Renaissance Rewritings

Helmut Pfeiffer, Irene Fantappiè, Tobias Roth, Helmut Pfeiffer, Irene Fantappiè, Tobias Roth

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110523256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

'Rewriting' is one of the most crucial but at the same time one of the most elusive concepts of literary scholarship. In order to contribute to a further reassessment of such a notion, this volume investigates a wide range of medieval and early modern literary transformations, especially focusing on texts (and contexts) of Italian and French Renaissance literature. The first section of the book, "Rewriting", gathers essays which examine medieval and early modern rewritings while also pointing out the theoretical implications raised by such texts. The second part, "Rewritings in Early Modern Literature", collects contributions which account for different practices of rewriting in the Italian and French Renaissance, for instance by analysing dynamics of repetition and duplication, verbatim reproduction and free reworking, textual production and authorial self-fashioning, alterity and identity, replication and multiplication. The volume strives at shedding light on the complexity of the relationship between early modern and ancient literature, perfectly summed up in the motto written by Pietro Aretino in a letter to his friend the painter Giulio Romano in 1542: "Essere modernamente antichi e anticamente moderni".

1Rewriting

Manuele Gragnolati (Paris)

Without Hierarchy: Diffraction, Performance, and Re-writing as Kippbild in Dante’s Vita nova

This paper focuses on the lyric output of the young Dante and in particular on his Vita nova, the “booklet” (libello) in which at around 1294 he selected some previously written lyrics and organized them within a unitary prose narrative that tells the story of his amorous and poetic development. Drawing on some previous work I did both in the context of a project on performance in the Middle Ages and as author of the notes to the poems in Teodolinda Barolini’s edition of Dante’s lyric poetry, I will put forward the argument that the Vita nova can be considered as a particular kind of rewriting, which produces new poems not by altering their text, but through a “diffractive performance”, that is, by diffracting earlier poems through the new prose narrative.1

The notion of “diffraction” is inspired by the epistemologist Donna J. Haraway, who proposes a shift of optical metaphors for a new critical mode of thought and practice. Taking as its point of reference the optical phenomenon of diffraction, according to which light-waves striking an object do not reproduce its exact form, but give way to interference patterns that depend equally on the object and the lightwaves themselves, Haraway argues that diffraction produces a different critical consciousness, which, unlike reflection, is not interested in the relationship between original and copy but changes perspective and aims at making a difference:

Diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals. Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form, thereby giving rise to industries of metaphysics. Rather, diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness at the end of this rather painful Christian millennium, one committed to making a difference and not to representing the Sacred Image of the Same.2

In my 2013 book Amor che move I mobilized diffraction in order to propose a new reading of Dante’s texts through two authors who grappled with them in the twentieth century: Pier Paolo Pasolini, who engaged with Dante directly at various points in his career, producing several veritable ‘rewritings’ (like his Mortaccia and Divina Mimesis, and parts of Petrolio), and Elsa Morante, whose encounters with Dante were also a constant feature of her work, if more oblique than those of her friend Pasolini.3 In particular, rather than merely looking at the ways in which Pasolini and Morante re-wrote Dante or related to him, relying on diffraction allowed me to revert the perspective and also read Dante through the lenses of Pasolini and Morante, creating an itinerary that begins at Dante’s Vita nova, continues with Pasolini’s Divina Mimesis and Petrolio, returns to Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio and, by way of Aracoeli, Elsa Morante’s last novel, concludes with a reading of the aesthetic of Dante’s Paradiso.

While in Amor che move I drew on Haraway’s notion of diffraction in order to make a difference by reading texts through one another beyond any apparent genealogy or hierarchical idea of original and copy, in this paper I argue that in the Vita nova Dante himself engages in a diffractive reading of his own lyric poems and rewrites them. In highlighting this operation of the Vita nova – which is enabled by the fact that, at least for some of the poems, there is evidence that they were understood differently if read independently or integrated within the Vita nova – my aim is to arrive at a notion of re-writing that avoids any hierarchy of original and copy and can be understood as leading to a bi-stable figure, or Kippbild.

Dante began his activities as a lyric poet before he turned eighteen in 1283 and for about a decade he wrote poems which, according to the norms of the day, were conceived as standalone texts, independent of one another, without any expectation either that there would be links between the poems or that they would one day be collected. It is a varied and multiform output inspired by the modes and styles of Occitan and European poetry, and even if we might be able to spot, already in this early work, the first signs of the experimentalism which characterizes Dante’s whole output, it is only with the Vita nova, composed around 1294, that Dante undertook his first truly unusual, audacious turn: that of collecting thirty-one lyrics – most of which were certainly written previously, as distinct, freestanding poems – and organising them within a unifying prose narrative which gives an account of their origins and significance. (The prose is divided into ragioni [“explanations”], which describe the events that inspired the poems, and divisioni [“divisions”], which comment upon their structure.) This prosimetrum text presents itself as a coherent account of the poet’s youth and his apprenticeship in the arts of love and poetry: the various phases of his love for the “most noble” (gentilissima) Beatrice, her death, his abandonment of her for the “noble lady” (donna gentile), and finally his return to Beatrice.

This innovative textual operation is described in the Vita nova’s proemial paragraph with the famous image of memory as a book made up of several different sections, among which is to be found the chapter about the poet’s youth containing the lyric poems and the memories which he will now transcribe:

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia (i 1 [1.1]).

In the book of my memory – the part of it before which not much is legible – there is the heading Incipit vita nova. Under this heading I find the words which I intend to copy down in this little book; if not all of them, at least their essential meaning.4

Incipit vitanova: here begins the story of a life which is “nova” in several senses: because it relates to the youthful experience of Dante’s love for Beatrice; because the life being recounted is extraordinary in its relationship to an exceptional creature like her; and also because the poet’s life is transformed and renewed by Beatrice, as is his understanding of desire and poetry. But there is another sense in which the “vita” is “nova”, the life is new, and in which it is classifiable as a rewriting. It is this sense of the Vita nova as re-writing that I’m interested in discussing and my hypothesis is that it can be thought of in terms of a specific concept of “performance”, which I call “diffractive”.

I am calling this specific concept of performance “diffractive” in order to distinguish it from other senses of performance that would spring more readily to mind when thinking of medieval lyric poetry but that are less present in the Vita nova. Indeed, at first glance, the interest in the performative dimension of Dante’s libello, might be surprising, given that it lacks the symbiosis of music and poetry typical of other European lyric poetry in the Middle Ages, which is bound up with the oral performance of the text in front of an aristocratic court audience. There is no court in the Florentine commune of the late thirteenth century and, more pertinently, the separation between music and poetry is not only suggested by the fact that the text presents itself as a written compilation of the memories of the author, but it is also confirmed by the prosimetrum structure of Dante’s libello.5

So, while there is no evidence of a literal performance situation, my hypothesis is that we find other performative aspects in the Vita nova. We can ascertain an initial aspect of this complex performance from Michelangelo Picone’s analysis in his work on the Vita nova. Picone explored the manner in which the text presents itself as a revelation and reconstruction of the past of the protagonist-actor according to an ideal model of amorous and poetic development which corresponds to the process of transformation into an auctor, i.e., one who is both a writer and an auctoritas (a textual authority), someone who is not merely to be read, but who is to be respected and believed.6 In particular, Picone shows how, in the opening paragraph which I’ve just cited, the authorial figure of the Vita nova presents his act of interpreting his own past as a series of progressive operations: that of scriptor, the copyist who transcribes the lyrics written for Beatrice from his own book of memory; that of compilator, who doesn’t just copy those past lyrics from the book of memory, but also selects and organizes them according to a teleological and significant programme; and that of commentator, who, with his “ragioni” and “divisioni” comments on the chosen lyrics and reveals their “sentenzia”, which is to say, in Picone’s words, their ‘final and definitive meaning’ (“il significato ultimo e definitivo”) – a meaning which was not necessarily known or understood at the moment of their composition or at the time the events of the narrative took place, but which is ultimately revealed in Dante’s Vita nova.7

The roles of scriptor, compilator and commentator are the selfsame functions which had, until Dante’s time, been used to interpret Scripture and the auctores of the classical past, but which in the Vita nova, rather than repres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Rewriting
• 2 Rewritings in Early Modern Literature