Picaresque Fiction Today : The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature [1 ed.] 9789004311237, 9789004311220

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Picaresque Fiction Today

Postmodern Studies Series Editors Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens

Volume 54

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/pmst

Picaresque Fiction Today The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature

By

Luigi Gussago

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016022063

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0923-0483 isbn 978-90-04-31122-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31123-7 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

In loving memory of Auntie Rosy

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Mundus vult decipi, decipiatur ergo. (Petronius)

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Contents Acknowledgements IX Introduction: A Journey around the Picaresque Novel 1 1 History through Roguish Eyes 13 Foreword 13 History and Picaresque Fiction 17 Meaning and Significance in Historical Fiction 21 The Pícaro and History 25 Dual Sign Irony 28 ‘Historical’ Irony 30 Deictic Markers of Time and Space 36 Polemical Use of the Allocutive Pronoun ‘you’ 39 Metonymy 43 Markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ 46 Otto, Baudolino, Niketas: Three Portraits of the Emperor 55 The Death of Two Obsessions 61 2 Alienation and Counter-culture 66 Foreword 66 The Picaresque Counter-culture 70 What Happens at the Boundary? 71 The Stranger, der Fremde, l’estraneo 74 Mirror Symmetry and Alienation 83 Mythological and Metadescriptive Consciousness 87 Homonyms/Synonyms 92 Circumlocution 94 Euphemism 98 Synecdoche 101 Acting vs Improvising 104 Rhetorical Questions 107 Odilo’s Private Holocaust 115 3 Women on the Edge: Sexuality and Gender Dissent 120 Foreword 120 Platonic Love and the Pícara 124 Cupid, Psyche and Curiosity 134 The Constraints of Nature 140

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Procreation 142 Parenthood 150 The Constraints of Society 156 Demystified Women 164 Religion 165 Sentimental Love 167 Primeval Innocence 170 Literature, Ambition and Transcendence in Vendita Galline km 2 175 King Lear’s Pasteboard Crown 179 4 Humour and the Muffled Voice of Reason 188 Foreword 188 Varieties of Humour in the Picaresque 195 Irony 196 Irony in the Picaresque: Benni and Doyle 203 Contradiction 206 Self-irony 213 Summary 221 Satire 223 Self-satire 228 Parody 231 The Enlightened Grin 238 The Enlightenment Watershed 244 Individualism, Common Good and General Will 248 Experience and Causation 255 The Question of Happiness 262 God’s Laughter in Saltatempo 265 Concluding Remarks 272 Bibliography 283 Index 298

Acknowledgements I am especially thankful to Dr Nicole Prunster, Professor Sue Martin and Dr Brigid Maher for their constant encouragement and invaluable suggestions during my PhD studies at La Trobe university. Thanks to Nicole for being always ready to answer enthusiastically my quite recognisable knocks on her office door, to Sue for attending some of my paper presentations and for giving precious feedback, and to Brigid, for offering her expertise as translator and her friendly support throughout these years. I would also like to thank two tireless advisors and dearest friends, Dr Isabel Moutinho and Professor John Gatt-Rutter for their illuminating advice and endless patience: I am pleased and honoured to have known them. To Dr Piero Genovesi, Dr Tony Pagliaro, Dr Linda Pennings and Professor Iain Topliss goes my appreciation for their help in retrieving some important sources for my dissertation. I am most thankful to the School of European and Historical Studies at La Trobe University for investing their time, energy and a providential scholarship on my candidature. My gratitude also goes to the staff at Student Learning Centre for their assistance during a series of really helpful projects of orientation to research. I am also indebted to my dear friends Gillian Falzon Darcy, Enrique Del Rey Cabero, Getrude Cosmas Grace, Neil Macedo, Elena Frazzetto, A ­ braham Hernández Cubo, Nam Nguyen and Meredith Wrigley for sharing their ­experiences, expectations and occasional frustrations, along with the pleasure of many strong, invigorating afternoon coffees. Special thanks also go to Sam Maitland for his time and energy, and for tolerating my not always impeccable English! I also want to acknowledge Brill | Rodopi Publishers for handling this publication in the most professional manner, without neglecting the friendly, amiable side of the process, a collaboration that was made possible through the expertise and valuable advice of my editors, Ms Masja Horn and Mr Peter Buschman. Finally, my most affectionate thoughts go to my parents and my brother for bearing with my dreams of setting out on a new journey to the other end of the world. Your love, that knows no frontiers, has kept me going for over four years. Luigi Gussago

Introduction: A Journey Around the Picaresque Novel “The world wants to be deceived; therefore, let it be deceived.” This sentence, more than any other, can describe my first impressions in dealing with the literary trickster: the more I became acquainted with the picaresque anti-hero, the more I enjoyed my role of indulgent victim of a rogue’s derisive ruses. Readers of rogue tales like me come to realise that they are dealing with a fraud who nevertheless aspires to win their approval or, at least, their sympathy, in an endless tug of war of contrasting feelings and excuses for moral compromise. With time, I have learnt to approach and decipher the intricate personifications of the petty criminal as both a poetic vehicle and an ideological mouthpiece of discontent and blatant, though ambiguous rebellion. In my quest for the legacy of rogue narrative, then, I have come across eight examples of contemporary picaresque novels in Italian and in English and paired them in each of the ensuing four chapters. However, every investigation of present forms of the picaresque has kept unwinding towards a common thread in earlier, traditional manifestations of the genre. The picaresque novel definitely marked the earliest stages of Western long prose narrative, with Miguel de Cervantes as its most sublime interpreter and desecrator. In the fascinating figure of Don Quixote, Cervantes crossed the limits of picaresque tradition and portrayed a new image of humanity in the hidalgo’s courage in opposing a visionary world of outdated chivalric values to the cynical disillusions of a colourless reality. I often had the impression that in the picaresque these two instances, vision and brutal reality, converge and at times mesh into a continuum, which propels the whole story and gives it universal thrust. This ideal bond between the rogue tale and Cervantes led to the rediscovery of the great Spanish author by eighteenth-century novelists in France and Britain who also admired picaresque fiction and creatively tested its conventions. Despite some affinities with ancient Greek and Latin literature, from Aristophanes’ comedies, to the prose of Petronius and Apuleius,1 or with medieval genres like carnivalesque poetry, mystery plays or comic-realistic fiction, the picaresque novel, with its set of tacit compositional rules and motifs, officially flourished in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature. Its national character is still a debatable issue. To some Iberian scholars like 1 Aristophanes’ Comedies, Petronius’ Satyricon or Apuleius’ The Golden Ass are common examples of a satirical, mock-heroic tradition. For Apuleius, see Chapter 3.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_002

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Introduction

Gustavo Correa the picaresque – la picaresca in Spanish, the feminine ­ agreement referring to the text-type of the novela, either a novel or lengthy ­narrative – should be considered as an exclusively sixteenth-century Spanish ­domain, while other works from different ages or countries simply re-elaborate the Spanish archetype.2 Outside Spain, scholars like Alexander Blackburn and Robert Alter tend to be more ecumenical and include later developments and literary areas. Anyway, there is no doubt about the ground-breaking impact of the Spanish picaresque in comic literature. As a matter of fact, earlier prose like that of Boccaccio, Bandello or Sacchetti tends to align with the picaresque; yet, a relevant difference between those narratives and the picaresque tale is not only the relative shortness of the former and the fact that even novellas are not extended rogue autobiographies, but, more importantly, the picaresque storyteller, unlike Boccaccio’s narrators, professes a one-sided moral direction, although this stance is hardly defensible. In Boccaccio the variety of ethical directions is presented by the protagonists as equally acceptable, persuasive viewpoints, whereas what the picaresque narrators say often clashes with what they show: it is more a case of internal disagreement than a polyphony of discordant voices.3 The Spanish picaresque sensibility is the product of a tangled historical context, replete with social conflicts and religious tensions, in which outward conduct suppresses private convictions, and many instances of censorship involving several writers of rogues’ tales testify to how often this narrative delved into the most unpleasant aspects of reality. The first classic rogue novel, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, for instance, was banned in 1559, after a first edition dated 1553 (unavailable) and another three in 1554. A purged version appeared only in 1573. Quevedo’s El Buscón, published in 1626, went quite unnoticed until 1629–30, when a master of arms of King Philip iv, Luis Pacheco de Narváez, presented a memorial to the Inquisition against four of Quevedo’s works, including El Buscón. Quevedo never admitted to being the author and, finally, the tribunal did not file suit against him;4 yet, authorities had soon realised the subversive nature of this new, only apparently mild, form of satire. 2 Gustavo Correa, “El héroe de la picaresca y su influencia en la novela moderna española e hispanoamericana,” Thesaurus, Tomo xxxii, Núm. 1 (1977) and Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., 1969) 129–41. 3 As Wayne Booth emphasises with reference to Boccaccio, “various forms of telling” are ordered “in the service of various forms of showing.” See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Second Edition (Chicago & London: Chicago up, 1984) 16. 4 An interesting reference to the episode is made by Victoriano Roncero-López in “La Censura en Quevedo: El Caso del Buscón,” HiperFeira, Issue 1, Fall 2001 (http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/ Publish/hiper/index.html).

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The tale of roguery usually centres on characters taking advantage of social iniquities and fighting their way into an alien world, attempting a ‘rebellion from within’ as the only possible expression of discontent at a particularly repressive time in history, such as the final years of the glorious Siglo de Oro. According to Alexander Blackburn, picaresque narratives regain popularity whenever events reach a nadir of desolation or degeneration: “A picaresque novel is a seriocomic form that tends to appear at times when the literary imagination is unusually threatened by catastrophe: that is, at times when the very idea of existence commingles with the world of illusion.”5 Trickster, along with rogue and pícaro – whose obscure etymology will be illustrated shortly – are closely related terms to identify the main character of my inquiry, namely the petty criminal, the vagabond taking up the role of servant of many masters and, by consequence, of none, the swindler, the unsuccessful social climber, and so forth. The trickster as a fictional type is a mixture of paradigmatic features that constitute a common literary ancestry and atypical, peculiar features relating to the diversified cultural milieu the rogue inhabits from time to time. The pícaro and his female counterpart (the pícara), will be outlined as distinct personalities, but also as members of a community of rogues sharing a similar argot, a distinctive attitude to reality and its aberrations, observed from the outside but often also dissected from the inside. The temporal framing adopted is not restricted to the present, or to the development of the picaresque type through time, but it also considers that even those rogue narrators telling us about remote past events – such as those of Carey’s and Eco’s novels – clearly allude to problems and incongruities of present-day society. It is not easy, and perhaps not even opportune, to list the mandatory stylistic or plot-related requirements of a picaresque novel because it would contradict the natural tendency of all text-types to transform, contract, expand their normal literary-artistic potential. However, a few criteria for selection should be allowed for in order to delimit the field of analysis: for instance, priority in the identification of the picaresque was given to first-person narratives6 where the clash between the personality of the expert narrator and the rogue-to-be character appears more strikingly exposed. The picaresque novels in this selection of texts are all mock autobiographies in which the narrator has no claim to reliability or coherence, although the reader may perceive, in most cases, 5 Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Pícaro. Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel, 1554–1954 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 14. 6 In this, Umberto Eco’s Baudolino looks like an exception, as the novel is based on an introductory third-person teller, but the protagonist very often takes the lead in the story, relating his adventures during a sort of private interview with the historian Niketas (see Chapter 1).

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Introduction

the rogues’ none-too-subtle intent to rid themselves of an uncomfortable past or to exorcise it by means of humour and understatement. Most novels in this study present the rogue’s life from birth to mature age in chronological order, with the exception of Vendita galline km 2 (1993) by Aldo Busi (Chapter 3), where events are recollected at random, and Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991; Chapter 2), in which the whole autobiography of the protagonist is told in reverse. Two further ‘requirements’ of the picaresque that have dictated my choice of primary sources are their fascination with incessant, aimless travel and their problematic relationships with a master, meant not only as a figure of authority or a symbol of imposition, but also, in some cases, as a father or mother figure, a set of political ideals – as in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) – an historical leader, etc. Finally, an element that seems to characterise all the selected narratives is the substantially open conclusion, suggesting issues about the repetitiveness of a rogue’s life, the expediency of a happy ending, the lack of any genuine inner growth on the part of the scoundrel and the hardly formative nature of experience. The term pícaro itself stems from a rather intricate etymology.7 The words pícaro/picaño presumably derive from the Spanish verb picar – to prod with a pica, a large spear. Alberto Del Monte holds that pícaro may derive from pikharti, the term indicating the followers of Pedro de Valdo’s heretical cult established in Picardy in the twelfth century (13); he also charts a semantic affinity with the Flemish term bigardo from beggen, ‘to beg’. The Diccionario de uso del español, edited by María Moliner, proposes, with the benefit of doubt, a common etymology between pico (a bird’s beak) and picar (to prod), pico possibly deriving from the Celtic word beccus, while picar may have an onomatopoeic origin (731). Corominas points out a common stem with the Latin term pīcus, woodpecker (pájaro; 518). Moreover, Moliner observes that the term picador, related to bull-fighting, probably derives from the profession of picador de toros to designate a mob of unemployed, irregular members of society (730). Francisco de Quevedo, for instance, uses pícaro as a synonym of picador (Diccionario Critico 522). Another expression that recalls the rogue’s thirst for social recognition is picar alto (733), to aspire to a higher rank in society, especially through a convenient marriage – another motif in classic 7 For an interesting description of the origin and use of pícaro, see also Alberto del Monte, Itinerario de la novela picaresca española, revised Spanish edition, translated from Italian by Enrique Sordo (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1971) 11–13. The ensuing definitions have been taken from the Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico by Joan Corominas in collaboration with José A. Pasqual (Madrid: Gredos, 1980–1991) 518–23, and from María Moliner (ed.), Diccionario de uso del español (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, S.A., 1967).

Introduction

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picaresque fiction. Originally, the term pícaro did not have a derogatory meaning: for example, pícaro de cocina/cozina is used in the novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604) with the neutral meaning of ‘helper in the kitchen’ and, in a wider sense, a person of very humble origin. Later, though, the alleged influence of another word, picardía, adds a negative meaning to the original word. Picardía derives from Picardie, a region in Northern France, where tradition had it that unemployed soldiers used to roam around like vagabonds looking for people to deceive or rob – the first example of the use of this term, meaning “brotherhood of rogues”, can be found in Lazarillo de Tormes. The regiment of Picardy must have become a settled tradition because Tobias Smollett mentions it, in a benevolent tone, in a passage from Roderick Random (1748): I had never before seen such a parcel of scarecrows together, neither could I reconcile their meagre gaunt looks, their squalid and ragged attire, and every other external symptom of extreme woe, with this appearance of festivity. […] This jollity had a wonderful effect upon my spirits! I was infected with their gaiety, and, in spite of my dismal situation, forgot my cares, and joined in their extravagance. […] Having, therefore, maturely weighed the circumstances pro and con, I signified my consent, and was admitted into the regiment of Picardy, said to be the oldest corps in Europe.8 Despite their “squalid and ragged” appearance, the cheerful soldiers engage the readers’ sympathy – a typical characteristic of the literary rogue; when this special empathy between the reader and the rogue falls short, then the picaresque narrator irreparably trades off his identity, becoming a ‘rebel with a cause.’ Noticeably, a literary shift in the meaning of the word pícaro as ‘rogue’ in the Castilian language has prevailed over its common use in everyday language, though this appears to have been a rather gradual process: in Guzmán, for instance, both meanings still coexist. Moreover, Francesco Alziator outlines a kinship with the typical Spanish figure of the servant strolling around the main city squares in late sixteenth-century Spain: the esportillero, from esporta/esportilla, a bag used to carry victuals.9 The esportillero was an occasional servant hired to carry groceries or other goods from the marketplace to 8 Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (London: Everyman’s Library, 1975) 243. Original italics. 9 Francesco Alziator, Picaro e folklore ed altri saggi di storia delle tradizioni popolari (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1959) 11.

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the customer’s house. Alziator describes him as a “pícaro with a vehicle ­registration” (“picaro con il libretto di circolazione” [12]), who enjoys a specific role in society, as well as the benefit of being part of a guild. Once again, the rogue inhabits a twilight zone between social convenience and intolerance of power. The historical period at the centre of this study ranges from the early nineties to the first decade of the year 2000, a significant period in literary history when the long-standing postmodernist movement seems to have loosened its experimental grip and consolidated a poetics of liberation from the ideologies of modernism, while facing, from the opposing faction of the pro-modernists, harsh criticism for lack of commitment and ethical relativism. Most of the authors of rogues’ stories in this study are hastily ascribed to postmodernist currents – with the exception of Cesare De Marchi, who has often been categorised as a traditionalist – although their views on literature differ from the actual product of their creative talent: for instance, Angela Carter is postmodern in her deconstruction of literary styles and traditions, but she was also an advocate of the avant-garde and the surrealists as well as being a cautious supporter of feminism, positions that do not always tally with postmodernism. Umberto Eco’s style reflects a postmodern slant, but also carries on elements of experimental/engaged vitality inherited from the neo-avant-gardist Gruppo 63. Similarly, Martin Amis, another representative of the postmodern, has taken a strong moral position in defence of his none-too-orthodox political views, thus transgressing the presumably apolitical postmodernist creed. The same can be said of Stefano Benni’s polemical stance with regard to Italian leftwing politics in works like Saltatempo (2001).10 What is more, the intersection between eighteenth-century picaresque and the Enlightenment’s great ideas as ‘grand narratives’ on the one hand, and the acquisition of modern thought on the part of the authors of tales of roguery on the other, has oriented subsequent forms of picaresque towards a veiled criticism of the postmodern idea of a rejection of ideology and universalism. Each chapter deals with a pair of novels showing a certain correspondence not so much in plot, setting, or character presentation as in the range of themes 10

Mapping out the direction of Italian prose from the sixties to the late eighties, Stefano Tani includes both Aldo Busi and Stefano Benni, whose writing careers started at the beginning of the 1980s, in a group of writers led by Pier Vittorio Tondelli. He defines these authors as “accumulators” [“accumulatori”] for their exuberant, hyperbolic style; they also have the tendency to depict picaresque, non-conventional, dreamy characters – elements usually ascribed to the postmodern. See Stefano Tani, Il romanzo di ritorno. Dal romanzo medio degli anni sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta (Milano: Gruppo Ugo Mursia, 1990) 198–99.

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or motives that emerge, in different ways, in each pair. I avoided the limitations imposed by a face-to-face textual analysis by including a host of complementary examples of literary tricksters and their possible thematic relationship with the contemporary rogues in the primary sources. Themes are often related to an extra-literary sphere; therefore, I could not remain within the narrow limits of two texts which, of course, need to be contextualised into a wider field of debate: it is the domain which Armando Gnisci, citing the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, describes as “common places” [“lieux communs”], literal spaces where an idea about the world meets and confirms another idea by virtue of its own presence, “des lieux où une pensée du monde confirme une pensée du monde.”11 Hence, I attempted to recreate a sort of ‘common place’ for ideas about pícaros and their world; furthermore, the discussion of literary topics will also take into account some hermeneutical and aesthetic features, the way themes have been represented artistically, specifying the various uses of rhetoric, tropes, irony and other creative solutions that often characterise not only a single text, but a large number of picaresque novels. Why adopt a comparative approach to the picaresque novel, and to what purpose? Some reflections on the epistemology of comparative studies will help clarify my choice. The Belgian scholar Raymond Trousson distinguishes between two ways of looking at comparative themes: the “hero’s themes”, which depend on an immutable stereotypical character, e.g. the allegorical deity, and the “situation’s themes”, where the protagonist faces perpetual changes under the pressure of situations and circumstances.12 Unlike Prometheus or Orpheus, heroes that remain true to themselves in all situations, bearing the “hero’s themes”, rogues are defined by the situation, the setting they live in or, at times, that from which they are expelled. Thus, the mythical dimension of the trickster as a combination of sempiternal qualities needs to be replaced by a protean figure – a metaphor of Claudio Guillén13 – adapting to the contingence of a situation. In Chapter 3, for instance, some relevance will be given to the similarities between the rogue and Psyche, the mortal creature that seduces and upsets the mythological order of things and discloses the basically human 11 12

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Armando Gnisci, Creoli meticci migranti clandestini e ribelli (Roma: Meltemi, 1998) 82. Gnisci quotes the original French version. Raymond Trousson, Un problème de littérature comparée: Les études de themes; essay de méthodologie (Paris: Minard, 1965) 35, quoted in Anna Trocchi, “Temi e miti letterari, in AA.VV., Introduzione alla letteratura comparata, ed. Armando Gnisci (Milano: Edizioni Bruno Mondadori, 1999)” 57–8. Claudio Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” Literature as System: Essays toward a Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton up, 1971) 71–106. Once again, this is a metaphor borrowed from mythology, but, in this case, Proteus is a quasi-mythological, as well as a disruptive figure.

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excesses of the gods. In sum, the pícaro appears to side with Trousson’s second category, but the use of the rather imprecise term ‘situation’ needs to be better clarified. Trousson differentiates myth as the product of remote religious lore from the literary theme, which is the culture-specific revisitation of a myth.14 This distinction, though widely neglected by scholars, is far from irrelevant in the sense that, as Lotman and Minc specify with regard to the passage from the mythological to the narrative character, a mythological figure tends to become a “crowd” of figures when it crosses the border into narrative and its cultural context.15 To them, the mythological hero passed on to a myriad of narrative specimens across ages and locations, but still perpetuates some common elements: this is the case with the disparate examples of literary rogues presented in this study. Conversely, then, is the mythological character really the originator of narrative? Italo Calvino seems to maintain the opposite: to him, the roots of story-telling are not in myth but in fable, as he observes with reference to the significance of fairy tales, of “the remotest fables”, the “irreplaceable outline of all human stories […] where a moral personality fulfils itself traversing a ruthless nature or society.”16 Although he is referring to a general feature of the fairy tale hero, this itinerant aspect suggests an immediate resemblance to the trickster’s migrations abounding in the picaresque novel. In short, a narrative, despite its popular origin, is not a vulgarisation of a myth, but a predecessor of it. The myth is then a result of the narrative persistence of a fable. Both principles of a plurality of stories which crystallise into or from myth seem to account for the primacy of the literary text over the ideological/historical elaborations of mythology. Following this premise, the present book will consider the trickster as a “literary representation of types”, to use a definition by Siegbert Prawer, an early theorist of comparative literary studies based on “themes and prefigurations”.17 The pícaro is thus a kind of “stock-figure” 14 Trousson, Un problème 35, in Anna Trocchi, “Temi e miti letterari” 58. 15 Jurij Lotman, Zora Minc, “Letteratura e mitologia”, La semiosfera 215 (201–24). 16 Italo Calvino, “Il midollo del leone”, in Una pietra sopra (Torino: Einaudi, 1980) 15. My translation from the Italian original: “[le] favole più remote […] lo schema insostituibile di tutte le storie umane […] in cui una personalità morale si realizza muovendosi in una natura o in una società spietate.” 17 Siegbert Prawer, Comparative Literary Studies: An Introduction (London: Duckworth, 1973) 100 and 99 respectively. Prawer explains the meaning of ‘prefiguration’ as illustrated by John White in Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 1971) 12–13: “Although now frequent in literary criticism, the word ‘prefiguration’ is of religious origin, a translation of the Latin technical term figura used to describe the scheme by which ‘the person and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of Salvation’

Introduction

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appearing time and again in many personifications within a variety of literatures. Vittorio Strada asserts that it is not enough to delimit the picaresque to Spanish, or even European literature, but a complete study of the rogues should encompass the “cultural” trickster of the Winnebago tradition in Nebraska and Iowa18 or, it could be added, the type of the Brazilian malandro, or the men figures who steal the storytelling power from the higher gods in Bantu folklore, etc. Would this generalisation of the picaresque protagonist infringe upon the limitations of a purely literary corpus of texts? First of all, the definition of what should or should not be literary appears to be more and more arbitrary, especially in recent times, when the canon has been, not unjustly, contested and unhinged. Secondly, even classic Spanish picaresque had no easy access to canonical literature. Another justification for a joint literary/anthropological study of the picaresque is provided by Alziator, who argues that the literary trickster is necessarily linked with folklore: “the pícaro is an elementary strength, the centre of gravity of a little world with profoundly different connotations from the larger world surrounding him.” (7).19 The anthropological element, to be highlighted in the discussion on sexual identity as a social superstructure and in that dealing with the contradictory essence of the comic, should not be underestimated in the definition of the literary rogue. John Frow warns that an intuitive “folk classification”, deriving from a general, unofficial opinion, affects the way readers label genres too:20 the folkloric element is thus not only a potential source of the picaresque, but it also forges the direction of what should be generally acknowledged as picaresque – in this, for example, the carnival spirit emerging at many points in this study proves the ingrained popular, ancestral facets of a

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[Erich Auerbach]. One of the classic examples of prefiguration in this sense is the prophetic relationship between Abraham’s preparation to sacrifice his son Isaac and the Crucifixion” (Comparative Literary Studies 107). White also admits that, in a non-religious sense, prefiguration extends the enquiry of themes not only to myths but also to legends and folktales (108). Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione”, in György Lukács, Michail Bachtin et al., Problemi di teoria del romanzo: Metodologia letteraria e dialettica storica (Torino: Einaudi, 1981) xxvi–xxvii. My translation; original quote: “Il picaro è una forza elementare, un centro intorno al quale gravita un piccolo mondo con connotati profondamente diversi dal più vasto mondo che gli è intorno.” John Frow, Genre (London/New York: Routledge, 2006) 13: “Readers and viewers and listeners have constant resort to a kind of folk classification, an unsystematically systematic taxonomy which feels intuitive and yet covers most of the difficult and ambiguous cases they are likely to encounter, and translates an experience of texts into the terms of a naturalised moral order (‘I don’t like Hollywood action movies because they’re so violent’).”

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Introduction

tale of roguery. In short, the definition of the picaresque as an abstract literary genre or mode is insufficient to delineate the affinities that connect the past and the present figure of the trickster; it seems more effective to contemplate a study of the picaresque as a distinguishable type, carrying on a diversified, pre-doctrinal, pre-mythological literary culture21 based on the principle of the fable character. In general terms, it could be possible to treat the roguish hero as a recurrent figure, a Pícaro with a capital ‘p’, that resurfaces over and over in the novelistic scenario – in exactly the same way as figures like Dr Faustus, Lancelot, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Don Juan, etc. reappear in different literary or artistic texts. Drawing a parallel between language and games, in Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that different games, as much as different uses of language, are connected by “similarities, relationships”, but these elements are not necessarily “common to all”.22 He develops the family analogy as follows: Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. […] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (31–32) David Fishelov argues that literary criticism has settled for a direct parallel connecting family resemblance and literary genres, thus skimming over the philosophical premises Wittgenstein had formulated in his analogy and insisting on the openness of genres, their “continuum of loose networks of similarities”.23 21 Daniel-Henri Pageaux, La littérature générale et comparée (Paris: Colin, 1994) 108. 22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989) 31. Alastair Fowler applies this definition almost literally to genre, as he affirms that “Representations of a genre may then be regarded as making up a family whose septs and individual members are related in various ways, without necessarily having any single feature shared in common by all.” See: Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982) 41. 23 David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory (University Park, pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) 56.

Introduction

11

The reasons behind the game-family analogy are in fact more elusive: discussing language games as elementary, though paradigmatic, language structures, Wittgenstein contends that meaning is not an aprioristic certainty, the same way a game is not an unchangeable set of rules – not only because games, like language uses, tend to vary and evolve, but also because, as he mentions elsewhere, “Moving a piece could be conceived in these two ways: as a paradigm for future moves, or as a move in an actual game.”24 This idea that the game is at the same time an individual act and a paradigm of future games suggests an appropriate similarity with the work of art, or literature, functioning in two directions, as a single, autonomous work and as a paradigm of subsequent works. Fishelov also stresses this point (62–63), but the family resemblance he applies to genre should embrace, with presumably better results, the literary type. The present study will point out on many occasions how each individual fictional rogue is the representative of a common prototype, inspired by the Spanish Renaissance novel or, indirectly, by Cervantes, elected as the “founding fathers” or “parental figures” (66) but, simultaneously, each single picaresque type pushes the boundaries of artistic representation a step forward – for instance, Amis’ unrepentant Nazi doctor, or Busi’s deceased lesbian heroine. This approach seems to motivate the intent of comparing such a composite cast of characters; accordingly, every chapter in this study presents a few examples of prototypical aspects of the trickster, along with their possible variations. As a corollary to the games analogy, it must be clarified that Wittgenstein also objects to a clear definition of what a game and, by consequence, language, is: in order to understand what a game really means, players have at least an idea of how games work, otherwise they will not be able to make sense of the whole situation (Philosophical Investigations 15). In this case, the intersection between the acquisition of an abstract meaning through language and the lived experience beyond words becomes a highly existential question, which somehow impinges on the idea of my enquiry, namely of the rogue as the core of both abstract meanings and lived, first-hand experience. This is another essential aspect characterising the sense of ‘immediacy’ conveyed by a picaresque narrative, as compared with other more reflexive forms of story-telling. One of the family traits of the trickster is a commonality of formal linguistic resources. John Frow lists rhetorical functions and pragmatic effects among the “structural dimensions of a genre” (9, 75). It is my contention that, for the purpose of a definition of the novel of roguery, the pragmatic element is more effective when applied to the pícaro as a character/narrator rather than to an 24

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Ascombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967) No. 294, 54e.

12

Introduction

abstract genre. For example, there is no picaresque when, although the typical formal elements of the story are present, the protagonist is deprived of the rhetorical strategies that characterise the rogue, some of which will be described in subsequent chapters. This is the case, for instance, with novels by Thackeray or Dickens, where the objectification of the narrator’s voice contradicts one of the main tenets of the picaresque rhetoric, an unreliable first-person account. The prevailing pseudo-autobiographical, first-person perspective already reflects a genuine, yet ambiguously unmediated approach to the past as re-lived experience, but with a rather moral or emotional separation between the unaware protagonist and the shrewd story-teller. This conflict between experience and first-hand initiation becomes paramount later in the history of the picaresque, when eighteenth-century scepticism championed by David Hume or Voltaire starts permeating, and continues to permeate, the modern and contemporary rogue’s grasp on what Bildung is about. In simple terms, people inhabiting the same household necessarily share a similar jargon. It is a consolidated tradition among gangs of rogues to hold on to a common argot that guarantees continuity, discretion and, possibly, impunity. Henry Fielding draws a parallel between the rascals’ (the “great men’s”) use of empty euphemisms and normal society’s loss of touch with the real meaning of words like honour, learning, worth, wisdom.25 Not unlike many picaresque examples, the use of euphemism as a typical roguish turn of phrase helps unmask the hypocrisy of ‘normal’ society, where words are not disguised, but completely misunderstood and misused. Last but not least, the picaresque is essentially laughter: it is a satirical and self-derisive impetus, a caricature of human frailties, sympathetic humour and much more. With a bit of luck, the more-or-less attractive theories discussed in this study will not completely divert our attention from appreciating these moments of amusement.

