On Literature

THE FLAWS IN THE FORM

I would like to reread a page from Luigi Pareysons Aesthetics;^* actually, it is less than a page, just a few lines from subsection 10 of the third section ("The Parts and the Whole") of chapter 3 ("Completeness of the Work of Art"). Subsection 10 is entitled "The essential nature of each part: structure, stopgaps, imperfections."

We know that one of the central preoccupations of Pareyson's Aesthetics was its polemic against Croce's idealism and against its most deleterious consequences in militant criticism. He aimed at reclaiming the character of totality in artistic form, and therefore refused to pick out in the work sporadic moments of "poetry," like flowers growing among the (however functional) brushwood of simple "structure." It is not really necessary, but it is useful to remind ourselves that "structure" in those days, and particularly in Italy, was something to avoid; it meant scaffolding, mechanical artifice that had nothing to do with moments of lyrical intuition, and at most stood out in a Hegelian sense as a negative impulse, as conceptual residue, which at best served to let the moments of poetry shine like individual jewels. In his notes to the chapter Pareyson refers to Luigi Russo as a cautious champion of the "nonextraneity of structure in art," but the latter author (though he recognizes that there is a structure that is not pre-poetic, not a mere frame or skeleton on which to insert later poetic flowers, and sees structure "as though generated by the interior of the mind that has been moved to poetry") cannot avoid conceding that the mind so moved "catches its breath and rests in these havens of doctrine." So structure is absolved, but on the grounds that it does not harm the poetry, not because it too is poetry. Structure functions as a buoy to which the poetic swimmer clings: it is good that it is there, but only to let us catch our breath before we start again on the crawl of lyric effusion. As if to say that Dante, who could not see at every step "the sweet colors of the oriental sapphire," or Beatrice's "smiling eyes," took long rests by discoursing on theology and digressing on the composition of the heavens.

This concept of structure had nothing to do with the sense we would give to the term "structuralist" today; even though in this respect Pareysons theory of the totality of form could be reread in a structuralist way, his inspiration came from organicist aesthetics of Kantian and Romantic origin, not through the post-Saussure axis.

However, by opposing so decisively the poetry/structure dichotomy with his notion of the totality of artistic form, Pareyson risked falling into an organicist rhetoric.

It was one thing to say that in the complete work (and in fact right from the first moment when the initial spark starts the creative process) "tout se tient, "and that therefore theory must affirm and interpretative activity pick out the organic design supporting it, the individual rule, the "forming form" that in some dark way precedes the work, directing it as it is created, and appearing as the result and revelation of the formed form. And quite another thing to celebrate this "unity-totality of the work" in tones that frankly, forty years on, seem to us to belong more to a rhetoric of the Beautiful than to a phenomenology of forms. Just one example:

This dynamic character of the unity-totality of the work of art can explain the relations that exist within it between the parts and the whole. In a work of art the parts have a dual kind of relationship: each part with the others, and each part with the whole. All the parts are connected among themselves in an indissoluble unity, so that each one is necessary and indispensable and has a specific and non-interchangeable place, so much so that the absence of any part would disrupt the unity and any variation would return it to disorder ... Each part is set up as such by the whole, which itself has summoned up and arranged the parts of which it is made up: if changing parts leads to the dissolution of unity and disintegration of the whole, that is because the whole itself presides over the coherence of the parts among themselves and makes them work together to form the whole. In this sense the relations that the parts have among themselves do nothing but reflect the relation that each part has with the whole: the harmony of the parts forms the whole because the whole forms their unity (page 107).

Too neat. Here—as elsewhere—Pareyson seems to be seized by a Pythagorean raptus, and one day it might be worthwhile tracing the sources of his aesthetics that he does not own up to, by going back beyond Romanticism to Renaissance Neoplatonism, or Cusanus. Not to mention some readings of the mystics, with whom he was familiar even though he did not write about them.

