novel (the successor of the romance). In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the chivalric romances were the first secular books whose circulation had a profound impact on the life of ordinary people, not just on the learned. Dante himself provides evidence of this when he writes about Francesca da Rimini, the first character in world literature to find her life changed by the reading of romances, long before Don Quixote, long before Emma Bovary. In the French romance
Lancelot
, the knight Galahad persuades Guinevere to kiss Launcelot; in the
Divine Comedy
the book
Lancelot
takes on the role played by Galahad in the romance, persuading Francesca to let herself be kissed by Paolo. By seeing the identity between the character in the book who influences other characters and the book which influences its readers (‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’ (the book and its author were Galahads to us)), Dante carries out the first ever, disorientating manoeuvre of metaliterature. In verses that are unsurpassed in density and sobriety, we follow Paolo and Francesca who, ‘senza alcun sospetto’ (completely unsuspecting), allow themselves to be carried away by the emotions aroused by their reading, looking into each other’s eyes every now and then, turning pale, and when they reach the point where Launcelot kisses Guinevere on the mouth (‘il desiato riso’ (her desirable smile)), the desire described in the book makes obvious the desire felt in real life, and at that point life takes on the form narrated in the book: ‘la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante’ (trembling all over, he kissed me on the mouth).

[1985]

The
Orlando Furioso
is an epic which refuses to begin and which refuses to end. It refuses to begin because it presents itself as the continuation of another poem, the
Orlando Innamorato
by Matteo Maria Boiardo, which had been left unfinished at the authors death. And it refuses to end because Ariosto never stopped working on the poem. Having published it in a first edition as a poem of forty canti in 1516, he constantly sought to expand it, first by trying to write a sequel, which also remained incomplete (the so-called
Cinque canti
, published posthumously), then by inserting new episodes into the central canti, so that in the third and definitive edition published in 1532 the number of canti rose to forty-six. In between there was a second edition, in 1521, which also bore the signs of the poem’s unfinished nature in that it was simply a polished version of the first, consisting solely in a refinement of the language and metre to which Ariosto continued to devote great attention. An attention which lasted all his life, one could really say, since it had taken him twelve years’ labour to produce the first edition of 1516, and another sixteen years’ work before publishing the 1532 edition: one year later he was dead. This expansion from within, with episodes proliferating from other episodes, generating new symmetries and contrasts, seems to me to epitomise perfectly Ariosto’s creative method: for him this was the only real way of continuing this poem with its polycentric, synchronic structure, whose episodes spiral off in every direction, continually intersecting with and bifurcating from each other.

In order to follow the vicissitudes of so many both principal and secondary characters, the poem requires a cinematic editing technique
which allows the author to abandon one character or action-scene in order to turn to another. Such shifts sometimes occur without losing the continuity of the narrative, for instance when two characters meet and the story-line, which initially had been following the first character, pans away from him to follow the second. On other occasions, there is a clean break and the action is interrupted right in the middle of a canto. Usually it is the last couplet of the octave which intimates the interruption or delay in the plot, a rhymed couplet like the following:

or:

or again:

While such shifts in the action take place in the middle of a canto, the close of every single canto promises that the story will continue in the following one. Here too the explanatory function is usually assigned to the final rhymed couplet which rounds off the last octave:

Often in order to conclude the canto Ariosto pretends once more that he is a bard reciting his verses before a courtly audience:

Either that or — although this happens more rarely — he pretends that he is in the physical act of writing:

So it is impossible to give a single definition of the structure of the
Orlando Furioso
, because the poem possesses no rigid geometry. We could resort to the image of an energy field which continually generates from within itself other force fields. However we define it, the movement is always centrifugal; right from the outset we are immediately in the middle of the action, but this is true both for the poem as a whole as well as for each canto and each episode.

The problem with every introduction to the
Furioso
is that if one starts by saying ‘This is a poem which is in fact a continuation of another poem, which in turn continues a cycle of countless other poems …’, the reader is immediately turned off: if before starting this poem, the reader has to know what happened in all the preceding poems, as well as in those that preceded the preceding poems, when will it ever be possible to start Ariosto’s poem? But in fact every introduction turns out to be superfluous: the
Furioso
is a book unique in its genre and can, or perhaps I should say must, be read without reference to any other text that either precedes or follows it. It is a self-contained universe, across whose length and breadth the reader can roam, entering, exiting, getting lost.

The fact that Ariosto makes us believe that the construction of this universe is nothing but a continuation of someone else’s work, an appendix, or as he himself terms it a ‘gionta’ or addition, can be interpreted as a sign of Ariosto’s extraordinary discretion, an instance of what the
English call ‘understatement’, that is to say that particular form of self-irony which leads us to downplay things that are actually enormously important. But it can also be seen as a sign of a conception of time and space which rejects the closed paradigm of the Ptolemaic universe, and opens itself towards the infinity of both past and future, as well as towards an endless plurality of worlds.