25

Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, ed. David Nokes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1982) “Introduction” 19. Fielding re-defines some words according to the latest fashion of language equivocation in his “Modern Glossary” (Covent Garden Journal for 14 January 1752). “Honour” means “duelling”, “worth” equals “power, rank, wealth”; “wisdom” is “the art of acquiring all three” (19). For “great”: “Applied to a thing, signifies bigness; when to a man, often littleness, or meanness” (265, note 4). A “patriot” is “a candidate for a place at court” while “politics” is “the art of getting such a place” (271, note 47).

chapter 1

History through Roguish Eyes Non avevo ancora capito che, ad immaginare altri mondi, si finisce per cambiare anche questo. Eco, Baudolino1

…

Thus it was history itself that became our subject, our enemy, our ambition. Together we hammered at its pages, windows, doors. carey, Parrot and Olivier in America2

∵ Foreword The picaresque novel is an account of the life and adventures of ordinary, humble characters, exploring the crudest, most disenchanting aspects of their lives with the covert purpose of delivering themselves from anonymity or infamy. Through their mock-autobiographies, social outcasts and rejects aspire to a place among the great heroes of history. Interestingly, as it happens with the pedigree of many real historical celebrities, picaresque novels of all times are crowded with aliases, sobriquets and noms de plume which can sometimes conceal the pícaros’ humble parentage, or refer back to episodes in their lives. Lazarillo de Tormes, for instance, was born ‘in’ the river Tormes; the rogue of Alemán adopts the title of Guzmán de Alfarache, reminiscent of both a noble family (the Guzmáns) and the place where he was conceived (Alfarache); El Buscón (‘petty thief’), finds inspiration in the verb ‘buscar’, ‘to search’. Even Saint Baudolino has a strange connection with his namesake: the 1 2

1 Umberto Eco, Baudolino (Milano: Bompiani, 2000) 104; Baudolino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002) 99: “I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.” 2 Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2009) 83 (original italics). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_003

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protagonist claims that the Saint appeared to him in a forest near Terdona, but he then explains that “the problem of my life is that I have always confused what I saw with what I wanted to see” (29–30) (“il problema della mia vita è che io ho sempre confuso quello che vedevo e quello che desideravo vedere” [35]). In Carey’s novel, Olivier himself attaches to John Larrit, aka Parrot, a plethora of titles connected to his ungraceful conduct or his physical flaws: “Perroquet” (parrot in French), “Captain Larrit”, “Great Bird of the Antipodes”, “Mr Stasis”, “Holy Rooster”. Parrot, in his turn, does not spare Olivier nicknames: “Lord Migraine”, “Lord Pintle d’Pantedly”, “Lord Snobsduck”, “Lord Compte nez pointu”, or “duck legged aristo”. These attributions, far from being simple caricatures of physical traits, suggest a clash between two nationalities (a Frenchman and an Englishman), and two social ranks (aristocracy and middle-lower class). As Alexander Blackburn contends, a pícaro plays an archetypal role and is far from revealing a clear-cut personality;3 however, multiple nicknames attached to a character often incorporate a cluster of archetypes, defying generalisations. Therefore, how can this eccentric private dimension be reconciled with a super-individual historical context with which, willy-nilly, rogues are confronted? What happens when historical figures access the make-believe microcosm of fiction? Writers are willing to recruit a star among a cast of unknown actors with the intent of providing their stories with a veneer of credibility; elsewhere, this contamination of fiction by history may be a simple exercise in the deconstruction, or even desecration of a public icon. The postmodern novel, with its fancy for pastiche and sequels of literary works by other writers, could not avoid the temptation of merging history and fiction. Sometimes history may suggest an ideological recreation of events, while fiction, however enclosed in the Coleridgian pact of the “suspension of disbelief”, strives to assert a more genuine flair for credibility. The last thirty years have seen a renewed interest in the historical novel, to which Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa4 can be considered one of the most relevant contributions. The focus has shifted not only to the passage from history to fiction, but also towards the essence of history as a particular kind of narrative. Hayden White contends that historians must look for meaning beyond a maze of unconnected facts, and this can only be attained by encoding the sources within a limited range of plot structures inherited from creative literature. For example, the tragic, comic, romantic, satirical deployment of a piece of news is not intrinsic in the reconstructed event, but it is the outcome 3 4

3 Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel. 1554–1954 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 25. 4 Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (Milano: Bompiani, 1980).

History through Roguish Eyes

15

of the “historian’s decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another.”5 This has become particularly true with the tension between fact and event in the modernist rendering of twentieth-century history, overhauling the scope and significance of the historical discourse as such.6 To Michel de Certeau, an event is “the hypothetical support for an ordering along the chronological axis”. Its function is to contain and localise a portion of history. Facts are “signifiers intended to form a series of significant elements in the mode of narrative”: they provide items of evidence that develop into events.7 The Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman contends that history and creativity seem to progress along independent lines, though the past is always lurking in the shadows; he warns against the tendency to categorise past and present as distinct entities: “If history is a window on the past, then art is a window on the future (with a significant warning: the glass of these windows may be mirrors).”8 Linda Hutcheon highlights how in the postmodern novel events tend to become facts, since fiction deprives the historical event of its realistic content; the dividing line separating reality and fiction in historical detail can then become intangible. In her overview of the postmodernist approach to the novel, Margherita Ganeri explains that from the nineteenth century onwards the debate on the function of the historical novel, seen as a macro-genre, has always faced an insoluble contradiction between fiction as a creative act and historical truth, or truthfulness.9 On looking more closely, the advent of a modernist anti-idealism in many fields of the humanities has somehow downsized history from indisputable, factual eye-witness to an elaborate, time-constrained, and often reticent form of narrative. This said, the incursion of history into the realm of fiction is even more contentious when the historical data is poured into the already fermenting melting pot of a picaresque tale, where dissonance is already visible in the 5 6 7 8 9

5 Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1978) 84; italics by the author. 6 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event” in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996) 17–38. 7 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia up, 1988) 96. 8 Jurij M. Lotman, Cercare la strada (Venezia: Marsilio, 1994) 80: “Se la storia è una finestra sul passato, allora l’arte è una finestra sul futuro (con una sostanziale avvertenza: i vetri di queste finestre possono essere specchi)” (my translation from the Italian version). 9 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 76; Margherita Ganeri, “The Double Bind of the Historical Novel and the Italian Postmodern Debate,” Spunti e Ricerche, Vol. 26, 2011, 40–50.

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Chapter 1

reasons sustaining this kind of narrative. In the picaresque, tricksters stand in as narrators who recollect their past tricks, adventures, misfortunes in a personal, tragicomic tone, mindless of the accuracy and reliability of their stories. The writing of history,10 on the other hand, reflects the constant interaction between three “universal” aspects, whose relevance is appraised differently according to various schools of thought: history seen as immanence, history as determined by the historical subject, and the nature of transcendence testing the limits of a single event (for example spiritual, dogmatic, gnostic forms of transcendence, etc.). In the picaresque, history is reflected through the eyes of a notorious impostor, leading to unexpected outcomes. In particular, this chapter draws a comparison between the official, historical and legendary image of Frederick i Barbarossa and his mysterious death, and his fictional persona in Umberto Eco’s semi-picaresque novel Baudolino (2000). The focus will then shift to the literary rendering of another historical figure, the historiographer and publicist Alexis de Tocqueville, as portrayed in Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America (2009). These two texts seem incompatible, since they deal with different ages and contexts; still, a combined reading of both novels and their distinct manners of presenting the act of “writing history” will help illuminate the function of the picaresque technique in reconstructing factual events. Far from taking a rigorous philosophical approach, this chapter will highlight the historian’s role in shaping history according to a religious plan or a merely earthly scale of values, and how these principles can be upset or even reversed by the disruptive interference of a trickster-narrator. Eco’s book is a long dialogue between the protagonist and Niketas Choniates, a real-life chronicler fleeing from the Crusaders during the sack of Constantinople (1204). Baudolino is the son of a farmer who runs into Emperor Frederick i Barbarossa, and subsequently becomes, by virtue of his captivating witticisms and wise-cracks, the king’s ministeriale, confidence man and stepson. The young peasant embarks with Frederick on an ill-fated quest for the kingdom of Prester John, a half-legendary patriarch allegedly descended from the Wise Men, and witnesses the mysterious, uncanny death of Barbarossa on their way to the Holy Land. The story ends with Baudolino taking on his godfather’s mission and leaving Constantinople for a new adventure in search of the mythical Prester. 10

10

This expression is used by the French historian Michel de Certeau in his definitions of history and historiography in The Writing of History.

History through Roguish Eyes

17

Parrot and Olivier in America is an account of the French nobleman Olivier de Balmont’s journey to America, officially in order to write a report on the prison system in the New World and, at the same time, to escape the chaos of the July Revolution in 1830, followed by Louis Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy. The story is narrated in turn by Olivier himself and by his servant, “clown and secrétaire” John Larrit, called Parrot for his habit of picking up people’s idiosyncrasies and language twists. They travel together through the United States and, though learning differing lessons about life, they come to share a similar fate, as Parrot clearly points out, describing his past experience as a child convict in Australia: “I was transported by misadventure […]. Your voyage to America was pretty much the same, I think.” (287).

History and Picaresque Fiction

In his notes on Il nome della rosa,11 Eco defines three strategies by which fiction can resort to history: as pure scenery where fictional figures live in a distant time and space, and no reference is made to present-day events (for example the romances, from the matière de Bretagne to Tolkien); as a ‘true-to-life’ scenario, where well-known figures interact with imaginary ones, although this scenario very rarely adapts to the historical framing (typical examples are Alexandre Dumas’ cloak-and-dagger novels). A third option is the historical novel in the narrow sense of the term, wherein the spirit of an age is captured through the eyes of anonymous characters, without resuscitating history-book figures (as in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi). While Eco’s first novel follows this path rather diligently, Baudolino cannot be easily categorised as a typical historical novel. In fact, although the narrative abounds with historical episodes, they are very often retold in an unconventional way; moreover, the protagonistnarrator does not completely accept the idea of inhabiting a one-dimensional past. Undoubtedly history plays a central role in Baudolino’s adventures, and this excludes the novel from any direct affiliation with traditional romances. Yet, history here is not so much an ‘excavation’ of past events as a real-time case study of history ‘in the making’, an incursion behind the scenes of history, a disclosure of the irrational crux hiding behind apparently logical strings of facts. Given this undefined position between historical novel, romance and 11

11

Umberto Eco, “Postille a ‘Il nome della rosa’ 1983”, in Il nome della rosa, xxv edizione (Milano: Bompiani, 1989) 531–33.

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Chapter 1

anachronism, with glimpses of Menippean satire12 wherein “the heroes of the absolute past” interact, discuss and inevitably quarrel with “the living contemporaries”, all these components tend to invite a picaresque reading of the book. In traditional rogue’s tales historical details are merely landmarks the narrators insert to delimit episodes related to their own often unreliable biography. Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), one of the earliest examples, ends with a reference to Holy Roman Emperor Charles v’s establishment of the so-called Cortes (the parliament) in Toledo, a controversial date by itself.13 Historical facts usually frame the fictional world and finally bring the reader back to reality. At times, as in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), one of the earliest examples of the picaresque in Britain,14 historical personages and events often appear as fleeting presences on the page. They do not interact with the pícaro but are carefully chosen by the narrator to exemplify his cultural interests, from Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More defending their philosophical positions, to Henry viii, sumptuously camped near the little village of Guines in France, or even a caustic account of the reasons behind the massacre of the Anabaptist brotherhood in Münster. To Jack Wilton, the protagonist, history is a series of isolated, unconnected events; he addresses his readers with a clearly unambitious plea: “Let me be a historiographer of my own misfortunes.”15 12 13 14 15

12

13

14

15

Mikhail Bakhtin underscores the intersection of history and parody in Menippean satire (such as the Satyricon by Petronius, or the De Consolatione Philosophiae by Boethius), identified as an ancient degeneration of the Socratic dialogue. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981) 26. The convocation of the Cortes in Toledo happened both in 1525 and 1538. This raises some doubts about the chronology of the novel. In Lazarillo de Tormes and El Abencerraje, Introduction and notes in English (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966), Claudio Guillén dismisses any possible means of deciding between 1525 and 1538, while Rodolfo Cortina Gómez argues that 1538 is more likely; see “On Dating the Lazarillo,” Hispanic Review, vol. 45, No. 1, (Winter, 1977), pp. 61–66. Angela Locatelli mentions a quasi-picaresque novel prior to Nashe’s, The Traveller (1575) by Jerome Turler, while another similar narrative, A Method for Travell by Robert Dallington appeared in 1598. She also hints at the importance of Lazarillo (translated into English in 1586) in the development of the rogue theme. See Angela Locatelli, Il doppio e il picaresco. Un caso paradigmatico nel rinascimento inglese, con l’ameno racconto di Meum e Tuum di Henry Peacham Jr. (Milano: Editoriale Jaca Book, 1997) 13, note 6. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972) 326.

19

History through Roguish Eyes

In his classification of modes of fiction (Illustration 1.1), Robert Scholes ­posits the existence of an incongruity separating history and the picaresque:16 he identifies it as a “development of [basic] fictional modes,” – a phrase r­ eminiscent of Northrop Frye’s archetypal pre-narrative categories17 – situated ­between satire and comedy. These three categories, satire, comedy and the picaresque, inhabit a fictional world that is ideally worse than the purely mimetic cosmos of history: satire

picaresque

comedy

history

tragedy

romance

sentiment

Illustration 1.1 The picaresque and Scholes’ fictional modes

History as a narrative mode is supposed to belong to the dimension of ‘objective truth’, which, converted into fiction, becomes ‘mimesis’, ‘imitation’ in the Aristotelian sense of the word, “an instinct of human beings, from childhood” by which “we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as the forms of the vilest animals and of corpses.”18 Aristotle maintains that a historian “relates actual events”, while the poet talks about “things that might occur”. He deduces that “poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal, while history relates particulars”.19 Scholes’ categories are rather heterogeneous, but they admit some combinations of different modes along the spectrum. Satirical elements emerge quite often in the picaresque, according to Scholes, but they cannot prevail. In addition, this model seems to discriminate, with no apparent justification, between different traits of these modes: for instance, ‘satire’, ‘sentiment’, and ‘romance’ refer mostly to 16 17 18 19

16

Robert Scholes, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Genre,” Novel, 2 (1969) 101–11, also cited in Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of the Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” pmla, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Mar., 1974) 240–49. 17 A good point about Scholes’ categories is that the picaresque enjoys a separate place as a narrative mode. It is definitely a tangle of different components along the scale. Scholars have often associated this ambiguous role of in-between with the pícaro’s own possible mythological personifications, such as Janus, Proteus, Hermes, Psyche, etc. 18 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard up, 1995) Sec. i, Part iv 37–38. 19 According to Aristotle, “The difference between the historian and the poet is not that between using verse or prose; Herodotus’ work could be versified and would be just as much a kind of history in verse as in prose.” (Poetics, Section i, Part ix 59).

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Chapter 1

themes and content, while ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ also suggest a series of formal principles relating to the use of an appropriate style. A corrective is necessary here because pragmatic strategies should play a leading role also in defining history. Hayden White explains that, far from being an exercise in creative writing, the accuracy of the reconstruction of a past episode is defined by the most suitable communicative strategy with regard to a specific topic:20 the purposes of communication, the receiver of the narrated message, the interrelation between language units within the text – elements that Wayne C. Booth describes as “rhetorical resources” (The Rhetoric of Fiction 116): “Regardless of how we conceive the core of any literary work, will it be entirely freed of a rhetorical dimension? […] the subject is thought of as something that can be made public, something that can be made into a communicated work.” (104–05). Pursuing historical precision and objectivity in fiction is a chimera, especially within the perspective of a misleading picaresque reporter. However, as Booth wisely remarks, we do not have to deprecate or dismiss un-realistic, non-objective narratives as bad literature. He explains how “every literary ‘fact’ – even the most unadorned picture of some universal aspect of human experience – is highly charged by the meanings of the author, whatever his pretensions to objectivity.” (112). In this sense, the picaresque in its own right deserves the dignity of being one of the possible plot structures a particularly eccentric historian could find adequate for his audience. Following that, is an un-realistic historical account still to be considered ‘bad’ history? The way the picaresque narrator deals with history is reminiscent of the historical approach adopted in Baudolino and Parrot and Olivier in America: both convey the sense of a personalised grasp on events, or even the ambition to forge or manipulate them. In a farcical adaptation of Manzoni’s vision of history as the collective creation of humble, insignificant, voiceless heroes, the picaresque entrusts a similar mission to a bold, blatant, unfaithful rogue. The picaresque text is closely knitted to an individual’s life, therefore the subjectivity and prejudice of the hero’s judgments must impinge also on the recollection of historical facts. This would be a good enough reason to dismantle the picaresque as an inadequate plot structure in the reliable reconstruction of historical episodes. On the other hand, one may wonder whether the historical novel should be the only plausible instrument to fictionalise history, also due to 20

20

For the distinction between figurative and literal discourse in the historical treatment of the Holocaust, see Hayden White, Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, ma, Harvard up, 1992) 37–53.

History through Roguish Eyes

21

the fact that this text-type is widely acknowledged as a sort of circumstantial, objective retelling of past events. The ‘official’ event that “seems to tell itself” – as Benveniste qualifies the object of an historical account – is also the result of intermediation and second-hand sources; otherwise, different versions of the same fact would be unthinkable.

Meaning and Significance in Historical Fiction

Roman Jakobson identifies selection and combination as two components of an act of communication.21 The addresser selects a language unit among a ­series of related signs and combines them with others in a more or less creative way. Figures of speech, being condensed acts of communication, may p ­ rivilege selection or combination: for instance, metaphors are figures of selection because they use one or a limited number of subunits of m ­ eaning of a word; irony derives from a selective semantic choice. Metonymy and synecdoche, instead, are basically combinatory figures since they proceed by way of logical relations between similar semantic fields. For example: “The White House announced: …” In this case a metonymic association replaces the authority, for instance the presidency of the United States or one of its representatives, with its institutional headquarters. Selection and ­combination pertain to a purely textual realm; they are unrelated to the extra-textual context. Hence, we can see selection and combination of strings of words as the surface level of a deeper structure of meaning. Michel Riffaterre ­defines meaning as the result of a “first reading” of a poetical text. It is a brief survey of the mimesis, or a “heuristic reading”,22 a search for semantics inside the text. At the same time, it creates a binary connection with the world of things, it is the referential value of language.; a notion similar to Charles Peirce’s “object”. The most ­immediate instance of this direct heuristic connection is synecdoche, which emphasises a detail (body parts, clothes, unusual views of an object) and amplifies its meaning in communication. The definition of significance also requires further interpretation. Following Riffaterre, a “second reading” initiates a quest for the semiotic value of the language used in a n ­ arrative context, including the extratextual dimension. This reading is a retrospective, truly hermeneutic interpretation of a text’s poeticalness (5). Its final object is s­ ignificance: to be precise, 21 22

21 22

Roman Jakobson, On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Harvard up, 1990) 117–20. Michel Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1978) 6.

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meaning is referential and ­intra-textual, significance is extra- or inter-textual. These categories remind us of Greimas’ deep semiotic structure of narrative and Peirce’s “interpretant.”23 The dialogue between meaning and significance is paramount in picaresque fiction in view of its different angle of observation on history. A first example can be found in Eco’s novel, when Baudolino describes an unusual familiarity with Emperor Frederick of Sassonia: “E chi è il Barbarossa?” s’infuriava Federico imperatore. Sei tu, padre mio, laggiù ti chiamano così, e d’altra parte non vedo che male ci sia, perché la barba ce l’hai rossa davvero, e ti sta molto bene. Che se poi volessero dire che ce l’hai color rame, ti andrebbe bene Barbadirame? Io ti amerei e onorerei lo stesso anche se tu avessi la barba nera, ma visto che ce l’hai rossa non vedo perché devi fare tante storie se ti chiamano Barbarossa. (52) “And who is Barbarossa?” The emperor Frederick was furious. You are, dear father; that’s what they call you there, and for that matter I don’t see anything bad about it, because your beard really is red, and the name suits you well. And if they wanted to say that your beard was the color of copper, would Copperbeard suit you? Barbadirame? I would love and revere you all the same if your beard were black, but since it’s red, I don’t see why you should make such a fuss about being called Barbarossa. (47) Historical protagonists are commonly renamed by metonymic association with their personal features, or their noteworthy behaviour, such as ‘Flagellum Dei’ for Attila, ‘Dear Father’ (batûška)24 for Stalin (itself a nom de guerre), the ‘Duce’ for Mussolini, etc.25 Most of these nicknames have circulated in popular culture as derogatory, informal or endearing appellatives, and this seems to be the case with Barbarossa, a mocking pseudonym assigned to the emperor by the league of the communes. The element of surprise in Baudolino’s revelation to the emperor lies in the fact that the boundary separating the makers of 23 24 25

23 24 25

Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (London: Frances Pinter Publishers, 1987). Regarding some Russian terms cited in the thesis, I adopted the recent iso 9 1995 transliteration: ‘û’ for ‘ju’ or ‘yu’, ‘â’ for ‘ja’ or ‘ya’, ‘š’ for ‘sh’, ‘ŝ’ for ‘šč’, and ‘h’ for ‘ch’. Historical celebrities such as Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher are re-baptised with sarcastic nicknames in Doyle’s trilogy The Last Roundup.

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23

history as predestined heroes – a mystical halo surrounded Frederick during and after his life – and the way the populace humanises them is wiped out, and both sides are given equal dignity. In this passage, the rhetorical tool of synecdoche, quite common in the picaresque, amplifies some of the observed subject’s most evident features: body parts (the red beard) then become grotesque, disembodied entities representing the whole. This strategy in Baudolino is extended to the untouchables, to historical personalities: the episode of the revelation to the emperor that people call him ‘Barbarossa’ has both a farcical and depersonalising effect on the traditionally distinct figure of Frederick i. To the emperor this nickname is humiliating as it diminishes him to a physical trait which, associated with a common superstition about red-haired people, is perceived as offensive to his divinely inspired authority. Baudolino, half-heartedly loyal to his hometown, the commune of Civitas Nova/Alessandria (Piedmont), invites his patron to look beyond any ideological challenge to his primacy, and read this nickname as a metonym, where the association is purely non-referential, without any offensive allusions – or at least, this is what Baudolino wants Frederick to accept. Baudolino’s humorous remark that Barbarossa is the appropriate term for him seems to take for granted that this will be the actual appellative history will grant the German sovereign. In terms of significance, it is what Vladimir Shklovsky describes as the technique of “defamiliarization”,26 a way of representing objects and situations as they are seen for the first time: in a humorous tone, Baudolino makes clear to the emperor, presumably for the first time, that his beard is unequivocally red. The episode illustrates very effectively that even the most ‘innocent’ mystifications about historical personages can be questioned: an historical celebrity is then trapped in its synecdoche, its figure of meaning; in other words, it exists only in the literal meaning of a text. This aspect, relating synecdoche or metonymy to grotesque, dehumanised portraits of historical celebrities, is also very common in Parrot’s vulgarisation 26

26

Vladimir Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” quoted in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition, (Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004) 15–21. Commenting on the final scenes of Anna Karenina, Shklovsky observes how, describing the episode of the heroine’s suicide, the narrator lingers on the detail of her purse in order to dissuade the reader from likening Anna to a predictable tragic figure. The example is taken from Part 7, Chapter 31: “She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage.”

24

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of the French Revolution and its aftermath. He summarises great events in brief, sharp-tongued metonymic comments: “In 1793 the French were chopping off each other’s head” (41); “In July 1830 the Frogs had once again become maddened by their king and went around the capital smashing anything that reminded them of their own stupidity.” (98). The absurdity of both images is expressed by the use of a quite unlikely reflexive verb, in the first instance, and the self-destructive instinct of the mob during the July revolution, in the second. The beheading is treated as a sort of routine, a national sport, reducing the violence of the events to a meaningless power struggle. Earlier on, the child Olivier had found a vignette about the late king Louis xvi’s severed head in an old satirical newspaper: The king’s head was a perfect living head that might smile and speak, and its eyes were perfect eyes, and the hair dressed as a king’s hair should be dressed, and everything about him was so fine and good except for his vile machine, these flying drops of blood, this filthy squirt and gush. (13) The king’s head has a life of its own, producing a caricature not only of the king but also of the utterly useless presence of the monarchy in France. With or without his head, the monarch looks exactly the same. In his last book, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (publ. 1856), Tocqueville looks back at the ideals of the Revolution with disillusionment and, interestingly, overturns ­Olivier’s dichotomy head/body by saying, with reference to the survival of absolutism in modern France, that “all that has been done has been to place the head of Liberty on a servile body.”27 Likewise, Parrot draws a sketch of the king’s head on a slab of stone and shows it proudly to his father, who does not disguise his contentment with his son’s natural disgust for tyranny. In contrast to that, though, Parrot has to reconcile his liberal, quasi rivolutionary Englishman views with his position as a servant of French loyalist patrons: first of all, the enigmatic marquis de Tilbot, a nostalgic realist-turned-publisher, and the more open-minded, somewhat predictable Olivier de Garmont. As is usually the case in picaresque stories, the hero wavers between his own unruly temper and the impositions of common sense or social niceties. Parrot describes his political credo as follows: “I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for eighteen hours a day I was a vassal.” (302). 27

27

Alexis de Tocqueville, De Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime, translated by M.W. Patterson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1937) 220.

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Is there a similar attitude of mistrust and demythologisation of monarchy in the aristocratic Bourbon Tocqueville? As he widely discussed in L’Ancien Régime, Tocqueville condemned the sovereign’s gradual destruction of individual liberties for the sake of administrative centralisation dating back to the Middle Ages. The king ended up depriving the nobility of its patronising role as peace-keeper in local institutions. The aristocracy, according to Tocqueville, could have led France towards a real democratic solution if the king had not transformed it into a caste rather than a class.28 Olivier narrates the episode of a family reunion at his father’s château, when his mother and all her guests bemoan the loss of Louis xvi by singing a tear-jerking song.29 As a reaction to his mixed feelings of jealousy for his mother’s devotion to the king and contempt for her public display of weakness, the young Olivier pinches his mother’s arm, a gesture that, as he admits, reveals his resentment for “this vault of historic feeling she had hidden from me.” (8). Olivier’s mother’s intimacy with historical awareness is violated as soon as it is made public, and it clearly contradicts the Garmonts’ real experience of how unjust the king had been towards the aristocracy. The Pícaro and History Picaresque heroes rarely seem to be in control of their memories. Even though they usually tell a story with an apparent biographic linearity, starting from birth and childhood, their audience almost immediately perceives that they are trying to extricate themselves from any involvement with the past. Picaresque narrators usually give the impression of re-creating something different from what they were supposed to tell in the first place. Baudolino as a narrating character devises a sort of pact of unreliability with the narratee, and with us, his implied readers, by confessing: “‘I have lost everything I had written down about my past, what’s more, when I try to recall it, my thoughts become all confused.’” (22) (“‘ho perduto tutto quello che avevo scritto sul mio passato, ma se tento di ricordarlo mi si confondono le idee.’” [28]). As a result, the complex relationship 28 29

28 29

A similar theory, the “thèse nobiliaire”, was formulated by Montesquieu in his famous book L’esprit des lois (publ. 1748). The episode is related to a real one that occurred at Tocqueville’s manor, described in a letter to Lady Theresa Lewis on May 6, 1857, and quoted in Richard Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime (Princeton nj: Princeton up, 1962) 87–88.

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between a pícaro’s account of events and history implies a fairly subjective attitude towards it; however, the most fascinating implications lie in the way fiction can encroach upon the epistemology of history. In this, the modernist historian flounders around in the same dilemma: the meaning of history is not simply a list of facts in chronological/logical order, a fabula according to the formalists; its meaning must necessarily seep through the net of interpretation and creativity, converging towards a mostly unforeseen level of significance. Carey’s novel deals with the issue of handling reliability in history in a remarkably different way. Parrot’s belated dedication to Olivier, at the end of the book, takes the form of a mild retort directed at his master. This subversion of a literary formula is both an example of a deliberate breach of conventions but it is first and foremost a coup de théâtre that is supposed to confute most of Olivier’s considerations about America: Sir, your fears are phantoms. Look, it is daylight. There are no sanculottes, nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. Your horrid visions concerning fur traders are groundless. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule. Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in democracy is unsupported by the truth. You are wrong, dear sir, and the proof that you are wrong is here, in my jumbled life, for I was your servant and became your friend. (452) As in Baudolino’s case, Parrot opposes his historical reality, his micro-history as “jumped-up John Larrit” (452) to signify that, from his personal point of view, events can take a positive course. On a different level, though, the contemporary reader cannot take Parrot’s optimism for granted, and this contributes to what will be defined later as ‘historical irony’. The servant reproaches his own master for his chauvinistic prophecies about the dangers of democracy, yet in one of the primary sources of the novel, the monumental book Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s invective against the ‘tyranny of the majority’ is not mentioned in the first book of the first part – the French edition of which was published in 1835 – which draws more directly on the notes written during his journey to the New World, and coincides with the time of the novel. A more pessimistic view, in many respects, is expressed in the second book, where Tocqueville airs the possibility of a tyrannical leadership in America. This second part was written around 1840, when Tocqueville was back in France, and, three years later than the fictional time of Parrot’s concluding dedication (1837). Later on in the story, Parrot asserts that “all these words, these blemishes and tears, this darkness, this unreliable history – although written pretty much

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as well as could be done in London – was cobbled together by me.” (452). He claims full control over his narrative material, but he has not simply acted as an editor of the book; in fact, Olivier’s version of the story also betrays a strong yet illusory hold on the plot. Olivier is convinced, especially at the start, that he is writing his autobiography, and the author addresses a potential reader as a colloquial, sometimes polemical ‘you’, that will evolve in the course of his confessions. Parrot is not merely collating bits and pieces of Olivier’s diaries and books. He is Olivier’s secretary and copyist because his master’s handwriting is too difficult to decipher. At one point in his recollections, in a rather farcical tone Parrot gives away the fact that his version of Olivier’s manuscript – his “smudgy notes” (143) – may not be the same as the original, revealing that “it was a mistake to trust it to me, for he [Olivier] never had the patience for the proofs.” (143). In a subsequent passage Parrot actually admits to a certain discrepancy between what his patron is dictating (“he said”) and what the copyist himself is reporting (“I wrote”), for example while the French aristocrat is visiting the Eastern State Penitentiary. Parrot aptly amends Olivier’s condescending, diplomatic style by inserting clear remarks about the ‘reformed’ American prison system: ‘The prisoner had been there five years,’ I wrote, ‘and is to remain five more. He has been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods but, even after his long imprisonment, denies his guilt.’ ‘Add this,’ his lordship demanded. ‘Each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.’ […] Oh, lucky man. […] What pigwash, I thought, writing it down, correcting my employer’s English. (264–65; original emphasis) Sometimes the reader can grasp a more condemning attitude towards American institutions in Parrot’s words than in Olivier’s, the latter being more critical with regard to the principle of democracy as political practice and its socially distinctive traits. The complexity of this picaresque novel lies in the variety of intertexts cooperating, or colliding, within the overall story. Metanarrative comments by the character intertwine with original excerpts from diaries and letters by Tocqueville or by his fellow traveller, Gustave de Beaumont.30 30

30

In the novel he could be identified with Olivier’s best friend Blacqueville, but the fictional character dies before boarding the “Havre” to America.

28

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Of course, in these multifarious sources, autobiographical elements enmesh with romanticised anecdotes to create a fairly unreliable substratum for the narrative’s objectivity and verisimilitude. Dual Sign Irony One of the official ‘historians’ in Baudolino, the Bishop Otto of Freising, gives the word Istoria –“History” with a capital H in the English version – a different meaning from the traditional Greek sense of “eye-witness”.31 What is surprising is that Otto, already aware of Baudolino’s tendency to tell lies, suggests he use his own skills as a would-be historiographer (“writer of Histories”), but with self-discipline: “The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.” (43) (“Il mondo condanna i bugiardi che non fanno altro che mentire, anche sulle cose infime, e premia i poeti, che mentono soltanto sulle cose grandissime.” [48]). The Bishop’s exhortation to lie about “the greatest things” makes the role of the historiographer even more untrustworthy. This is not what people would expect from an ‘eye-witness’, but it is exactly what they would expect from a proficient historian. The ambiguous use of the word Istoria is an illuminating example of ‘dual sign’ irony. Riffaterre describes a dual sign as “an equivocal word situated at the point where two sequences of semantic or formal associations intersect.” (86). On the one hand the reader is made aware of the traditional meaning of Istoria, a living account of real events; on the other hand, the picaresque lesson allows for a different connotation, a sort of manipulated account of an event for a different purpose (political, religious, etc.). Istoria/History is no longer a recollection of past events, but a metaphor conveying arcane undertones. One of the characters, the old-fashioned byzantine historian Niketas, describes Baudolino as a manipulator, a master of irony: Quello che colpiva in Baudolino era che, qualunque cosa dicesse, guardava di sottecchi il suo interlocutore, come per avvertirlo di non prenderlo sul serio. Vezzo da consentire a chiunque, meno che a qualcuno da cui ti attendi una testimonianza verace, da tradurre in Istoria. (19) 31

31

Istoria comes from the Greek word ιστoρία, “a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative,” from historein “inquire”, from histor “wise man, judge”, from pie [ProtoIndo-European] *wid-tor-, from base *weid- “to know,” lit. “to see”. This term relates to Gk. idein “to see,” and to eidenai “to know.” (web site: http://www.etymonline. com/index. php).

29

History through Roguish Eyes

What struck him about Baudolino was that, whatever the man said, he would glance furtively at his interlocutor, as if warning him not to take him seriously. A tic admissible in anyone, except perhaps in one from whom you are expecting a truthful account, to be translated into history. (13)32 Illustration 1.2 summarises three conceptions of History – Istorie in the ­original – on the part of two ‘professional’ historians and of the improvised historian Baudolino. The irony stems from the fact that a supposedly unambiguous term like ‘history’ can give rise to three competing outlooks.

Istoria / History

Hellenistic tradition (Niketa): “living witness”

Augustinian tradition (Otto): “History” separated from “tales”

Picaresque approach (Baudolino): “story” blends into “History”

Illustration 1.2 Three views of history in Baudolino

What is Tocqueville’s place inside this grid? He was educated according to an orthodox Catholic doctrine, but he subsequently converted to deism, a ­philosophical current which limits the intrusiveness of providence in human history. Nevertheless, Tocqueville recognised the role of religion in shaping and leading the collective conscience toward its historical telos. He points out that “the movement of ideas and passions,” including religious belief, is the driving force behind every single event in history. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville appeals for God’s intervention in establishing democracy in society: “[the] effort to halt democracy appears as a fight against God himself, and nations have no other option but to acquiesce in the social state imposed by Providence.”33 This thesis is restated in the book’s final pages: “Providence did not make mankind entirely free or completely enslaved. Providence has, in 32 33

32 33

The English version of Baudolino uses “history” in lower case. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York/Evanston/London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1966) 6.