Is it possible that a theorist so sensitive to the moment of actual reading of works of art could think of it as an experience so overwhelmingly totalizing, of almost Panic raptus, never disrupted by moments of perplexity or dissatisfaction, either on the part of the artist (who, when rereading, revising, or relistening to the work, may wish to correct himself) or on the part of the critic (who might be tempted to correct the artist)? The good interpreter, who has penetrated the work, is also he who, even at the peak of his enthusiasm for an author, says every now and again, "I don't like this," or even "I would have put it better" (then, perhaps out of modesty, he does not actually say anything, but is straining at the leash all the same). Yet Pareyson was the first to think of interpretation as an exercise that can also accentuate, attenuate, and put into perspective the work's various aspects, and therefore—out of loyalty to the spirit of the work—also correct it.

But it is immediately after writing the passage quoted above—and I chose that passage from the many I could have chosen precisely because of its closeness to the amazing "about-turn" I am about to discuss—that Pareyson confronts the problem of so-called inert moments, or "structure."

He confronts it in order to redeem structure, to make it part of the creative project, an essential, not a marginal or extraneous, moment: if "the whole emerges from the unity of its parts to produce something complete" there can be no trifling detail or irrelevant minutiae; and if in interpreting the work some parts are less important than others, this happens because in the organized form a distribution of functions takes place.

Pareyson is not saying—for this would be to read him as though he had written thirty years later, or had come from a different background—that The Divine Comedy is more beautiful for its theological construction than for its famous poetic pearls, which instead represent something accidental, not essential; but he certainly is saying that the Homeric structure underlying Joyce's Ulysses is as important in an aesthetic sense as Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which could not produce the effect it does were it not inserted into that structure, so that the reader must find in the monologue a whole host of infratextual quotations that necessarily refer back to other hints, apparently irrelevant and pointless, which have appeared over the course of the other chapters.

Pareyson does not express himself in these terms, of course. He writes, rather, that "the really perspicacious observation of a work ... is aimed not so much at contemplating the detail in itself as at inserting it among other details ... in order to examine its irreplaceability in that living nexus where it appears as essential to the whole as it is revelatory of it, and is ready to evoke all the other parts in the very act of being invoked by them."

And it is at this point that Pareyson realizes he has to come to terms not only with structure as framework but also with the irregularities, weaknesses, patches, mends, slips, drops in tension, and even actual faults that at times spoil the much-vaunted harmony and necessity of the structure.

Stopgaps, in fact. "Stopgap" ("zeppa"in Italian) is an inelegant word, like the flaw it alludes to, and in its sound "zeppa" conjures up cough, sneeze, regurgitation, and hiccup, whereas semantically it suggests a clumsy intrusion, an obvious repair job.^*

And yet Pareyson, who is also an almost elevated writer, does not avoid this terminological stopgap when referring to an aesthetic stopgap. He uses it to describe works that appear "inconsistent and uneven, without thereby being open to the accusation of lacking poetry" (and we will allow this indulgence in the Crocean terminology to which he is so opposed; he means that certain works appear uneven and yet give an impression of great breadth and consistency of form), works in which the stopgaps function as crutches that are necessary for the whole work to proceed, they are bridges, bits of welding, "in which the artist works less carefully, less patiently or even with indifference, as though he were just getting through these bits, as though they were passages that, precisely because they are obligatory in order to move on, can be left to convention without prejudicing the whole" (p. 111).

Nevertheless, stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position. Let us deconstruct these metaphors (Pareysons aesthetics abounds in metaphors, and if we read it without bearing this in mind we risk not noticing how it questions fundamental problems of organization of systems); let us forget a personalized Whole that requires something. Pareyson is telling us that the stopgap is an artifice that allows one part to be linked to another, and thus that it is necessary. If a door has to open gently or majestically it has to have a hinge, however mechanical its function may be. The bad architect, obsessed with aesthetics, gets irritated because a door has to revolve around a hinge, and redesigns the hinge so that it appears "beautiful" while carrying out its function; and often by so doing he manages to create a door that creaks, sticks, does not open, or opens badly. The good architect, on the other hand, wants the door to open in order to reveal other rooms, and he does not care whether, having redesigned everything in the building, when it comes to the hinge he has to resort to the eternal wisdom of the ironmonger.

