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THEORIES OF METAPHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN
HERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON-SENSE
VIKTOR BERBERI
University of Minnesota
Morris, Minnesota
I
t was Francesco Flora who first insisted upon the association between
twentieth-century Italian hermetic poetry and the category of metaphor
referred to as analogy, an identification so complete that he is led to use
the terms “hermeticism” and “analogism” virtually interchangeably. The use
of analogy becomes perhaps the defining characteristic of the poets around
whom Flora’s theory of hermeticism turns (Ungaretti above all, but also
Valery and others from whom the hermetics supposedly inherited the
unhealthy tendency to rely upon the use of analogy). The relationship
between Flora’s La poesia ermetica (1936) and later criticism is, to say the
least, an ambivalent one: on the one hand, the poets Flora singles out as
examples of this “new art” are generally no longer seen as “hermetic”, or at
least not seen as constituting the central moment of Italian hermeticism, but
rather as its precursors (and, indeed, as poets whose significance and
individuality far exceed any such categorization). In fact, as Flora was
writing La poesia ermetica, the poets of the terza generazione – Piero
Bigongiari, Mario Luzi, Alfonso Gatto, Alessandro Parronchi, Vittorio
Sereni, Leonardo Sinisgalli, among others – were just beginning to publish
their earliest works and would hardly have come into his view. On the other
hand, the ideas elaborated in La poesia ermetica have continued to shape
even the most recent critical discussions of Italian hermeticism: while it is
certainly the consensus that Flora’s aim was off, many of the critical notions
he established have simply been brought to bear on other, later poets; and
where criticism has countered Flora’s denunciation of hermeticism, it has at
times done so without significantly changing the terms of the debate.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a survey of the discussion of metaphor in the
critics of hermeticism will to some extent read as a recapitulation of the
history of metaphor theory, from early theories originating in classical
rhetoric, through a shift from a word-based to a predicative, tensional
approach, to more recent theories emphasizing semantic innovation and the
production of meaning, to, finally, the problem of reference and a recognition
of, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, “the metaphorical statement as the power to
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HERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON-SENSE
‘redescribe’ reality” (The Rule of Metaphor, 6). I will therefore refer often to
significant moments in the history of the theory of metaphor as I consider the
place of metaphor in critical discourse surrounding hermetic poetry, ending
with the work of the poet Piero Bigongiari, who comes to occupy a central
position as practitioner and theorist of Italian hermeticism.
Virtually all theories of metaphor find themselves on common ground at
least insofar as they accept Aristotle’s assertion that “a good metaphor
implies an intuitive perception of similarity in dissimilars” (Poetics, 1459a
7). Indeed, perhaps the central problem around which one might organize
these various theories concerns the way in which they conceive of the nature
of resemblance and its place in the metaphorical process. Moreover, we
might characterize analogy itself – at least to the extent to which the term
plays a part in criticism addressing hermetic poetry1 – as that variety of
metaphor emphasizing the difference or distance between the two terms: thus,
on the one side of the debate, the threat to meaning posed by analogy in an
entire line of critics ranging from Flora on, and on the other, Luciano
Anceschi’s “poetica della distanza”, and Piero Bigongiari’s notion, borrowed
from Paul Ricoeur, of metaphor that constructs its sense by rolling back the
frontiers of non-sense. At the risk of oversimplification, one either assumes
that metaphor allows the poet to unearth previous unseen resemblances, or
that it is the work of metaphor to lay the grounds for those very resemblances
(that is, to produce the conditions for positing new resemblances): what
distinguishes hermetic analogy from a range of other experiences, including
Symbolist analogy (and that of D’Annunzio, whose conception of analogy
remains firmly rooted in late nineteenth-century sensibilities), as well as
surrealist analogy, is the question of the grounds for posing a relationship of
similarity. Of particular interest are those instances when hermetic metaphor
abandons traditional models associated with the representational modes. It is
in these instances that hermetic metaphor comes into its own: to say that
hermetic poetry abandons mimetic ideals is not to claim, of course, that it is
entirely, or even primarily, non-representational, but merely that it has come
to distrust scenic or pictorial means as “heteronomous”2.
In La poesia ermetica, Francesco Flora provides a brief definition of
analogy (suggesting at the same time the unfortunate appeal such a technique
has for contemporary sensibilities): “l’analogismo, elementare rapporto di
comparazione, attuato sopprimendo il sintattico ‘come’, la parola-brividosonoro, solitaria ed aleatoria, son modi ligi alla sensibilità dei lettori d’oggi”
(70). Flora’s definition of analogy is reiterated, virtually unchanged, in 1942
by Salvatore Romano in his own La poetica dell’ermetismo: “L’analogia
come metafora è un paragone abbreviato per la soppressione del ‘come’.
Soltanto, a differenza di quest’ultima, analogia è una similitudine di oggetti
lontani, d’impressioni e note di ordini sensibili più diversi” (99). These
relatively uncomplicated descriptions of analogy rely upon two key notions:
first, the absence of the syntactic “like”, and, second, the combination of two
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or more diverse orders of sensation3. Leaving aside the second4, the first
suggests that analogy (or metaphor in general) and simile are only
structurally distinct: in analogy, the connecting terms “like” or “as” (or the
Italian “come” and other similar terms) are merely suppressed and can always
be reinserted into the more elliptical expression. Such a theory of metaphor
remains firmly within the classical tradition and reflects a fundamental
assumption that one can retrace the path from the figurative expression back
to the thought behind it; in short, it assumes that the (meaning of) metaphor is
paraphraseable and therefore assigns to it a purely ornamental function.
In fact, Flora and Romano have done little more than adopt a model of
metaphor introduced by Quintilian in the first century A.D., who describes
metaphor as similitudo brevior, a formulation that continued to inform
studies of metaphor long into the twentieth century. Before Quintilian,
Aristotle had already considered the relationship between metaphor and
simile (explicitly in the Rhetoric, while this connection remains implicit in
the Poetics). However, where Quintilian describes metaphor as an
abbreviated simile, Aristotle inverts the relationship, subordinating simile to
metaphor. Paul Ricoeur, in The Rule of Metaphor, comments on this shift:
“Rather, simile is a metaphor developed further; the simile says ‘this is like
that’, whereas the metaphor says ‘this is that’. Hence, to the extent that simile
is a developed metaphor, all metaphor, not just proportional metaphor, is
implicit comparison or simile” (25).
The immediate implications of this inversion are clear: simile simply makes
explicit the grounds for all metaphor, which remains tied to the notion of
resemblance. The transfer of names at the heart of both metaphor and simile
in Aristotle’s word-based approach – according to which metaphor is defined
“on the basis of a semantics that takes the word or the name as its basic unit”
(Ricoeur, 3) – results in an apprehension of identity within difference; simile,
however, in making the nature of the comparison explicit, runs the risk of
dissipating its pleasure and, more importantly, its power to instruct. The
formulations of the relationship between metaphor and simile by Aristotle
and Quintilian (and, therefore, Flora and others who reiterate similar notions)
may seem to amount to a distinction without a difference; nonetheless, we
witness in them a pull toward one of the two poles of identity and difference,
the first instance of a tension that will mark all subsequent theories of
metaphor. To state succinctly what we will see to be a complex issue, we can
say for the moment that Flora and Romano adopt a model that puts them
squarely on the side of identity, with the work of metaphor consisting in its
power to demonstrate vividly and concisely existing, if hidden, similarities.