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truth, drawn a predestined circle around each man beyond which he cannot pass; but within those vast limits man is strong and free, and so are peoples.” (680). Describing American society, he affirms how important religion has been in creating the moral foundation of local institutions, while in France religious worship has been officialised and subjugated to the tyranny of the crown. Religion will unavoidably pervade man’s history, but, at the same time, it must grant all individuals the freedom to use their discernment. That is why Tocqueville rejects any form of determinism and the new principles of positivism, since they both enforce a fatalistic point of view on the role of social hierarchy in determining historical events. To Tocqueville history does not belong to a predestined caste of people, but it tends to reach the final objective of individual liberty as opposed to simple legal or institutional equality. Tocqueville/Olivier’s stance on history can be summarised in the following ­illustration (1.3) – the broken line indicating a sort of abstract reconciliation between human and divine will: Historia / History (Tocqueville’s Deism)

Will of the Sovereign Master

Human Will

Final Providential Goal

Individual Liberty

Illustration 1.3 History according to Tocqueville

‘Historical’ Irony Booth identified dramatic irony as the narrative situation in which author and readers share some kind of knowledge about facts or ideas, whereas the fictional characters remain unaware of the actual events unfolding around them (A Rhetoric of Irony 175). This rhetorical tool, which weaves a net of collateral centres of significance, has a wide range of applications in novels based on historical events; in particular, the picaresque renders history as a déjà-vu that can be brought to mind, while the characters are oblivious to or misunderstand the actual importance of an event. This helps to mar the overall ‘credibility’ of the historical setting, but, at the same time, it upsets the reader’s

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certainties about the real progression of facts. A case in point is Tocqueville’s role as a theorist of democracy and a witness of the American experiment in promoting equality, two attributes that do not accord with his fictional second self; to start with, Olivier considers democracy a menace to France’s social security: the future of France will be found in their experiment and when the wave of democracy breaks over our heads, it will be best we know how to bend it to our ends rather than be broken by its weight. (157) Democracy as an ironic topic is described both as a tool put in the hands of humankind and as a natural event that could be controlled or, at least, manipulated. Later on, it is called, less optimistically, the “lava of democracy” (308). According to Tocqueville’s deistic perception of the role of God in human history, democracy is God’s creation, it cannot be denied but, at the same time, God grants everyone the freedom to use their understanding of it in developing their concept of democracy. The term democracy widens its initially unequivocal meaning into a contradiction of significant details that mirror a typically eccentric, picaresque system of values. Later in the novel, Olivier contends that “if democracy was unstoppable, we might at least safeguard our future with certain principles and institutions.” (230). Feeling the threat of democracy as being the dictatorship of the mediocre – the ‘ignoramus’, as Parrot calls the ignorant mob – Olivier only has to oppose his own aristocratic model to it as a safeguard. The aristocracy could still defend individual freedom from the arbitrariness of the mob in France; however, in the course of the narrative, the French nobleman is shocked to discover his inability to adjust to the American lifestyle and, at the same time, to the progress of history both in the New World and in his native country. Another ironic unit of meaning unexpectedly assigned to the word democracy is connected to the significance of the aesthetic enjoyment of art. Democracy will lead to the denial of art and its degradation as pure business. In his dialogue with Parrot on genuine art, Olivier upholds his aristocratic, elitist point, arguing that “‘the taste for ideal beauty – and the pleasure of seeing it depicted – can never be as intense or widespread among a democratic as compared to an aristocratic people.’” (288). Parrot retorts: “‘Turner’s father was a barber […]. A plain old barber with a wart on his nose.’” Olivier seems puzzled: “‘Turner?’” Parrot explains: “‘An English painter.’” (288). The irony of this passage derives from our perspective of art in contemporary culture: artistry has become popular, accessible to everyone and, probably, it has lost the sense of secrecy, the rituality it used to have in prehistoric or medieval art history,

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or the cult of the messianic artist, the ‘chosen one’ in the romantic, decadent or modernist currents. At the same time, readers are conscious of the impact of America in the globalisation and massification of art and culture, and of what art really means in terms of enjoyment or business. In his essay titled “In a Post-Culture”, George Steiner contends that “America is, today, the main generator and storehouse of cultural means”,34 where the active fruition of knowledge is being undermined by the logic of an aloof, archival “museum culture”. At the end of the novel, Parrot cannot claim to have made a fortune out of his talent for art – he is merely a self-made illustrator of local birds and flora.35 Like Turner, whose humble origins have not hindered him from becoming an anticipator of a then unconventional ­Impressionist vein, Parrot has found a way of elevating himself above the mediocrity to which his social standing had doomed him. Art is a ‘privilege’ according to the pícaro but, at the same time, it becomes a means of social recognition. A further symbolic attribution in the dualism ‘democracy/democratic’ is exposed in an apparently unrelated metonymy which connects American democratic zeal and the haste characterising it – the rocking chair: “Clearly there is nothing less suited to meditation than democracy. […] In America, everyone is in a state of agitation: some to attain power, others to grab wealth, and when they cannot move, they rock.” (279). In defining a rocking chair as “that awful monument to democratic restlessness” (279), Olivier denotes not only the irony of attributing historical-symbolic prestige to a piece of furniture, but also the idea that democracy is perpetual unhappiness and the continuous desire to move forward while neglecting, at the same time, meditation and subjectivity. The rocking chair is a symbol of dynamism, but the breadth of its movement is reduced to a forced back-and-forward swinging motion, with no possibility of change. In his introduction to Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer observes that Tocqueville draws on his own experience in the field in order to formulate general rules of conduct regarding the concepts of democracy – by means of induction – and from these rules he develops further examples that lead on to generalisations. Olivier follows a similar pattern but the irony lies in the substitution of solid inductive reasoning with a cheap, often brisk 34 35

34 35

George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale up, 1971) 63. Parrot’s book Birds of America reminds us of the homonymous miscellany of 435 engravings by John James Audubon (1785–1851). See http://www.audubon.org/nas/jja .html.

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­misuse of the enthymeme, that is a deductive syllogism in which one of the premises is undisclosed. As a matter of fact, Olivier postulates truths whose premises can be easily disputed because they are based on class prejudice towards America. On the whole, enthymeme from both the French and American side distracts the reader from a clear definition of a presumably ‘positive’ democracy. For example, when Olivier boards the steamboat at Le Havre, the American passengers expect that he, a ‘repented’ aristocrat, will share his cabin with Parrot. But Olivier cannot accept this violation of the social code: ‘The Americans will not take it well,’ he [Mr Peek] said. I understood the word take, and thought take money. ‘The expulsion of your copyist – the republicans will be against it.’ ‘Ah, yes, but the servant is your natural enemy, an Englishman.’ ‘On the other hand you are, your lordship, an aristocrat.’ […] ‘But do they [the Americans] share quarters with their servants? I am sure they do not.’ ‘They do not, but they believed that you did and they liked you for it.’ (134; author’s italics) The presumed equality which the Americans expect from Olivier is not something ­expected of them. In a brief discussion about the meaning of equality to Americans, the French émigré Mr Duponceau replies very sharply: “­Equality only exists in the marketplace” (254). Like most values, it can be assessed economically. From another point of view, historical irony can be concealed beneath commonplace or clichéd viewpoints about the ‘other,’ as in Baudolino’s comments on the reluctance of the Italian cities to unify against the emperor: “‘That’s how it is in our parts. You may hate the foreigner, but most of all you hate your neighbor. And if the foreigner helps us harm our neighbor, then he’s welcome.’” (47) (“‘Dalle nostre parti è così. Si può odiare lo straniero ma più di tutti si odia il v­ icino. E se lo straniero ci aiuta a far del male al vicino, è b­ envenuto.’” [51]). Both the author and the reader know that, according to patriotic, ­post-unification literature,36 the communes strenuously resisted the German 36

36

See, for example, the account of the patriotic insurrection of the communes (1176) in Giosuè Carducci’s unfinished epic poem Della battaglia di Legnano (composed in 1879).

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e­ mperor who was forced to renounce his ambitious claims on Italy. To be true, the communes had always been antagonistic towards the Empire, and Frederick I had to withdraw from Italy for strategic reasons since the political turmoil in Germany and the conflict between the official pope, Alexander iii, and the three antipopes37 – Victor iv, followed by Paschal iii and Callixtus iii, all three nominated by Barbarossa – had become a severe threat to political stability and, despite a series of concessions in favour of the cities, Barbarossa kept Italy in his clutches anyway. The agreement with the communes was sanctioned by the Peace of Constance in 1183, following a quick reconciliation (Venice, 1177) with the pope, who was a staunch supporter of the League. Alluding to recent happenings, Eco adopts a sharp, polemic tone towards the ‘Northern League’ party, which claimed the heritage of Alberto da Giussano, a legendary commander of the league of the cities, as a symbolic figure of the rebel against a centralised, oppressive government; yet, the historical league of Lombardy and Veneto had nothing to do with a solid coalition. This, and several other examples make clear that to Baudolino stories must be acceptable, rather than strictly ‘real’, in order to become history; they can be negotiated as real facts. The pícaro’s technique of transforming story into history is not just accidental, it becomes a systematic way of making lies acceptable and even useful to their victims. It often happens when Barbarossa shows indulgence towards his stepson: he knows that his “strange and beloved imp of the Po plain” (49) (“strano e amatissimo folletto della pianura del Po” [54]) will play tricks on him, but they will always be profitable to the emperor’s cause. In this instance Baudolino differs from the ‘classic’ pícaro, as a rule an unfaithful servant: he is soon nominated Ministeriale by Frederick, the highest knightly rank a non-aristocrat could attain; nevertheless, he keeps referring to himself as the emperor’s son although Frederick’s fatal accident will cast a shadow of doubt on Baudolino’s loyalty to his patron. Parrot and Olivier provides a further highly iconic example of historical irony. Caught in his personal reminiscences of the disastrous colonial experience in Australia and the false expectations explorers had nursed towards the new land, Parrot produces a fanciful, almost surreal map of the continent by Thomas J. Maslen (1827), which the larrikin passes off as his own creation: the “Carte de l’Australie entire, Capt. John Larrit, 1804” (260; Illustration 1.4): 37

37

If we consider that, from its foundation until the fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had been confronted with more than forty antipopes, the episode belongs to a consolidated tradition of conflicts between spiritual and temporal supremacy.

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Illustration 1.4 T.J. Maslen, “Sketch of the coasts of Australia and the supposed Entrance of the Great River, principally designed to illustrate the Narrative of M. Baudins voyage on the West and N.W. coasts”38

In tune with Marquis de Tilbot’s ambitious plans, which closely reflect those of a real French explorer, Nicolas Baudin (1801–1802), the appealing invention of the “Delta of Australia” – an inland “Supposed Sea” receiving waters from bountiful rivers – would have goaded Napoleon’s ambitions to colonize the land (261); clearly, and herein lies the irony, events have taken a rather different course.39 In many passages throughout the novel, Australia is less a setting 38 39

38

39

Maslen, Thomas J., The friend of Australia, or, A plan for exploring the interior and for carrying on a survey of the whole continent of Australia by a retired officer of the Hon. East India Company’s service (London: Hurst, Chance & Co., 1830), State Library of New South Wales, M2 804/1831/1. Web link: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/album/ItemViewer .aspx?itemid= 862048&suppress=N&imgin dex=1. The map is available on microfiche at Mitchell Library, National Library of Australia, ­Canberra, and kindly authorised for publication in this book. The issue of an inland sea

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than a symbolic place in which Parrot nurtures his frustrations and thirst for reprisal; the hostile Down Under acts then as a counterpart to the lush rural Paradise of the New World. Carey repeatedly opposes the optimistic America of the pioneers, the model of Tocqueville’s faltering, tentative democracy, with Australia’s reluctance to accept a shared version of history and to establish it as “the” official history – consider, for instance, the public opinion’s constant re-visitation of a hazy colonial past with its successes and tragedies. Noticeably, Australia in Carey’s latest fiction appears as a kind of construction site of history – to the writer “Australian history is filled with denial and false consciousness.”40 Deictic Markers of Time and Space Episodes of roguery recur throughout a picaresque story as variations on a theme and are usually staged during an itinerant journey, resulting in a series of unpleasant encounters. The significance of this recurrence of similar scenarios relates to a metahistorical vision. According to Hellenistic philosophy, for instance, history is a cycle always coming back to the origin. For the Church Fathers, on the other hand, the impression of humanity moving forward is just a creation of the mind: humanity evolves according to a spiral movement that leads upwards, to the ultimate teleology of God. In this framework, deictics play an essentially disruptive game. From a pragmatic point of view, they violate the confines of text and plot to embrace the extra-textual dimension, inhabited by the teller or the audience. In pure historical texts, a deictic marker may give the impression of a failure in maintaining distance and objectivity in reporting facts, but in historical fiction and, even more so in the picaresque re-enactment of history, it contributes to undermine the idea of history as an archived past, an intangible ‘then’ in which the historiographer is urged not to intervene. Markers like “here”, “there”, “this”, “that”, etc., become crucial time references in the picaresque. History (Istoria) hinges on what de Certeau, in accord with Lacanian psychoanalysis, identifies with the “réel”,41 a dimension that language and the senses cannot gather. In the context

40 41

nourishes the illusion of an Australian Eldorado in Patrick White’s Voss and is widely discussed, with reference to explorer Charles Sturt, in Rosslyn D. Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998) 228. I owe this reference to Sabina Sestigiani, Writing Colonisation: Violence, Landscape and the Act of Naming in Modern Italian and Australian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) 202. 40 Gaile, Andreas, Ed., Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey (Amsterdam. New York: Rodopi, 2005) 7. 41 For this terminological parentage, see Tom Conley’s “Translator’s Introduction” to De Certeau’s The Writing of History, xvi.

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of the writing of history, therefore, deictic markers of time and space become clues in the search for the unsaid in the form of allegory and metaphor. As Tom Conley maintains in his “Translator’s Introduction” to The Writing of History, a historiographer is a “prowler who works on the edges of reason”, (xi) fumbling to translate the language of history – he is, in his own manner, a type of pícaro unravelling the tricks of history. In Parrot and Olivier in America, some episodes are narrated by the two protagonists from different perspectives, as in the description of Olivier sitting for a portrait in front of the charming painter Mathilde, or the shooting of an Irishman who had attacked Olivier, mockingly singing the Marseillaise. In comparison, Parrot’s relationship with the here/now, time/space dimension of America is more matter-of-fact, more deictic than the detached involvement of Olivier. Parrot takes pains to impose his here-and-now on Olivier’s own narrative, he points out that he is himself a living witness of how the American system is flourishing. Looking at the final sentences of the Dedication, Parrot uses deictics in a reproachful way, trying to convince his master/friend that he was mistaken: You are wrong, dear sir, and the proof that you are wrong is here, in my jumbled life, for I was your servant and became your friend. I was your employee and am now truly your progenitor, by which I mean that you were honestly MADE IN NEW YORK by a footman and a rogue. (452) Parrot’s réel is his life experience, and the fact that the trappings of language cannot reproduce historical facts faithfully is expressed clearly when Parrot compares the official character of Olivier’s report on the American penal system with the actual comments, or asides, that his trickster-copyist allows himself to add to the original: “Mesdames, messieurs, voilà. The very thing. Les conversations pittoresques. […] Of my own accord I [Parrot] wrote” (264; ­italics by the author). What is the function of deictics in Olivier’s version of the story? Despite his peregrinations to many corners of the New World, the only place to which the aristocrat can confer a solid dimension of time and space is France, or more precisely, the France of his childhood. In the opening of the novel ­Olivier wants to cross the border between the written page and the actual world he is representing – especially by the use of the present tense – but everything he is summoning to his memory belongs to a secluded past, the past of the ancien régime: And so we readers can leave the silky treacherous Seine and cross the rough woodlands and enter the path between the linden trees, and

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I, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a noble of Myopia, am free to speed like Mercury while pointing out the blurry vegetable garden on the left, the smudgy watercolour of orchard on the right. (3) Later on, as Olivier reaches the American shore, space seems to be more and more peripheral to the traveller’s réel, the abundance of self-referential representations of objects makes it clear that his language is losing its grip on reality. For example, the description of New York has a surrealist tone: buildings are not concrete, matter-of-fact constructions, but they attract other fields of signification – children’s games, the circus, etc. – or, sometimes, they bring to mind those trompe l’oeil scenarios that give the illusion of an improbable space: “I made out New York – a great deal of bright-yellow sappy wood, a vast pile of bricks, a provincial town in the process of being built or broken.” (170). Similarly, Mr Godefroy’s manor is depicted using rather inconsistent language and, once again, the adjective “democratic” acts as a metonym for “confusion of man’s standing in society” – “the democratic idealism of the house” (291). Further in the story, the two astonished travellers discover how Americans can turn a church into a venue for a town assembly (303–04). Both Olivier and Baudolino find their own deictic time and space within their imagination or in the turmoil of their memories. Baudolino catches a glimpse of the ineffability of the real when he experiences the subliminal effect of the green honey, a mysterious concoction that made “tangible that which had never been seen” (92) (“tangibile ciò che non si è mai visto” [98]). This irrational, senseless dimension reveals a new challenge to explore the kingdom of the legendary Prester John: “He exists, Baudolino decided, because there are no reasons opposing his existence.” (92) (“Esiste, aveva determinato Baudolino, perché non ci sono ragioni che si oppongano alla sua esistenza.” [98]). The existence of the Prester as an historical given is justified by way of negatives: he ‘is’ because the senses cannot deny him. Another instance of this separation from a non-sensorial perception of history and its actual manipulation through writing is shown in the passage when Baudolino and his friends need to jot down a fake letter by Prester John to Frederick: while the ‘witnesses’ as “sources of revelation” needed to draw their inspiration from the green honey, the authors, including Baudolino, could only indulge in wine (143; 136). Writers have to be conscious, while the witnesses (in this case, the real historians) have to be motivated by subliminal matters. Here again, ‘History’ is not a rational structure but a totally subconscious, non-religious illumination. Even Baudolino’s discovery of love, a topic rarely explored for a picaresque hero, reveals a radical loss of perception where imagination is ruled out as a false representation of the actual ‘truth’ which goes beyond the senses: he explains

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that love “cannot reproduce the corporeal form of the absent beloved” [“non riesce a riprodurre la forma corporale dell’amante assente”], unless it is debased to “love of fornication” (439) (“amore di fornicazione” [444]) – a rebuttal of the Neoplatonic and romantic idea that sublime love enters the soul through the eyes, as in Dante’s famous triplet: “Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira/che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,/che ‘ntender no la può chi no la prova.” [“She is so pleasant in the eyes of men/That through the sight the inmost heart doth gain/A sweetness which needs proof to know it by.”].42 Polemical Use of the Allocutive Pronoun ‘you’ In the unreliable first-person narrative, typical of a picaresque mock autobiography, the use of the second person singular is usually aimed at tracing an ideological, polemical detachment between the narrator and his listeners – in Baudolino’s case, Niketas – and, indirectly, with the reader. In Baudolino, the narrator acts as a speaker sympathetic towards the readers because he wants to win their approval and persuade them to believe that he is a character that still exists, someone that dwells in an eternal present. The narrator, as a projection of the hero, attempts a self-observation from the outside; simultaneously, his efforts to attain estrangement from his old self aim at earning the reader’s acceptance of his reformed conduct. For instance, in his recollections of his arguments with the emperor, Baudolino compares his current state with the past, but involving a judgement from his audience. The hero seems to speak here not about his own self, but about a different ‘I’, a ‘he’: “Quella sera stessa,” aveva concluso, “ho rinunciato per sempre a giudicare Federico, perché mi sentivo più colpevole di lui. È peggio tagliare il naso a un nemico o baciare sulla bocca la moglie del tuo benefattore?” (112) “That same evening,” he concluded, “I forever renounced judging Frederick, because I felt more guilty than he. Is it worse to cut off the nose of an enemy or to kiss the mouth of your benefactor’s wife?” (106) Of course, Baudolino the character cannot help condemning his own misconduct, but his double, the narrator, is ready to absolve himself when he claims that by rescuing the emperor at the battle of Legnano, he had somehow made amends for his moral transgression (211; 204). Readers, therefore, hesitate to 42

42

Dante Alighieri, La vita nuova [The New Life], Trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1910) 68.

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accept this non-judgemental stance as a resolution coming from the character at that exact moment, or as an afterthought on the part of the narrator. In the act of writing history, the first person rarely interferes in exposing facts. The French linguist Émile Benveniste describes the discourse of historical narration in the French language, specifying that the historian “will never say je or tu or maintenant, because he will never make use of the formal apparatus of discourse, which resides primarily in the relationship of the persons je:tu.”43 A true historical account should be, by nature, exclusively in the third person. From a purely rhetorical slant, Wayne C. Booth maintains that the choice between a first or third person account does not constitute a distinctive choice in fiction, although, he says, “if the ‘I’ has inadequate access to necessary information, the author may be led into improbabilities.” (150); and this seems to collide with an effective historical narrative. De Certeau observes that, history being a “discourse about the past”, its reference point must by necessity be an “absent, third party”, in which “the dead are the objective figure of an exchange among the living.” (46). This position places historical utterance within the domain of narration, where the events “seem to narrate themselves”, but in strong verbal confrontation between a narrator and a listener/reader. Given the concealed influence of the present on the narrated past, a first-person teller should not be dismissed as an inadequate mouthpiece for a fictional/historical account. Thus, the ever-changing present is the ultimate object of an historical enquiry translated into fiction, as Lotman also points out: While the historian attempts to comprehend a past that was accomplished on the basis of well-known, cold, hard facts, the artist writing about the past reinstates the moment in which the events took place, in their utter unpredictability.44 A narration about the past is not only a re-visitation, but also the recreation of a sense of the unexpected that surrounded the exact moment in which the event was taking place. A similar circumstance occurs during the execution of a music score, whose impending changes of mood and intensity ought to be 43 44

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Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971) 206–07. “Je”, “tu” and “maintenant” are in italics in the original. Jurij Lotman, Cercare la strada 80–81; my translation from the Italian version: “Mentre lo storico cerca di comprendere un passato ormai compiutosi sulla base di fatti noti e ormai freddi, rappresi, l’artista che scrive del passato ripristina il momento in cui gli avvenimenti si sono compiuti, in tutta la loro imprevedibilità.”

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perceived by the audience as mutable, unpredictable in their uniqueness, even after several performances. On the other hand, the only occurrence where discourse and history can dissolve into one another, according to Benveniste, is in “indirect speech” (209). On looking closer, a third-person historical narrative of events could hide the indirect speech of an authoritative first-person witness, especially when the ideological manipulation of an historical fact is called into question; history becomes a second-hand item of information. Free indirect speech as well is unlikely to be confined to purely fictional narrative, but this is not the case in picaresque fiction, where the narrators openly speak to their readers or listeners and seem to relate their past experience to the present of an audience. What is more, the picaresque storyteller, eager to entreat the reader’s mercy and indulgence, resorts to an undefined, assertive ‘you’, an uncommon pronoun in history books. Baudolino, or the omniscient narrator that intervenes occasionally in the story, addresses the reader only sporadically, but considerably more so through the subtle tool of ‘dramatic irony’. At the same time, though, Baudolino uses the pronoun ‘you’ polemically in reference to himself, in the form of a dramatic monologue, describing his attitude towards truth, after the death of his pregnant wife. He seems to relate not to the person he ‘was’ at the time of showing, but to the one he ‘is’ at the time of telling. A different use of the pronoun creates a clash between Baudolino’s real, private life, and the ‘history’ he has entangled himself in. What is more, he does not refrain from ‘making history’ in the most unconventional way, by using a composite of the linguistic and interpretative skills of his audience. As Niketas wisely points out, Baudolino is a master of language ‘camouflage’; the byzantine chronicler is bewildered by the real nature of his interlocutor: Avrà un’anima, si domandava, questo personaggio che sa piegare il proprio racconto a esprimere anime diverse? E se ha anime diverse, per bocca di quale, parlando, mi dirà mai la verità? (55) Can he have a soul, Niketas wondered, this character who can bend his narrative to express different souls? And if he has different souls, through which mouth, as he speaks, will he tell me the truth? (50) Similarly, Parrot imitates other people’s idioms and inserts bits of conversations in foreign languages or feigns different registers within a conversation. In Carey’s book ideological distance is expressed both through the different value codes of the first-person narrators (Olivier and Parrot) and their polemical attitude towards different denotations of the pronoun ‘you’. Parrot often

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argues with his own reader by means of free direct reprimands aimed at an audience he considers at the same level as he is. Therefore, the ideal reader of Parrot’s story could be the American commoner, as this passage can help illustrate: You might think, who is this, and I might say, this is God and what are you to do? Or I might say, a bird! Or I could tell you, madame, monsieur, sir, madam, how this name was given to me – I was christened Parrot because my hair was coloured carrot, because my skin was burned to feathers, and when I tumbled down into the whaler, the coxswain yelled, Here’s a parrot, captain. So it seems you have your answer, but you don’t. (41) At the same time, the reference to “monsieur” and “madame” allows for a French interlocutor, but the tone lacks the European formalities that belong to an aristocratic turn of phrase. At the end of the novel, Parrot starts a publishing business with the marquis de Tilbot, and the informal register he adopts betrays his attempt to destroy any barrier of propriety or social rank between him and the nobility. The master/servant relationship has evolved into interdependence for a common purpose. Olivier’s appeal to a second person is similar to Parrot’s for its frankness and caustic irony and, at the very beginning of the novel, when the French “aristo” describes his birthplace, his tone is direct and sympathetic towards the reader. Combining both deictics and the polemical ‘you’, Olivier even takes his readers on a virtual tour of his palace as if they were his guests, therefore narrative and real space overlap. When Olivier introduces his mother, he gives the impression of a real-time scene: “I will present to you the cloaked blindfolded figure on the chaise, my mother, the comtesse de Garmont” (5). The castle represents Olivier’s history, the past that is always being revived, where deictics, as previously mentioned, restore the réel in the narrative. Contrarily, Olivier’s self-assured dialectics come to a standstill when he is faced with the American way of life; he has lost the confidence he had shown to his potential European audience, his opinions are cloaked with the artifice of free direct or indirect thought. His addressees being a middle-class mob, the most unpleasant audience he could think of, the use of the polemical ‘you’ is replaced with a generalised third person singular or plural, as in the episode describing Olivier’s despair on his arrival in New York. Olivier acts as a reluctant pícaro trying to give a dignified portrait of himself to an ideal audience and then, in the course of the narrative, he conveys his awareness of the distance and hostility of his fellow speakers. In accordance with De Certeau’s idea of the reference to an “absent third party”, Olivier needs the presence of a reader as the only supporter of his personal history, which he identifies with

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the history of his own country. Parrot, on the contrary, has no real locus, he lives for the present; even Australia, the place where he had been confined, and where he had settled and established a family for several years, does not have the power to attract him as a deictic centre of gravity: he could not even call it home. Olivier’s consciousness, on the other hand, is projected exclusively into the French réel and he still re-lives the past. Finally, Olivier’s past constantly irrupts in his present life, while Parrot’s life is always projecting forward. ­Parrot’s past is considered just that; it has no time/space tangibility in his present. ­Olivier’s history is made of events; Parrot’s history is based on facts. Metonymy In his essay “Language, Power, Force,” Umberto Eco describes the connection between power and the use of language as an instrument of coercion and manipulation, where the presence of “infinitesimal shifts of accent” dictated by rhetoric “legitimizes certain relationships of strength and criminalizes others.”45 These “shifts of accent” can be put on the same level of significance as de Certeau’s concepts of metaphor and allegory in the writing of history. Historical acts of force – like revolutionary actions, or sudden groundbreak­ ing events – says Eco, were a “symbolic gesture, a theatrical finale that sanctioned, in a fashion also scenically pregnant, a crisis in power relationships that had been spreading, in a grass-roots way, for a long time.” (251). In the postscript to The Name of the Rose, he clarifies that the postmodern insinuates the possibility of accepting apparently obscure metaphors as matterof-fact, literally true sentences, an eventuality which is “the quality (the risk) of irony.”46 On many occasions, the literal reading of a metaphor becomes not the consoling acceptance of a circumstance, but an excuse for selfirony. The French Revolution, for example, is one of the “acts of force” that silently pervades Parrot and Olivier. Olivier belongs to a family that suffered the yoke of Terror, constantly recalled by his mother’s pitiful accounts; at the same time, the young historian has to measure himself against American public opinion that brands him as an enemy of the revolution and a “friend of Lafayette”. Nevertheless, in the course of the story, he seems to comprehend that the French revolution could not have any repercussion on America’s democratic experiment, it was a kind of bell-jar of history. The upsurge for liberty had warned French society about the impending dangers of class disparities, 45 46

45 46

Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes, Essays, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986) 247. Umberto Eco, Reflections on s, translated by William Weaver (London: Minerva, 1994) 68.

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yet the restoration of 1815 seemed to have successfully reinstated centralised immobility. However, an important aspect could no longer be ignored: the advent of a powerful, newly enriched middle class, who was soon to claim larger political participation.47 The metonymies that express the a-historicity of the revolution are mainly three: the guillotine as a monument to unreasonable violence (95); Delacroix’s picture of Marianne, commemorating the 1830 revolution, described by Olivier as a “pulpit” for the revolution (226) and a legacy of the republican ideals of 1789; thirdly, a fictitious play titled The Drama of the Revolution in France and its Children in America (355), an extravagant representation of the triumph of revolutionary ideals over aristocracy. Both the guillotine and Marianne’s picture are observed from Olivier’s point of view and belong to an established French cultural heritage: Marianne is compared with a pagan deity, and the revolution is an altar to her bloodthirsty craving for human victims. The guillotine condenses the idea of a place of execution and sacrifice with that of an instrument through which the middle class can triumphantly bathe itself in blood, as Olivier vividly recriminates: “For this you [the proletariat] spilled your blood and our blood – the bourgeois who turns his back upon the street, who eats your bread and drinks your blood while his fat arse blocks your way” (95). Olivier calls the revolutionaries “mammoth fools, mighty sanculottes, elephantine dupes” (96) to express both their encumbrance and obsolescence; moreover, Olivier seems to reverse the commonplace of the aristocrat as the enemy of revolution. Defining himself as “a Garmont, sworn to protect and care for you” [the proletariat], he is horrified at the “new bourgeois houses along the avenue de Neuilly” (95): the real target of Olivier’s sarcasm is not the French revolution of 1789, not even the ensuing Terror, but the bourgeois revolution of 1830, with its blatant vindications of social egalitarianism. Therefore, Olivier – even more explicitly than his historical counterpart – sees equality as a social palliative leading to mediocrity and escalating in the tyranny of public opinion. The episode featuring the theatrical reworking of the revolution by an American Jewish businessman is narrated from Parrot’s point of view, namely that of a much warmer supporter of the revolution’s ideals; still, the sarcastic tone of his review of the play betrays an utterly misplaced slant on history, where ideology prevails over facts and New York is, once again, pure scenography:

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This thesis is dealt with very thoroughly in Tocqueville’s survey about the legacy of the ancien régime.