The stopgap accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows us, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.

I would give as an example of stopgaps what contemporary theorists have called "turn ancillaries." These are the phrases found in novels after quoted speech:

"The murderer is the viscount," pronounced the police chief.

"I love you," he said.

"Some saint will help us," replied Lucia.

Apart from a few authors who take particular care in varying their "turn ancillaries" (choosing at different times between "he retorted," "quipped," "sneered," "added thoughtfully"—and I am not saying that these are the best), the others, from the greatest to the most banal novelist, use them just as they come, as it were, and those used by a great author like Manzoni are not in the end so different from those used by a writer of feuilletons like Carolina Invernizio. The fact is that "turn ancillaries" are stopgaps; they cannot be avoided, but nor can they be embellished very much, and the great writer is one who knows that when they are there, the reader tends to skip them; but if they were not there, the dialogue would become wearisome or incomprehensible.

But a stopgap is not just this. It can be a banal opening, which can be useful for finding a sublime ending. It was one night, at three in the morning, on the Colle dell'Infinito (the hill where Leopardi wrote "L'infinito") at Recanati, where the first words of one of the finest almost-sonnets of all time have been carved, that I realized that its opening, "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle" (This solitary hill has always been dear to me), is quite a banal line, which could have been written by any minor poet of the Romantic or other ages or movements. What can a hill be, in poetic "language," except "solitary"? And yet without that banal opening, the poem would not take off, and perhaps it needed to be banal, so that the Panic feeling of that shipwreck at the end, which is so memorable, could be felt.

I would go so far as to say, perhaps just to pursue my thesis, that a line like "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" (In the middle of the journey of our life) has the singsong dignity of a stopgap. If it were not followed by the rest of The Divine Comedy, we would not have attached much importance to it, perhaps we might have thought of it as just an idiom.

I am not saying that the opening phrase is always a stopgap. There are openings to some of Chopin's polonaises that are certainly not stopgaps. " Quel ramo del lago di Como" (That stretch of Lake Como) is not a stopgap; nor is "April is the cruellest month." But let us consider the end of Romeo and Juliet and then tell me whether it would not have ended better without the last sentence (in italics):

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

However, if Shakespeare decided to conclude with this moralizing banality, it can only be because he wanted to allow the spectators to catch their breath before allowing them to leave in peace, after the bloodbath they had just witnessed. So it was right that there was a stopgap there.

"It was Leo who was the first to fall asleep" is not bad. But then Moravia adds: "Carla's unexpected, if inexperienced, assault on him had exhausted him." Come on, what can an adult who has been subjected to an adolescent's amorous assault be except "exhausted"? Does not that "unexpected, if inexperienced, assault" sound as if it had been taken from a judge's verdict? Nevertheless, without this rather clumsy but essential passage it would not be possible to begin chapter 10 of Moravia's Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), where the sad truth is made evident that "omne animal triste est post coitum."

There is no need to belabor the point: "Examples of this are so widespread as to embrace the whole history of the arts" (Estetica, [>]). Certainly. Moreover, it is by arguing how stopgaps can be compensated for by the whole that Pareyson gradually moves on to talk of mutilations, of the action of time on things, of rubble, ruins, fragments, and the wastage that the work is subject to, and how despite all of this we can reconstitute its intimate legitimacy. A section that would not be clear unless we also saw the central value of the stopgap, and the appreciation for something that is not complete, because only if a work can be appreciated in spite of, and even because of, its imperfections can it be enjoyed in spite of (and perhaps because of) its weakness.

Thus, counterbalancing that kind of Platonic optimism that led Pareyson to celebrate form in its adamantine perfection, his remarks on stopgaps (inspired by concrete experiences of reading) lead his phenomenology of art back to more human dimensions.

If, however, we reexamine the problem of the stopgap in the light of Kant's doctrine of the reflecting judgment, it may become less marginal than it seems at first sight—both in the sense that the stopgap cannot be a marginal element in the work of art, and in the sense that the question of the stopgap is not so marginal in Pareysons aesthetics. For Pareyson, the reference to Kant is obligatory: his theory of form as autonomous organism stems from his reflections on the third Critique and on the aesthetics of German idealism.