The work in which Flora’s understanding of metaphor and related figures of
speech is most fully elaborated, I miti della parola, is a curious text that in
many ways stands at odds with his treatment of similar problems in La poesia
ermetica, where analogy is seen above all as symptom of the decadence of
contemporary poetry. In the chapter “L’arte come metafora” in I miti della
parola, Flora describes all art as being fundamentally metaphoric, in the
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HERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON-SENSE
broadest sense: “L’arte non è un paragone tra il modello e l’immagine: è
l’alchimia dei due termini e perciò metafora” (48). While he claims to reject
any strict mimetic function of art – “Il mondo dell’arte non è mai realistico:
l’arte è sempre metafora. [...] Bisogna saper vedere don Abbondio non come
un tipo il cui merito consisterebbe nell’essere fedelmente riprodotto dal vero
e dal verosimile, ma come metafora linguistica della sua realtà terrestre: in
questo senso l’arte è simbolo” (55) – he nevertheless maintains the two key
terms “model” and “image”, emphasizing the essential, yet inevitably
mysterious, relationship between the two. Flora is no more specific about this
relationship than to say that it is always “musical”, a term he never manages
to define, yet whose nature is unmistakable to the critic capable of reading
“con l’animo di poesia” (I miti della poesia, 55). He finds this last quality to
be generally lacking in contemporary critics; the irony of the following
indictment of these critics will not be lost on the reader familiar with the
dismay Flora displays, in La poesia ermetica, in the face of hermetic analogy:
Sono i nostri critici – anche i più sottili – son preparati, dico, a tutta la
rapida compenetrazione analogica della vita moderna, sì da intendere e
padroneggiare davvero le immagini della poesia e della pretesa poesia
contemporanea? Credo che i più abbiano scarsa capacità e velocità
psicologica, e nel nostro medesimo tempo siano antichi. Essi avranno
un’esperienza che è bastevole a far intendere un poeta di trecento anni fa:
e non ne hanno alcuna per intendere quelli che vivono accanto ad essi,
proprio perché c’è fra loro una differenza di età spirituale, in ciò che è
sano e in ciò che è corrotto. (I miti della parola, 75)
In I miti della parola, however, Flora’s own ability to manage metaphor
seems to take him no farther than Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, which serves
as treasure trove of metaphors that, once bold, have since been rendered
banal over time. It is telling that all of Flora’s examples (“il ramo del lago”,
“le catene dei monti”), even when newly minted, would hardly seem to have
struck one as terribly daring metaphors, resting as they do on a fairly clear,
easily retrievable (usually visual) image5. Even as he rejects baroque
metaphor for its desire to impress and inspire wonder, his own approach to
metaphor fails to go beyond a focus on its vividness and “internal harmony”.
Curiously, he blames the failure of Baroque analogy on its inability to call up
a coherent image: “Né il seicento peccò di troppe immagini, ma anzi peccò
perché non seppe avere immagini” (83).
Other critics, while attempting to defend hermetic poetry against an idealist
critique that either rejected or minimized the experimentalism of hermetic
metaphor, continue to rely upon notions of a necessary visual clarity.
Giuseppe De Robertis, for example, finds in Leopardi and Foscolo a “radical
defense” of hermetic poetry6:
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Chi lo crederebbe? Ma la più bella, più aperta, più radicale difesa della
poesia ermetica ce l’ha lasciata il Leopardi. Ma anche il Foscolo. Che
definì la poesia “un complesso di sensazioni, d’idee e di allusioni”, e che
lui, “non so se per virtù o per vizio, trasvolabat in medio posita, ed
afferrando le idee cardinali, lasciava a’ lettori la compiacenza o la noia di
desumere le intermedie”. (“Parliamo dell’ermetismo”, 78)
The aspect of Foscolo’s treatment of metaphor that gets the most play in De
Robertis’s essay, however, offers no challenge to what we have seen in Flora:
La forza poi delle immagini, la potenza di suggestione che hanno le “idee
concomitanti”, la necessità d’una lettura segreta, quasi che i poeti non
volessero per lettori che “i loro pari”, erano tante condizioni per far poesia
e per intenderla. E quel suo difendere infine “la fantasia pittrice”,
“l’arcana armoniosa melodia pittrice”, e che un poeta deve “dipingere”
non mai “descrivere”, tornava a riconfermare come sommo pregio
dell’arte, dell’arte vera, e soltanto dell’arte moderna, certo potere allusivo,
evocativo si direbbe oggi, e una eccitatrice velocità di trapassi. (79)
Moreover, De Robertis cites Leopardi on the importance of not taxing the
reader with excessively obscure metaphors:
Sapeva anche, il Leopardi, che “le metafore troppo lontane stancano”,
perché il lettore “non arriva ad abbracciare lo spazio che è tra l’una e
l’altra idea rappresentata dalla metafora, o non ci arriva in un punto, ma
dopo un certo tempo”, sì che “la moltiplicità simultanea delle idee, nel
che consiste il piacere, non ha piu luogo.” (80)
In the end, what is at stake in both Leopardi and Foscolo, in the view of De
Robertis, is the power of metaphor (that has its logic, again, in painterly
vividness and clarity, together with a musical harmony) to give pleasure to
the reader.
Mario Apollonio, on the other hand, takes a contrasting approach, refusing
to condemn the exceedingly obscure analogy as well as to deny the challenge
it presents, seeing it instead as an element in a ritual through which the reader
participates in a kind of divine secret. He writes in Ermetismo (1945):
Il poeta nuovo, abolendo il commento e la graduale istituzione oratoria
del lettore, fissa fin da principio quel che deve essere il punto d’arrivo in
ogni opera d’arte, e cioè l’adeguarsi del lettore all’immagine,
connaturandovisi (né una metafora si è connaturata alla parola finché i
passaggi intermediari non sono sottintesi)7. E se per ottenere questo scopo
gli chiede di incantarsi nella ripetizione di formule a prima vista astruse,
la famigliarità è pur la premessa sociale di ogni connaturarsi: virtù e
limite dell’abitudine. (70)
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In addition to the importance of the image as focus for the reader’s
identification, Apollonio points out the distance between metaphor and
discursive language, only to dissolve this distance as the metaphor’s hidden
connections are made explicit as a result of an incantatory repetition
bordering on the mystical.
In La poetica dell’ermetismo italiano, Mario Petrucciani’s critique of
Flora’s description of analogy in hermetic poetry is limited to pointing out
Flora’s tendency to generalize regarding the negative results in the hermetics
(apparent in the disconnect between the treatment of metaphor in I miti della
parola and La poesia ermetica), rather than to look at specific works
(something Petrucciani does briefly at the end of the chapter on analogy,
without, however, tackling examples that at all test his own thesis). Writing
in 1955, Petrucciani distances himself from Flora on analogy only in his
willingness to allow for a greater number of successful analogies in hermetic
poetry. Moreover, the basis here for making such a judgment coincides
entirely with what we have seen in detractors and defender of hermeticism
alike. Of the two terms of the metaphor, Petrucciani writes: “siano pur
lontanissimi, si giustificheranno sempre, ove abbiano una loro intima
necessità, e coerenza; ove la loro sintesi sia armonica” (163). Stopping short
of charging analogy in itself with being responsible for non poesia, he is
scarcely better off than Flora in conveying a sense of the rationale behind
successful metaphors, other than that they are apprehended by the critic
gifted with a sensibility toward music and harmony.
Where these approaches all seem to agree is in their assumption of an
underlying coherence and harmony justifying the metaphoric process and
embodied in the image that results from the synthesis of the metaphor’s two
terms. As we have seen, such an understanding of the image in the work of
metaphor has a precedent in Foscolo, who championed “la fantasia pittrice”
and “l’armoniosa arcana melodia pittrice” (cited in De Robertis, 78-79). Of
course, the notion that metaphor should produce a vivid image in order to be
effective dates back to Aristotle, who writes: “It is also good to use
metaphorical words; but the metaphors must not be far-fetched, or they will
be difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or they will have no effect. The words, too,
ought to set the scene before our eyes” (Rhetoric, 1410b 31-33). And as we
have seen, it finds its most insistent defender in the Flora of I miti della
poesia.
Moreover, as a precedent for the critics under consideration here, we cannot
overlook an essential moment in the history of metaphor theory during which
this emphasis on vision perhaps reached its apex: Emanuele Tesauro’s
typology of metaphor in Il cannocciale aristotelico is perhaps the most
representative work in this regard, contributing to the revival of the
ontological primacy of sight over the other senses characteristic of the
seventeenth century8. Pierantonio Frare, in “Il Cannocchiale aristotelico: da
retorica della letteratura a letteratura della retorica”, discusses this aspect of
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metaphor in Tesauro, referring to Aristotle’s claim that “it is from metaphor
that we can best get hold of something fresh” (Rhetoric, 1410b 13): “La
conoscenza di cui si parla è, prima ancora che intellettuale, visiva: spetta al
Ricoeur il merito di aver dimostrato come già il dettato aristotelico assegni
alla metafora il potere di visualizzare le relazioni” (35)9. Along with the
notion of a visual component implicit in Aristotle, Tesauro underlines the
cognitive, if not ontological, value of metaphor. Defining metaphor as
“parola pelligrina, velocemente significante un’obietto per mezzo di un
altro”, he considers its essential qualities to be brevità, novità and chiarezza,
the third of these resulting from the other two: “Da queste due Virtù nasce la
terza, cioè la Chiarezza. Peroche un’obietto rattamente illuminato dall’altro,
ti vibra come un lampo nell’intelletto” (301-03). In Tesauro’s typology, the
figure that currently goes by the name of metaphor corresponds to his
“metafora di simiglianza”, which allows us to know a distant object (this
being the task of all eight of Tesauro’s figures). He writes: “Con la Simile, io
conosco un Uomo per mezzo della sua imagine: e questa è la Metafora di
simiglianza” (303). Not surprisingly, it is here that we find the strongest
identification between image and clarity, as well as the notion that the image
that results from an effective metaphor should be transparent so as to be
immediately apprehended.
What is overturned in hermetic metaphor are two assumptions running
through all the theories we have examined until now: one concerns the
harmony that justifies the bringing together of the two terms, and the other
the character of the image that results from the comparison, setting the stage
for the final clarity into which the metaphor is resolved. In reiterating the two
emphases, the approaches of the critics we have examined mitigate the
primacy of vision by relying on a sense of harmony, but fail to release the
image from the burden of a determining concept, a notion that will prove to
be central to the work of the terza generazione. This shift in the conception
of the poetic image, fundamental to an understanding of the new relationship
to language embodied in hermetic poetry, will receive its first systematic
elaboration in the work of Luciano Anceschi, who incorporates Kantian
esthetics into his own work in order to provide the foundation for a notion of
image freed from a dependency on concept.
It is Anceschi who identifies by way of reference to the technique of
analogy an entire line of modern Italian poetry; far from being a phenomenon
restricted to hermetic poetry, analogy proves to be a defining aspect of a great
deal of Italian poetry, as a glance at the titles of a number of his works
suggests: “Leopardi e la poetica dell’analogia”, “D’Annunzio e il sistema
dell’analogia”, not to mention the important role analogy plays in Le poetiche
del Novecento in Italia, as well in demonstrating the genesis of the category
of pure poetry in Anceschi’s foundational work, Autonomia e eteronomia
dell’arte10. Moreover, as Anceschi shapes his anthology Lirici nuovi
according to a strong sense of continuity between poets such as Campana,
Onofri, Ungaretti and Montale, and younger ones, including a number of
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poets of the terza generazione such as Gatto, Luzi, Sereni and Sinisgalli, his
collection represents a significant moment of transition; the few years that
have passed since the earliest theories of hermeticism have allowed for the
focus to widen to include these younger poets. (The rationale behind the
anthology, in fact, consists in giving space to those poets perhaps too recent
to have been included in anthologies such as Pancrazi and Papini’s Poeti
d’oggi [the second edition of which extends to 1925] and Falqui and
Capasso’s Fiore della Lirica Italiana [1933].) In this sense, it is with Lirici
nuovi that we can see critical attention begin to shift onto poets soon to be
brought together under the grouping “terza generazione”. More important to
the present discussion is the fact that this process takes place, to a
considerable degree, according to a theoretical assumption that sees analogy
not merely as a salient poetic technique, but rather as a guiding principle of
esthetic judgment. It is not surprising, in fact, that Anceschi’s esthetic
project, grounded as it is in a phenomenological tradition inherited directly
from Antonio Banfi, interpreter of Husserl, might come to coincide in some
sense with an understanding of the potentially ontological function of
analogy itself.
In his 1942 Introduction to the Lirici nuovi, Anceschi attributes to
contemporary lyric poetry, among other qualities, “l’uso continuo ed energico
dell’analogia, come modo rapido e quasi veemente di porre rapporti, di aprire
orizzonti” and goes on to cite Ungaretti: “[la parola] si propone di mettere in
contatto ciò che è più distante. Maggiore è la distanza, maggiore è la poesia.
Quando tali contatti danno luce è toccata poesia. In breve, uso, e forse abuso,
di forme elittiche” (4-5). Through reference to Ungaretti’s claims for the
place of “distance” in contemporary poetry, Anceschi allows analogy to take
on considerable significance in his discussion of the relatively wide range of
poets represented in Lirici nuovi. As he formulates a notion of poesia come
distanza, he confirms more specifically the pairing of analogy and
hermeticism; indeed, he is more uneasy about the term “hermeticism” itself
than about the risk of reinforcing Flora’s equation of ermetici with analogisti,
an equation Anceschi will reformulate in positive terms, emphasizing the
productive nature of hermeticism’s alleged obscurity11:
La poesia come distanza: è questo certo uno dei motivi fondamentali che
possono servire come principio attivo di una poetica odierna della lirica,
di quella poetica che, con un nome in qualche modo incauto ed accettato
con troppa indulgenza, è stata classificata come ermetica. (5)
Under closer examination, the notion of “distance” in Anceschi’s work
proves to be not merely one among many, but perhaps the single most
resilient and wide-reaching motive behind the poetics of hermeticism.
Citing specifically the work of Flora and Romano – though hinting that a
critical commonplace initiated by these two would be taken up by others as
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well, as it certainly has been – Anceschi counters the tendency to understand
contemporary use of analogy as deriving primarily (if not entirely) from
French Symbolism and its immediate heirs, noting not only the foundational
differences between hermetic and symbolist analogy, but suggesting
characteristically that the critic look at poets’ individual styles and not follow
preconceived critical schemata:
Non pare, quindi, conveniente l’insistere, e lo si fa spesso (Flora,
Romano…), sul metodo antico dell’analogia, come su una certa riprova
di una proposta origine solamente simbolistica della nuova lirica: del
resto, l’analogia, per Mallarmé, era l’ideale principio di un puro ordine
estetico di metafisiche ‘corrispondenze’, mentre, se per Ungaretti è solo
una figura letteraria che, tra tante altre, giova alla sua volontà di stile per
accesi, fulminanti contatti tra evidenze lontanissime, per Quasimodo è il
modo opportuno di togliere indugi alla sua intensa ricerca di modulare
una durata pura della pronuncia poetica. (6)
One senses in Anceschi the impulse to gather the work of a number of
diverse poets under the single banner of analogy, variously inflected,
distancing, at the same time, these Italian experiences from the French
tradition. Rather than seek models among the French Symbolists, Anceschi
proposes, for example, another precedent, one closer to the experience of a
younger generation of Italian poets, in D’Annunzio’s “systematic”
understanding and employment of analogy12:
È vero: i “lirici nuovi” si rifecero ad una lettura diretta, che risultò
radicalmente diversa, di Baudelaire e di Mallarmé, ebbero una diversa e
diversamente fondata idea di analogia; ma è anche vero che il primo a
parlare in modo sistematico di analogia come istituzione della poesia nel
nostro paese fu il D’Annunzio. In tal senso, con questi limiti, in quegli
anni, egli appare veramente come il prologo a certi aspetti e modi della
lirica e della prosa “nuova”. (“D’Annunzio, e il sistema della analogia”,
40)
Anceschi traces analogy in D’Annunzio over a relatively brief span of time,
from an early, unsystematic use in Primo Vere and Terra Vergine, through
Canto Novo, to a much more self-conscious use (and theorization) in the
novels of the 1880’s. D’Annunzio’s conception of analogy ranges from an
emphasis, characteristic of the late nineteenth-century, on the perception of
obscure and profound symbols in nature, on the “comprensione simpatica
delle cose, e di penetrazione dell’anima umana nell’anima delle cose” (32),
to the occasional meditation on the poet’s work in shaping the raw material
of language, a focus that will have greater resonance with the concerns of
twentieth-century poetry:
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La parola appare segno imperfetto; solo un artista espertissimo nei suoi
strumenti può perfezionarla, essa deve essere continuamente intensamente
lavorata perché rapidi accostamenti, identificazioni, estasi sensibili e
piene di senso diano effetti esaltanti, raggiungendo la forza della
rivelazione. (33)
Even before he raises analogy to the level of “system”13, Anceschi’s
D’Annunzio is the modern poet who demonstrates early on an intuition of the
role of analogy in a much needed literary renewal.
In Le istituzioni della poesia, published in 1968, Anceschi returns to
analogy as one of two organizing principles influencing the works of the
lirici nuovi, but extending beyond those individual works to establish nothing
short of a literary “society” (“si pensa che il sociologo possa avere qualche
cosa da dire a questo proposito”):
Tutti i poeti che diciamo “lirici nuovi” nel nostro paese hanno avuto in un
modo o nell’altro a che fare con le istituzioni della analogia o del simbolo
oggettivo; ciò ha delle conseguenze sul modo con cui essi organizzarono
il loro universo verbale; e ha un significato che vive all’interno
dell’opera, ma va anche oltre l’opera. (38).
Later, however, when Anceschi tackles the poetics of hermeticism for the
Enciclopedia del Novecento (1975), even Montale, the most significant figure
associated with the use of the simbolo oggettivo, fails to escape the influence
of analogy (which becomes the istituzione per eccellenza):
Venuto dopo Ungaretti, Montale ha una formazione tutta diversa; e,
intanto, è da notare che se Ungaretti pone l’analogia al centro del suo
sistema, Montale si serve della analogia come di una componente per un
sistema che diciamo della “poetica degli oggetti”, che potremmo anche
dire di “correlazioni oggettive”, tale infine da giungere fino a toccare il
territorio difficile degli emblemi e dell’allegoria. (“Poetiche
dell’ermetismo”, 26)
For Anceschi, who locates the earliest manifestations of hermeticism in the
years 1916-1919, Ungaretti’s analogia will carry more weight than Montale’s
simbolo oggettivo with regard to the experience of the terza generazione –
culminating in Luzi, of whom Anceschi remarks, “porta fino al delirio
l’isituto dell’analogia” (37) – even if we consider the use of analogy in
Montale’s very early “Elegia” and “Musica silenziosa”.
Each of Anceschi’s istituzioni della poesia presupposes a response to at
least one of three functions: they may represent a technical notion aiding in
the production of poetry, or a didactic norm transmitting specific aspects of
poetic invention, or a traditional norm associating with a depository of
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codified literary knowledge. As istituzione in Anceschian esthetics, analogy
seems to fulfill all three functions, in addition to acting as a principle of
judgment extendable even to earlier poets for whom such a technique might
at first seem foreign:
Si aggiunga, poi, che se l’istituzione sarà l’analogia, comunque venga
intrepretata secondo le diverse disponibilità di pronuncia che, da
Autonomia alle Poetiche del Novecento, abbiamo constatato nei diversi
movimenti e nei singoli poeti, ecco proprio l’analogia, oltre che proporsi
come modello della poesia, come procedimento interno del fare, e come
struttura generale che tende a caricarsi di significati metafisici, vorrà
anche presentarsi come un sistema dei giudizi. E non solo servirà a
giudicare i poeti viventi che accettano il principio, ma anche per guardare
con occhio diverso quelli che T. S. Eliot chiamava i poeti morti. (49)
Before Le istituzioni della poesia, the sense in which analogy might serve
as a system of judgment had already been a central concern in Autonomia ed
eteronomia dell’arte. When Anceschi addresses the problem of judgment – in
Autonomia in particular, but also in his later writings – one is reminded of the
role the work of Kant plays in shaping Anceschian esthetics14. Indeed, in
addition to the fundamental notions of autonomy and heteronomy, Kant
supplies Anceschi with the means for positing the importance of analogy
within the broader discussion of a systematic understanding of esthetic
judgment. He does this through his description of the free play of imagination
in esthetic judgment.
Kant premises aesthetic judgment on the disinterested contemplation of the
object, so that the interests of the individual have no bearing on judgment.
More pertinent to the present discussion, however, is his description of a
necessary relationship between judgment and imagination. Although Kant
argued, in the Critique of Pure Reason, for the central role of imagination in
the synthesis of concept and intuition (one function of imagination being
precisely that of assigning concepts to our experience in order to give shape
to our perceptions of the world), he also believed in the possibility of freeing
imagination from a reliance on the concept in esthetic judgment, whether
through the absence of any determinate concept or its non-application.
Anceschi refers early on in Autonomia to Kant’s affirmation, in the Critique
of Judgment, that “è bello ciò che piace universalmente senza concetto”15,
upon which is founded the notion locating esthetic judgment in the free play
of faculties of the senses, that is, of the imagination16 (26-27). The
intersection of Kant’s thoughts on imagination with Leopardi’s notion of idee
concomitanti will take us beyond a word-based approach to metaphor that
fails to break with classical rhetorical in the direction of a predicative
approach capable of accounting for the complex nature of the “pictorial
dimension” of modernist metaphor. Moreover, such a focus will help us
appreciate the significance of Piero Bigongiari’s discussion of what he calls
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the “freedom of the image” in his own work and in that of his
contemporaries.
In the Introduction to Lirici nuovi, Anceschi relates analogy to “certe
dimenticate osservazioni leopardiane circa il diletto aperto e infinito delle
idee concomitanti” (4). Two years earlier, in 1940, De Robertis had, in his
own discussion of analogy, referred to Foscolo’s – not Leopardi’s – idee
concomitanti. However, De Robertis’ appeal to Foscolo as authoritative
precedent for hermetic analogy is limited to acknowledging the role of
ambiguity: Foscolo, after Locke, uses the term to designate the plurality of
ideas in the poet’s mind that result in a given composition; the task of the
critic and translator is then to rediscover and make explicit these ideas
(Fubini, 17-18). By citing Leopardi’s idee concomitanti, Anceschi
emphasizes instead the infinite variety of meanings associated with a literary
work (also involving sound and other qualities of language) whose range is as
wide as that of all of the possible contexts (readers, circumstances of time
and place) in which that work might exist17. Within a discussion of the theory
of metaphor, such an emphasis constitutes a shift away from the possibility of
an exhaustive paraphrase of metaphor and in the direction of the productive
force of metaphor as an unresolvable tension.
It was Paul Henle, an important theorist of metaphor in the Englishlanguage tradition, who emphasized the iconic character of metaphor, the
trait he claims singles it out among the various tropes18. This iconic character
is not associated with an image in a strong sense, but instead with the process
of seeing one situation in terms of another: as Ricoeur notes, it “has to do
with a parallel between two thoughts, such that one situation is presented or
described in terms of another that is similar to it. […] The essential role of
the icon is to contain an internal duality that at the same time is overcome”
(The Rule of Metaphor, 189). The analogical character of the icon, then,
accounts for its ability to suggest resemblances. Moreover, the idea of the
iconic moment of metaphor “calls to mind the ‘productive’ imagination that
Kant distinguishes from the ‘reproductive’ in order to identify it with the
schema, which is a method for constructing images” (189). Similarly,
because the iconic element in metaphor is not itself an image – in which case
the power of metaphor would be exhausted in its immediate expression – but
rather a formula for calling up icons capable of pointing toward “original
resemblances, whether of quality, structure or locality, of situation or, finally,
of feeling […], the iconic representation harbours the power to elaborate, to
extend the parallel structure” (189).
In Ricoeur’s work, Henle’s iconic function, like Kant’s productive
imagination, cautions against assigning to the image the character of a stable,
visual representation. Ricoeur locates this notion within the history of
metaphor theory by returning to Aristotle’s formulation, this time
emphasizing an inherent tension:
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“To metaphorize well”, said Aristotle, “implies an intuitive perception of
the similarity in dissimilar”. Thus, resemblance itself must be understood
as a tension between identity and difference in the predicative operation
set in motion by semantic innovation. This analysis of the work of
resemblance suggests in turn that the notions of ‘productive imagination’
and ‘iconic function’ must be reinterpreted. Indeed, imagination must
cease being seen as a function of the image, in the quasi-sensorial sense
of the word; it consists rather in ‘seeing as […]’ according to a
Wittgensteinian expression – a power that is an aspect of the properly
semantic operation consisting in seeing the similar in the dissimilar. (The
Rule of Metaphor, 6)
The intersection between Kant’s idea of productive imagination and a
characteristically modernist suspicion of image as embodiment of thought –
an intersection that informs both Anceschi’s description of the language of
the lirici nuovi as well as Ricoeur’s discussion of the place of resemblance in
a predicative theory of metaphor – is treated in depth in an often overlooked
article by Piero Bigongiari. In “Libertà drammatica della poesia”, which
appeared in the journal Prospettive early in 1943 (just a few months after the
publication of the first edition of Lirici nuovi), Bigongiari identifies in the
Romantics the beginning of a tendency to separate judgment and fantasy
(imagination), with which he associates the contemporary habit of assigning
a priori to thought the character of an image and expecting “life” to
correspond thus to a static, embodied concept:
Tra giudizio e fantasia il romanticismo creò una scissione inesistente,
sinchè per una cattiva abitudine dell’intelligenza oggi si dà alla riflessione
il carattere di un’immagine ognora presunta e sempre ipotetica, quasi che
essa sostituisca nella sua autonomia quel che la vita ha di fluido e di
fantastico. La ragione dei moderni opera per schemi successivi quel che
invece dovrebbe investire di una logica naturale. (253)
As the title suggests, “Libertà drammatica della poesia” centers on the two
terms in the phrase libertà drammatica, a quality of poetry that refers as well
to the nature of the individual’s relationship to the world. What Bigongiari
condemns, in fact, is a strong sense of the subject-object dichotomy, which
should instead be a fluid dialectic. This dichotomy involves the subject’s
stripping itself of “imaginary qualities”; as the object gains consistency, the
subject increasingly assumes the sense of a finite, constructed, “unreflective”
image. The movement inherent in the dialectic Bigongiari would substitute
for a dichotomy that tends toward reification – and results in a “closed”
poetry – acts as guarantor of the freedom to which he appeals19:
È giudizio la nostra libertà quotidiana, il cadere del nostro soggettivismo,
il senso del moto inerente alla dialettica soggetto-oggetto, il giudizio è
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l’atto stesso dell’esistenza dopo che ci ha deposto come immagini
anticipate, falsamente conclusive. [...] La facoltà del giudizio parte, deve
partire, dal silenzio, e non dall’occulto clamore degli uomini negati alla
storia; ha la moralità di un atto puro nella ragione continua dell’esistenza,
è il silenzio dischiuso al corpo, è una immagine non analogica; per cui
giudizio e fantasia vengono in questo senso a identificarsi. E una rondine
che righi il cielo della nostra finestra è il proprio perpetuo e libero
giudizio. (256)
Given the context of our discussion of analogy, it is important to clarify the
sense in which Bigongiari uses the term “analogical” here. We might oppose
this idea of analogy in Bigongiari to what we encountered in Anceschi’s
reading of D’Annunzio, where the analogical relation between the individual
and his surroundings, the “penetrazione dell’anima umana nell’anima delle
cose” (“D’Annunzio, e il sistema della analogia”, 32), implied an almost
violent imposition of the poet’s mind or sensibilities on the objects of the
world20. More significantly, it also stands in contrast to a “transcendent”
analogy that merely indexes some invisible, eternal absolute, as well as to the
notion of the power of the symbol to encapsulate the passions of a Romantic
“I”. According to Bigongiari, although his contemporaries may have
abandoned a predetermined morality, they nonetheless contaminate the
freedom of the image with the “morality” of the image, rendering it
demonstrative, closed, transcendent. In order for poetry to render this
freedom, it must resist the temptation of the idyll and remain open to a fluid
sense (“mobile senso”) in which judgment and imagination both play a part.
Thus, in place of the image grounded in an idyllic morality, in a “closed”,
analogical relation, Bigongiari proposes the anti-idyllic, dramatic, open
image.
We can clarify what is at stake in Bigongiari’s project by returning to
Aristotle’s description of metaphor in the Rhetoric, and specifically to the
attention he gives to the visual aspect of metaphor (“making one’s hearers see
things”): “We have still to explain what we mean by their ‘seeing things,’ and
what must be done to effect this. By ‘making them see things’ I mean using
expressions that represent things in a state of activity” (Rhetoric, 1411b 2425). As Ricoeur points out, this shift in emphasis results in a privileging of
Aristotelian over Platonic metaphysics, the emphasis being on “rendering
things dramatic” rather than on making the invisible appear through the
visible (The Rule of Metaphor, 34). In keeping with the underlying
assumptions of many of the critics who have played a part in this parallel
history – that of metaphor theory as determining factor in critical approaches
to Italian hermetic poetry – we have until now favored the “Platonic” reading
of the visual component of metaphor; in order to situate Bigongiari’s notion
of the dramatic liberty of the poetic image within a theory of metaphor that
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takes its cue from the Kant’s theory of esthetic judgment, it will be necessary
to emphasize instead the dramatic nature of imagination.
Ricoeur suggests a way of putting Aristotle’s recognition of the power of
figurative language to show things “in action” into a context of thought,
contemporary with the terza generazione, that moves beyond the referential
function of poetic language:
To present men ‘as acting’ and all things ‘as in act’ – such could well be
the ontological function of metaphorical discourse, in which every
dormant potentiality of existence appears as blossoming forth, every
latent capacity for action as actualized. Lively expression is that which
expresses existence as alive. (43)
Or to say it with Bigongiari: “Una rondine, ripeto, è solamente una rondine,
e non può dirci nulla per chiusura strofica, per analogia. Drammatico è il
giudizio per cui quella vive nella poesia: cioè l’apertura dell’esistenza; e
ritorno all’identificazione che pongo tra giudizio e fantasia” (“Libertà
drammatica della poesia” 257).
Bigongiari’s rejection of a closed, demonstrative, consolatory poetic image
in favor of the “dramatic freedom” of poetry, though little discussed in
criticism addressing Italian hermeticism, constitutes an indispensable
statement of the poetics of the terza generazione. Moreover, it is striking that
fifty-three years later, in an interview given to Daniele Piccini, Bigongiari
would reaffirm the significance of this “dramatic” character of language
when offering a description of the nucleus of values identifiable in the
specific experience of the hermeticism of the terza generazione:
È una poetica in cui il discorso è in uno stato di tensione: il punto di
scelta, la parola che in quel momento viene cercata e definita è una parola
che sente questa tensione fra gli estremi; è una parola che io definerei
‘drammatica’, nel senso che appunto avverte in sé questo stato dinamico,
potenziale. (“Nel labirinto della lingua”, Poesia, Giugno 2003, 12)
Perhaps the most pertinent demonstration of such a theory of poetic
language will be given by Bigongiari, in an essay entitled “Montale fra senso
e non senso verso il ‘correlativo soggettivo’”, where he takes up Montale’s
poem “Potessi almeno costringere”.
While “Potessi almeno costringere” (from Ossi di seppia; it remains
unchanged from the 1925 edition) precedes the experience of the terza
generazione by a number of years, it nevertheless hints at modes more
familiar from Montale’s later poems (particularly certain poems from Le
occasioni). Like other poems from Ossi di seppia21, “Potessi almeno
costringere” is an indictment of the poet’s language as incapable of equaling
its object, here the voice of the sea, through an operation rather more
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analogical (the strong relation one hears in “costringere”, “accordare”, and
“rapirti” recalls D’Annunzian analogy) than mimetic in a direct sense:
Potessi almeno costringere
in questo mio ritmo stento
qualche poco del tuo vaneggiamento;
dato mi fosse accordare
alle tue voci il mio balbo parlare: –
io che sognava rapirti
le salmastre parole
in cui natura ed arte si confondono
What distinguishes “Potessi almeno costringere” from other of Montale’s
early poems, and what makes it of relevance to a discussion of the “dramatic”
character of poetic language, are precisely the final lines, cited by Bigongiari
at the beginning of the essay, where Montale moves away from the discursive
register with which until this point in the poem he laments the bankruptcy of
received language. These final lines read:
Ed il tuo rombo cresce, e si dilata
azzurra l’ombra nuova.
M’abbandonano a prova i miei pensieri.
Sensi non ho; né senso. Non ho limite. (Tutte le poesie, 60)
The lines “Ed il tuo rombo cresce, e si dilata / azzurra l’ombra nuova”,
while determined by the imediate context (as well as by that of the
Mediterraneo as a sequence), look forward, in fact, not only to the language
of the Mottetti – where we find phrases such as “un ronzìo lungo viene
dall’aperto”, “allunga [...] l’ombra nera”, “un cigolìo si sfera, ci discosta, /
l’azzurro pervicace non ricompare” – but also to central works of the terza
generazione, such as Luzi’s Quaderno gotico and Bigongiari’s La figlia di
Babilonia. As Montale abandons an aspiration to capture (rapire) nature or
force it (costringere) into the bounds of a concordant language, his poem
becomes suggestive of the dramatization of abstract qualities so prevalent in
the terza generazione.
In the present context, what is of interest is that “Se potessi almeno
costringere” also looks forward to a Montale in which “non-sense” will be
understood as a necessary moment in preparation for the “other”, unforeseen
sense, that which results from the tension between two extremes22:
In Montale il “limite” che non ha, è il limite interiore, il limite della
qualificazione dell’esistenza in termini implosive, dentro il soggetto
sentito come soggettività senza fondo, dietro quel “rumore senza fondo”
che l’interior hominis avverte se si ausculta con l’orecchio dell’anima,
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dimessa ogni volontà di potenza, cioè ogni volontà mitica, nella
derealizzazione esistenziale di ogni mito di fronte alla realtà oggettiva.
Ma è proprio questo non aver senso, oltre al non aver sensi, a far sì che il
poeta nella sua prima fase senta anche in termini improgressivi la sua
“immobilità come un tormento.” (473)
The torment constituted by the absence of sense prepares the way for the
second phase of the poet’s career, where it is transformed into a kind of
“interior dialectic”, between an internal and an external – or centrifugal and
centripetal – impulse, as in the later “La casa dei doganieri”. Indeed, it is this
quality that distinguishes Montale’s “correlativo oggettivo” from that of T. S.
Eliot, which remains fundamentally allegorical (and, therefore,
fundamentally static):
[Il “correlativo oggettivo” montaliano è] a fondo strettamente esistenziale,
senza cioè alcun diritto di prelazione sulla conoscibilità anche emotiva
dell’oggetto rispetto a cui il soggetto correla la sua procedura. È proprio
“l’occasione” a togliere alla correlazione qualsiasi premessa gnoseologica
in favore della casualità geometrica dell’intersezione tra soggetto e
oggetto. (474).
Rejecting the premise of a resulting self-knowledge or knowledge of the
object, Bigongiari draws attention, instead, to the random nature of the
intersection – or, rather, impact – between the two impulses.
What I have traced until now are a number of theories that provide
productive ways of reconsidering the work of metaphor in hermetic poetry. I
do not mean to suggest, however, that any one approach will be universally
effective, even that of Ricoeur, whose approach resonates so well with the
aspiration to a dramatic image in the terza generazione. One finds numerous
uses of metaphor in the terza generazione, and, indeed, often enough these
uses are quite conventional and present little difficulty for the reader (and, in
fact, seem not to exceed approaches relying upon notions of similarity within
a semiotic or word-based theory of metaphor). At other times, one’s attention
is drawn to the suspension of sense as a precondition for semantic innovation
and the recognition of some unanticipated sense. Nevertheless, occasionally
one encounters a disposition of language that remains in some sense
“impenetrable”, a phenomenon that has, as Marcello Pagnini has pointed out,
its own cultural “necessity”, as well as a rhetoric of its own (“cioè, un
repertorio di modalità che generano indecidibilità e oscurità”) 23.
The theories of metaphor implicit in the work of several of the critics I have
considered thus far (Flora, Romano, Petrucciani) limit the relation between
the two terms of the metaphor to one of similarity (the “harmony” at the heart
of effective metaphors)24. Such emphasis on “intimate coherence” and
“harmonic synthesis” in these critics strikes one as fairly anachronistic, given
the preference among modernist writers for what Karsten Harries has called
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“metaphors of collision” (“Metaphor and Transcendence”, 72). Yet, other
critics, such as Anceschi and Bigongiari, while allowing for the notion of
metaphor as generator, rather than the mere conveyor, of meaning,
nevertheless leave aside the question of metaphor that fails to achieve a
degree of harmony or coherence. Even Ricoeur’s discussion of the iconic
moment rests upon the work of resemblance in the production of meaning:
Metaphorical meaning does not merely consist of a semantic clash but of
the new predicative meaning which emerges from the collapse of the
literal meaning, that is, from the collapse of the meaning which obtains if
we rely only on the common or usual lexical values of our words. The
metaphor is not the enigma but the solution of the enigma.
It is here, in the mutation characteristic of the semantic innovation, that
similarity and accordingly imagination play a role. (“The Metaphorical
Process”, 144)25.
Ricoeur’s formulation of the semantic innovation and the significance of
imagination in the metaphorical process offers considerable advantage over
previous theories of metaphor in dealing with the difficulty presented by
many uses of metaphor in the terza generazione. However, it is difficult to
deny that there are moments when hermetic metaphor seems to remain at the
moment of semantic impertinence, a problem Harries addresses in
formulating his notion of “metaphors of collision”. Though he generally
agrees with Ricoeur, Harries argues that not all metaphors result in a new
semantic pertinence:
There are metaphors that direct us away from reality toward the aesthetic
object; in such instances semantic collision weakens or breaks the
referential function of language and, supported by phonetic collusion, lets
us become absorbed into the poem. (“The Many Uses of Metaphor”, 171)
In acknowledging the possibility that certain instances of hermetic
metaphor may fail to result in a gain in meaning, we seem to have come full
circle, left, as it were, with something troublingly close to the parola-brividosonoro that was for Francesco Flora the symptom of a kind of modern
sickness:
The impossibility of translation points out that the collision of images is
balanced by the collusion of the pattern in which these images find
expression. This collusion, which has its ground not so much in a real
similarity of the referents as in the flow and texture of the words
themselves, gives the poem a presence that lets us accept the poet’s
broken metaphors. (“Metaphor and Transcendence”, 79)
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Harries’ theory, which takes us away from a reliance on similarity into the
realm of unbridgeable difference, also has its place in a comprehensive
approach to the place of metaphor in the hermetics’ modernist project.
In lieu of a broader investigation into the specific instances of metaphor in
the work of the terza generazione, a brief look into an exemplary poem by
Bigongiari will have to suffice. In “Trama”, the final poem of La figlia di
Babilonia (1942), the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is reduced,
metonymically, to the “passo” of the absent other, just as the last lines of the
poem call up a number of the issues I have addressed here. The entire poem
reads:
Su un ambio di cavalli tu cammini,
lungo rocce bianchissime, o sognante,
divalli, il cuore perso in altri minî
che l’orizzonte insanguina alle valli.
Ed è questo il divino? come cadono
tepide piogge sui muri al suburbio
e rose rose in cieche fogge invadono
la tua finestra brancolanti a un Ade.
Strade senz’ombra, luci senza altare,
cuore che ingombra un vano delirare,
e le serre fiorite, in altre sere
più cariche, di croci di nepente.
Io lungamente attesi il mio morire
da uno sguardo più lungo, ma se niente
sopravanzava fuor che il tuo transire
sempre là dove inalterata i sogni
tradisci per non essere men vera,
nelle lacrime dove mi specchiai,
nella spera impazzita, nel segreto
della mia vita incalcolato, andrai
per sempre, o sognante, col tuo passo
o sia esso un po’ di sole che ti giustifica.
(Tutte le poesie: 1933-1963, 120-21)
Certainly, the poem is replete with metaphors – “il cuore perso in altri
minî”, the “cieche fogge” of the roses, the “luci senza altare” – that are
unresolvable into a clear sense, but whose logic resides in the interaction of
abstract properties that drives much of the poem. The central moment,
however, coincides with the resistance of the other – “là dove inalterata i
sogni / tradisci per non essere men vera” – to any sort of transfiguration
(whether in memory or metaphor). Here Bigongiari looks forward to the final
poem of Luzi’s Quaderno gotico (1947), “Dove non eri quanta pace: il
cielo”, the second stanza of which begins “Né memoria, né immagine, né
sogni”, a phrase one is tempted to read as a declaration of an ideal (negative)
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poetics. Ultimately, what the refusal to stage such a transfiguration allows to
persist is the unbounded and unforeseen (and unforeseeable) secret of life:
“nel segreto / della mia vita incalcolato.”
__________
NOTE
1
Clearly, the subject of analogy does not entirely coincide with that of
metaphor. I will leave aside the larger problem, beyond the scope of this
study, of the many uses of analogy, including its role in philosophy, as well
as the distinction Aristotle himself makes between other types of metaphor
and metaphor by analogy. (Aristotle describes four types of metaphor,
according to whether the transference – using the name of one thing for that
of another – occurs from genus to species, from species to genus, from
species to species, or by analogy. The last of these is what we generally
understand as metaphor, without, of course, having to call up the four terms
of the analogy.)
2
Moreover, the hermetics were certainly not the first to come to such a
recognition, nor was theirs the most violent rejection. Indeed, what Charles
Altieri says of nineteenth-century artists has a striking resonance with the
hermetics, particularly given the political climate in which they came into
being: “Representational ideals once profoundly caught up in the project of
Enlightenment now seemed capable of sustaining only public values that
reinforced a self-congratulatory bourgeois dispensation, which became more
appalling as it achieved increasing power” (Painterly Abstraction in
Modernist American Poetry, 389).
3
Flora’s discussion immediately moves from one of art as metaphor to what
we might call, more specifically, “art as synesthesia”: “E se ci si riferisce alla
comoda divisione del tatto, della vista, dell’odorato, dell’udito, l’arte può
essere la traduzione di un’immagine da un senso all’altro, la mutazione di
uno stato musicale in un colore, di un sapore o di un odore in un suono o in
un gesto” (48).
4
For more on the place of synesthesia in Italian hermeticism, see my
“Synaesthetic Metaphor in the Poetry of the terza generazione” (forthcoming
in The Italianist).
5
That Manzoni’s metaphors would tend to rely on a clear, associated image
is hardly surprising, given the debt owed in I promessi sposi to an
Enlightenment tradition emphasizing the coupling sguardo-pensiero, an
aspect of the novel discussed in depth by Ezio Raimondi in Il romanzo
senza idillio (Torino: Einaudi, 1985): “Il fatto è che lo sguardo con cui il
narratore misura ed esplora lo spazio del suo universo romanzesco non si
rapporta soltanto all’occhio della ‘fronte,’ ma anche a quello della ‘mente’
che interpreta, che scruta i segni di una realtà faticosa e non immobile. Anche
la visualizzazione della scrittura manzoniana, in fondo, procede nel senso di
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VIKTOR BERBERI
una logica scientifica, di una conoscenza appassionata del fenomeno umano”
(56)
6
For the significance of Leopardi for the terza generazione, see Anna Dolfi’s
“Leopardismo e terza generazione”, in La cultura italiana negli anni ’30’45 (Omaggio ad Alfonso Gatto). Atti del Convegno – Salerno, 21-24
aprile 1980, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1984, pp. 349-90.
7
When Marco Fioravanti anthologizes this section of Apollonio’s
“Ermetismo”, in La critica e gli ermetici (Bologna: Cappelli, 1978), this
parenthetical statement is oddly omitted without explanation (nor is the
ellipsis noted). Given the context of our discussion, what would otherwise be
an inconsequential editorial error takes on certain significance for
Apollonio’s take on the paraphrasability of the metaphor statement.
8
For this shift in the hierarchy of the senses, see Ezio Raimondi’s chapter
“Verso il realismo”, in Il romanzo senza idillio, Torino: Einaudi, 1985.
9
Ricoeur writes: “To this same characteristic [the ability to astonish and
instruct rapidly] Aristotle attributes another feature of metaphor that has not
appeared before, and that seems somewhat disconcerting at first glance.
Metaphor, he says, ‘sets the scene before our eyes’ (Rhetoric, 1410b 33). In
other words, it gives that concrete colouration – imagistic style, figurative
style it is called now – to our grasp of genus, of underlying similarity. It is
true that Aristotle does not use the word eikôn at all in the sense in which,
since Charles Sanders Pierce, we speak of the iconic aspect of metaphor. But
the idea that metaphor depicts the abstract in concrete terms is already
present” (The Rule of MetaphorG, 34).
10
Analogy will take its place alongside other – though, one suspects, not
equally significant – “institutions” of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Italian poetry, most notably that of the correlazione oggettiva. However, the
amount of work that the concept of analogy is made to do in Anceschi’s
critical enterprise risks an accusation similar to the one he himself levels
against Baudelaire with regard to his view of other nineteenth-century French
poets: “Se pure Baudelaire si pone di fronte agli artisti in una posizione che
finisce col vedere in essi solo determinati fatti, comprenderemo che egli si
pone di fronte agli artisti con un’esperienza personale troppo vissuta –
esperienza personale vissuta, in cui la sua personalità essenzialmente si
resolve – per permettergli di assumere un atteggiamento di vera
comprensione verso i motivi determinanti di personalità diverse dalle sue:
tutti i poeti gli appaiono, dunque, o poeti delle analogie o non poeti. Poesia o
non poesia. La differenza starà nel tipo delle analogie” (Autonomia ed
eteronomia dell’arte, 132).
11
Anceschi writes: “Ormai, è chiaro, ‘l’oscurità’ di questi poeti consiste
soprattutto nell’ostacolo che offre naturalmente ogni inconsueta disposizione
del linguaggio – e in questa necessaria ‘riforma’ è già il segno che garantisce
la validità estetica, l’urgenza morale delle ricerche – in forme per cui i modi
poetici si fanno agili a suggerire moti violenti e nuovi del sentimento, sì che
spesso si richiede una collaborazione attiva e aperta del lettore, quasi che
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THEORIES OF METAPHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN
HERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON-SENSE
ogni composizione sia fatta insieme dal poeta e da chi lo interpreta secondo
infinite libere direzioni” (“Introduction” to Lirici nuovi, 11).
12
As we might expect, D’Annunzio will speak of analogy as an individual’s
heightened state of sensitivity to his surroundings, in which previously
unimagined relationships of similarity among things suddenly become
apparent. Anceschi cites D’Annunzio’s Taccuino: “Sento nel mio viso
pallido il colore dei miei occhi simile a quello delle acque che guardo. Il mio
spirito – per questa sensazione singolare – entra nello stato di ‘grazia’ ossia
di ‘sogno’” (Taccuino, XXIII 209; the italics are D’Annunzio’s).
13
Anceschi points out that, while one certainly comes across examples of
analogy in poets like Carducci, the Scapigliati, and Pascoli, it would be
difficult to locate in them what would amount to a “poetics of analogy”.
14
The larger problem of the influence of Kant on the terza generazione and
their immediate predecessors has received little attention. In addition to keen
interest on the part of theorists like Anceschi and poets like Bigongiari, it is
worth noting Laterza’s reissuing in 1938, during period of intense activity for
Italian hermeticism, of Gargiulo’s translation of the Critique of Judgment,
originally published 1907.
15
Of the autonomy of the imagination, Kant writes: “If […] imagination must
in the judgment of taste be regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with, it is
not taken as reproductive, as in its subjection to the laws of association, but
as productive and exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitrary
forms of possible intuitions” (Critique of Judgment, 86). Though I will be
unable to do so here, one might trace the influence Kant’s discussion of the
concept in the work of esthetic judgment has on the aspiration to an
athematic poetry cultivated by the terza generazione.
16
In referring to “le facoltà conoscitive” in Kant, Anceschi glosses the
phrase, significantly, as immaginazione – “Kant fonda il giudizio di gusto
sopra il libero gioco delle facoltà conoscitive (immaginazione)” (Autonomia
ed eteronomia dell’arte, 27). Kant himself has it (in Meredith’s translation)
as imagination and understanding: “For the ground of this pleasure is found
in the universal, though subjective, condition of reflective judgments, namely
of the final harmony of an object (be it a product of nature or of art) with the
mutual relation of the faculties of cognition (imagination and understanding),
which are requisite for every empirical cognition” (Critique of Judgment,
32). The fact that Anceschi emphasizes the role of imagination is emblematic
of his desire to place analogy at the center of the theory of the modern lyric,
elaborated first in Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte and continued in Le
poetiche del Novecento in Italia and Le istituzioni della poesia.
17
See Leopardi’s Zibaldone 3952.
18
See Paul Henle, “Metaphor”, in Language, Thought and Culture, ed.
Paul Henle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1958.
19
Bigongiari echoes here one of the central concerns – the principle of
subject-object correlation, as opposed to the tendency to render absolute both
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VIKTOR BERBERI
subject and object – of many for whom Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte,
by applying Antonio Banfi’s “critical rationalism” to a view of the task the
contemporary lyric has set for itself, served as a theoretical premise for the
new poetry. On the project of Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte,
Anceschi writes: “Si cercava, dunque, un punto da cui muovere; e, pertanto,
per sfuggire alle secche sia dell’idealismo che dal realismo, come alle
tentazioni (anche molto seducenti) della parzialità che si fa dogma, tale punto
fu trovato nel rilievo della continua correlazione soggetto-oggetto nella loro
reciproca azione, proponendo un movimento infinito della riflessione umana
nell’apertura e come instabilità continua del problema” (XVIII).
20
In Il fuoco, D’Annunzio posits “segni e forme” that impose analogies
between the mind of the poet and the universe; in Il secondo amante di
Lucrezia Buti, he describes such a process as “cogliere qualche accordo
insolito tra la forma mentale e la forma universale” (cited in Anceschi,
“D’Annunzio e il sistema della analogia”, 35).
21
One might mention in this regard poems like “Non chiederci la parola” and
“So l’ora in cui la faccia più impassibile”, among others.
22
Bigongiari finds a similar suggestion in Montale’s reference to the tertium
non datur: “Credo vero il miracolo che tra la vita e la morte / esista un terzo
status che ci trovò tra i suoi” (Tutte le poesie, 721). Published in Altri versi
(1978), the poem “Credo” is dated 1944, though, as Bigongiari points out,
there is some doubt in this regard. See Gianfranco Contini’s essay in
“Dedicato a Montale”, Antologia Vieusseux, n. 64, October-December 1981
(cited in Bigongiari, “Montale fra il senso e non senso verso il ‘correlativo
soggettivo’”, p. 484).
23
Marcello Pagnini, “Difficoltà e oscurità nel modernismo letterario”, 31718.
24
Again, these are word-based approaches that fail to break with classical
rhetoric: if were to speak of deviant predication instead of deviant
denomination we might then refer to the “interaction between a logical
subject and a predicate” (Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process”, 143).
25
As Mary Gerhart notes, Ricoeur seems to believe not so much that certain
metaphorical combinations are incompatible as that ‘some poets are not able
to throw a bridge between them’ (“The Live Metaphor”, 219)
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THEORIES OF METAPHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN
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