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But all in all, Eckerd [the Jewish playwright] knew his Americans, and he delivered his hero and heroine in front of a backdrop which faithfully represented the city of New York. Here both hero and heroine declared the revolution won. I thought it awful. But the audience went wild, as Peter von Gunsteren would say, throwing fruit and nuts. (364, original emphasis) This grotesque staging of the revolution is followed by the ignominious exposure of Mr Watkins, a talented but deformed artist, to the amazement and outrage of the audience. According to Mathilde, Parrot’s sweetheart, Watkins embodies the troubles and expectations of America (365). He had previously been the victim of arson at the hands of the British authorities who had discovered that an English publisher was forging French money (the “assignats”) in order to devalue it and mar the revolution. In the end, then, the concept of revolution is nothing but a temporary prop, a vague memory in the consciousness of the European immigrants. In Eco’s novel, symbolic hints are scattered throughout the episode of the siege of the newly founded city of Alessandria, in particular metonymies of hunger, one of the obsessions of any authentic pícaro. These symbols become an historical “act of force”, since the two opponents assess their mutual strength and willingness to continue a useless war over exactly how long the besieged will hold out against starvation: [Il padre di Baudolino:] “fa’ conto che gli imperiali catturano una delle nostre vacche, e la trovano così piena di grano che la pancia quasi le schioppa. Allora il Barbarossa e i suoi pensano che noi abbiamo ancora tanto da mangiare da resistere in sculasculorum, ed ecco che sono gli stessi signori e soldati a dire di andiamocene perché se no la prossima Pasqua siamo ancora qui…” (194; author’s italics) [Baudolino’s father:] “let’s suppose that the imperials capture one of our cows, and they find her so stuffed with wheat that her belly’s about to explode. Then Barbarossa and his men will think that we still have so much food that we can hold out in sculasculorum, and so it’ll be those very same lords and soldiers who’ll say let’s clear out, otherwise we’ll still be here for next Easter…” (187) In truth, nobody is persuaded that the citizens of Alessandria waste their supply of wheat on a cow. The enemies unravel this symbolic gesture of “logical shift of meaning” as a gesture of pacification, transferring a referential

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meaning – ‘our cows are overfed’ – to an underlying, deeper semiotic level – ‘neither of us wants to fight any longer’. The enemies’ comments on the episode show another aspect that emerges time and again in the significance of history in the picaresque: the correlation between markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’: [Il marchese del Monferrato:] “Mi pare ci troviamo di fronte al chiaro segno che la città è più fornita di quanto supponessimo.” “Oh, sì, sì,” dissero a una voce tutti gli altri signori, e Baudolino ne concluse che non aveva mai visto tanta gente in malafede, tutta insieme, ciascuno riconoscendo benissimo la malafede altrui. Ma era segno che quell’assedio era ormai insopportabile a tutti. (199) [The marquess of Monferrato]: “it seems to me we have a clear sign that the city is better supplied than we had supposed.” “Oh, yes, yes,” all the other lords said with one voice, and Baudolino concluded that he had never seen so many people of bad faith, all together, each clearly recognizing the bad faith of the others. But it was a sign that this siege was by now intolerable for all. (192) Historical rhetoric and hunger-induced deceit form a perfect synthesis here. All in all, the pícaros are frauds but, most of the time, their victims find a selfjustifying reason to believe their machinations. Markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ As previously discussed, the writing of history implies the unravelling of metaphors and allegories behind facts and events. According to Jakobson, metaphors and allegories pertain to the forms of language selection, in which one sign or group of signs replaces another. The correlation between the two language unities is based on a substitution in accordance with the rules of the language code, suggesting a host of non-linguistic contexts. For instance, the expression “no man is an island” transposes the aspects of loneliness, immobility and seclusion implicit in the language sign ‘island’ into the human sphere. According to de Certeau, this is the attitude historiographers maintain towards history: far from being ‘creative’ writers, they transfer one entity of the language code into another with the awareness that their receivers will share it with them. Dealing with two types of aphasia, Jakobson maintains that a lack of ‘selection’ skills results in the patients’ inability to start a conversation afresh: they need a context – an event, a question, a comment from another speaker – to build their own associations. Thus, he explains, “the sentence ‘it rains’ cannot

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be produced unless the utterer sees that it is actually raining.” (121). Far from being omniscient writers, historians convert some aspects of the language code into a figurative one with the awareness or, occasionally, the presumption, that their receivers will understand the shift. Historians, then, build their metaphors on a language context that can bridge past and present; telling about the past, writers of history tell about their present. Algirdas Julien Greimas defined the equivalence established between two agents in a narrative as an isotope of ‘being’: metaphors are isotopes of being because they are usually introduced by an equivalence using the verb ‘to be’ – for example “Love is merely a madness”.48 To Gérard Genette, a proper metaphor is not simply an identification between two terms, but the welding of their semantic motivation into each other; it results from the elimination, or incorporation, of the first term of a simile, e.g.: “Thy eternal summer shall not fade”. Verbs that express, or reveal a relationship of being between terms are quite frequent in Eco’s and Carey’s novels, for instance ‘exist’, ‘find’, ‘accept’, ‘become’, ‘last’, etc. They all imply the existence of a person, object or situation, or the confirmation of this existence. Baudolino frequently uses equivalences to justify his “making of history”: non appena io dicevo ho visto questo, oppure ho trovato questa lettera che dice così (che magari l’avevo scritta io), gli altri sembrava che non aspettassero altro. Sai, signor Niceta, quando tu dici una cosa che hai ­immaginato, e gli altri ti dicono che è proprio così, finisci per crederci anche tu. (35–36) whenever I said this, or I found this letter that says thus and so (and maybe I’d written it myself), other people seemed to have been waiting for that very thing. You know, Master Niketas, when you say something you’ve imagined, and others then say that’s exactly how it is, you end up believing it yourself. (30) Baudolino’s veridiction process can be inscribed within Greimas’ semiotic square (Illustration 1.5), where his view of ‘being’ closely resembles that of a 48

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Gérard Genette, Figures iii, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972) 29–31. Genette defines the difference between simile and metaphor according to three criteria: the two terms of a comparison (“comparant”, the “vehicle”, and “comparé”, the “tenor”), the “comparative modaliser” (“modalisateur comparatif”; for example: “as”, “like”, “seem like” “resemble”, etc.) and the “ground” (“motif”).

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modern historian; other characters in the novel, on the other hand, make a more traditional appeal to history: ‘BEING’ (Metaphor) (Baudolino)

‘SEEMING’ (Otto of Freising)

‘NONSEEMING’ (Barbarossa)

‘NONBEING’ (Niketas) Relation between contraries Relation between contradictories Relation of implication

Illustration 1.5 Greimas’ semiotic square applied to Baudolino

Despite the risk of oversimplification, the square helps to highlight some logical links between four representatives of historical thought in Eco’s book. Baudolino has lost any written, physical record of his past, he anchors history to the present, to metaphors motivated by his everyday existence, and verging, at times, on pure enthymemes, namely deductions in which at least one premise remains undisclosed. Alternatively, Niketas, the old-fashioned, courtly historian, lives outside the present, he is trapped in a legendary past, always regenerating itself around the belief in a circle of events. His favourite tropes are metonym and paradox, both articulations of an empty, inconsistent language of ‘non-being’, in the form of trite appositions, such as in this bombastic eulogy of Constantinople: O Costantinopoli, regina delle città, tabernacolo di Dio altissimo, lode e gloria dei tuoi ministri, delizia dei forestieri, imperatrice delle città imperiali, cantico dei cantici, splendore degli splendori, rarissimo spettacolo delle cose più rare a vedere. (240) O Constantinople, queen of cities, tabernacle of the Lord most high, pride and glory of your ministers, delight of foreigners, empress of imperial cities, most rare spectacle of things rare to be seen. (233) Baudolino interrupts this flowery rhetoric with a clear-cut reproach: “you are already forgetting the misfortunes of your city as you lose all fear of what will

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happen tomorrow.” (234) (“tu già dimentichi le sventure della tua città e perdi ogni timore per quello che accadrà domani.” [240]). Niketas is not an historiographer in the modern sense of the word because he has no awareness of present or future. He does not play with the universals of language, but only with his preconceived set of clichés, consequently losing touch with the current state of affairs in Constantinople. Discussing a similar misuse of history, Lotman believes that exploring the past with the sole purpose of predicting a future state of events has often occasioned mystifications and prejudices towards both the past and the present; for instance, the myth of the French revolution instigating and justifying the civil war in Russia in the years 1917–20 (Cercare la strada 80). In this use of the stereotype, Niketas echoes, in a different register, Olivier’s aristocratic rhetoric. Otto’s attitude towards history, on the other hand, has a strong ideological component: politics and religion intertwine in an infallible theocratic order. Accordingly, he forgives human mistakes and lies in chronicles, since God will have the final word on man’s destiny anyway. He belongs to the realm of appearance, of ‘seeming’ – lies are good if they are used for a higher purpose. On his death bed, Otto recommends to his disciple Rahewine that he continue his Gesta Federici, the emperor’s biography, mixing facts and divine wisdom: “it was easy: he should narrate the events and put in the emperor’s mouth speeches drawn from the texts of the ancients.” (54) (“era facile: raccontasse i fatti e mettesse in bocca all’imperatore i discorsi tratti dai testi degli antichi.” [59]). Max Beerbohm seems to echo this remark, observing that “History […] does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”49 This unflattering maxim could be a perfect description of what Otto expects from a true historian. Contrary to Baudolino, Frederick I quite often uses markers of ‘seeming’ – verbs like ‘seem’, ‘appear’, verbs expressing opinions and modal verbs, or dubitative forms – but with a negative connotation: he is aware that what happens around him is unreal, but he admits, quite redundantly, how useful belief can be, as in the episode of Baudolino’s overfed cow: “‘And so apparently it must seem to me,’ Frederick said diplomatically. ‘The enemy army is pressing us from behind.’” (193) (“‘E così pare a me che mi debba parere,’ disse diplomaticamente Federico. ‘L’esercito nemico è alle nostre spalle.’” [199]).50 Barbarossa demonstrates that he is not an historian in the modernist sense of the word because his reading of events – for example his own nickname – is narrowed down to a stimulus–response paradigm, he takes events at face-value or, when 49 50

49 50

Max Beerbohm, “1880”, The Early Works (Cirencester: The Echo Library, 2005) 15. Note the pun on the double meaning of the verb “parere” (seem and judge).

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he tries to transcend them, he can only see them as allegories which are easily decoded into reality; he does not construct new meanings from words, he is a factual, down-to-earth, morally inflexible personality – as illustrated earlier, he cannot contemplate a role outside the divinely designed hierarchy sanctioning his dominance over the communes, therefore he can only consider their calling him ‘names’ as a breech in the status quo. Baudolino instinctively looks into history above and beyond ideology and refuses to accept that the true meaning of history is to be found in a simplistic inventory of facts and actions. On the other hand, though, the Emperor is also the perfect audience for a modern historian; in truth, Baudolino and Frederick are linked by a bond of interdependence, expressed by the implication existing between ‘being’ and ‘non-seeming’ (illustration 1.5). Although Barbarossa is not a writer of history, he can grasp the shifts of significance in Baudolino’s own words. In the following example, Baudolino becomes the mouthpiece of the emperor’s presumably unconscious reasons for accepting a low-profile crowning ceremony  – Frederick’s ‘unsaid’ version of history – a gesture which the German princes deplored as a blazing humiliation inflicted by the pope: Lui [Federico] aveva bisogno che incoronazione ci fosse, e fatta dal papa, ma non doveva essere troppo solenne, altrimenti voleva dire che lui era imperatore solo per grazia del papa e invece lo era già per volontà dei principi germanici. Gli ho detto che lui era proprio furbo come una faina perché era come se avesse detto: guarda papa che tu qui fai solo il notaio, ma i patti li ho già firmati io col Padreterno. Lui si è messo a ridere dandomi uno scappellotto sulla testa, e ha detto: bravo bravo, tu trovi subito il modo giusto di dire le cose. (39) He [Frederick] needed to have a coronation, and it had to be complete with the pope, but it should not be too solemn, otherwise it would mean he was emperor only thanks to the pope, whereas he was already emperor by the will of the Germanic princes. I told him he was sly as a weasel, because it was as if he had said: See here, Pope, you’re merely the notary, but I have already signed papers with the Almighty. He burst out laughing and slapped my head, saying smart boy, you always find the right way to express things. (34) The Baudolino/Barbarossa connection is comparable to that of an historiographer – not a chronicler – with his object, entailing both practice – reality – and discourse – a mode of intelligibility (de Certeau 21). A chronicler like Otto is too involved in ideological-religious quibbles while Baudolino, a picaresque

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‘outsider’ in the great machinery of Istoria, is above the role of a partisan reporter; what is more, even Baudolino’s conflict between his gratitude towards the emperor and love for his native land is resolved by means of a farcical interchange of roles. Another example of how history is constructed through language is the episode of the renaming of Alessandria as Cesarea. Baudolino knows that formalities are essential to the emperor, and a play on language can determine a turn in the events. After the city has been rebaptised, the inhabitants mockingly uncover the purely linguistic basis of this apparently pointless ritual: “Ma guarda che bella città!” “Ma sai che sembra proprio a quella là, come si chiamava, che c’era prima?” “Ma guarda che tecnica questi alemanni, in quattro e quattr’otto ti hanno tirato su una città che è una bellezza!” “Guarda là in fondo, quella sembra tutta casa mia, l’hanno rifatta uguale!” (245–46) “Look at this fine city!” “You know something? It looks just like that other one – what was the name? – that was here before.” “These Alamans, they’re really geniuses! In no time at all they’ve run up a city that’s a true masterpiece!” “Just look over there. That house looks exactly like mine! They’ve remade it exactly like it was.” (239) The town people confuse the ‘signifier’ – the new name – with the ‘object’ – the actual city – but the situation has changed: this new signifier brings back an old ‘interpretant’ of the word: Cesarea means a reconfirmation of the emperor’s patronage of the city. ‘Cesarea’, identified as sign, finds its own object in the concept of ‘the city’, while its interpretant is represented by the ‘subjugated citizens’. Picaresque fiction is unrealistic in the way it lets markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ co-exist within the semiotic frame of a narrative. In Olivier’s case, ‘being’ as the core of his social dignity based on a blood-line harking back to his dynasty, is seriously endangered by the persistence of the contrary semiosis of ‘seeming’ (illustration 1.5), expressed by the metonymy of theatrical acting. Regardless of the commonplace of aristocratic affectation, Olivier can only remember one occasion when his mother, a survivor of Bourbon high ­society, did not behave according to her status: that is, when she used to act on

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a private stage at the palais, impersonating “that which she was not”, and had to wipe off her makeup to prove her identity to little Olivier, to let him “know her for who she really was” (146). Later on, in the course of his journey from France to America Olivier goes through a rite of initiation into the significance of ‘seeming’: Mr Peek, one of the American new-rich onboard, suggests he “play the democrat” (135), implying that democracy is nothing but appearance, especially for the visitor. Further on, Olivier draws a disenchanted conclusion from his inductive observations of “the mercurial world of the Americans, who have more stages in their lives than caterpillars” (147). Onboard the ship to New York, where social distances are much narrower, he discovers the sociolinguistic nuance of the word ‘likeness’. Till he came face to face with the bourgeoisie, he had never thought that aristocracy should give up its role of absolute paradigm; yet, on a neutral ground, nobility is merely a term of comparison: Was this so-called likeness not my nightmare of democracy – the fishwife taken to be a great lady, the banker strutting as a noble lord? Was this not the red-clawed creature I had fled? Was I now rushing to its open arms? To a place where I was instructed to share my cabin with my servant? (146; original emphasis) At the same time, the discovery of a different dimension outside that of the aristocracy is never accepted by Olivier but, in common with most picaresque heroes, he tolerates it for convenience’s sake. During his journey he sits for a portrait, “trying to act a great excitement.” (147; author’s italics). Neoclassic art, like the theatre, is an attempt at reproducing nature with great abundance of detail and precision of form, that is, at establishing a close likeness with the original subject. This affinity with the subject underlies an aesthetically incomplete approach, in which external appearance means an almost symbiotic understanding of the subject. However, as Mikhail Bakhtin ingeniously highlights, the full accomplishment of aesthetic activity only happens when the object is observed from the outside. He compares this circumstance with the artist’s attitude towards a suffering human being: The life situation of a suffering human being that is really experienced from within may prompt me to perform an ethical action, such as providing assistance, consolation, cognitive reflection. But in any event my projection of myself into him must be followed by a return into myself, a return to my own place outside the suffering person, for only from this

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place can the material derived from my projecting myself into the other be rendered meaningful ethically, cognitively, or aesthetically.51 Olivier is gradually, though reluctantly, involved in this acting game when he even sees himself from the outside (a sign of estrangement) as an actor in a badly assorted company. He even knows the unfortunate pièce he’s going to star in: “Old Europe Taught a Lesson by Young Democracy” (220). In a following stage in Olivier’s apprenticeship as an actor, he accepts Parrot’s suggestion that he act out some bits from Molière’s L’Impromptu de Versailles to Amelia Godefroy, a young American lady he is courting. Molière’s play-within-the-play (or “comédie des comédiens”) forces Olivier to take on different roles, a skill he had never been able to practise, while Parrot, accustomed to acting various characters at the same time, becomes Olivier’s mentor.52 The nobleman simply imitates his servant and his ‘being’ remains uncontaminated; what is more, in his attempt to ‘seem’ a “true American” and marry Miss Godefroy, Olivier attends the Fourth of July Parade in Albany. Yet, far from understanding the emotional pathos that brings different social ranks together, the French aristocrat can only grasp an illusion of reality: the breach of etiquette, the cheap oratory of the speaker and the shabbiness of the throng marching in the parade make him dread America and the idea of living there. He describes himself in ironic terms as a “corrupted actor, a kind of cad” (416), praising the event to please Mr Godefroy. Echoes of this theatrical rituality shift his perspective from the isotope of ‘seeming’ – for example the stilted tone he adopts with his would-be father-in-law – to the isotope of ‘non-seeming’, the defeat of pretence, when Olivier clearly admits that he is behaving like an actor. In a letter to his sister Eugénie (14 July 1831), Beaumont describes Tocqueville’s reaction to the parade episode in similar terms to those of Olivier: “They should have stopped there; but after the reading of the Declaration of Rights a lawyer stepped up to make us a long rhetorical harangue … this had all the appearance of a farce.”53 His initial position on aristocracy as the only repository of ‘being’ (genuine) is 51 52 53

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Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. and notes Vadim Liapunov (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990) 24–25; italics by the author. For greater ease in tracing the sources, I will keep the transliteration of Russian names as they appear in the editions cited. for the difference between acting and improvising on the picaresque stage, see Chapter 2. A miscellany of letters and correspondence by Tocqueville and Beaumont is collected in the web site http://www.tocqueville.org/.

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reversed into the enthymeme of aristocracy’s ‘seeming’: “I did an excellent job of disguising my feelings. Sometimes I think it is the sole talent of the aristocracy.” (417). As soon as Olivier confesses to Mr Godefroy that he would never take his daughter to France and marry her because his own parents would not accept her, his acting talents succumb: he reaches a climax of ‘non-seeming’. Mr Godefroy’s straightforward approach casts Olivier from the stage back into the street: [Olivier]: ‘French society has none of your vigour, your love of innovation. It is looking backward while it marches to its doom’ [SEEMING: affectation] [Mr Godefroy]: ‘What are you saying?’ [BEING: claim for an identity between saying and meaning] ‘I have no intention of being insolent.’ [NON-SEEMING: disguise] […] [Olivier]: ‘They will not be able to grasp Amelia’s originality’. [SEEMING: politeness] [Mr Godefroy]: ‘Amelia, original?’ [BEING: truth about his daughter] ‘My mother, my father, the family. Their lives are circumscribed.’ [SEEMING: concealed truth] ‘Circumscribed?’ [BEING: rejection of disguise] […] [Olivier]: ‘Should I be more blunt?’ [NON-SEEMING: exposure of disguise] [Mr Godefroy]: ‘You mean they are snobs?’ [BEING: truth about the Balmont family] ‘They have a way of living.’ [SEEMING: affectation] ‘Snobs.’ [BEING: truth] ‘You may think them so.’ [BEING: admission of a partial truth/enthymeme] (430–31) This indecision between ‘seeming’ and ‘non-seeming’ cannot be tolerated any further: Olivier recollects his uniqueness as an unredeemable aristocrat, he recovers the original ‘being’ and, curiously enough, the admission of his own inability to cope with a different role in society, in addition to his consistency, will strengthen his friendly bonds with Parrot. In sum, a few elements co-exist in a new, rebellious perspective on historical data given by the picaresque narrator in both novels: first of all, the frequent use of synecdoche, fragmenting the individuality of an historical celebrity (e.g.: Barbarossa); secondly, the recurrence of metonymies, ­perpetrating shifts of accent and the acceptance of a convenient half-truth (the guillotine). In terms of

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style, the presence of deictic markers of time associate narrative ­fiction with the realm of ‘truth’ as senseless experience – the existence of P ­ rester John. As well, the polemical use of the pronoun ‘you’ reveals the fact that history is not only a third-person account, but it calls for a dialogue “­between the ­living” – Parrot’s asides. Finally, historical irony and the ­markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ reveal history as a déjà-vu for the reader, along with the ­relativism of history, while the threat of metaphor as equivalence c­ollides  with the ­revelation of “likeness” and the incapacity to re-enact one’s true self in a hostile ­environment, as in Olivier’s failed integration in America.

Otto, Baudolino, Niketas: Three Portraits of the Emperor

De Certeau points out that, until the fifteenth century, historians tended to separate cautiously two elements of history: “materia” – facts, the simplex historia – and ornamentum – “presentation, staging, commentary.” (11). As discussed in the previous section, Otto’s recommendation to his pupil Rahewine reflects this stance on historiography: the materia is what the emperor, as supreme authority, said (objective truth), while the ornamentum is simply a plethora of quotations from ancestors which, in due course, will attest to Frederick’s claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Otto’s view of history is condensed in this epigram: Bada, non ti chiedo di testimoniare ciò che ritieni falso, che sarebbe peccato, ma di testimoniare falsamente ciò che credi vero – il che è azione virtuosa perché supplisce alla mancanza di prove su qualcosa che certamente esiste o è accaduto. (61) I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true – which is a virtuous act because it compensates for the lack of proof of something that certainly exists or happened. (56) Men can deceive themselves or their readers, they can attach as many ornamenta as they want, but man’s history has already been dictated from above: this view was determined by St. Augustine’s precepts. However, even Augustine’s apparently clear-cut vision of political issues, of their justification through divine grace and the appointment of religious institutions, is not entirely transparent. On the one hand, in his De civitate Dei, he divides ­humanity into two

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separate, unreconciled entities: “those who live according to man”, and “those who live according to God”.54 Therefore, though he praises the rightfulness and justice of the early Roman rulers, he cannot absolve them from the sin of following human rather than divine laws. This kind of mistrust in political institutions does not exempt the Christian emperors from heralding divine grace and leading humanity to the utmost epiphany of God, the heavenly city. However tainted by sin, temporal rulers have a messianic role: We find, therefore, that the earthly city has two aspects. Under the one, it displays its own presence; under the other, it serves by its presence to point towards the Heavenly City. (xv, 3 637) Later on, Augustine exhorts the Church to ask the Christian emperors for help and support against the unfaithful, and he cites the example of Theodosius i, the last monarch of the unified Roman Empire, who fought against the usurper Maximus under the flag of Christian doctrine. Augustine reveals that he “rejoiced more in being a member of the Church than in being the ruler of the world” (v, 26 235). Here, the authority of the Church as an all-embracing institution is clearly vindicated. However, in a previous passage, which probably helped sustain the Holy Roman Emperors’ claim to spiritual and political leadership, he explains: [L]et us not attribute the power to grant kingdoms and empires to any save the true God. He gives happiness in the kingdom of Heaven only to the godly. Earthly kingdoms, however, He gives to the godly and the ungodly alike, as it may please Him, Whose good pleasure is never unjust. (v, 21 227) In this case, a convenient interpretation of this passage in support of the emperor’s cause is based on the ‘unsaid’: if God bestows His grace evenly on ­godly  and ungodly, who is entitled to give a moral judgement on them? Of course, this role was to be taken over by the Church as a magistrate for both religious and political issues. This had led to an unresolved clash of powers, which the fictional Otto of Freising describes quite well in the exhortation to Baudolino to urge Frederick towards the east in order to consolidate his rule and drag him out of the quagmire that has spread from Milan to Rome. Wryly, 54

54 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, edited and translated by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge, Cambridge up, 1998) xv, 1 634.

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Otto exhorts the emperor to “‘[k]eep clear of a kingdom where a pope rules.’” (56) (“‘Stia lontano da un regno dove comanda un papa.’” [61]). Baudolino finds himself invested with another difficult task – restoring the sacredness of the emperor. Otto of Freising seems to have lost faith in the unifying political and religious role of Frederick in Europe: the supremacy of the pope in spiritual matters was eroding the principle of the translatio imperii (transfer of rule), the imperial legacy of ancient Rome, to the Franks, Longobards and, finally, to the German kings. Making things worse was the fact that Otto himself belonged to the clergy. Thus, the only way of putting an end to an unresolvable conflict between the emperor and the pope was to change perspective: Barbarossa would be a sort of spiritual bridge between the West and the East by reconciling Rome with the heretical community of the Nestorians, led by the legendary Prester John. In his ambitious messianic plan, Otto would dissociate the historical role of the emperor from his supernatural mission of opening a new era.55 This, in the eyes of Baudolino and his typically unconventional view of history, is the real reason for the emperor’s intervention in the fourth crusade: the reconquest of Jerusalem would be simply an early stage of a much longer journey towards the kingdom of Prester John. Nonetheless, Frederick would never see the Holy Land: he died in 1190 on the shores of the Saleph River in Cilicia (South-Eastern Turkey). Once again, legend and imagination blend with an otherwise easily demonstrable truth about Frederick’s tragic fate (see below). With the affirmation of historiography as productive writing, facts and truths do not belong to the sphere of simple natural events, but they are generated from writing itself; to de Certeau “the fact ceases to function as the ‘sign’ of a truth, when ‘truth’ changes its status, slowly ceasing to be what is manifest in order to become what is produced, thereby acquiring a scriptural form.” (12). In sum, the new historians have to respond to the need to define facts that made an event possible and they are to provide a consistent set of metaphorical interpretations that help them fill in the inconsistencies between unconnected sources of information. As a matter of fact, Baudolino seems to have acquired the know-how of a modern historian: his ways are inconsiderate and ridiculous, but his ability to transform metaphors into truths, language into practice, makes him different from other ‘writers of Histories’. Writing becomes a surrogate for real events and even turns legendary characters into real people. When Niketas censures Baudolino’s obstinacy in defending his thesis on the 55

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The mystic relevance of the emperor is reflected in a variety of legends connected to his mysterious death in Anatolia. In German lore, Barbarossa is not dead, but is awaiting his final revelation within a rock chamber in the Kyffhäuser hills in Thuringia.

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existence of Prester John, he simply answers: “The Prester would become credible if he made himself known, with a personal letter to Frederick.” (131) (“Il Prete sarebbe diventato credibile se si fosse fatto vivo, in persona, con una lettera a Federico.” [138]): a letter, a piece of writing sanctions Prester John’s historical dignity. Remarkably, the letter sent by John to Manuel i of Constantinople in 1165, later known to be one of the most memorable hoaxes in the Middle Ages after the Donation of Constantine, was allegedly composed by a Northern Italian forger – another clue that substantiates Baudolino’s stature as a plausible historical figure. Obviously, writing history bears no ultimate truth for the pícaro, it can be moulded into ever-changing shapes. In another passage, Baudolino confesses that he scratched out part of Otto’s pessimistic Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus at the same time as the bishop was writing the Gesta Frederici in praise of his nephew: È che io sospetto che nella prima versione della Chronica, il mondo a­ ndasse ancora più male, e che per non contraddirsi troppo, a mano a mano che riscriveva la Chronica, Ottone sia diventato più indulgente con noi poveri uomini. E questo l’ho provocato io, grattando via la prima versione. Forse, se restava quella, Ottone non aveva il coraggio di scrivere le Gesta, e siccome è per via di queste Gesta che domani si dirà che cosa Federico ha fatto e non ha fatto, se io non grattavo via la prima Chronica finiva che Federico non aveva fatto tutto quello che diciamo che ha fatto. (45) What I suspect is that in the first version of the Chronica the world went even worse, and so as not to contradict himself too much, as he gradually went on rewriting the Chronica, Otto became more indulgent towards us humans. This is what I caused by scraping away the first version. Maybe if that remained, Otto would not have had the courage to write the Gesta, and since it’s thanks to the Gesta that in the future they will say what Frederick did and didn’t do; if I hadn’t scraped away the first text, in the end Frederick would not have done everything we say he did. (39) Far from being an act of sabotage to the normal course of history – the pícaro’s attitude to it is always positive: he knows to what degree of importance the written word has risen in reshaping reality. The practice of superimposing on previous manuscripts was very common in the Middle Ages (the so-called palimpsests) but Baudolino adds his personal touch to it: if he had been able to dispose of the pessimistic bits, this would have definitely ‘helped’ the course of events. Finally, what is Niketas’ slant on Barbarossa? Although he does not

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know the German emperor directly, Niketas attempts to define this historical figure according to his Hellenistic precepts. First of all, he does not see history as a linear progression towards ultimate salvation; on the contrary, history is a recurrent cycle of events. To him, Baudolino’s story seems to revolve constantly around the same themes: “‘It’s like one of those dreams where the same story keeps recurring and you long to wake up.’” (101) (“‘Sembra uno di quei sogni dove torna sempre la stessa storia, e tu implori di svegliarti.’” [107]). His concept of history as a cycle commingles with a deterministic view of a punishing God who, as recurrently as natural events, crushes his herd of unruly disciples. For instance, the pillage of Constantinople at the hands of the crusaders is read as God’s revenge against the corrupted Eastern Romans, but, at the same time, according to Niketas punishment brings about a process of purification and rebirth that seems to look to Fichte’s idealism. Reminiscing on the tragic persecution of the Byzantine population, the historical Niketas refers to Western Christians as “wrathful barbarians”,56 “nefarious men”, sacrilegious even towards the most sacred symbols.57 Certainly, the episode of the Sack of Constantinople further exacerbated the conflict between Eastern and Western churches, which had exploded, after decades of clashes, in a mutual excommunication in 1054. Moreover, the clash between power and religion in the Byzantine Empire has not yet reached the zenith of the investiture struggle in Europe and the clergy is still faithful to its leader: “‘In our empire the men of the Church work for their basileus not against him.’” (210) (“‘Nel nostro impero gli uomini di chiesa lavorano per il loro basileo, non contro di lui.’” [216]). Religion is ritualised and serves the purpose of the state, keeping believers in check. Niketas still holds as undeniable fact the principle of history repeating itself; he clings to what Gertrude Stein identifies as the traditional historian’s consoling idea of history as a cyclic repetition of similar circumstances, whereas the modernist sense of history has disproved this belief.58 A similar process has taken place, over a longer span of time, for creative writing: Lotman explains how the evolution 56 57 58

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Theological tenets such as the definition of the divine nature of the Son of God – the filioque, a clause added by Western Christians to the original Nicene Creed, describing the Son as descending ‘from the Father’ – along with other disputes involving the administration of the bishoprics, sanctioned a separation between the two churches that still persists. 57 See Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, trans. by D.C. Munro, Series 1, Vol. 3:1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1912) 15–16 (web site: http://www. fordham.edu/halsall/source/choniates). 58 Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures, Introduction by Thornton Wilder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 59, quoted in H. White, “The Modernist Event” 34.

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from a cyclical to a linear presentation of events has reflected on the transition of narrative from purely folkloric forms of storytelling, celebrating the regeneration of life, towards a quest for the unusual, the unexpected, in the form of more elaborate plot constructs (Cercare la strada 88). In Niketas’ contention history is “‘the book of the living’” (12) (“‘il libro dei viventi’” [17]), a biography and a ‘science’ based on eternal human passions. When Baudolino talks about the fact that Frederick’s son was jealous of him because he was usurping his prerogative as legitimate son of the emperor, Niketas points out that their attitudes as historians are quite similar: [Niceta:] “Anch’io ho scritto e scrivo le cronache del mio impero soffermandomi più sulle piccole invidie, gli odi, le gelosie che sconvolgono sia le famiglie dei potenti che le grandi e pubbliche imprese. Anche gli imperatori sono esseri umani, e la storia è anche storia delle loro debolezze.” (297) [Niketas:] “I too wrote and am writing the chronicles of my empire, emphasizing more the petty jealousies, the hatred, the envy that jeopardized both powerful families and great public undertakings. Even emperors are human beings, and history is also the story of their weaknesses.” (290) In actual fact, their views are substantially different: Baudolino, by use of the ‘unsaid’, is literally struggling to recover the sacredness of Frederick because he really thinks that he deserves this title, while to Niketas’ mind every ruler is moved by the same instinct for survival: nothing goes ‘unsaid’ in their deliberate gestures and symbolic behaviour. Conversely, Baudolino responds to Niketas’ fatalism with a humorously blasphemous reflection on the reasons for counterfeiting the Graal, obtained from his father’s filthy goblet: Noi pensiamo soltanto di aver bisogno, noi, di Dio, ma spesso Dio ha bisogno di noi. In quel momento pensavo che occorreva aiutarlo. Quella coppa doveva pure essere esistita, se Nostro Signore l’aveva usata. Se era stata perduta, era stato per colpa di qualche uomo dappoco. Io restituivo il Gradale alla cristianità. Dio non mi avrebbe smentito. (287) We believe that we, only we, need God, but often God needs us. At that moment I believed it was necessary to help him. That cup must truly have existed, if Our Lord had used it. If it had been lost, it had been through the fault of some worthless men. I was restoring the Grasal to Christianity. God would not have contradicted me. (280)

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The ‘Grasal’ (Old French for ‘Graal’) as a relic is not a way of manipulating credulous believers, but it becomes a metaphor, or, even better, a metonym, the Graal being related to the blood of Christ, through which God writes his own history among humanity. Indeed, Baudolino is merely retracing God’s metonyms and allegories inside the secret language of history and rephrases them literally. Unlike historical accounts employing extended metaphors to mediate between the real and its presentation as a plot structure, the picaresque treatment of history prioritises metonym and synecdoche, the two tropes that better convey irony and the grotesque. They form associations between the figurative representation and the object of this representation, between historical celebrities and their human limitedness. In short, in the novel three different approaches towards historical facts are intertwined: Niketas’ Hellenistic vision of history as eyewitness; Otto’s mainly Augustinian consideration of tales as instruments to make the ultimate truth of history more accessible; Baudolino’s blending and mutual contamination of history and personal vicissitudes.

The Death of Two Obsessions

After all these examples of pure lies that Baudolino moulds into historical facts, or Parrot’s manipulated witnesses of events, is a connection between history and reality still viable? De Certeau tackles the issue from a different plane: “This does not mean that history rejects reality and turns in on itself to take pleasure in examining his procedures. Rather […], it is that the relation to the real has changed.” (30). Since the relation to the real has changed during the evolution of historical practices, how can reality be reconciled with a picaresque way of making history? It is no longer a question of faithfulness to facts or ideologies, as it is for Niketas or Otto. Right from the start, Baudolino cannot explain why he needs to tell his story, apart from the fear of going “crazy” (22). But then he discovers that he is capable of reconstructing events because he has dismissed his past as history: “all those who were connected with my story are no more. Only I remain.” (207) (“tutti quelli che c’entravano con la mia storia non ci sono più. Sono rimasto solo io.” [214]). De Certeau notes that the demarcation of the past is the first step towards a reflective historiography. Despite this separation, the recurrence of the past determines what he calls the “return of the repressed” (“le retour du refoulé”, 4), a phrase taken from Freud:59 “First of all, historiography separates its present time from a past. But 59

59

Sigmund Freud, “Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten,” in Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion, Drei Abhandlungen (Amsterdam: Verlag Allert de Lange, 1939) 220–25.

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everywhere it repeats the initial act of division.” (3). Baudolino’s obsession with his second father figure is then a clue to this determination to dismiss his past experience and relegate it to history. The reason why he finds himself in an historical present (the sack of Constantinople, 1204) is to bring back the ghost of his godfather, the obsessive past, once and for all: “Ho ucciso un uomo. Era colui che quasi quindici anni fa aveva assassinato il mio padre adottivo, il migliore dei re, l’imperatore Federico.” “Ma Federico è annegato in Cilicia!” “Così tutti hanno creduto. Invece è stato assassinato” (28). “I killed a man. It was the man who almost fifteen years ago assassinated my adoptive father, the best of kings, the emperor Frederick.” “But Frederick drowned in Cilicia!” “So everyone believed. But he was assassinated.” (22) The man Baudolino is referring to is the Poet, one of his fellow-travellers, who was indicted for the emperor’s murder. The subsequent reconstruction of the mystery surrounding Frederick’s death exemplifies another “return of the repressed”. Appropriately enough, Chapter 25 remarks on this repetition in the title: “Baudolino sees Frederick die twice.” (305) (“Baudolino vede morire Federico due volte.” [312]). Until the epilogue of the novel Frederick is supposed to have been the victim of a plot and Baudolino has agreed to stage an accident to prevent any allegation that he killed his godfather. However, when Baudolino discusses this story with Niketas’ friend, Paphnutius, he discovers that Barbarossa did not die of suffocation, but from drowning: Baudolino had caused the death of his own father by throwing him, still unconscious, into the river; therefore, the Poet was innocent. The obsession with the historical past revives unnoticed details about the pícaro’s personality: his thwarted passion for the emperor’s wife may have secretly instigated the murder (516; 511–12). Nevertheless, Baudolino’s self-condemnation does not resemble the usual last minute repentance of some other famous picaresque ancestors – like that, for instance, of Guzmán de Alfarache.60 His devastating sense of remorse for the emperor’s death finally brings an historical past back to the present: the timely punishment for the protagonist is the actual loss of his manipulative powers over historiography. At this stage, what the readers already knew about the 60

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Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. S. Gili Gaya, 5 vols. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1972); English translation: The Rogue or the Life of Guzmán De Alfarache, trans. James Mabbe, 4 vols. (New York: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1924), vol. iv.

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end of Barbarossa from official reports – his drowning in the river Caleph61 – coincides with the version given in the narrative. To be true, the circumstances of Frederick’s death remain unclear: the Historia de Expeditione Frederici Imperatoris relates that the emperor was carried away by the currents of the Calycadmus River while swimming, in spite of the scriptures’ admonition, “‘Thou shalt not swim against the river’s current’[Eccles. 4:32].” The chronicler comments in a wry note: “He, who had often escaped great dangers, perished miserably.” Other sources speak of an accident that occurred to Frederick while he was crossing the river on his horse: he was carried away by the current and could not swim because of his heavy armour. To the reader, this return to the real, however controversial, is signalled by the rhetorical use of belated dramatic irony – mentioning the emperor’s “foolish”, “miserable” death, as opposed to any responsibility for it on Baudolino’s part. Olivier’s obsession, recurring over and over in his travelogue, is encrusted in the word ‘democracy’ and in a whole host of connections that are inevitably hard to reconcile: liberty, equality, aristocracy. The conflicts and contradictions between these isotopes are sketched in the following semiotic square, where Olivier’s stance on democracy implies equality as a social palliative leading to mediocrity and degenerating into the tyranny of public opinion. On the contrary, aristocracy is supposed to balance powers and protect individual liberties (Illustration 1.6; see also Chapter 4):

ARISTOCRACY (Olivier)

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY (Parrot)

DEMOCRACY (American institutions)

EQUALITY (Americans) Relation between contraries Relation between contradictories Relation of implication

Illustration 1.6 Greimas’ semiotic square applied to Parrot and Olivier

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Historia de Expeditione Frederici Imperatoris, [History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick], ed. A. Chroust, in Quellen zur Geschichte des Kreuzzügges Kaiser Frederichs i,

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In Democracy in America, Tocqueville explains the virtues and flaws of equality: “In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls.” (666). Later on, he bemoans that “the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be.” He has to admit, though, that “equality may be less elevated, but it is more just, and in its justice lies its greatness and beauty.” (678). However, the concept of aristocracy itself has been complicated by two combined circumstances: on the one hand nobility has become a caste, deprived of political power but invested with privileges based exclusively on blood and parentage, the most unbearable of which was tax exemption, which dated from the Middle Ages. The fast increase of the tax burden on the lower classes had fostered unanimous discontent in all ranks of the Third Estate, as Tocqueville maintains in his Ancien Régime. Louis xi had sanctioned the Act of Ennoblement which allowed rich middle-class citizens to purchase a title, meaning the legal title of nobleman was far from untouchable; quite the opposite, as Tocqueville points out. Both kings Louis xiv and Louis xv declared the abolition of the Ennoblement Acts and only allowed the parvenus to re-obtain their position after paying a price they had already paid several times. On the other hand, a new tax on non-nobles who had purchased lands from aristocracy was established in the fourteenth century, initially as una tantum, but in the eighteenth century it was regularly exacted every twenty years. This yoke on property would create a much wider divide between nobles and the middle class. At the same time, their positions as half caste did not enable the upper ranks to improve their standing. The main consequence of this onslaught against the nobility was the loss of its economic power and the insurgence of an aggressive bourgeoisie. The aristocracy Olivier would like to restore in his country is not the blood-tied caste of his parents, but the medieval, politically committed nobility, the same that Tocqueville still observed in contemporary England (Ancien Régime, 86 and 105). The ease with which the middle or lower class could attain property in America must definitely have fascinated Tocqueville. The ownership of a house is the lifetime pursuit of all Americans and settling migrants. To Olivier’s eyes, the American upper middle class is more mobile than those enriched, ennobled French landowners whose immense wealth will never help them refine their coarse manners.

mgh, ssrg new series, translated by James Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary History (Milwaukee, wi: Marquette up, 1962); see also the web site: http://www.fordham .edu/halsall/source/1190barbarossa.html) 164–66.

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To Tocqueville, rather, the dynamic and mutable oligarchy of middle-class entrepreneurs, which had peacefully taken over the political scene in America from the start, could not have succeeded in France, since he judged the tiers état as a money-driven, utterly unproductive imitation of aristocracy. In the following chapter the focal point will narrow from human history to social relations, with the portrait of the trickster as an isolated yet intrusive element in mainstream culture.

chapter 2

Alienation and Counter-culture Sono nato quarto di tre figli in una famiglia decorosamente malestante. Fin dove risale la mia memoria, l’omissione della mia persona fu concorde e completa.1

…

It may very well be that I’m not playing with a full deck. The cards won’t add up for me; the world won’t start making sense.2

∵ Foreword Everyday life is a maze of disconnected episodes that only on rare occasions happen to fit together reasonably, whereas novels are more likely to afford a consistent surrogate for reality. With this assumption in mind, in Romanzi, leggerli, scriverli,3 Cesare De Marchi defines fiction as a “movement of words”, an “analogical experience” (45), based on a first-hand perception of visual impressions through a language medium. It is not a reproduction of the real, but a parallel, utterly verbal reality. In other words, a novel looks more convincing than the so-called ‘real’. This chasm between the real and the feasibility of its artistic reproduction becomes a priority in defining modern poetics. In accordance with De Marchi, British avant-garde writer B.S. Johnson expresses doubts about literature as pure creative freedom: “Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from 1 2 3

1 Cesare De Marchi, Il talento (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1997) 9. “I was the fourth born of three children in a decently badly-off family. As far as my memories can reach, my person’s omission has been concordant and complete.” All translations of the quotes from this book are mine. I am thankful to Dr Brigid Maher and Dr Nicole Prunster for their assistance in the translation of these quotations and those from Aldo Busi in the next chapter. 2 Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) 37. 3 Cesare De Marchi, Romanzi, leggerli, scriverli (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2007).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_004

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life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.”4 Martin Amis iterates this point about the subjection of ‘reality’ to style and language: “I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it.” He lessens the impact of “mere psychological truth” in fiction, asserting that “I would sooner let the words prompt me, rather than what I am actually representing.”5 Lotman comments on the naive critic’s rejection of art as non-responsive to real life: he asserts that “unpredictability in art is simultaneously a cause and a consequence of unpredictability in life”,6 providing instances of how art itself can interfere with everyday existence. In the number of typical aspects of coherence in a novel, De Marchi mentions the salience and delineation of character, the well-developed parabola of the story towards its climax, the relevance of dramatised dialogues compared with household chatter. Most novels come to a conclusion, a resolution of events which is unattained in real life, or seldom achieved. Bearing this assumption in mind, the central issue is to situate picaresque narrative among the accounts of a fictional, flawless reality on the one hand, or as faulty chronicles of events, on the other. In fact, the picaresque seems more inclined to simulate the chaos of real life than the tidiness of fiction: characters are fundamentally shallow; the story, based on different stages of a journey, has more to do with the fragments of a routine than with classical literature; dialogues are idiosyncratic like most everyday conversation. Therefore, is the picaresque ‘bad’ literature trying to copy experience or ‘good’ mimesis in Aristotelian terms? Yuri Lotman aptly describes the interplay of these two slants: The semiotic nature of the artistic text is fundamentally dualistic: on the one hand, the text simulates reality, suggesting it has an existence independent of its author, to be a thing amongst the things of the real world. On the other, it constantly reminds us that it is someone’s creation and that it means something. This double interpretation leads to a game in the semantic field: “reality-fiction”. 4 5 6

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4 B.S. Johnson, Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973) 14, quoted in Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant, The Story of B.S. Johnson (New York: Continuum, 2005) 5. 5 John Haffenden, “Martin Amis,” in Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985) 16. 6 Juri M. Lotman, Culture and Explosion, ed. Marina Grishakova, trans. Wilma Clark (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009) 77. Regarding some Russian terms cited in this chapter and elsewhere, I have adopted the recent iso 9 1995 transliteration: ‘û’ for ‘ju’ or ‘yu’, ‘â’ for ‘ja’ or ‘ya’, ‘ŝ’ for ‘šč’, and ‘h’ for ‘ch’.

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The picaresque gropes with these two attitudes, the merely existential and the literary, the incoherence of everyday events and the exactness of a created world. This stance makes the picaresque a textual outsider, a stranger within the cultural and literary system of narration, affecting both the linguistic premises of the text and the set of values the pícaro represents in the story. The pícaros are strangers to society because they represent a counter-culture inside the bigger sphere of the ‘official’ culture. They are not outside culture – not an ‘Other’ in Levinas’ terms – even less a non-cultural entity, as the dominating civilisation would dismiss them. By way of their attempts to confront the social milieu,7 the pícaros play the double role of confirming mainstream culture while revealing its weaknesses and inequities. The phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels assumes that the delimitation of the self could not exist without the experience of the ‘stranger’ (der Fremde): “The ‘I’ is an Other because alienness begins in one’s own house.”8 Similarly, Lotman argues that “there can be no ‘us’ if there is no ‘them’, culture creates not only its own type of internal organization but also its own type of external ‘disorganization.’”9 Starting from different assumptions on the stranger, this chapter will define the extent to which the rogue protagonist imposes alienation on an unsympathetic society in two novels about typical outsiders: Time’s Arrow or The Nature of the Offence10 (1991) by Martin Amis and Cesare De Marchi’s Il talento (1997). These two works, dissimilar both in setting and subject-matter, have not typically been referred to as picaresque by reviewers,11 but they are pervaded by a genuine tragicomic picaresque vein. 7 8 9 10 11

7

8

9 10

11

This is the case of famous pícaros taming their reckless temper, and somehow homologating, or surrendering to society, such as Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, Jack Wilton or Roderick Random (the protagonist of the eponymous novel by Tobias Smollett). This search for a happy ending, though at times gimmicky, is in response to the influence of a literary ‘real’ on a mostly empirical narration. Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, translated from the German by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern up, 2011) 16. Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind, A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Introduction by Umberto Eco (London/New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1990) 142. Amis owes the subtitle of his novel to a quote by Primo Levi, debating the tragic legacy of the lager: “no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion” (Primo Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf [London: Sphere Books Ltd, Penguin Group: 1987] 188). Despite this, some of Amis’ novels have been considered as such: Richard Todd describes the post-mortem journey of Mary Lamb, the heroine of Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), as picaresque. See Richard Todd, “Looking-glass Worlds in Martin Amis’s Early Fiction: Reflectiveness, Mirror Narcissism, and Doubles,” in Gavin Keulks, ed., Martin Amis:

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Il talento tells the story of Carlo Marozzi: his undesired birth and omission from the family circle, a rather lackluster school career, failed relationships and a divorce. Carlo’s constant struggle to earn money forces him to work as a janitor in a well-regarded high school, while stealing complimentary copies of books from the teachers. At the same time, he tries his hand at snail farming with disastrous outcomes, supported by his unreliable friend Michele. He eventually finds a job as a proof-reader, but this new position does not spare him a few days in jail, with the allegation of picking – or simply picking up? – a wallet from a passer-by. The novel ends with the pícaro ringing a distracted emergency operator to ask for help after a comical suicide attempt. The none-too-edifying epilogue reveals the real meaning of the book’s title: the Italian term ‘talento’ does not only identify positive, innate skills, but it may as well have a derogatory connotation or a sarcastic overtone. The epigraph to the novel, taken from Dante’s Inferno (Canto v, 39), adds another archaic meaning of ‘talento’ as ‘sexual drive’, occasionally subjugating the rational mind: “… la ragion sommettono al talento.” (7) (“Subjecting reason to the rule of lust.”).12 In Time’s Arrow or The Nature of the Offence, the reader is gradually introduced to the roguish nature of the main character. The narrating voice, defined in the text as “passenger or parasite” (16) inside the hero’s body, or, according to Amis “the soul he never had”,13 tells the life of Odilo Unverdorben (German for ‘undecayed’, ‘unspoiled’), and his parallel identities, from the moment of his death backwards, adopting a sort of rewind technique. Accordingly, all actions are told in reverse, they become mirror reflections of themselves, generating a series of comic episodes while the arrow of time speeds backwards, from the early nineties, all the way to the Second World War, the Holocaust and its ominous warning signs. Odilo had been a doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp (the kz), participating in the Nazi medical policy of ethnic cleansing. The story presents the astounding scenario of an unsettling, topsy-turvy world, where Jews are rescued from the gas chambers and sent back home. While for 12 13

12 13

Postmodernism and Beyond (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 31. With reference to Money: A Suicide Note (1984) as a picaresque novel see Jamie McCulloch, “Creating the Rogue Hero: Literary Devices in the Picaresque Novels of Martin Amis, Richard Russo, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Steve Tesich,” in The International Fiction Review, Vol. 34, Nos. 1 & 2, January 2007. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1995) 78. From an interview with John Mullan at the Guardian Book Club, London, 23 January 2010, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2010/feb/01/book-club-martin -amis-times-arrow?intcmp=239.

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Odilo the culprit in this reversal of events is his search for a sense in history, the reader is left with the disturbing afterthought of what the real Holocaust was like in linear time. The book ends with a presumed new reversal of time back to normal: “I see an arrow fly – but wrongly. Point first” (173).

The Picaresque Counter-culture

The members of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics give a somewhat disputable definition of culture as “non-hereditary collective memory expressed in a definite system of prescriptions and prohibitions.”14 Common sense readily associates culture with ancient or modern artefacts, discoveries and inventions, historical data and figures, a complex of traditions and mores that have been transmitted unaltered through time. However, on looking closely, every single text-type – linguistic, iconic or gestural – is perpetually redefining its function among the other texts with which it interacts, but it is not evolving in any direction. Of course, such a position inevitably challenges consolidated traditions, from Giambattista Vico’s concept of a cyclic recurrence of phases of civilisation, to obsolete, yet ingrained socio-genetic theories which compare different levels of civilisation to different ages in human life – for instance in Norbert Elias. In fact, Lotman formulates the principle of an ever-changing historical/cultural sphere, where two kinds of alternatives are possible: either a gradual process or a so-called explosion, dictated by a ground-breaking, apparently irrational event (Culture and Explosion 114–22). The inspiring assumption that keeps this variegated system of texts moving is the creation of new information, an all-embracing view grounded on Vladimir Vernadsky’s theory of the biosphere as “the totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for the continuation of life”, where “a human being observed in nature and all living organisms and every living being is a function of the biosphere in its particular space-time.”15 Lotman forges the term ‘semiosphere’ to pinpoint the interdependence of different systems of signification inside a culture, including intentional or inadvertent messages, human and animal codes of communication, etc. The essential outcome of this concept is a dynamic 14 15

14

15

Yuri M. Lotman, Boris A. Uspensky, “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (Up to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” trans. by N.F.C. Owen, in The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Michigan: Ann Arbor, Michigan Slavic Contributions, No. 11, 1984) 3; my emphasis. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, Izbrannye sochineniya [Selected Works], vol. 5 (Moscow-Leningrad: lzdatelstvo Akademii Nauk ussr, 1960) 102, quoted in Lotman, Universe of the Mind 125.

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hierarchy, since every single element reflects itself and the bigger sphere of influence that surrounds it, to the point that each act reverberates its significance-ridden effects on the whole system. What Happens at the Boundary? Since the semiosphere is an agglomerate of texts – a “many-eyed Argus” ­(Universe of the Mind 133) – the centre is basically the most normative, descriptive area. In the centre, the primary modelling system (natural language) tries to define itself and is therefore more reluctant to change. A self-definition process took place, for instance, when local Florentine vernacular was adopted as the Italian literary language during the Renaissance (128). Likewise, Italian courtly epic in the sixteenth century arose from decaying chivalric lore, but then developed into a highly sophisticated form of poetry, with Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1522) building on its literary predecessors, dating back to the Orlando innamorato (pub. 1495) by Matteo Maria Boiardo and, earlier, to La chanson de Roland, and the matière de France. Even late satirical versions of epic texts, such as La secchia rapita (1622) [The Stolen Bucket] by Alessandro Tassoni, though farcical in tone, are acquainted with the original paradigm. On a general basis, self-description is at one and the same time a way of regulating a potentially unruly mechanism of signification and a hurdle in the natural progression of literary language. Moreover, at the semiotic boundary, where regulations tend to be less strict, the influence from other signifying realms becomes more invasive. The boundary is “a filtering membrane which so transforms foreign texts that they become part of the semiosphere’s internal semiotics while still retaining their own characteristics.” (137). Assuming the Renaissance epic to be the cultural centre, the boundaries allow for different ways of conveying new literary information, which range from carnivalesque, satirical, or obscene, to more insightful, mannerist lyric, along with forms of prose writing: exotic novellas, exempla (the lives of great personalities),16 sermons, and a distinctive mock-autobiographic narrative, the picaresque novel. The picaresque has carved out a niche at the boundary of official literature, though its status was unofficially established among the most variegated readership and social strata. Lazarillo de Tormes was popular among clergymen, students and soldiers, but also with the grand aristocracy. Further evidence of this appreciation from the court is the fact that Philip ii required a ­Lazarillo 16

16

The American scholar Thomas Hanrahan argues that the picaresque was the result of a reciprocal influence between epic poetry, pastoral eclogue and hagiographic, devotional literature: see Thomas Hanrahan, La mujer en la novela picaresca española (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1967) 57 ff. See also Chapter 4.

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de Tormes castigado, an expurgated version, in Madrid (1573), instead of simply banning the novel.17 This sense of belonging to the periphery in the literary status quo is consciously acquiesced to by the first writers of the picaresque, who often dodged any claim to authorship – Francisco de Quevedo disavowed El ­Buscón – and even denied being its author – as did also the author of ­Lazarillo.18 Only since the eighteenth century have humorous novelists such as Alain-René Lesage or Tobias Smollett openly acknowledged their literary debts to earlier picaresque models, especially to Guzmán de Alfarache.19 Once again, this is evidence of how cultural models change over time, how boundaries can dissolve into the centre. In the meantime, another phenomenon connected with cultural interchange determined the discovery of picaresque in Britain and all over Europe: Cervantism. In his works, Cervantes achieved a blending of epic, parody, mock-heroic and picaresque elements. While Aristotle and the classical, medieval tradition enclosed a literary genre within the limits of its consonance with a certain language or phrasing imposed by the subjectmatter, Cervantes attempted to transcend these limitations by dragging the sublime towards semiotic frontiers, and vice versa. Cervantes dealt with picaresque characters and situations extensively in his Don Quixote. Moreover, according to Juergen Hahn, the picaresque-like short novela of Rinconete and Cortadillo, presumably meant to be interpolated in Part 1 of Don Quixote, was excised by Cervantes because its purpose as ‘an effective anti-Lazarillo’ had been taken over by the recently published Guzmán, a work that “restored a self-consciousness of evil in the protagonist” and converted the irreverent style of “Lazarillo’s pride-full autobiography into a Church-approved process of confession.”20 Despite this change of plans, Cervantes’ innovation allowed for the 17 18 19 20

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Leonardo C. de Morelos, “Introduction” to The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities, trans. W.S. Merwin (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1962) 21–22: “For the first time the Spaniard saw his surroundings mirrored sharply, almost brutally. […] here the reader was confronted with himself and his society.” For the editorial fate of this purged edition see Felipe E. Ruan, “Market, Audience, and The Fortunes and Adversities of Lazarillo de Tormes castigado (1573),” Hispanic Review, University of Pennsylvania Press, Spring 2011, 189–211. A study by Mercedes Agulló y Cobo has recently attributed the novel to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, allegedly ending more than four hundred years of controversy: see Mercedes Agulló y Cobo, A vueltas con el autor del Lazarillo. Con el testamento e inventario de bienes de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Biblioteca Litterae 21. (Madrid: Calambur, 2010). In his preface to Roderick Random, Smollett quotes Cervantes, Lesage and the Spanish writers as models for his story. For the reappraisal of the picaresque novel in the eighteenth century, see Chapter 4. Juergen Hahn, “Rinconete y Cortadillo in Don Quijote: A Cervantine Reconstruction,” mln, Vol. 116, Number 2, March 2001 (Hispanic Issue) 232. It is relevant to highlight Cervantes’ eventual consideration of the picaresque as an imperfect literary genre.

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ennoblement of the picaresque tradition in the late seventeenth century and beyond. The rebirth of the picaresque in Britain is testified to by an increasing number of editions, adaptations and translations of picaresque novels,21 especially Guzmán, the first, by James Mabbe, in 1623, following the success of an early translation of Don Quixote, completed in 1620 by Thomas Shelton. The picaresque narrative seemed to have lost its appeal in Spain, drifting to the boundary of the semiosphere, but it resurfaced as a new source of inspiration in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German, French and British literature, thus also re-awakening a complementary interest in Cervantes and his works. What is therefore the place of the picaresque in the semiosphere nowadays: centre or periphery? Postmodernism, and twentieth-century literature in ­general, have always been fascinated by a more or less complacent depiction of the self’s brokenness, the loss of an existential compass. From this perspective, the picaresque exemplifies the crisis of modern man: pícaros, coming from the fringes of the cultural ‘centre’, where the authoritative ‘I’ is crumbling to pieces, tell their own story as central figures, using a self-satisfied ‘I’ that cannot claim to represent an entire regulated culture, but it certainly shows the attempt of an individual to master his/her own life. According to Levinas, this is the principle of heroism attained through solitude.22 Picaresque literature has hardly changed its role: from a fringe genre, to a peripheral literary mode in contemporary fiction. This time, however, the picaresque asserts its peripheral privilege: it has become conscious of its dangerous potential as picaresque ‘with a purpose’. An explanation of this ‘purpose’ will be attempted with regard to the dualism acting/improvising. But, first of all, some discussion should be devoted to the stranger as a trait d’union with the external cultural space. In Waldenfels’ words, “The alien is a limit phenomenon par excellence. It arrives from elsewhere, even when it appears in our own house and own world.” He infers that “[t]he expression ‘the alien’ is no less occasional than the expression ‘the ego.’” (8). 21 22

21

James Fitz-Maurice Kelly contends that most translations of Spanish picaresque texts into English were based on French adaptations, as Spanish was not a well-known language in Britain, at least until the eighteenth century. See James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, The Relations between Spanish and English Literature (Liverpool: up of Liverpool, 1910), quoted in Herman Oelsner, “Review”, The Modern Language Review, vol. 12, No. 1, Jan. 1917 109–12. Nevertheless, this helped the evolution of the picaresque in unexpected directions. 22 To Levinas, “everyday life, far from constituting a fall, and far from appearing as a betrayal with regard to our metaphysical destiny, emanates from our solitude and forms the very accomplishment of solitude and the infinitely serious attempt to respond to its profound unhappiness [malheur]. Everyday life is a preoccupation with salvation.” See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other [and additional essays], trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne up, 1987) 58; author’s italics.

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The Stranger, der Fremde, l’estraneo Waldenfels tackles the concept of alienation in relation to different languages: the German adjective fremd covers a wider semantic field than the English ‘strange’ ‘alien’, ‘foreign’ or the French étranger. Fremd entails three aspects of alienation: (a) place – a stranger is beyond the border of what is known; (b) possession – a stranger belongs to an alien dimension; (c) mode – a stranger is an unusual, unexpected, strange entity (71–72). The Italian term estraneo may involve attributes of both place and possession, but the ‘mode’ aspect is expressed more appropriately by the adjective strano (‘strange’). Besides, in Russian the adjective чужoй (čužoy) condenses the three semantic fields of fremd: ‘strange, alien and foreign’, while ‘Other’ in philosophical texts is rendered by the word Дpугoй (Drugoi), whereas in German it is translated with the adjectival noun der Andere.23 Waldenfels defines ‘place’ as the main requirement of the stranger (72)24 and, in this respect, the pícaro is restlessly migrating from one hostile environment into another. For instance, Carlo Marozzi, the hero of Il talento, follows his own instincts, but his constant failures force him to move from one location to another, both physically and symbolically. He is an ‘omitted’, an outcast within the family circle, and home is only a place to sleep, eat and watch television. Moreover, every time Carlo faces a major disappointment in life, he returns to his starting point, the house in via Tiraboschi, in a working-class Milan suburb, or he seeks the help of his sister. These homecomings do not really mean a search for familial relief; on the contrary, they mark the rock bottom in Carlo’s failures, a sort of self-inflicted punishment. The death of Carlo’s beloved brother Sandro, in Chapter 7, marks a break with the family in physical terms, but not in terms of the pícaro’s psychological subjection. He later has a sudden outburst of independence and moves to an apartment on his own; his mother, against all rules of stereotyped family cohesion, helps him sign the loan contract. Yet Carlo does not recreate a better household even when he starts an “almost conjugal existence” (“esistenza quasi coniugale” [93]) with Maria, a prototype 23 24

23 24

The Concise Oxford Russian Dictionary, edited by Colin Howlett (Oxford: Oxford up, 1996). The adjective fremd has been translated with ‘alien’ in some editions of Waldenfels’ essays and his Phenomenology. See, for instance: Bernhard Waldenfels, The Question of the Other (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007). To my mind, regardless of its technical/philosophical use, the word ‘alien’ complies with the idea of extraneousness and strangeness of the original German word, but it seems to keep too much distance from the idea of the ‘self’ to allow for the possibility of an ‘alien’ within our own consciousness. Therefore, I will adopt the general term ‘alienness’ (or ‘alienation’) to refer to the situation, but would rather use the term ‘stranger’ because it conveys the basic characteristic of ‘space’ more neutrally.

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of the caring housewife. Maria embodies two contrasting features: she is the object of Carlo’s “flustered and at times hasty effusions” (“concitate e talora frettolose effusioni” [97]), but, in keeping with the dominant culture in which Carlo tries to establish his position, she is not a “real woman” because of her strabismus. The obsession with Maria’s physical flaw – she is herself an outsider – along with financial discomfort, drive Carlo to make a fresh start and apply for a job as a janitor in a school. School has always represented another place of estrangement for Carlo: as a teenager, he cannot comply with the ceremonials of angry students making fake recriminations against the system. As an adult, he is confined to watching the flow of students coming and going from the building through the window of a guardroom (a “guardiola”): in both situations, he is relegated to the border of the intellectual centre. Meanwhile, money provides an alibi to end a makeshift family relationship: Carlo’s debts and fraud lead to his house being taken over by his wife’s parents and this appropriation eventually leads to the end of his marriage, while the title of ‘ex-husband’, hastily inflicted on him by his father-in-law, is enough to erase him from the family and reassert the patriarchal role of the senior to decide for the whole extended family: [Il padre di Alice:] “Domani tu dai lo sfratto al tuo… come vogliamo chiamarlo, ex marito?… e io passo dalle banche a regolare la faccenda.” Schiocchi di baci sulle guance, la squillante buonanotte! della bimba. Poi più niente, interi minuti, come se mi avessero lasciato solo in casa: solo e al fondo dell’umiliazione. (226; author’s italics) [Alice’s father]: ‘Tomorrow you will give notice to quit to your… what shall we call him, ex-husband? … and I will go and settle things with the banks.’ Smacks of kisses on the cheeks, the shrill good night of the little girl. Then nothing, whole minutes, as if they had left me alone in the house: alone and in the depths of humiliation. This human pilgrimage has a counterpoint in Carlo’s attempt to comply with the main culture, but always from behind the lines: he starts working as a copyholder, indeed a peripheral role in creative art, a second-hand reworking of a text – in the end he even has to compile captions for pornographic booklets! At the same time, he attends highbrow gatherings with the sole intent of pilfering some food, and, finally, his next intellectual effort is the whim to start narrating his “compendium of a not yet strangled life […] just to kill time.” (“compendio di una vita non ancora strozzata […] giusto per passare il tempo.” [269]), ­considering the act of writing as an “expedient against insanity.”

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(“ripiego per non impazzire.” [269]). The reader learns that Carlo, like his forerunner Guzmán,25 is writing his story from a prison cell because he had been unjustly (sic) accused and almost lynched by an enraged crowd for picking up a lost wallet that he describes as “swollen to the point of deformity.” (“gonfio fino alla deformità.” [270]). After fifty-one days in jail, another place of confinement for ‘irregulars’, Carlo’s story of dejection reaches its apogee: the very last episode in this progress towards estrangement is a grotesque suicide attempt, where the first aid operator cynically assures him that “no one dies that quickly.” (“Non si fa tanto presto a morire.” [282]). These endless migrations of the pícaro through variegated scenes of family or social life can be seen as a forced path towards a threefold target, the personal omission of the hero from the family, the social isolation in jail and the attempted self-omission of suicide, followed by the satisfied acceptance of his state of alienation. What is the nature of Odilo Unverdorben’s pilgrimage inside and outside physical and symbolic borders? First of all, the isolation of the picaresque narrator begins in his subconscious: ‘Odilo’ – in single inverted commas, to designate the narrating voice – is trapped inside his own body, he is unable to influence his behaviour – “I am impotent. I can make no waves.” (63). ‘Odilo’ is deprived of the will and power to change events, and only in the last forty pages of the story, during the experience of the lager and the early years in Germany, the two personas will reunite, until the inexorable final rebirth of the protagonist inaugurates a new beginning of the circle of life. The use of the parallel pronouns ‘I’ and ‘he’ alludes on the one hand to a distance between the morally chaotic but unchanging world of the flesh-and-blood character and his four namesakes, and the evolving conscience on the other, as in this example, presenting his first alias, Tod Friendly: “Tod Friendly. I have no access to his thoughts – but I am awash with his emotions. I am like a crocodile in the thick river of his feeling tone.” (15). In a further episode, ‘Odilo’ expresses his sense of confinement in an unheeded outcry about Tod’s girlfriend: “It’s one of those triangular things. I love her but she loves him and he loves no one.” (95). At times, the pronoun ‘we’ (or the phrase “Tod and I”, “John and I”, etc.) is used to encompass perceptions that belong to will and soul, not with the aim of creating an illusion of unity, but to stress the narrator’s arbitrariness in choosing aspects of his outer person that he likes and rejecting others that he dislikes, creating a humorous hotchpotch. In this passage, for instance, Tod is placing a 25

25

Lazarillo, on the other hand, has to submit his will to a higher spiritual authority, the archpriest, which actually deprives his marriage of any moral value, since the clergyman has a presumed liaison with his wife: a form of deprivation of personal freedom.

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large amount of money in the offering bowl in a church, but he is described as a stranger boldly stealing alms: Tod goes to church and everything. […] The forgiving look you get from everybody on the way in – Tod seems to need it, the social reassurance. We sit in lines and worship a corpse. But it’s clear what Tod’s after. Christ, he’s so shameless. He always takes a really big bill from the bowl (23; my emphasis). Here, the use of ‘we’ may suggest that the narrator is beyond religious belief, reducing the symbol of the cross to a simple physical object (a “corpse”). ­Alternatively, the use of ‘we’ encroaches a paradox when the narrator delves into his character’s intimacy (“Irene lies in our arms”, 63), or in the mysteries of rejuvenation: “Occasionally we get spare bits of our body back, from the trash. A tooth, a nail. Extra hair.” (36). In this reversed world, fire and trash become receptacles of memories, fragments of experience and actual creative resources, but devoid of any sacred or mysterious connotation. In one passage, ‘Odilo’ reflects on the ordinariness of creation: “Destruction – is difficult. Destruction is slow. Creation, as I said, is no trouble at all.” (26). Such a surprised, but not in the least disillusioned stance becomes ritual bewilderment when the same regressive description applies to the Auschwitz experience, as will be shown later. One instance in which the narrator deliberately dissociates himself from his aliases is in dreams: they work as bridges between emotions and imagination. In the reverse progress of things, ‘Odilo’ sees dreams as premonitory omens, avoiding any form of regretful hindsight of the pícaro’s own obsessions. According to the narrator, dreams are simply steps towards the knowledge of something he does not want to come to terms with, and this is the usual selfacquitting tone a pícaro adopts towards his own failures and weaknesses: “I’m always awake when the dreams happen. And I am innocent…” (54; italics by the author). Understanding the dream means getting to know some secrets, and knowledge, in the broad sense of the word, leads invariably to corruption. By neutralising the moral message concealed in dreams, ‘Odilo’ reduces them to impressions that “love to tease and poke fun at the truth” (136), even when his oneiric fantasies are contextualised in factual reality. Hence dreams are translated into more or less precise depictions of the real, they do not elicit any metadescriptive reflection – metadescription meaning a particular perspective on language as detached from its ‘object’ in Peirceian terms, as will be further illustrated. Tod Friendly and his other namesakes can be regarded as mouthpieces of conventional culture because, despite their bizarre conduct, they behave in the same absurd way as the rest of humankind: they drive ­without

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looking at their destination, they dribble drinks into empty glasses, they erase letters with their pens, they talk and read backwards, etc. Nevertheless, this conformity to strangeness does not prevent them from being perceived as misfits. For instance, in a dialogue between Tod and his fiancée the issue of Tod’s criminal past is even amplified by the reverse order of the discussion: [Irene:] “I’m going to call the New York Times.” “Irene,” he said, with a new heat in his voice. And a new heat all over his body. “I know you changed your name. How about that! I know you ran.” “You know nothing.” “I’m going to tell on you.” “Oh yes?” “You say it in the night. In your sleep.” “Irene.” “I know your secret.” “What is it?” “I want you to know something.” (28–29) The character’s isolation, emphasised even more forcefully by this back-tofront sequence, derives from the conflict within the self which the narrator, in his rationalising effort, completely misconceives. Contrasting with the paradox of isolation inside one’s self, the chapters where ‘Odilo’ speaks exclusively for himself, ruling out both ‘he’ and ‘we’ from his memoirs, are the only passages in the book where the narrator dismisses his sympathetic, unreliable rogue’s tone and aspires to fit into a time niche and a mainstream culture which he feels justified to defend. In his speculation about the significance of the stranger inside our perception of the world, Waldenfels specifies how the discovery of the self is a consequence of the encounter with the stranger: “Ownness arises when something withdraws from it, and exactly that which withdraws is what we experience as alien or heterogeneous.” (11). Rogues, always hesitating between the border and external experience, do not mar the self’s foundations; on the contrary, they confirm their presence. Lazarillo does not want to uproot the post-Tridentine creed; Parrot is not overthrowing the American value system. With a paroxysm of irreverence and outrage, they confirm the existence of the centre, but their radical impact on the self is subtler: the self has gained its identity, but should this identity be univocal? Are the terms of this identity indisputable? Waldenfels argues that “if the own is interwoven with the alien, this also means that the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves, or rather, it means that

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we are never entirely at home with ourselves.” (76). This inner cohabitation with the stranger is a key element shaping the trickster’s conduct and use of rhetorical tools. A major difference between ‘alienness’ and ‘otherness’ (as expressed by Emmanuel Levinas) consists in the fact that a stranger sheds light on the individual’s self-consciousness, while the Other as an entity outside the individual is the result of an acquired existential identity or, as Levinas puts it, when “the existent is master of existing” (Time and the Other 54). Waldenfels explains his point about the dichotomy stranger/other, stating that alienness, in contrast to otherness, exhibits an impregnable asymmetry […]. Whereas we can reverse the formula “A is not B” into “B is not A,” this does not hold for alien relations in the same way. Alien experiences exhibit a different shade that evades the differentiating language of pure identities and non-identities. (76) The principle of asymmetry between self and stranger also features prominently in Lotman’s considerations on the semiotic space of culture, as will be discussed later. A further remarkable view on the stranger is expressed by Jacques Derrida in “Cogito et histoire de la folie”.26 Derrida criticises Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique27 and its method of defining the separation (Foucault’s “decision”) between Reason and folly, and the segregation of folly as incompatible with Descartes’ rational mind (the “Cogito”). With a compelling analysis of Descartes’ First Meditation, Derrida infers that Descartes was not proposing the alienation of folly but, on the contrary, a complete surrender to the fallibility of both the sensory experience and the Cogito. From the position of the outsider, folly expands its dominance on thought; extravagance, for which Descartes appears to blame fools, is inexorably affecting all fields of knowledge: “ideas of neither sensory nor intellectual origin will be sheltered from this new phase of doubt, and everything that was previously set aside as insanity is now welcomed into the most essential interiority of thought.” (53). Folly is an outsider which nevertheless has a grasp on the rational mind: only language attempts to isolate the foolish thought and preserve it from natural doubt, but the crisis of the Cogito is always lurking; thus, God’s last word on infallible truth becomes the only solution to elude folly. The stranger unveils a new perspective on the self, while the fool’s voice reverberates inside the 26 27

26 27

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge Classics, 2001).

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rational mind. Conversely, the fool’s silence can only be partially filled by the rationalising disruption of language. From this perspective, Carlo and ‘Odilo’, along with most pícaros, constantly unmask this cover-up role of language by dismantling its purely formal features and criticising its infallible grip on reality. For instance, among many techniques of language exposure, they make use of hyperbole to exaggerate an occurrence that could be considered as certain or veritable per se in order to show the fallibility of our sensory perception of it; thus, even truth intuited by the senses may be undermined by folly. For example, in this passage from Time’s Arrow, the teller adopts synecdoche to describe the amphibious nature of doctors: “morally we are like the refrigerated tongue on the dentist’s chair, mouth open as wide as it ever goes to the instruments of pain, but speechless.” (84). Doctors are sedated against suffering; they accept pain with unreasonable indifference: the grotesque image of the tongue on a dentist’s chair demeans human beings, reducing them to their silenced speech organs. A similar choice of amplified details emerges in Carlo’s description of his disabled brother Sandro in Il talento: L’immobilità della sua anima non frenava l’inutile trasformazione del corpo: le sue cellule morivano e rinascevano, più languide, più lente, smagliando e afflosciando i tessuti, facendo invecchiare il bambino. (70) The immobility of his soul did not slow down the useless transformation of the body: his cells died and were re-born, more languid, slower, laddering and softening the tissues, ageing the child. Sandro’s cells become personified; they behave independently and beyond rational observation. The narrator tells us of the ageing of a child – itself a paradox – but the reader infers that Sandro was not a child at the time of the disease. From a culture-specific outlook, Lotman and Uspenky devote an essay to the ‘debased’ (изгoй: ‘izgoy’ in the original),28 another stage in the definition of

28

28

Jurij M. Lotman, Boris Uspenskij “Il ‘degradato (izgoj) e il ‘degradamento’ (izgojničestvo) come condizione socio-psicologica nella cultura russa precedente al regno di Pietro I. ‘Proprio’ e ‘altrui’ nella storia della cultura russa,” [The degraded and degradation as a socio-psychological condition in Russian culture preceding the reign of Peter I: ‘one’s own’ and ‘someone else’s’ in the history of Russian Culture] in La semiosfera. L’asimmetria e il dialogo nelle strutture pensanti, ed. Simonetta Salvestroni (Venezia: Marsilio, 1985) 165–80. I have translated some passages from this collection of essays from Italian into English whenever the English version was not available. For further clarity, I also give the original quote from the Italian source.

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the stranger type. The ‘izgoy’ is a renegade living at the margins of society both physically and symbolically. Nevertheless, this isolation does not prevent the stranger from affecting social conventions, arousing either contempt or fearful respect. In pre-Petrine Russia, you could suspect that in every stranger there may hide a wizard and treat him then with cautious respect, but you could also address a wizard or a shaman with mistrust, as though they were agents from hostile nearby peoples, even when they visibly belong to the community. (165–66)29 A case in point is represented by the baffling figure of the fool, the jester of Russian medieval lore, enacted by the юpoдивый (ûrodivy), the ‘fool for Christ’s sake’, an ambiguous figure of the beggar and prophet, usually a foreigner, a misfit, unsettling the natural and social order of things. By tradition, the foolbeggar becomes the only plebeian who could take the liberty of addressing a supreme state authority and flout social rules of conduct, as masterfully exemplified in Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1825), scene 19. Strangers can be messengers of evil or sanctity, or both according to the point of view of the judging culture but, in any case, they have privileged access to knowledge, either rational or supernatural.30 This is so with the picaresque antihero of Amis’s novel, a doctor. ‘Odilo’ is aware of the privileged social status enjoyed by doctors, he calls them ironically “soldiers of a sacred biology” (86),31 they 29 30 31

29

30

31

“In ogni estraneo si può sospettare che si nasconda uno stregone e trattarlo quindi con guardingo rispetto, ma si può anche rivolgersi allo stregone o allo sciamano con diffidenza come ad agenti di popolazioni vicine ostili, anche quando la loro appartenenza alla comunità è evidente.” Lotman, “Il degradato” 169: “The art of medicine, the most variegated skills, the ‘artistic talent’ connected with the initiation to knowledge, entail the acquisition of a secret. The man who has been initiated to a secret is considered ‘strange’ and dangerous.” [“L’arte della medicina, le abilità di vario tipo, ‘l’ingegnosità artistica’ legate all’iniziazione alla conoscenza, comportano l’acquisizione di un segreto. L’uomo iniziato ad un segreto è considerato ‘estraneo’ e pericoloso”]. This phrase is not accidental: “An influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the medical faculty of the University of Berlin [published in 1943] proposed that each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of the sick but was to become a ‘cultivator of the genes,’ a ‘physician to the Volk,’ and a ‘biological soldier.’” See Robert Jay Lifton in The Nazi Doctors. Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Macmillan 1986) 30, a work cited by Amis in the novel’s afterword. An extended commentary on the influence of Lifton’s book on Time’s Arrow can be found in an essay by Brian Finney, “Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and the Postmodern Sublime,” in Keulks (ed.) Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond 101–16.

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“wield the special power” (90), people look up to them as healers. On the other hand, in the world he experiences, doctors destroy rather than create; they seem to have attained respect out of their victim’s fears: You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll soon have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do? We stick a nail in it. Get the nail – a good rusty one – from the trash or wherever. (85) This painful initiation to the secrets and absurdities of knowledge cannot go unheeded: a stranger is bound to disseminate new, creative information in semiotic terms. In this light, the pícaros are ‘izgie’, debased, outcasts, because their destructive creativity within a given culture cannot be ignored: in particular, Carlo and ‘Odilo’, much like their picaresque predecessors, do not fit in a ‘normal’ society, but society itself does need them, in order to justify its own presumed normality. Table 2.1 recapitulates different views about strangers and how they intersect with the centres of individual or social consciousness:

Table 2.1

Three points of view on alienation

Author

Type of alienation

2nd Term of dialectic

Waldenfels

der Fremde (the stranger in terms of ‘space’) the fool

the Self, encapsulating the idea of the stranger within itself Descartes’ ‘Cogito’, which cannot deny the existence of folly

Derrida

Lotman and the ‘debased’ as Uspensky stranger, fool, outcast from society

Role of language

Significance of questions and the act of answering The word tries desperately to suppress folly and hide the crisis of the rational mind the leading collective the stranger uses an culture (hostility, fear, alien/foreign lanrespect) guage that discloses new frontiers of knowledge

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Mirror Symmetry and Alienation Lotman describes three distinct approaches to cultural interchange: symmetry, asymmetry and enantiomorphism (mirror symmetry).32 This terminology can be very useful to determine the nature of a pícaro’s alienation and its developments on the edge of the ruling culture. Symmetry is a process through which a semiotic code tries to translate another in its own terms, overlooking the peculiarities of the other. It is clearly a way of dismantling the other culture as irrelevant or scarcely informative. In Il talento, most episodes concerning Carlo’s family and their judgement of him reflect this symmetry. His family simply transfers the frustrations and clichés about a typical ‘bum’ onto the pícaro. On the other hand, the literary rogue tries to adjust ‘symmetrically’ to this stereotype, as shown in this passage involving a casual dialogue between mother and son: “Ciao mamma”, dissi io. “Ciao. Mi fa piacere vederti”, rispose con perfetta cortesia; e poi, come ricordandosi a un tratto, aggiunse: “Ma non sei al lavoro?” Sentii, a queste parole, riattizzarsi la vecchia fiamma del rancore ed ebbi l’impulso di affondare la mano nella cesta, afferrare il borsellino e scappare con quello come un ladro: anche se non dubitavo che lei sarebbe stata capace di andarmi a denunciare ai carabinieri. Ma già mi stava porgendo la mano e mi congedava, dopo il breve scambio di frasi impassibili, col sorriso della persona estranea. (113) “Hi mum”, I said. “Hi, I’m glad to see you”, she answered, with perfect politeness; then, as if suddenly recalling something to her mind, she added: “But you’re not at work?” At these words, I felt the old flame of resentment stirring and was tempted to dip my hand into her basket, grab her purse and run away with it like a thief: even though I did not doubt she would have been capable of reporting me to the police. But she was already holding out her hand and saying goodbye, after the short exchange of impassive sentences, with the smile of a stranger. Carlo’s mother smiles at him as if she were a stranger; she temporarily stoops to Carlo’s marginalized position to stress his rejection from the family circle:

32

32

Lotman, Juri, “On the semiosphere,” trans. Wilma Clark, Sign Systems Studies 33, 1 (2005) 205–26.

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s­ ymmetry here traces the boundary between two unreconciled outlooks on life. This is not a common feature in picaresque narratives because the trickster’s counter-culture does not usually tally with the official one. Only the surreal anti-picaresque section about the lager in Amis’s novel is based on symmetry: any form of cultural exchange is ruled because it is pre-judged as incapable of providing new information – it is what happens with ready-made opinions and stereotypes about foreigners. In the same way, the Babel of languages in the camp, far from helping cultural dialogue, actually reduces chances of communication to basic words and creates mistrust. The only unifying language, apart from that of physical violence, is German (“a funny language”; 134). Therefore, during the kz experience the narrator inserts common German words and their literal translation, along with a despicably euphemistic terminology used in the camp. As Primo Levi explains, “I did not realise, and I realised only much later, that the Lager’s German was a language apart: to say it precisely in ­German, it was Orts- und zeitgebunden, tied to the place and time.”33 In the following abstract, ‘Odilo’ wonders why patients – the prisoners in the kz – walk with their heads facing the sky: There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens – awaiting ­human form, and union… (131) From Odilo’s ritualised, mystical perspective, the Jewish prisoners lift their faces to look up to heaven while, as reported by Primo Levi in Se questo è un uomo, this posture was only a way of looking more upright and healthy in front of the medics selecting the unfit to be sent to the gas chambers. Once again, symmetry overlooks the tragedy of the interned fighting for survival. Asymmetry, on the other hand, states the discord between different codes. This process is based on the distinctive ways a system of signification refers to reality: for instance, two languages are asymmetrical when their words, referring to seemingly identical objects, describe, in fact, different aspects of ­reality. 33

33

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael J­ oseph, 1988) 75–76. In If This is a Man, Levi argues that “If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer” (129).

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For instance, the terms related to negritude or whiteness can be accepted, tolerated or ostracized to varying degrees in different language contexts and according to socio-political, ethnic or historical circumstances. Dialogue is prohibitive from the start and the possibility of a language filter to translate a text into another from the boundary to the nucleus of the semiosphere is partial. In a sardonic passage from Time’s Arrow, the narrator blames Tod, his outer persona, for reacting in disparate ways to the individuals he happens to encounter: Tod has a sensing mechanism that guides his responses to all identifiable subspecies. His feeling tone jolts into specialized attitudes and ­readinesses: one for Hispanics, one for Asians, one for Arabs, one for ­Amerindians, one for blacks, one for Jews. And he has a secondary repertoire of alerted hostility toward pimps, hookers, junkies, the insane, the clubfooted, the hare-lipped, the homosexual male, and the very old. (49–50; my emphasis) Tod’s attitude is dictated by a cluster of clichés undermining asymmetry: the  others do not mean the same to him but, in the end, they all obtain a similar hostile response. There can be no space to negotiate or reconcile differences. At the same time, ‘Odilo’s embarrassing classification “all identifiable ­subspecies,” does not really allow for a more sophisticated, unbiased view of the narrator on this issue. Asymmetry is quite unusual in both novels: in Il talento, for instance, Carlo realises how his concept of rebellion clashes with that of his schoolmates, who take umbrage about institutions as a kind of role play: Credetti di ritrovarmi nel mio elemento, ma subito mi fu chiaro che ogni somiglianza era illusoria. La nobiltà di forma, o per meglio dire la nobiltà di sostanza, dei miei compagni di classe si serbava intatta anche nella più aperta volgarità. (41) I thought I was in my element, but I realised at once that any resemblance was illusory. The nobility of form or, better said, the nobility of substance, of my schoolmates remained intact even in the most explicit rudeness. Carlo’s schoolmates retain their nobility of substance: since their words refer back to the referential circle of high society, they cannot possibly be accepted or tolerated as rebellious by the low-middle-class uncultured pícaro. In fact, asymmetry does not bring new information between centre and boundary of the semiosphere because the gap between the two interlocutors is too wide.

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Mirror symmetry, instead, is the essential vehicle of cultural dialogue for the pícaro/stranger. A significant step in the recognition of another culture is the separation between the self and the other. It is not yet a complete divergence, as with asymmetry, but it is the creation of a double, a mirror image, like two hands, two gloves, the two segments of dna, a sequence of palindromes, etc.: separately, they look the same, but although they can only be joined together, they are not identical. Mirror symmetry is a typical feature in Time’s Arrow, first of all because the text is centred on rewinding actions and events which can be visualised as mirror reflections of normal actions. The new information arises from the narrator’s struggle to channel the reflected image into a cause-effect frame of mind, so that causes become consequences, and vice versa; indeed, causation and the effort to make sense of apparently unrelated causes and effects is an essential point in the debate concerning the repercussions of Enlightenment scepticism on the picaresque. The process of rewriting events backwards implies a wide creative display of metadescription and arduous ambages. A mirror image is not a surrogate for the real object; in fact, the ambiguity of the mirror reflection has inspired the theme of the double in literature: an individual that Lotman describes as a “combination of features, which makes it possible to see their invariant foundation and shifts.” (Culture and Explosion 73). With reference to the mirror image, Lotman specifies that .

Every reflection is at one and same time a dislocation, a deformation which, on the one hand, emphasizes certain aspects of the object, and on the other hand shows up the structural principle of the language into whose space the given object is being projected. Universe of the mind 56

A clear example of this revealing role of the mirror is a passage in Time’s Arrow when ‘Odilo’ secretly gloats over his improved physical appearance as seen in a mirror: Every day, before the mirror, as I inspect Tod’s humanity – he shows no sign of noticing any improvement. It’s almost as if he has no point of comparison […] Why aren’t people happier about how great they’re feeling, relatively? (52) The mirror lays bare the essence of the outside world and acts as the only possible medium to unify a displaced conscience with its own appearance. In this case, though, any effort at identification is thwarted by the lack of any comparison, and the term ‘humanity’ comes to mean both the physical and

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the moral distance of this caricature Narcissus from the rest of humankind. In a subsequent episode, ‘Odilo’ sees his own much younger image reflected in the little mirrors on his bride’s wedding crown: in this case the mirror has the ­twofold ancestral function of trapping the self and keeping evil spirits away (161). A reflected image, however, cannot be a separate entity and either a conventional or an unconventional tool may be used to translate it. The idea of the mirror finds a conventional linguistic application in literal translations, which presume perfect equivalence in the referential role of different languages with respect to reality. A forced literal translation ends up neutralising the distance between two languages meant as identical mirror reflections of the object; it falls into the trap of symmetry.34 For example, the parallel use of German words in the Auschwitz chapters of Time’s Arrow seems to suggest a progression of the English-speaking narrator towards the German culture of origin. On second thought, though, the referential substratum of the two languages does not allow for continuity between them. For instance, when ‘Odilo’ reads a plate on a hospital window and translates it literally: “Arzt für Seelisches Leiden, say the placards in the ground-floor windows. Doctor for sick souls. Now that sounds like the kind of doctor I need.” (165; author’s emphasis). The German adjective seelisch in abstract terms relates to the concept of soul, but in this precise referential context, it is part of a commonplace euphemistic phrase to identify the psychiatric division. There is no poetry or introspection involved. Moreover, if we think of the consequences a psychiatric patient could eventually suffer in Third Reich, pre-Aktion-T4 euthanasia programme Germany, the literal translation “sick souls” is painfully out of context.

Mythological and Metadescriptive Consciousness

Peirce’s categories of sign, object and interpretant – referred to in Chapter 1 – can be extended from the purely linguistic to include a wider cultural spectrum. Starting from this assumption, Lotman and Uspensky define two ways of describing the world: as a text or as a non-text. If the world is conceived as a text, it must encapsulate a meaning that has to be deciphered. On the other hand, if the world is not a text, it does not have a pre-cultural meaning; therefore “to contextualise into a culture” means to confer the structures of culture 34

34

This is what happens, from a neurological viewpoint, in the brain’s left hemisphere: language detaches itself from the external, non-linguistic domain. In the right hemisphere, on the other hand, language is strongly rooted in the real. See Jurij Lotman, “L’asimmetria e il dialogo,” in La semiosfera 91–110.

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to the world. This was Kant’s concept of the relationship between thought and reality.35 Identifying culture as a text means to establish a strict referential link with the world of objects and phenomena, claiming the supremacy of meaning as a criterion for the cultural system. This approach establishes a complete biunique correlation between language and the encyclopaedia. The encyclopaedia is, to Umberto Eco, the spectrum of interconnected subunits in which a sign content can be decomposed, according to several criteria, a sort of “medieval ‘speculum mundi’” in which any attempt at scientific formalization is destined to fail.36 Hence, things are labelled and named once and for all, while meanings are predetermined by their own references to the world. On the other hand, the world is a non-text when its significance is independent, or deviates from a language structure. As a result, language can only apply its rules to give a limited, blurred vision of the world: this attitude towards culture acknowledges the importance of the content and the outright arbitrary choice of language to transpose the ‘here and now’ inside a cultural setting. The text-oriented view of the world centres on formal aspects like expression, nominalisation – names are tagged onto things –, ritualised actions, while a non-text oriented perspective is based on content (semantics, symbols), ­synonyms – the refusal of a unique labelling – and arbitrary, conventional behaviour. Significantly, Lotman offers a practical example by comparing semiosis in the Middle Ages and during the Enlightenment: while the former always kept in mind the connection, the motivation between sign and meaning, justified by a divine order, the latter has discovered the arbitrariness of this connection, its “lack of motivation”. Thus, “in the medieval system the word was conceived of as an icon, as an image of the content; in the age of the Enlightenment, pictorial representations appear conventional”: a similarity intervenes between the medieval code of signification and the idea of the world as a text, and between the Enlightenment and the concept of the world as a non-text.37 In a passage from De Marchi’s novel La furia del mondo (2006; The Fury of the World), Abel, an exceptionally talented, though neglected young poet, realizes at an early age how things become real only when they are assigned a name. The same happens with self-affirmation and confidence: 35 36 37

35

36

37

Jurij M. Lotman, Boris A. Uspenskij “Introduzione,” Tipologia della cultura, a cura di Remo Faccani e Marzio Marzaduri (Milano: Bompiani, 1975) 33–34. My translation from the Italian version. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington and London: Indiana up, 1976) 113. See also: Umberto Eco, “Testo e enciclopedia,” Lector in Fabula (Milano: Bompiani, 1979) 13–26. Juri M. Lotman, “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, trans. Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins up, 1977) 220.

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Dunque lui era Abel e Abel era lui; il nodo di suoni con cui si era sempre sentito chiamare, si scioglieva in un nome; e questo andava a raggiungere tutti gli altri nomi che gli crescevano dentro togliendo dall’ombra imma­ gini e sensazioni, cose e persone; era tanta la soddisfazione di avere e di essere un nome, che cominciò a farne il soggetto necessario di ogni frase: Abel aveva fame, Abel aveva sonno; non solo: Abel aveva visto tramontare il sole e decretava la notte. […] i nomi facevano chiaro; niente sfuggiva ad essi, ogni cosa aveva un nome, e finché non l’aveva non era davvero sé stessa.38 Well, then, he was Abel and Abel was him; the knot of sounds that people called him by, had unravelled in a name; and this added up to all the other names that were growing inside of him, unveiling images and sensations, things and people; such was the excitement of having and being a name, that he started making the necessary subject of each sentence out of it: Abel was hungry, Abel was sleepy; not just that: Abel had seen the sun go down and decreed the nightfall. […] names made things clear; nothing escaped them, everything had a name, and until it did have one, it was not really itself. For the poet and his beliefs, names are a safeguard in that they ensure a stable correlation between the outside world and its verbal expression. Later on in the story, as soon as Abel experiences the variety of language and the insidious beauty of poetry, he infers that words are not always a justification for things, but inscrutable mysteries, as in the passage where he discovers Dante’s Commedia: Gli sembrava di scendere dentro un abisso di pietra, i versi che lo rompevano per aprire il passaggio avevano il suono e la durezza della roccia. Ma a tratti, benché aiutandosi col commento latino capisse il senso delle parole, benché intuisse la veemenza delle immagini, sentiva che qualcosa gli sfuggiva ancora… Non era stato così con gli altri poeti italiani, anche con Tasso, mai avuto questo sgomento di non toccare il fondo delle parole che leggeva, come se ognuna di queste avesse una sostanza più ampia e sconosciuta, della quale lui vedeva solo affiorare la cima senza il grande corpo sommerso. (318; my emphasis) 38

38

Cesare De Marchi, La furia del mondo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2006) 22; my emphasis.

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He seemed to be sinking into an abyss made of stone, the lines of poetry that broke it, opening a rift, had the sound and hardness of a rock. But at times, although the Latin commentary helped him understand the meaning of the words, although he grasped the vehemence of the images, he felt that something was missing… It had not been the same with other Italian poets, even with Tasso, he had never felt such dismay at being unable to touch the bottom of the words he was reading, as if each of them was made of greater and uncannier stuff, where only the summit was emerging, while the great body was still submerged. The first passage conveys a text-oriented view of the world, the second passage belies a non-text oriented perspective, represents a sort of existential peak in the hero’s self-discovery and moral growth. Lotman and Uspensky oppose a mythological and a descriptive consciousness as a projection of text- and nontext-oriented cultures in anthropological terms. These two tendencies for signifying the world usually interact within a culture, but one of them could impose its criteria on the other. Mythological consciousness is based on the principle of nominalisation: phenomena have a reason as long as they are named, establishing an isomorphism, a bilateral correlation between objects and their proper names. Mythological consciousness reduces language to a monolingual code where identification and analogy are the only possible forms of comparison between language and reality. Just as a proper name does not withhold any attributions of the person or animal it is assigned to, so is this perspective on language completely justified by the presence of a reference point in reality that expresses an archetype. Language is enclosed in its own correspondence with reality and is therefore more reluctant to change: Lotman and Uspensky describe this self-contained creative act as an “alternative to thinking in signs,” while “the very act of naming is identical to the act of cognition” (Soviet Semiotics 242). To Roman Jakobson, proper names are tightly associated with their language code: there are no external attributions that may motivate the choice of a proper name; hence, for example, “the appellative pup means a young dog, mongrel means a dog of mixed breed, hound is a dog used in hunting, while Fido means nothing more than a dog whose name is Fido.”39 From another point of view, Uspensky underlines how proper names in Russian history represented a 39

39

Roman Jakobson, On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard up, 1990) 387. Eco argues that “proper names of unknown persons are sign-vehicles with an open denotation and can be decoded as one would decode an abstruse scientific term that one has never heard of, but that certainly must correspond to something precise” (A Theory of Semiotics 88).

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signifying brand of social distinction, and they sometimes had to be changed to comply with a different stance in society: each person had two appellatives, the ‘Christian name’ and the ‘civil name’: “In theory this ­opposition may have been intended as the juxtaposition between the given name (by God), and the consciously chosen one, according to some typical features of a person.”40 The ‘given’ name belongs to a mythological view of language as a simple label imposed on the person, while the ‘chosen’ name has a strong conventional basis, therefore it rests on metalinguistic awareness. Names “usually denominate, but they do not signify.” However, “they can accumulate remarkable meanings, determined, on the speakers’ side, by their relationship with the specific denominative tradition occurring in a given social reality.” (85). Moreover, if semantic movement in natural language bears a character of gradual development and internal semantic displacements, then “the language of proper names” moves as a chain of conscious, rarely isolated acts of naming and renaming. A new name corresponds to a new situation. “Myth – Name – Culture” 242

Historically, absolutism applies this sort of mythological outlook as a weapon to undermine freedom of choice by imposing a predetermined bundle of knowledge and renaming what was already established, e.g. Hitler’s propaganda, Stalin’s obsession with acronyms, Frederick’s renaming of Alessandria, etc. With respect to rebellion through language, the picaresque narrator does battle with the static world of myth, to reinstate the right to supplant ­homonyms with synonyms. In fact, while homonyms tend to match objects to a single identifying sign, synonyms give multiple perspectives on an object, allowing for constant, unrestrained shifts of meaning. As a matter of fact, a feature of descriptive-metalinguistic consciousness is the use of synonymy: language and the cultural system it describes are always changing, words are unreliable, yet knowledge is not hidden in objects, but in the words describing them. The following table subdivides mythological and metadescriptive consciousness into some of its components: 40

40

Boris Uspensky, Linguistica, semiotica, storia della cultura (Bologna: Società Editrice il Mulino, 1996) 77, 85; original emphasis. My translation from the Italian version: “In teoria tale opposizione poteva essere intesa come la contrapposizione tra il nome ricevuto (da Dio), e quello coscientemente scelto, in conformità con qualche tratto caratteristico della persona. […] in generale sono chiamati a denominare, ma non a significare. […] possono […] caricarsi di un notevole significato, determinato, per chi li recepisce, dal loro rapporto con la specifica tradizione di denominazione, corrente in una data realtà sociale.”

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Table 2.2 Mythological and metadescriptive consciousness

Mythological consciousness

Metadescriptive consciousness

Bilateral correlation between sign and object Nominalisation: proper names and homonymy Emblem as an entity that “cannot take a cluster of meanings […] it is identical to itself”41 (monosemy)

Conventional, arbitrary correlation between sign and object Synonyms: common nouns, nicknames Symbol: “The new sense arises here from the most subtle changes in the shades of meaning” (Grigor’eva 91–92) (polysemy) Translation (strange world) Adult language Picaresque counter-culture.

Identification (familiar world) Child language Dominant culture within the picaresque.

The following section will show how the pícaro uses euphemisms, circumlocutions, hyperbole and intra-linguistic translations of a synonym. The favourite practice of a metadescriptive culture is translation, meant as an imperfect, distorted identification between words or texts. Synonyms are not created ex novo, they are rooted in the conventionality of the language code. For instance, a conventional nickname brings much more semiotic information than a proper name: once again, the nickname is a typical denomination of a pícaro – usually a self-inflicted one – and, in semic terms, it marks a rebellion against whatever mythology the ‘given’ name condenses. Homonyms/Synonyms Semantic equivalence between terms belonging to similar semantic areas is practically unattainable, since differences of context, register or use do not allow for a perfect substitution of words within the same language, no less than 41

41

E.G. Grigor’eva, “Emblema e fenomeni contigui,” in Galassi, Romeo and De Michiel, Margherita (eds.), Il simbolo e lo specchio. Scritti della scuola semiotica di Mosca-Tartu ­(Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997) 91–92. I could not find an English version of this source; my translation of a few terms is from the Italian edition.

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they do in the case of a foreign language.42 With reference to synonyms, Ferdinand de Saussure points out that words with similar meanings define one another through their reciprocal semantic limits, given by the communicative context. For instance, the word ‘table’ can be translated, among the possible meanings available, with the Italian words ‘tavola’ or ‘tavolo’. Although they are almost homophonic, they support substantial differences in context: ‘sedersi a tavola’ (‘sit at a table’) evokes the idea of having a meal, while ‘sedersi ad un tavolo’ (‘sit at a round table’) usually refers to the act of discussing an issue or taking a decision. Synonyms create an illusion of lexical overabundance, which can be viewed both as evidence of variety in language, and as the lack of a precise corresponding definition of a term with another term or paraphrase, creating the illusion of a ‘metalanguage’. The pícaro’s perspective on language as a secondary modelling system of a marginalised culture abounds with synonyms, not simply for the sake of playing with words, but as a way of detracting from the certainties of a codified terminology. By extending the number of synonyms of a common noun, the roguish narrators do not explain the original noun any better; on the contrary, they enrich and destabilise the purely informative purpose of communication. For instance, the more nicknames speakers attach to a person, the less universally recognisable this person will appear and his/her identity will blur into a multifaceted whole. In Time’s Arrow, for instance, proper names are not chosen by the trickster, they are casually ­conferred by an outside agent – a forger and two priests, the latter enacting two farce-like baptisms – in order to conceal his real uncomfortable identity. They may imply either a second meaning, like “Tod Friendly”, recalling the German word “Tod”, “death”, or an exotic, hardly convincing “Hamilton de Souza”, which however suits the purpose of hiding in a secluded village in Portugal with many other refugees, a “crowd [that] must churn with pseudonyms, with noms de guerre” (110). The narrator’s attitude to these ever-changing personal labels is of amused acceptance, without any inkling of the serious implications behind them: “We’ve been through three names already. We seem to be able to handle it. Some people, though – you can see it in their faces – some people have no names at all” (110). Here the pícaro consigns the plurality of his names indicating the same ‘object’ – as synonyms of himself – to the undesirable fate of the anonymous, the nameless, those people who do not even 42

Saussure argues that “within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter ‘dread’, craindre ‘fear’, and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors” (Saussure 116).

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have a face or an identity. This is exactly the destabilising role a pícaro plays in terms of language and, to a greater extent, in the realm of signification. Some examples, taken from both the novels that are the focus of this chapter, will illustrate how synonyms disrupt the fragile self-assured balance of homonymy that seems to rule the antagonist, dominant society which Carlo and ‘Odilo’ struggle to repudiate. The types of synonyms that will be taken into consideration are circumlocution, euphemism, synecdoche, the dualism acting vs. improvising, and rhetorical questions. Circumlocution Circumlocution or periphrasis is the most extended and subversive form of synonymy. In Time’s Arrow, the observation of the mainstream culture from a ‘back in time’ perspective forces the narrator to exploit all his imaginative resources in order to make ends meet as logically as possible. This effort accounts for the flexibility of the written word as a convention, rather than on its mythological features. A fitting example of this newly devised language is the humorous description of the taxis in New York: This business with the yellow cabs, it surely looks like an unimprovable deal. They’re always there when you need one, even in the rain or when the theatres are closing. They pay you up front, no questions asked. They always know where you’re going. They’re great. No wonder we stand there, for hours on end, waving goodbye, or saluting – saluting this fine service. The streets are full of people with their arms raised, drenched and weary, thanking the yellow cabs. Just the one hitch: they’re always taking me places where I don’t want to go. (74) In such a subverted, yet plausible description, actions in reverse take a different designation from their corresponding normal course: They’re always there          vs. They always take you to your destination Theatres are closing          vs. Theatres are opening They pay you up front        vs. You pay them We stand there waving goodbye vs. We stand there waiting …thanking the yellow cabs    vs. … calling for the yellow cabs They go to unwanted places    vs. They are coming from somewhere Periphrases are in fact not just remarks that create an opposition to the real course of an action; they mostly restructure actions, and give them unexpected meanings, trying to neutralise contradiction. The alienation of the character

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lies essentially in his stubborn resistance to surrender to this upside-down culture. In spite of this, not all these endeavours to rationalise things in terms of language prove successful; in the following examples, something does not really work out: Intellectually I can just about accept that violence is salutary, that violence is good. But I can find nothing in me that assents to its ugliness. […] A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade: anything like that made me flinch and veer. (34) The women at the crisis centres and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis centre is not called a crisis centre for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them. (39) One is hard pressed to consent rationally to the healing power of violence but, by way of contrast, ‘Odilo’ insists on the frequency of these acts of mercy – in fact, deplorable acts of violence against women – and their objective occurrence. In this satirical reversal of values, in which violence has the power to put things in order and efface any moral restraint, Amis’s novel has been closely compared with Jonathan Swift’s famous pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729), where the Irish writer promotes the need to feed on poor children to overcome pauperism.43 Another instance of an unsettling turn of phrase is the violation of natural laws: “Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. But that’s all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet” (51). Fire as a creative element can be acceptable almost exclusively from a mystic-religious stance as a regenerating 42

43

“A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends, and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will make a reasonable Dish, and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.” See Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, in Satires and Personal Writings (London: London up, 1965) 24. For the comparison between Amis and Swift see James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004) 134. Another book by Amis, Dead Babies (1975), whose title is suggestive of the Proposal, bears similarities with Swift’s satire, as contended in Nicolas Tredell (ed.), The Fiction of Martin Amis (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 32.

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medium, but not in rational terms, as ‘Odilo’ presents it. As a matter of fact, circumlocutions taking for granted these violations of a natural status cannot be explained by the reader’s common sense. Therefore, they degenerate into paradox. In this context, Waldenfels draws an interesting distinction between two aspects of a paradox: Paradoxes are, literally, opinions that conflict with the prevailing opinion (παρά δόξαν). Like all “para” – cases (compare parasite, paraphysics, paralogism, parapsychology), paradoxes presume a normal state of things. But as long as paradoxes only deviate from the prevailing opinions, they can be defended against any kind of opposition. Things are different when an assumption conflicts with its own preconditions, making one assumption stronger at the expense of the other and vice versa. In order to prevent assumptions from failing, it is often attempted to downplay paradoxes, as is the case with the famous paradox of the lying Cretan. (14) According to this view, the sentence “fire creates”, intended literally, is a paradox, since experience has it that “fire destroys”. However, if compared with a weaker assumption like “fire is not always creative”, the possibility of a hidden truth sustaining the paradox tends to become more plausible. The reader, on the other hand, is lured into giving more credit to the paradox itself. This is what happens when ‘Odilo’ tries to sell the Holocaust as a weak paradox: “Auschwitz was a secret. It covered fourteen thousand acres, and it was invisible. It was there, and it wasn’t there. It was outside. So how can you follow it?” (147). ‘Odilo’s reference to the “outside” as an unidentified dimension (in space? of the soul? in history?) corrodes the certainties behind paradox, so that even Auschwitz as an historical fact can be tainted with scepticism. Here, the narrator hints at one of the most controversial issues about the Holocaust: to what extent was the German population aware of the concentration camps? This is one of the most appalling dilemmas Primo Levi tries to clarify in his “Afterword” to If This is a Man: in spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. […] In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. (386) In The Drowned and the Saved Levi warns the reader against forgetfulness as a causeway to self-justification: “The further events fade into the past, the more the construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected.” (14).

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In a more light-hearted passage from Il talento, Carlo describes a collision of personalities and styles: mi sentii apostrofare con una indignazione e una libertà lessicale che fino a quel punto della mia vita mi erano state risparmiate: “Di’ un po’, ma tu sei stronzo o lo fai?” (163) I was addressed with a kind of indignation and lexical freedom that I had, until that time in my life, been spared: “Tell me, are you actually a turd or are you just acting like one?” Carlo is a champion of formal language, hiding the humiliation of abuse behind the screen of an ornate prose. In cultural terms, Carlo states his position of odd-man-out compared with his soon-to-be wife Alice, a mouthpiece for the leading money-conscious culture. Circumlocution aptly conveys diverging views of the world, along with a strong ironic purpose on the part of the narrator. But, most of all, circumlocution in picaresque texts shows how the situation of a verbal skirmish loses its reference points when enclosed within the pattern of behaviour of an arguing couple: in fact, the mocking tone of Carlo’s convoluted language not only belies his own supposed innocence, but it actually allows for the benefit of doubt about Carlo’s real astonishment at the swear word. A similar kind of wrangle takes place between Tod and his lovers: ‘Odilo’ reports the dialogue in reverse but he ends up saying, ironically: “I  have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked – and still get no further forward.” (60). In this shocking world, even a curse will not obtain the effects one would hope. Alice’s allusion to the contrast between acting and being nasty betrays the principle of ritual denomination, typical of a mythological consciousness. Insults from Alice are like labels put unequivocally on Carlo, they are not synonyms because they do not admit any polysemy, they are appellatives with no right of reply. She defines Carlo as a “cerebral have-not”, or precisely “haveless” (“meno abbiente cerebrale” [163]), which, in itself may sound like a funny rambling of words, but is simply the echo of Carlo’s snobbish schoolmates, who defined pinball as a game for mentally disabled people (44). Here, the logic of money (“meno abbiente”) as a social brand in the dominant culture overlaps with a completely unrelated aspect of the human being: mental faculties. A similar juxtaposition can be found in the expression “moral paralytic” (“paralitico morale” [272]), used by Angelo, Carlo’s fellow prisoner to describe his mate’s unawareness of what happens around him (272). Insults in Il talento are therefore emblems that converge on the same prejudice: money as

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­discriminator of a social status. Alice pokes fun at Carlo’s former partner because, as mentioned before, she is cross-eyed and, worst of all, she clearly has no money to buy sunglasses to cover her eyes (164). Picaresque strangers are generally money-conscious, even ambitious, but the social implications of wealth are beyond their reach: for instance, Baudolino has become a powerful ‘Ministeriale’ at Frederick’s court, but his social stance is unchanged; by virtue of that, he can deal with any sort of people on equal terms. The same can be observed for Carlo or ‘Odilo’ and, in the latter, frustrations about the way money is misused keep simmering throughout. For instance, when he expresses his disappointment at the way people pay one another for work that, conversely, should not be remunerated: “I don’t understand. At the hospital we reward our victims with money. I pay the hospital. Irene pays me. I don’t get it. Are we all slaves? Are we somehow less than slaves?” (102). Only in a further passage ‘Odilo’ finds a moral justification for wealth when he bestows gold on his riotous Jewish patients: “Most of the gold we used, of course, came direct from the Reichsbank. […] I knew my gold had a sacred efficacy. All those years I amassed it, and polished it with my mind: for the Jew’s teeth.” (130; author’s italics). In another episode from Il talento, rude language used by Carlo’s schoolmates is naively judged as a way of defying oppressive teachers and contesting the education system but, as an afterthought, the pícaro discovers that this verbal intemperance is simply poised, ritualised behaviour. He depicts the farce with the redundant accuracy of circumlocution: sotto il coperchio di quella lingua limpida e lontana dalla vita, che isolava nella luce le comunicazioni ufficiali della scuola e che tanto mi aveva colpito, bolliva per tutto l’edificio, dall’atrio ai corridoi, dalle aule ai gabinetti, il più denso turpiloquio (41). Under the lid of that clear, far-fetched language, which radiated from the school’s official communications and had impressed me so much, there brewed all over the building, from the hall to the corridors, from the classrooms to the toilets, the most dense obscene language. Significantly, while in Il talento circumlocution usually makes sense as a linguistic turn of phrase uncovering the inconsistencies of the referential world, in Time’s Arrow circumlocution degenerates into paradox and undermines the logical assumptions behind it. Euphemism Euphemism is a periphrasis cloaking unpleasant, sexually allusive, offensive phrases in a more decent, respectful language. Nonetheless, this language

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camouflage is anything but neutral or impersonal: the more covert the actual meaning appears, the more outrageous and disturbing the outcome. Readers of the picaresque are accustomed to freewheeling derogatory terms or prurient situations, but, in line with the role of the narrator as an unusual filter of information, euphemism is a much more common and effective tool. Instead of dealing with sexual euphemisms in the two novels, other strategies of concealing the unspeakable need be discussed. For instance, in this passage from Il talento the subject of disability is described in an unmediated way: [Maria:] “L’ho visto spesso, seduto sulla panchina… in compagnia di un uomo, non so come dire… un po’ strano. Lei non guardava mai dove ero io…” [Carlo:] “Quell’uomo è mio fratello.” E dopo un attimo d’indecisione aggiunsi: “Non è strano: è mongoloide.”(85) [Maria:] “I have seen you often, sitting on the bench… beside, how can I say… a rather strange man. You never looked where I was… […]” [Carlo:] “That man is my brother.” And after a moment of hesitation, I added: “He is not strange. He is mongoloid.” While Maria uses a hypernym44 – a comprehensive term, such as ‘tree’ for ‘oak’ or ‘flower’ for ‘daisy’ – as a euphemism for Sandro’s unusual ­appearance (“strange”), Carlo corrects her with a more appropriate adjective ­(“mongoloid”), a hyponym, namely a more specific term inside the wider semantic field describing “strangeness”. Through reversal, the picaresque outsider sees “strangeness” as the unpleasantly hypocritical word, while “mongoloid” becomes its euphemism and, at the same time, a way of setting his own condition of deranged apart from that of his unknowing brother: chi era Sandro? Che cosa significava la sua morte? Un deficiente di meno al mondo: e il mondo continuava, anzi si perfezionava, si liberava di una macchia. Io invece al mondo ci restavo […]: non ero superfluo, io, no! la vegetazione del mio lustro sacco di carne rallegrava la creazione. (102) Who was Sandro? What did his death mean? One idiot less in the world: and the world went on, actually it improved, it got rid of a stain. I, instead, was still in the world […]: I wasn’t superfluous, not I! Creation rejoiced at the vegetation of my lurid bag of flesh. 43

44

Maurizio Dardano and Pietro Trifone, La nuova grammatica della lingua italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1997) 701.

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The term “deficiente” or, earlier in the text, “hybrid” person (17), instead of being the unpleasant word that a reader is expected to condemn as disrespectful, denotes an actual euphemistic term because it hides a more desperate, unresolved condition, the condition of the stranger, the “omitted”, without any further attribution. Being a non-entity becomes the real curse of the alienated anti-hero. This kind of inverted euphemism can be found in Amis’s narrative too: for instance, when the narrator describes the act of defecating in reverse: Corporeal life is not without its minor indignities. We still take it in the ass every morning, along with everybody else – but the whole thing’s over in a trice these days. Tod, I salute you: what bowl know-how, what can can-do. I was more or less resigned to a lifetime of the tearful half hour. But now we’re out of there after a tearful twenty minutes. (52) ‘Odilo’ is evidently unprepared to give an account of his “corporeal life” using the stereotyped expressions a speaker could usually apply to indecent matters. He has to provide other intra-textual, purely linguistic devices to describe them: the most poignant euphemisms are provided through slang. Slang ­expressions have a recognised function as sociolects; they belong to specific social groups or to an informal register. As Odilo – now reunited with his corporeal shell – specifies, slang has been the watershed in his integration into American society (134). At the same time learning colloquialisms is the proper way to participate in a selected entourage, or a counter-culture, according to the pícaro, regardless of the rudeness some slang idioms necessarily convey. The inversion of euphemism lies precisely in this denial of the offensive connotation of slang words: since the narrative of a world reverting backwards is basically a play on and with words, even the repugnant content of a slang term is deprived of its object. Therefore, it sounds like a euphemism for the teller, whereas the readers are encouraged to reconsider their own taboos regarding the choice of a term in context.45 The only moment in which the protagonist unveils the rudeness of his English jargon is when he returns to his native ­German, a new language shift that brings him closer to his original puzzled identity and evokes new moral dilemmas. Illustration 2.1 shows the inverted euphemisms in the examples given: 44

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The most common jargon used in the novel includes “john” or “trick” for a prostitute’s customer, “can” for toilet, “stiff” for corpse, “double-lifting” or “two-timing” for cheating, “broad” as a derogatory term for a woman or a girl, etc. A different angle of observation is taken when it comes to euphemisms within the Auschwitz terminology, as will be shown in the section about Odilo’s version of the Holocaust.

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MAINSTREAM CULTURE PICARESQUE COUNTER-CULTURE

UNPLEASANT TERM HYPONYM mongoloid, idiot ---can can-do, bowl know-how

EUPHEMISM HYPERNYM strange ---corporeal life

HYPERNYM strange ---corporeal life

HYPONYM mongoloid, idiot ---can can-do, bowl knowhow

Illustration 2.1 Euphemism and picaresque counter-culture

Synecdoche Synonymy can also be expressed by a synecdoche, the syntagmatic substitution of a whole object or person with a detail or a fragment. In the previous chapter, synecdoche helped deconstruct the wholeness, the integrity, either physical or moral, of an historical character such as Frederick I or Louis xvi. Elsewhere, in Amis’ novel Odilo gives a brief, fragmentary description of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, also known as “the angel of death” or “the white ­angel”.46 He calls him “Uncle Pepi”,47 in a sort of mock-confidential tone, though he confesses he could never keep his eyes on him for more than a few seconds. Consequently, he can hardly portray a full picture of the man. Therefore, Mengele’s stainless white gown and black boots are recurrent details in the pícaro’s tormented dreams:

45 46

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“‘Uncle Pepi’ is everywhere.” Omnipresence was only one of several attributes that tipped him over into the realm of the superhuman. He was also fantastically clean, for Auschwitz […]. His face was feline in shape, wide at the temples, and his blink was as slow as any cat’s. On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions. You felt that he was only playing the part of a human being. (136) Some details about Josef Mengele and his scandalous escape from the consequences of the Holocaust due to a bureaucratic mistake are given in the entry “Josef Mengele” from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; web site: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/ en/article.php? ModuleId=10007060. See also Vivi Papanayotou, “Skeletons in the Closet of German Science,” Deutsche Welle, 18.05.2005, web site: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/ article/0,2144,1587766, 00.html. “Onkel Mengele” was the nickname the doctor used to introduce himself to his child cases, as explained by Robert Jay Lifton in The Nazi Doctors (167).

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The teller’s reverential remark about Mengele simply playing the part of a human being and carving out an immaculate shape against the filth of the camp, suggests that he was much better than ordinary humankind, whereas the reader is forced to formulate quite the opposite judgement about this rapacious, feline creature. Similarly, in De Marchi’s book synecdoche aims at depicting fragments of a grotesque character, the mosaic of a carnivalesque figure, such as Carlo’s school colleague Michele, “my Pulcinella-like friend” (“il mio pulcinellesco amico” [177]). Michele is not a rounded character because the reader never enjoys a full view of him: he is a compound of small, ridiculous details; yet, there is a reason behind this limitedness. Michele is represented as a purely referential persona, but any detailed reference to the real is worthless to give him credibility because details, though based on the space beyond the text (extra-text), are nothing more than parts of a whole. Michele, a sort of ‘fake’ pícaro, is a character transposing into language the failures of a mythological consciousness. Like Michele, very few secondary characters in picaresque novels are consistent with metadescription since most of them embody the main culture opposing the picaresque counter-culture. Through synecdoche, the extra-textual ‘real’ crosses the boundary of textual/linguistic reality, but the effect is to confirm the latter as the sole coherent form of reality. As a matter of fact, a character whose only points of reference to reality are disjointed fragments cannot be a proper character: here synecdoche has the disruptive power of deconstructing the ‘real’ in fiction, thus abdicating to metadescription, through which only language-based characters are ‘real’ characters. This consideration has a more general aesthetic bearing: by way of example, the similarity with the real, or its improvement, in the form of figurative art clashes with the possibility of a purely metalinguistic, self-referential depiction of a subject, in which the language of art is self-sufficient, rejecting any assumption to ‘look like’ reality. Examples of this mismatch of perceptions are the r­ esistance of academic figurative art towards innovative approaches like those of Impressionism or the Cubist movement, but it also involves literature, for instance in the case of realistic as opposed to formalist poetics, and so forth. The topic is quite controversial: according to Levinas, there is no aesthetic displacement between art as representation and art as metalanguage because artistic language removes any correlation between the object of art and its reference point in reality: “The represented object, by the simple fact of becoming image, is converted into nonobject.”48 Levinas tries to reconcile these extremes by extending the original concept of reality: “Reality would not simply be what it is, what it reveals of itself in the truth, but also its double, its shadow, its image” (82). In 47

48 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” in Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004) 81.

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Time’s Arrow, ‘Odilo’ describes John’s attitude towards women through synecdoche in a very cut-and-dry, depersonalising manner: Women’s bodies bring out all his finer feelings. The fact that a woman’s body has a head on top of it isn’t much more than a detail. Don’t get me wrong: he needs the head, because the head wears the face, and supplies the hair. He needs the mouth; he badly needs the mouth. As for what the head contains, well, yes, Johnny needs some of the things that live in there: will, desire, perversity. To the extent that sex is in the head, then Johnny needs the head. (87) Synecdoche replaces an objectively determined woman with a universalised, fragmented depiction of women – all women are reduced to disjointed parts, each of them functioning independently: no wonder Martin Amis has been accused of demoting women in his fiction. His novel London Fields triggered a disgusted outcry for its sexist representation of a ‘murderee’: Sara Mills contends that “it is not simply the case that the female character is acted upon… but the fact that she wishes to be acted upon and paradoxically strives to bring that about.”49 In a way, this also happens in many sketches regarding women in Time’s Arrow; however intentional such an approach to female integrity may appear, these limitations in perspective reflect the biased point of view of the narrator who tries to make sense of John’s emotional pattern without trying to read through it. In truth, it is always the emotional, physical dimension of the rogue that reminds the conscience about the horrors of the past. ‘Odilo’ senses physical upheavals of “alerted fear” and “ignoble relief” (24), before – indeed, after – Tod receives letters from his protector (a priest), reassuring him that “the weather here continues to be temperate!” (24), a cryptic message hinting that the police are not after war criminals. The same symptoms of moral misgiving appear when the protagonist dreams about episodes in the prison camp; yet, the narrator simply reads dreams as premonitions, and not as afterthoughts, or recurring obsessions. Dreams are plain sequences of synecdoches which cannot be assembled to create a full picture of what happens in the hero’s mind. Looking more closely, the “impotence”, the inability of ‘Odilo’ to exert his will on events and people could have been grounds for a genuine exploration of the pícaro’s sense of guilt and would have justified a final reconciliation with the 48

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Sara Mills, “Working With Feminism: What Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?” in Peter ­ erdonk and Jean Jacques Weber (eds.), Twentieth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context V (London: Routledge, 1995) 216, quoted in Susan Brook, “The Female Form, Sublimation, and Nicola Six,” in Keulks (ed), Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond 88.

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past – with the “nature of the offence”; in this, Amis’ novel ends up deviating from a genuine picaresque solution to the character’s inner qualms. Acting vs Improvising Mythological consciousness is steeped in the concept of language as pure reference to its object: a word is a name attached to isomorphic objects; what is more, this attitude is reflected on behaviour as a meaning-generating set of actions. Actions are strictly connected to a tangible real, they are actual emblems of a given reality (see table 2.2). Ultimately, everyday behaviour turns into a ritual in mythological consciousness. As Lotman clarifies, every single action entails meaning-ridden gestures: “it is always a sign and a symbol”.50 By means of repressive strategies, the antagonist dominant culture struggles to impose a formalised routine on the picaresque counter-culture. Referring to aristocratic behaviour in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, Lotman argues that symbolic gestures in everyday actions reflected a tendency to unify ideology (ethics, politics) and everyday conduct.51 In his view, nominalisation is evidence of a transformation of everyday acts into ideological declarations: Decembrist speech gave unambiguous verbal labels to acts that previously did not have names or were designated through euphemism and metaphor. […] As a result, everyday behavior ceased to be merely everyday behavior. It acquired an elevated ethical and political meaning. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History 107

This does not happen to picaresque counter-culture. In Il talento, for instance, Carlo pans many people around him as executors of rites imposed by society or by supposedly natural regulations: “rite of the flesh” (“rito della carne” [16]) referring to his parents’ sexual acts, “meticulous ceremonial of pain and dissolution” (“minuzioso cerimoniale di dolore e dissoluzione” [98]), recalling the mourning over Sandro’s death, etc. Like many other pícaros, he unmasks society’s failures in reconciling ideology and everyday actions. For instance, 49 50

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Yuri M. Lotman, “The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a HistoricalPsychological Category),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca and London: Cornell up, 1985) 105. Another English translation of this article by C.R. Pike is available with the title “The Decembrist in Everyday Life: Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category,” in The Semiotics of Russian Culture 71–123. Lotman maintains that popular romantic literature affected the lives of revolutionary aristocrats like the Decembrists.

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Carlo describes some snobbish club-goers dressed poorly to look socially or politically ‘alternative’: “Yes, I finally understood that I was among people so deep-dyed in luxury that they needed the thrill of a (fake) poorness in order to keep relishing it.” (“Ormai avevo capito, sì, di trovarmi tra gente così incallita nel lusso che per trovarci ancora qualche gusto ha bisogno del brivido di una [finta] povertà.” [133]). By comparison, ‘Odilo’ represents the role of doctors as failed healers (53) because they cannot perform a ritual; only at the kz will they prove capable of playing their esoteric role. In this disturbing epilogue the alienating picaresque tone succumbs to the narrator’s cultural assimilation to the centre. Il talento shows two kinds of symbolic staging gestures. On the one hand, Michele’s ready-made acting attitude betrays incongruities between word – as expression – and action – as content, discrepancies that are disguised under the referential purpose of actions. Michele is portrayed as a carnivalesque figure, an emphatic ‘ham’, a “Pulcinella”, dressed sometimes as a “Harlequin”, a trickster in full command of his “instinctive actor’s nature or, better said, an actor without any other nature; truthful in all his manifestations, therefore, in the end, an incessant simulator” (“istintiva natura di attore, o meglio attore senz’altra natura; veritiero in tutte le sue manifestazioni e dunque, in definitiva, simulatore incessante” [170]). There is no trace of instinct in Michele, just simple sham. On the other hand, the trickster is a champion of improvisation, creating urgency, simultaneity between word and action; at the same time, words and actions are coincidental so that it cannot be certain which one comes first. Carlo’s acting episodes – his “momentary inspiration” (“estro momentaneo” [176]) – often reflect this interchange between content and expression, as in this passage where actions even anticipate words: “The disbelieving amazement that made my mouth gape […] astonished even me for the ease with which I managed to reproduce it” (“Lo stupore incredulo con cui spalancai la bocca […] stupì anche me per la facilità con cui riuscii a riprodurlo” [84]); or later, “after pretending to pretend to be disconcerted for a moment, I thanked him” (“dopo aver finto di fingere un momento di sconcerto lo ringraziai” [162]). In Chapter 1 the friction between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ was identified as a fundamental of picaresque ambiguity. This principle is still viable here: Carlo and Odilo’s inner voices give their own unreliable versions of facts and often contradict themselves but, at the same time, their anti-ritual acting follows an internal coherence: the outside world acts to hide hypocrisy, the pícaro acts to underpin the commonplace of behaving for a goal or a purpose that proves uncanny because it is grounded in a nebulous zone outside language use. The tricksters act for acting’s sake, confusing ‘seeming’ (words/expressions) and ‘being’ (actions/content) through improvisation. The outcomes of these two

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stances are very different: Michele attempts in all possible ways to conform to conventional culture, embodied by successful intellectuals, and even when he is arrested for fraud, he ends up submitting to the ritual, transforming the whole episode in a see-saw theatrical pièce – his Pulcinella-like face turns into a “death mask” (210). Carlo, on the other hand, incessantly mixes his ideological personification with his acting alter-ego, and never aligns himself with the mainstream culture, even when he seems willing to please his audience. His arrest is not a ceremony of defeat, it is simply an episode among many that he, for narrative requirements, cannot tick off his memoirs. Actually, the reader finds out very late that the book was written in prison but, most significantly, imprisonment provides a reason, a means of inspiration rather than a final punishment or dead end. As mentioned before, the notorious rogue Guzmán de Alfarache also wrote his biography on a galley, but prison marks the end of his narrative journey, and this clearly corresponds to Alemán’s intent to confine his hero “into the Gallies, where his wings were clipt, that he could not get thence in haste.” (The Rogue iii 5).52 By his own admission, ‘Odilo’ is a peculiar sort of prisoner: he regards his adventures not as “recollections in tranquillity” in a hospital deathbed, but as a life revisited yet utterly removed, forgotten, deprived of causality. The actual prison, which alienates him from his own humanity as a whole is represented by the body, where will and random scraps of remorse – in the form of pangs rather than musings – are still alive, but cannot be acknowledged by the forgetful soul. The picaresque denial of causality will be discussed in Chapter 4 with reference to enlightened scepticism. Considering the dualism acting-improvising in Time’s Arrow, ‘Odilo’s struggle to account for a topsy-turvy world is often tinged with instinct and reckless improvisation, and only in the stratified, counterfeit society of the lager, where behaviour is encumbered by aberrant rituals, improvisation as a metadescriptive tool yields to theatricality and mythological conscience. When behaviour is ritualised, every action, even the most aberrant, is constrained by the actor’s intentions to endorse the dominant culture and it becomes motivated, even reasonable. A final remark on the distance between acting and improvising comes from another interesting definition by Lotman. 51

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There is a remarkable difference, reasonably dictated by different purposes and audiences, between Mabbe’s accurate, yet often flowery translation and Alemàn’s more sober original: “[un hombre perfecto] castigado de trabajos y miserias, […] puesto en galera por  curullero della” (“Dedicatorias,” Guzmán de Alfarache. Atalaya de la vida humana 52–53).