Let us review Kant's position: the recognition of organicity emerges in the reflecting judgment; the organicity of nature is postulated as an order that has to exist in things but which things by themselves do not exhibit; it has to be constructed, projected, as if. It is only because we cannot fail to see nature as an organism that we are then able to turn to art in the same spirit.

But a judgment of organicity will be, like all reflecting and teleological judgments, a hypothesis: nature is sampled through its primary patterns and is more and more subtly subjected to interpretative activity. This must be due to countless other influences, but the weight that interpretation assumes in Pareysons philosophy is also due to Kantian aesthetics.

Interpretative activity involves (and this is a central point for Pareyson) a kind of "perspective." Now, in pronouncing verdicts on organicity in things of nature, one finds elements that seem to contradict the postulate of the perfection of form: namely, stopgaps. They remain as a record of evolution, elements that at first seem not to work together with the whole but to exist in a natural body like records of a failed attempt. In studying the work's form, and subsequently in categorizing it and inserting it into the architecture of genus and species, sometimes these elements are dropped, or kept in the shade while the beam of interpretative attention shifts to illuminate other elements it considers central.

One might wonder to what extent this criterion intervenes or not in the assignment of internal legitimacy to a work of art. The latter is given shape by the interpretative act, which sees it as a completed organism, and is stripped of apparently nonessential aspects, which are sacrificed in favor of others, and only in a further or parallel interpretation do these aspects come to assume a more prominent position. This is exemplified by the history of Dante criticism: theological elements that were seen by Romantic criticism as stopgaps (if they were defined as such) become fundamental in the light of a criticism that has injected greater familiarity with the medieval cultural world (dealing with a Dante that is reread not only after, say, Gilson, but also after Eliot), become the essential grain of the poetic architecture, just as much as the vaults and windows do in a Gothic cathedral. The perspective of Dante's cantica is thereby reversed: one discovers that Dante is sometimes more of a poet when he is talking of the planetary spheres and the flashes of light than when he is moved by the love affair of Paolo and Francesca.

The stopgap then becomes relative, surviving like a remnant of a stage of interpretation, and as such remains in reserve, ready to assume a different light in a new "reading," for which it will no longer be accidental.

We looked at the example of turn ancillaries: we accept them as stopgaps, and as stopgaps we "skim" them. That someone said, sneered, insinuated, or replied does not seem to us to be essential to the dialogue's progress or the narrative universe that it illuminates. They are almost casual support posts. Then, suddenly, for another reader these "points" (in the railway sense of the term) become fundamental, for good as well as for ill: if for some authors they are pure elements of a "gastronomic" strategy (at times the fact that someone "sighs" rather than "says" can produce effects that are actually pornographic), for others these interjectory mechanisms become instead an element of rhythm, an indicator of harshness or restraint, or of extraordinary inventiveness. The stopgap is then redeemed, and becomes a structural element; from essential but inelegant it becomes inessential but graceful, or even supremely necessary. The work as organism has been examined from a different point of view.

If this were the case, it would mean that in Pareysons aesthetics a stopgap acts as more than a prudent corrective to the Platonic or Neoplatonic triumph of Form in all its metaphysical purity, and as a recognition of the material life of "forms," which are also accepted as impure and imperfect; it is also something that interpretation sets aside, keeping it as a latent opportunity or stimulus for later interpretations, a potential signal capable of calling the interpreter back to renewing with each reading his faithful commitment to the works promises. Thus interpretation is reconfirmed as both free and faithful at the same time, capable of many indulgences as long as in the end it comes to rest in the recognition of a form, but is also capable of many changes of direction in order not to let the form rest in the condition that our reading has led it to provisionally.

And should it turn out that a stopgap can never, despite many rereadings, be redeemed at any cost (because it is genuinely evidence of a distraction or weakness), its very presence would be there to testify how and to what extent the interrogation of the work can be collaborative and charitable, can identify a pattern drawn even where it was only a sketch, a wish, an intention, left as a bequest to the infinite work of interpretation.