From its opening words the
Furioso
presents itself as the poem of movement, or rather it presents a particular type of movement which will inform the poem’s entire length: a zig-zag. We could trace the general outline of the poem by following the constant intersections and divergences of these lines on a map of Europe and Africa, but the first canto alone is enough to give us its flavour: there three knights pursue Angelica through the wood, in a convoluted dance consisting of losing the way, chance encounters, mistaken paths, and changes of plan.

It is this zig-zag traced by the galloping horses and by the oscillations of the human heart that introduces us into the spirit of the poem. The pleasure deriving from the rapidity of the action instantly blends with a sense of breadth in the amount of time and space available. This aimless wandering is inherent not just in the knights but also in Ariosto himself: it is almost as if the poet when beginning the narration does not yet know at the start of the narration the direction the plot will take, though subsequently it will guide him as though perfectly planned. Yet he has one thing totally clear in his mind: his own mixture of narrative élan and informality, what we might define, to use an adjective loaded with meaning, as the ‘errant’ movement of Ariosto’s poem.

These characteristics of Ariosto’s ‘space’ in the poem can be perceived either on the scale of the whole poem, or in individual canti, or on an even more minute scale in each stanza or even each line. The ottava is the unit in which it is easiest to recognise what is distinctive about his poetry: Ariosto is relaxed in the ottava, he feels at home in it, and the miracle of his poetry resides above all in this nonchalance.

This is so for two reasons above all. One is intrinsic to the ottava itself, in that it is a stanza which can handle even lengthy speeches as well as an alternation of sublime, lyric tones with more prosaic, humorous notes. The other reason is inherent in Ariosto’s method of writing poetry, which is not bounded by limits of any kind: unlike Dante, he has not set himself a rigid division of subject-matter, nor any rules of symmetry which would force him to write a set number of canti or set number of stanzas in each canto.
In the
Furioso
the shortest canto contains 72 stanzas, the longest 199. The poet can take things easy if he wants, using several stanzas to say something which others could say in a single line, or he can concentrate into a single verse something that could be the subject of a lengthy discourse.

The secret of Ariosto’s ottava resides in his following the varied rhythm of the spoken language, in the profusion of what De Sanctis called the ‘inessential accessories of language’, as well as in the swiftness of his ironic asides. But the colloquial is only one of the many registers he deploys, which extend from the lyric to the tragic and sententious and which can all coexist in the same stanza. Ariosto can be of memorable concision, and many of his verses have become proverbial: ‘Ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra!’ (This is how human judgment errs so often!) or ‘Oh gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui!’ (Oh the wonderful goodness of the ancient knights!). But it is not only with such asides that he executes his changes of speed. It has to be said that the very structure of the ottava is based on a discontinuity of rhythm: the first six lines linked by just two alternating rhymes are then followed by a rhyming couplet, which produces an effect which today we would term
anticlimax
, a brusque shift not only in rhythm but also in the psychological and intellectual atmosphere, from the sophisticated to the popular, from the evocative to the comic.

Of course Ariosto plays with these contours of the ottava as the expert he is, but the play could become monotonous without the agility of the poet in giving movement to the stanza, introducing pauses and full stops in varying positions, adapting different syntactic structures to the metre, alternating long and short sentences, splitting the stanza in two or in some cases tagging another stanza on to the first, constantly changing the narrative tenses, switching from the remote past tense to the imperfect, the present, then the future, in short creating a whole array of narrative planes and perspectives.

This freedom and ease of movement which we have noted in his versification dominates even more at the level of narrative structure and composition of plot. There are, as we all remember, two main themes: the first tells how Orlando from being merely the hapless lover of Angelica went furiously mad, how the Christian armies without the presence of their hero risked losing France to the Saracens, and how the madman’s wits were recovered by Astolfo on the Moon, and then forced back into the body of their rightful owner, thus allowing him to take his place again in the army ranks. Parallel to this runs the second plot, that of the predestined but
constantly deferred love of Ruggiero, champion of the Saracen camp, for the Christian female warrior Bradamante, and of all the obstacles that come between them and their destined marriage, until Ruggiero manages to change sides, be baptised and win the hand of his warrior lover. The Ruggiero-Bradamante plot is no less important than the Orlando-Angelica one, because it is from them that Ariosto (like Boiardo before him) claims that the Este family descends, thus not only justifying the poem in the eyes of his patrons, but above all linking the mythical period of chivalry with the contemporary history of Ferrara and Italy. The two main plots and their countless ramifications thus proceed intertwined, but they also develop in turn around the more strictly epic trunk of the poem, namely the course of the war between the Emperor Charlemagne and Agramante, king of Africa. This epic contest is concentrated particularly in a block of canti which deal with the siege of Paris by the Moors, the Christian counter-offensive, and the discord in Agramante’s camp. The siege of Paris is in a sense the poem’s centre of gravity, just as the city of Paris presents itself as its geographical ‘navel’: