Italian Bookshelf (download as PDF) - Ibiblio

464 “Italian Bookshelf.” Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007)
reality” (39). He further identifies Orlando’s madness as a definitive moment within the
poem and emphasizes its centrality within the Furioso.
In chapter three, “Turpin’s Role: Poetry and Truth in the Furioso,” Zatti examines
the relationship between truth and fictional writing in the Furioso, as well as its
applicability within other epic works, such as Pulci’s Morgante. Zatti emphasizes the
romance poet’s relationship to and dependence on the auctor Turpin and his credibility as
a reliable source: “In Italian popular epic, simply quoting Turpin (as was the case with
any source, real or fictitious) was enough to support veracity […]. It was a distant
memory of a real process that claimed to go back to the old French gestes, but that in fact
went back to their vernacular translations in prose and the Franco-Veneto poems that first
document the popularity of chivalric stories on the Italian peninsula” (63). Zatti stresses
that audiences of the chansons de geste did not bother to make a distinction between
historical truth and events legitimated by the oral tradition within the poems they heard.
Chapter four is entitled “Tasso versus Ariosto?” and discusses the querelle between
the artistic legitimacy of the Furioso and the Liberata. “Ariosto’s work represents an
illustrious summa of the romance tradition, and Tasso repudiates it less in reality than he
affirms in theory, because it is in relation to it (and not only in his historical role as
‘imitator’ of Ariosto) that he begins his decisive encounter with modernity and ‘the
custom of current times’” (95). Zatti maintains that current scholarship on the Liberata
should recognize the legacy of chivalric literature in Tasso’s Counter-Reformation epic.
He utilizes Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence” as a point of departure
for his critical approach to “understand the attitude at once of reverence and repulsion, of
veneration and antagonism, that links Tasso to Ariosto” (96). Zatti defines this dispute as
one of the “longest and fiercest of Italian literary history” (96).
In chapter five, “The Shattering of the Chivalric World: Ariosto’s Cinque canti,”
Zatti stresses how the unfinished narrative of the Cinque canti has an undeniable
relationship to the fictitious historical context and characters of the Furioso. Since the
narration is linear with only one omniscient narrator, the Cinque canti can be seen to
advocate “a return to the pre-Boiardo form of the genre [chansons de geste]. In fact, the
plot of the Cinque canti follows a single thread (the rebellion of the Christian peoples
incited by Ganelon against the authority of Emperor Charles), which brings together the
assorted threads crisscrossing the poem into a single, compact block” (118). Zatti’s
observation of the internal conflict among the Christians is emphasized in this chapter.
Zatti scrutinizes the legitimacy of a figurative reading of the martial encounters
between the Christian and pagan armies in chapter six, “Christian Uniformity, Pagan
Multiplicity.” He stresses both the multiplicity of antithetical points of view that emerge
within the conflict of the poem’s strict ideological framework, as well as the
representation of emotional identification on both sides (136). In the next chapter,
“Errancy, Infirmity, and Conquest: Figures of Conflict,” Zatti identifies a division within
the narrative aspects of the Liberata maintaining a distinction between the “poetic ‘I’ (the
formal consciousness that guarantees the text’s unity and views the text as a means of
redemption), and the historic ‘I’ (the phantoms of an existential condition of fragility and
division that obsessively resurfaces in the poem)” (162). According to Zatti, Tasso,
unlike Ariosto, “gives up the opportunity to carve out that niche for the ‘I’ that allowed
Ariosto, within the freer narrative frame of romance, to mediate within the conventional
setting of the canto’s proem” (163-64). This chapter also offers biographical information
on Tasso, detailing in particular his rash of restless wanderings and mental illness.