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After defining behaviour as the combination of gesture, act and behavioural text, he specifies: Since real human behavior is complex and motivated by a multitude of factors, behavioral texts can remain incomplete, change into new texts, or interweave with parallel ones. But on the level of an individual’s idealized interpretation of his own behavior, behavioral texts are always ­complete and meaningful plots. Otherwise, goal-directed activity would be impossible. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History 109

Mainstream culture requires behavioural texts to express a purpose, however futile or useless it may be; picaresque anti-heroes, instead, consider their own behavioural texts as accomplished only inside the text because only through narrative can their intentions be rediscovered. The act of telling the story from the beginning revives motifs and scopes that were far from being identified at the time of the improvised set of actions. In brief, the behavioural text in the main culture matches the actor’s intentions, whereas in picaresque counterculture the behavioural text makes sense only by means of the act of telling. Acting in mainstream culture is an imitation of empty behaviour, whereas to the pícaro acting assumes the form of improvisation; nevertheless, improvising makes sense only insofar as it is recollected in literary terms, as literary behavior – a kind of a posteriori retelling of a fictional event. In conclusion, acting in the picaresque has its own semiotic potential only when it imitates or derives its motivation from a literary or aesthetic process. Rhetorical Questions It is Waldenfels’ contention that questions from a stranger kick-start a process of self-discovery that the act of replying sets into motion, whatever the effectiveness of the answer may be: “In the call of the Other which breaks the purposive circle of intentionality as much as the regulative circle of communication, the alien emerges in actu” (37). Every time external agents pose questions about our status in life or society, they necessarily raise issues about our stance in the conversation. As a matter of fact, the role of the literary trickster entails thought-provoking enquiries about the world; yet, as in the case of the narrators in both the novels examined here, most of their questions are presented as indirect questions and, from the other side of communication, they usually express redundant retorts in place of answers. An example may clarify this point: when Carlo wonders what the students are doing in the streets of Milan, in the 1968 student riots, he receives the following answer from a bartender:

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a una mia innocua richiesta di chiarimenti si mostrò oltremodo risentito (‘ma lei in che mondo vive? non li legge i giornali? Qui un giorno sì e uno no fanno a botte con la polizia!’). (221) at my harmless request for an explanation he showed some resentment (“What planet are you living on? Don’t you read the papers? Every other day they’re brawling with the police!”). The reaction to Carlo’s query contains a reproach rather than a piece of information.53 The same disconnection between question and answer happens whenever ‘Odilo’ recollects some brief conversations. The act of reporting dialogues in reverse disrupts the consecutio temporum between question and answer; therefore, the reader is invited to reconstruct the dialogue back to front, though the option of searching for a hidden meaning between the lines of the dialogue as it appears in print is certainly a challenge which the author is urging the reader to engage in. In this example, John’s hypocrisy about his criminal profile is much more evident if the reader accepts the cues of this quasi-theatrical dialogue in the order given: [REVEREND:] “So. All they have is this [a picture], which is thirty years old, and two so-called witnesses.” “Nothing,” said John. [REVEREND:] “What, nothing?” [JOHN:] “I had no criminal record.” [REVEREND:] “The usual catch: did you lie about your criminal record?” [JOHN:] “Ah.” [REVEREND:] “It’s taking the form of inquiries about your u.s. naturalization.” [JOHN:] “Go on.” (81–82; original emphasis) At the same time, the reader is asked to reflect on the function of a question here: if the questioner has already been given an answer in advance, which new information can we abstract from a question? Questions that generate 52

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Interestingly, the 1968 protests are at the centre of another novel featuring in this study, Stefano Benni’s Saltatempo, in which the protagonist plays an active role in the demonstrations. However, not unlike Carlo, Lupetto does seem to rejoice in his own ignorance of the events’ actual import: see, for instance, his comic rendition of the French May riots in Paris (Chapter 4).

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irrelevant answers are likely to belong to the category of rhetorical questions; they are synonymous with the answer insofar as they are already enucleated in the question. Waldenfels identifies four aspects of the “responsive logic” that characterise genuine interaction with the stranger: (a) singularity of the request, seen as peculiar and unexpected; (b) inevitability of the act of replying, whatever the answer given; (c) diastasis (or deferment), where “responding takes place here and now, but it begins elsewhere” and “responding means to renounce a first and, consequently, also a last word”(40–41); (d) asymmetry: questions and answers steadily shift the informative-logical balance of communication – practically, Lotman’s principle of potential transmission of new cultural information. These categories imply a willingness to accept requests and formulate answers from both sides; yet, narrative semiotics may contradict this readymade picture: by its own nature, narrative is a recreated, time-transcending form of communication where questions and answers are predetermined by the narrator or, from a stance within the plot, by the protagonist, as in both novels. In addition, the position of a stranger should imply reciprocity with the other entity: I am a stranger to them, they are strangers to me. Nevertheless, at various stages in the picaresque novel, reciprocity is clearly rejected as i­ llogical by the mouthpieces of the dominant culture. Open or closed questions are often replaced by rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question has the formal appearance of a common question, but it is mainly centred on the speaker rather than on the listener. In Il talento there are more than 150 rhetorical questions scattered over a total of 283 pages, an average of about one question every two pages, but their number could increase if we consider indirect questions inserted in the narrator’s reported speech. In Time’s Arrow over 200 rhetorical questions (including reverse dialogue tags) are dispersed among 165 pages, a higher occurrence compared with Il talento. What really makes a difference between the two novels is that Il talento employs rhetorical questions mostly in actual dialogues between the pícaro and other characters to show isolation, whereas in Time’s Arrow almost any form of interaction with the characters is filtered and contextualised from the narrator’s stance, albeit biased, misleading or utterly wrong. The sense of alienation of the roguish protagonist is ­alluded to by the queries he addresses to himself or the outside world, which can be seen as the mainstream culture. The narrator’s preferential interlocutor is the reader, p ­ ossibly an impassive, callous one; besides, the author’s preferential a­ udience is supposed to be much more vigilant. On the basis of c­ ommunicative ­purposes, it is possible to detect four types of rhetorical questions.

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(a) “Phatic” rhetorical questions. The adjective is borrowed from Jakobson’s concept of “phatic” function in his communicative model,54 when two or more speakers eventually need to ensure that their message is correctly put across or acceptable to one another. The English language allows for a wide use of the phatic function by means of tag questions as a device aimed at involving the listeners, or the readers, without really confronting them: “The old aren’t cruel, are they.” (30). There need not be a question mark at the end of this kind of tentative question. Here are some examples: (i) [the bookseller:] “Non so se mi spiego?” (139) [“You know what I mean?”] (ii) [Carlo’s colleague Michele:] “Non capisci ancora?” (200) [You still don’t understand?] (iii) [‘Odilo’:] People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? (51) (iv) [Odilo:]55 You know, of course, that she [Herta] doesn’t shave her legs? (142) These examples deal with bits of conversations whose aims have to be reaffirmed, clearly stated. Most questions are formulated by or addressed to the trickster but surprisingly the inquirers show very little or no concern about the outcomes of their questions: this careless acceptance of a communication gap sets a distance between speaker and listener that can be easily compared with the relations between an audience and the actors on a stage: in the flow of acting a role, the response of the audience must go unheard. The questions shown before have, respectively, the following answers: (i) Risposi che capivo e non aggiunsi altro. (201) [I answered that I understood, and said nothing more]. (cut-off conversation) (ii) In effetti, sentivo la mia testa macinare adagio e controvoglia i pensieri, e anche il mio sguardo azzurro […] doveva apparire velato d’ottusità. (201) (Actually, I felt my head grinding thoughts slowly and unwillingly, and even my blue gaze […] must have looked as if it was tinged with dullness”). (distance)

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54 Jakobson, On Language 75–77. The phatic function “may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. […] The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings” (75). 55 As mentioned above, the name without quotation marks identifies the moment in the narrative where Odilo the narrator and Odilo the character are trapped in the same ‘person’.

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(iii) Well they don’t look free. (51) (retort to an imaginary listener) (iv) It’s true. (142) (confirmation of a truth) These four quotes describing unsuccessful interactions betray a preconceived dismissal of the stranger from the very onset of a conversation, or the inability to bridge a gap with the stranger: this attitude is reminiscent of a symmetrical approach to an alien culture that was described earlier. (b) Rhetorical questions with a highly predictable answer. When speakers have such a high opinion of themselves, they can presume only one possible answer to their questions. This is of course an act of non-communication because it does not allow for the freedom of an alternative reply. Once again, the refusal of synonymic answers is indicative of a mythological consciousness about language as a cultural tool, and a tyrannical attempt to even up asymmetry: (i) [Carlo’s mother:] “Cosa ti aspettavi da uno come lui, che di colpo gli fosse venuta la voglia di lavorare?” (81) [“What did you expect from someone like him, that he’d suddenly got the urge to work?”]. (ii) [Carlo’s daughter:]“Ma perché papà viene sempre a mangiare a casa? (213) [“How come dad always eats at home?”]. (iii) [‘Odilo’:] Where would the poor girls be without their pimps, who shower money on them and ask for nothing in return? (39) (iv) [‘Odilo’:] Is it that the human being is secretly nothing without others? (71) In Il talento, once again these types of rhetorical questions come from other characters embodying the dominant culture. Example (ii), especially, sheds light on Carlo’s hopeless alienation because even his young daughter takes it for granted that, as a rule, her father does not have dinner with the family, and she does not seem to contemplate any other answer. Carlo can only consent to this evidence: “An obvious question, I do not know how spontaneous, that hurt me and drove me out, into the streets.” (“Domanda naturale, non so quanto spontanea, che mi ferì e mi spinse fuori, per le strade.” [213]). While example (iv) bases its reasons on a shared belief (human beings need others), (iii) invokes a paradox as an undisputable truth that everyone should take for granted – the poor girls need pimps. This kind of betrayed communication is grounded on a symmetrical approach to the stranger that admits of exceptions to stereotyped rules of behaviour such as honesty, work, family bonds, but it immediately turns these exceptions into rules inflicted on the anti-world of the stranger.

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(c) Rhetorical questions claiming no answer. This kind of question does not even conceal incommunicability under the pretence of requiring a readymade retort. On the contrary, the answer is completely ‘out of question’: (i) [Michele:] “Guardami nel bianco degli occhi: ti piacciono i quattrini?” (133) [“Look me in the eye: do you like money?”] (ii) [Carlo’s cellmate:] “Non sai cos’è un pentito?” (274) [“Do you know what it means to be a pentito?”] (iii) [‘Odilo’:] If I am his soul, and there were soul-loss or soul-death, would that stop him? (96) (iv) [Odilo:] Who would want to cook with an oven such as this? (129) Example (i) clearly does not require an answer: it is simply a instance of a­ cting from Michele. Example (ii) is interesting because it is, itself, an answer to a previous question posed by Carlo: “How do you repent? What do you repent?” (“Come ti penti? Ti penti di che cosa?” [274]). Neither question sinks into rhetoric, they are direct thought-provoking endeavours to force a confession from Carlo’s fellow prisoner. But this attempt is thwarted by an evasive answer that hinges on the legal concept of the pentito [the “repentant”], rather than on its more compelling moral connotation. In the Italian jurisdiction, the pentito has become a relevant though controversial position, especially in mafia-connected crimes or terrorism. The pentito offers to cooperate with the justice system but, at the same time, enjoys privileges from the state that seem to conflict with common sense or ethics, since the pentito is inevitably a criminal awaiting judgement. Despite these lexical complexities, Angelo is unable or unwilling to see a word in its variety of meanings, i.e. its synonymy; he simply relies on the most comfortable interpretation of the word, its official, juridical one. Paradoxically Angelo, though a convict, is less of a stranger or an alien to society than Carlo. Who is the addressee of question (iii)? Probably this question on the soul’s destiny could allow for a theological debate that ‘Odilo’ is unwilling or unable to sustain; thus, he curtails all further retorts as paradoxes. Question (iv), instead, is a naïve, unsettling remark on the function of crematoriums, an example of alienating ‘historical irony’. In addition, answering a question with another question can usually undermine dialogue with the c­ hallenging voice of the stranger, as in this example, where Carlo asks his wife for untimely advice: “Tu al mio posto che cosa avresti fatto?” Lei ripeteva retoricamente la mia domanda: “Che cosa avrei fatto al tuo posto?”, trovandole poi subito una risposta non meno retorica: “Io non avrei sperperato i soldi e non avrei ipotecato la casa!” (231)

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“What would you have done if you were in my shoes?” She repeated my question rhetorically: “What would I have done if I were you?” She found a quick, no less rhetorical answer: “I would not have squandered my money and mortgaged my house!” The pícaro’s question echoes rhetorically in Alice’s answer as if Carlo were reciting a monologue that the audience can only repeat to themselves without being able to offer any feedback. This is the feature of the fourth kind of rhetorical question. (d) Self-directed rhetorical questions. In this case, the speakers direct questions to themselves, but they are not always the real target of their own enquiries. Seymour Chatman explains the basic difference between soliloquy, monologue and dramatic monologue.56 Soliloquy is a way of transmitting a speech act to an implied reader or audience, e.g. the character’s asides in a play, usually ignoring other interlocutors, as in the case of digressions giving vent to a character’s hidden intentions. A monologue, including interior monologue, is a speech ideally aimed at a character within the story, and not at an audience or reader. Tags are not commonly inserted as an introduction to the speech. In dramatic monologues, on the other hand, the speakers talk to another character but they receive a reaction to their words, and this reaction often affects their speech acts. Thus, though self-directed questions can be easily singled out from other types of questions in Il talento, the same cannot be said for Time’s Arrow. Whenever ‘Odilo’ is not talking to a covert reader, or most ironically, to his own physical counterpart, he is supposed to interrogate himself. On a closer look, what really makes many questions from ‘Odilo’ atypical is the effort to give them a prompt answer, usually a non-pertinent one. The frequency of these question/answer sequences is understandably higher in the Auschwitz section. As mentioned before, expecting a ready-made answer is a hurdle to the exchange of new information; nevertheless, making sense of the world gives the illusion of reaching a stage of entropy, namely a standstill in the interchange of information in a culture and a transitory absence of information in the semiosphere.57 In periods of cultural entropy, new information seems ­undesirable, and the stranger ends up being encoded in the dominating semiotic system. The following examples present three categories of speech/ thought: 55 56

56 57

Seymour Chatman, “The Structure of Narrative Transmission,” in Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (ed.), Literary Theory: An Anthology 97–124. Lotman, Uspenskij, “The Role of Dual Models,” The Semiotics of Russian Culture 10.

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(i) Tutto – va detto58 – era cominciato per caso, da un errore: ma quanti, al suo [di Michele] posto, avrebbero saputo riconoscere nell’errore un suggerimento fatale? (134) (Everything – this must be said – had started by chance, from a mistake: but how many people, in his [Michele’s] place, would have been able to recognize an ominous hint in their mistake?) (interior monologue) (ii) Ora chiedo: in tutto questo dov’era la mia cattiveria? (230) [Now I’m asking: where was my wickedness in all this?] (dramatic monologue) (iii) How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? (123) (soliloquy) (iv) When will it happen, the conversion of the Jews? Tomorrow morning. (133) (soliloquy) Even though Carlo is not talking directly to a character, he is referring to someone within the story, since he does not show, in any passage of the book, the slightest intention of having his “compendium” published or read. More precisely, it is a dialogue between two stages in his life, between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ protagonist, a common feature of picaresque narrative and, consequently, further evidence of alienation. Besides, the use of a polemical ‘you’ in other picaresque novels does not account for a submissive or complacent attitude on the part of the narrators towards their potential readership (see Chapter 1). In Time’s Arrow, most self-directed rhetorical questions are addressed to an unidentified ‘you’, which can include either an implied reader, or simply an impersonal, universal listener – e.g.: “How do you figure that?” (16). In example (iv), the answer leaves behind a powerful intertextual link: in fact, “tomorrow morning” is a euphemism used in the camp to mean “never”, conveying the prisoners’ sense of disillusionment about their future. Primo Levi refers to this expression in If This is a Man (139): once again, ‘Odilo’ manipulates the prisoners’ argot for his caustic purposes. A relevant difference taken from Il talento, centred on the alienated ‘I’ as a questioner, is that the alienated self can emerge in the forms of ‘I’, ‘we’ and even ‘he’ – not meaning a stranger outside ‘Odilo’, but a stranger cohabiting within the same personality. Therefore, the focal point in the two novels, the heroes’ quest for independence from mainstream culture, is expressed not only through their conflicting reasons and alibis, but also by way of thought-provoking, self-directed rhetorical questions. Not surprisingly, one of the most bluntly meaningful, non-rhetorical questions in Il talento is asked by another genuine stranger in the story, Carlo’s disabled brother Sandro: “Why don’t you come back home?” (“Perché non torni a casa?” [80]). 57

58

This insertion makes clear that Carlo is conscious of an audience and makes his point in favour of Michele.

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Odilo’s Private Holocaust

After following ‘Odilo”s desperate and comic search for a rationale in a hostile environment, involving the reader’s alertness to dramatic irony, Chapters 5 and 6 take an unexpected turn. As ‘Odilo’ seems finally to have reached a balance between body and conscience, he tells the story exclusively in the first person (“But I was one now.” [116]), and seems completely at ease in the gruesome upturned world of the Auschwitz camp. His usual humour does not break down as it did before and even the final acts of his life are imbued with a profound sense of self-deceit about the real course of events. The sympathetic dimension of the picaresque hero is dissolved into the appalling scenario of the Shoah: his alarming ingenuousness in the face of the real tragedy of the kz estranges him from the reader. In the aforementioned interview,59 Amis says that George Steiner objected to his choice of writing about the Holocaust. However, if he really wanted to write about it, he recommended that Amis did not publish the book. On his own account, Steiner had released a novel about Hitler in 1979.60 This anecdote shows that fictionalising the Holocaust had a taint of blasphemy about it, especially for Jewish intellectuals, and the portrayal of the Shoah in Amis’s book certainly introduces two elements of disturbance: its rationalisation and ritualisation through narrative. The fifth chapter, titled “Here there is no why” (124), starts with an indisputable appeal to logical and referential reality: “The world is going to start making sense…/Now.” (124; author’s italics). The use of the deictic “now” defines a referential space between words and reality: whatever Odilo says is presumed to have a direct correspondence with the world of things. The chapter title is a quotation from one of the most influential sources of the novel, Levi’s If This is a Man. In this account of a year spent in a prison camp in Monowitz, near Au­schwitz, the first-person narrative is interspersed with a collective ‘we’ to signify a common fate for the prisoners – common but not always shared. Levi relates the episode when he tries to grab an icicle hanging from the roof of his barrack to soothe his thirst, and one of the guards (the Kapo) snatches it from him in an unjustified gesture of cruelty. Primo asks for a reason, a meaning, and the answer is: “Hier ist kein warum.” (Here there is no why. [35]; original italics). Considering how differently Odilo, the oppressor, and Primo, the oppressed, ought to be portrayed, they both start from the same assumption: Odilo is a physician, a scientist, while Primo is a chemist. They both revere the laws of nature, the consequentiality of action and reaction. In this, they both search for a rationale behind the use of violence – in particular, ‘Odilo’ had already 58 59

59 60

See note 13. The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981).

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experienced the constructive outcome of an act of violence. This effort to work out a rational explanation for the horrors of the Holocaust was one of the great dilemmas of Levi’s literary output. After about forty years, in The Drowned and the Saved he makes a clear point about the atrocities of the Shoah, as a reaction against a widespread feeling of indulgence towards war crimes against ­humanity and to collective responsibilities.61 In the appendix to If This is a Man, he seems to draw a conclusion from his efforts at understanding – in this case the original passage renders the consonance of terms: Forse, quanto è avvenuto non si può comprendere, anzi non si deve comprendere, perché comprendere è quasi giustificare. Mi spiego: “comprendere” un proponimento o un comportamento umano significa (anche etimologicamente) contenerlo, contenerne l’autore, mettersi al suo posto, identificarsi con lui. (208; author’s emphasis) Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him” “Afterword,” If This is a Man 395

The same belief is expressed by Elie Wiesel: “I didn’t understand, though I wanted to. Ask any survivor and you will hear the same thing: above all, we tried to understand […]. Perhaps there was nothing to understand.”62 Emmanuel Lieber fears the same danger of identifying with the enemy in Steiner’s The Postage to San Cristobal of A.H.: I know you will never forget. […] But the memory will turn alien and cold. A man’s smell can break the heart. You will be so close now, so terribly close. You will think him [Hitler] a man and no longer believe what he did. That he almost drove us from the face of the earth. (34) Usurping the language of the downtrodden and transmuting it to signify his own mission of self-sacrifice “for a preternatural purpose” (124), Odilo defaces the context of the expression “there is no why”: it is no longer a surrender to understanding the Holocaust, but quite the opposite: there is no reason to ask 60 61

61 62

Cesare Cases, “Introduction” to Primo Levi, Opere (ix–xxxi). Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. Volume 1, 1928–1969 (London: Harper ­Collins, 1996) 79. This quote was cited in Lucie Benchouiha, Primo Levi. Rewriting the H ­ olocaust (Leicester: Troubador Publishing Ltd: 2006) 143.

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for an explanation for a miracle that takes place every day, “now,” under the doctor’s eyes. All the irrational details – the mass graves, the separation of the Jews as auseinandergeschrieben – as ‘written separately’, as heads of cattle – the flourish of derogatory language to describe the ‘patients’ – are part of a redemptive project that nobody should dare deny. If the keyword for Levi is “ricordare” [“remember”] as a way of avoiding mystifications or manipulations of the past, to Odilo understanding is the only remedy against the human tendency to forget, meant “not as a process of erosion and waste, but as an activity.” (89). In The Drowned and the Saved Levi discusses how criminals take advantage of forgetfulness – either their own or public opinion’s – to reshape their past and absolve themselves of their nefariousness. Perhaps Odilo’s journey through conscience is a small-scale version of what humankind always does to remove, or attenuate a dark past. The second element of defilement of the Holocaust in the novel is its ­ritualization. The term Holocaust bears both historical and religious connotations, but this is not the case in German, where the term indicating the persecution of the Jews came to be closely associated with Hitler’s final solution as early as 1938. It is a Greek borrowing – der Holocaust – while the religious ritual has a more explicit Germanic morphology – das Brandopfer,63 literally  “sacrifice through fire”, a calque translation of holókaustos, a compound noun of hólos (‘whole’) and kaustós (‘burnt’).64 The same lexical differentiation ­between the sacrificial rite and Jewish persecution can be found both in Hebrew sho’ah and Yiddish churben, or Wiesel’s new coinage shoe, all of them  meaning ‘­disaster’, ‘calamity’, ‘biblical catastrophe’, while the ritual ­offering is ­indicated by the Hebrew word olah “offering”, in Yiddish korben.65 Levi, on the other hand, ­describes the lager as a “perpetual Babel” (If This is a Man 44), a sort of ­antireligious scenario, where prayers have no meaning, or degenerate into selfish invocations to God, as evoked in this well-known passage:

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63 64 65

Kuhn [a Jewish prisoner] is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? http://www.duden.de/suchen/dudenonline/Brandopfer. http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Holocaust. The Yiddish terms are quoted from David Mendel Harduf, Transliterated English-Yiddish Dictionary, (Union City: Gross Bros. Printing, 1989); for Hebrew: http://www.milon.li/ DeuHebr.htm and http://www.balashon.com/2008/04/shoah-and-holocaust.html.

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Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. If This is a Man 135–36

In The Drowned and the Saved (771) Levi acknowledges that religious faith would have helped him accept the tragedy of the Shoah as a providential plan, and describes how the believers saw their tragedy as a purifying sacrifice. Conversely, this consolatory religious attitude is undermined by a self-proclaimed defender of the Jews, Odilo. As a result, he develops a moral one-sidedness that characterises the anti-picaresque mythological conscience. The narrator depicts the selection at the ramp in the light of an eschatological revelation, a farcical Doomsday: These familial unions and arranged marriages, known as selections on the ramp, were the regular high points of the kz routine. It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart – and built an ­autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? […] When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze (131–32; my emphasis). Here, the cruel separation of the Jews assigned to the labour camps from those who were sent to the gas chambers on arrival at the kz – mostly children and women – is reinterpreted in reverse by way of circumlocutions and periphrases, such as “familial unions and arranged marriages”, which should coincide with what was mentioned as metadescription, i.e. a form of synonymy. Instead, circumlocutions do not work insofar as they present a referential world that we as readers know to be the opposite. As mentioned above, the reader’s historical awareness brings the text back to the original referential world; accordingly, no other version of the Holocaust is plausible, even in linguistic terms. It has to remain univocal, its language must necessarily be a cluster of self-referential homonyms. Another leitmotiv in Levi’s prison camp experience, along with the confusion of languages, is the cryptic use of German euphemisms to describe the most despicable practices: “one did not write ‘extermination’ but ‘final ­solution,’ not ‘deportation’ but ‘transfer,’ not ‘killing by gas’ but ‘special treatment,’ and so on.” (“Afterword,” If This is a Man 384). The attempt to soften the edges of an

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otherwise aggressive, intolerable language is not dictated by pity or compassion, but simply, as Levi puts it, by the urge to keep a secret even among the victims. A different spirit permeates Odilo’s euphemisms in the camp: “we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi. And I can think of no finer tribute than that” (133). The same expression is used in The Drowned and the Saved: “anus mundi, the ultimate drainage site of the German universe.” (47). Here, Levi means a place where all the wickedness of the German bad conscience was hidden from view, while, to Odilo’s scatological mind, Auschwitz is the place where scum and ordure become gateways to the sublime. “Heavenstreet” (133), a translation of Himmelstrasse, is the road that led to the crematorium, while “Musselmänner” (133) is the actual term used to identify the most destitute prisoners, those who presumably looked like praying Muslims because they could not keep their head up due to exhaustion – also documented in If This is a Man (94). It is remarkable that before Auschwitz ‘Odilo’ used slang words as euphemisms to account for the absurd, picaresque situations in which he was involved. In the camp, euphemisms belong to the kz’s secret code; they have a single, ­immutable relationship to the same ghastly reality; they totally supplant the real, concrete words and expressions. It is the symbolic language of rituals, or more precisely, of rituals celebrated in reverse, as in satanic or esoteric rites.66 The author seems to suggest a bitter truth lurking underneath the paroxysm that Odilo is adumbrating: if one day the readers are not going to master the knowledge of the antecedents submerged by this masked language, will they possibly dismiss these horrible events as ordinary or even acceptable? Such moral concern hinges on the picaresque search for new meanings, new synonyms, as a way of distancing language from the precariousness of referential reality, warding off the danger of transforming actions into stereotyped rituals. In a passage describing ‘Odilo’/John’s journey ‘back’ to Europe, the narrator reflects on the despicably human tendency to forget: “The ship’s route is clearly delineated on the surface of the water and is violently consumed by our advance. Thus we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks” (109). The following chapter will tackle issues of gender and sexuality regarding two female rogue protagonists.

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For a reading of esoterism from a semiotic and socio-historical viewpoint, see Jurij M. Lotman, “La caccia alle streghe. Semiotica della paura,” trans. Silvia Burini and Alessandro Niero. This article is part of the proceedings of the conference “Incidenti ed esplosioni, A.J. Greimas e J.M. Lotman. Per una semiotica delle culture”, Venice, iuav, 6–7 may 2008. Lotman argues that an excess of zeal in celebrating religious rites caused more suspicion among the orthodox ranks of society than a distracted rituality.

chapter 3

Women on the Edge: Sexuality and Gender Dissent io e mia sorella non contavamo, eravamo solo delle donne e con ogni probabilità lo saremmo rimaste per sempre.1

…

a mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.2

∵ Foreword In Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791),3 the ill-fated protagonist, forced to join a band of criminals to escape an unjust charge of murder, is soon confronted with one of her jailors’ immoral sermons. The bandit, tellingly named Coeur de Fer, advocates a rather bizarre view of a woman’s integrity by wondering “How can a girl be so dull-witted as to believe that virtue may depend upon the somewhat greater or lesser diameter of one of her physical parts?” (487). A scoundrel acting as an amateur logician, he warns the reluctant Justine not to confuse virtue as a (female) quality with chastity. Coeur de Fer awkwardly blends the belief in a hostile, overpowering Nature, typical of the Enlightenment, with the vision of an impassive God and an indisputable male supremacy. His sole purpose is to corrupt the innocent, defenceless Justine; however, on looking more closely, this passage exposes 1 2 3

1 Aldo Busi, Vendita galline km 2 [Hens for Sale 2 Km] (Milano: Mondadori, 1993) 102 [My sister and I did not count, we were only women and, in all likelihood, we would stay women for ever.]. All translations of quotes from the novel are my own. The title of the novel refers to the scene of Delfina’s deadly accident: she crashes into a placard advertising a poultry farm. 2 Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1991) 216. 3 This particularly explicit title, mentioned by de Sade in a letter to his friend Reinaud (12 June 1791) was later replaced, in the Paris, Girouard Edition of 1791, with the more edifying Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. The novel is included in Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings (London: Arrow Books, 1991) 447–743.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_005

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the unresolved moral contradictions between body, soul and sexuality, and how these elements affect gender identity and the role of woman as a subject or object of sexual representation, either in fiction or in reality. In a further episode from de Sade’s book, Rodin, a doctor possessed by sadistic instincts, lectures Justine about the relativity of a doctrine on virtue, and the various ­interpretations which societies of all times have given to the notion of virtuous conduct: his reasoning hinges on the inconsistency of a universally accepted meaning of virtue as a supporting idea to completely confute whatever preternatural origin man may attribute to it (544). There is hardly any affinity between de Sade and the picaresque; therefore, the decision to examine sexuality from the slant of one of the foremost theorists of pornography may appear arbitrary or misleading. Nevertheless, Angela Carter’s study on the Sadeian woman explicitly mentions Justine as a work drawn from the tradition of the picaresque novel: “His [de Sade’s] fiction blends the picaresque narrative of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with the fictions of moral critique of his own youth, and adds to them the sharp outlines of the nightmare.”4 Considering the extent of Carter’s acquaintance with the picaresque, which pervades most of her fiction,5 this categorising of de Sade’s novel calls for a comparison. At an ideal level, de Sade’s sadomasochistic literature plays with the interchangeable role of master and servant in sexually, but also socially antagonistic forces, and this interplay forms a fairly common basis for the complex picaresque master/servant symbiosis. From the point of view of plot, that of Justine is closely related to other rogues’ stories: she is an orphan, bereft of any means to survive, neglected and mistreated by humankind; she recalls her story from a personal stance, describing all sorts of shameful humiliations in her hopeless pilgrimage in search of a better life, until a fateful bolt of lightning brings her tormented, doleful life to an abrupt end.

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4 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago Ltd, 1978) 35. 5 See the Introduction by Helen Simpson to Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (London: ­Vintage, 2006) xvii: “Carter loved narrative proliferation, forks in the road and red herrings. In her novels, too, she was attracted to the picaresque.” Lorna Sage indicates in the “speculative and/or picaresque plot” the basic structure of Carter’s novels of the 1970s (The Infernal Desire Machine of Doctor Hoffman, 1972; The Passion of the New Eve, 1977), a “style of allegorical adventure” that, arguably, also had a strong impact on her subsequent fiction. See Lorna Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago Press, 1995) 11. See also Lorna Sage, Angela Carter (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1994) 20. Sage traces a connection between Carter’s treatment of time and the picaresque: “The point of picaresque for Carter is that it moves inexorably onward, ever onward, generating stories out of stories” (50).

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Hence, far from suggesting any allusion to supernatural intervention, de Sade intended the lightning as a cruel incursion of Nature which destroys rather than creates life. Interestingly, as Carter recounts in her essay on de Sade, the sequel to Justine’s novel, dedicated to her depraved sister Juliette, the infamous lightning bolt actually pierces through Justine’s genitals, causing not so much distress as a general outburst of hilarity from the amused witnesses, including her ­sister. Any hope that Nature had contrived to spare Justine further sufferings is resolved in a sarcastic, outrageous farce: “Nature has killed Justine in a parody of the act of giving birth.” (The Sadeian Woman 100). Justine is a victim who never really familiarises herself with the corruption of the world, but she does not thirst for revenge against society, whereas the picaresque hero usually connives with iniquities in order to reveal them. Another basic difference between de Sade’s unhappy heroine and the pícaros regards the way sexuality and gender identity are expressed. The investigation of gender disparity and the sexual dimension in picaresque fiction will take into consideration Angela Carter’s Wise Children, published in 1991, a few months before the writer’s premature death, and Vendita galline km 2 by Aldo Busi (1993). Both novels portray a variety of characters and situations from the point of view of a woman protagonist. In Wise Children, Dora6 Chance, a chirpy seventy-five-year-old South Londoner – from “the bastard side of Old Father Thames” (1) – recollects her own career and that of her sister Nora, a cheekier alter ego of the narrator, relating their debut as song-and-dance girls, their triumph as pantomime stars, up to their return to anonymity as nude revue dancers. The twins strive to reconnect with their real father, the famous Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard; they evoke a lovehate relationship with their foster mother, Grandma Chance, “a convert to naturism” (27), as Dora’s fondness for her adventurous uncle Peregrine, Melchior’s twin brother, culminates in a belated, passionate encounter. The sisters finally take timely revenge for the neglect they had endured at the hands of their biological father, who is celebrating his hundredth birthday – significantly, on Shakespeare’s presumed date of birth (and death), 23rd April. A series of astonishing reversals of events finally unveils the malevolence of Dora’s halfsisters, Saskia and Imogen Hazard, who turn out to be Melchior’s illegitimate daughters: to their great dismay, their real father is uncle Peregrine. 6

6 Kate Webb traces a possible connection between the protagonist and Freud’s homonymous patient, (real name Ida Bauer), afflicted with hysterical deviation induced by her father’s sexual abuse. The fictional Dora, though, Webb explains, “suffers very little psychic damage from lusting after her father […] or her uncle, or a string of father substitutes (men old enough to be) with whom she has affairs.” See Kate Webb, “Seriously Funny: Wise Children,” in Lorna Sage (ed.), 293.

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Aldo Busi’s novel is a no less chaotic, freewheeling mock-autobiography centred on the character of Delfina, the lesbian (“donnasessuale”, “womansexual” 19) petty scribbler and uncared-for scion of the Pastalunghi, one of Italy’s most powerful dynasties. It is a Family with a capital F, devoted to corruption, bribery, sexual exploits and celebrated vices. From the coffin of one of the most slovenly cemeteries in a suburb of Milan, she calls for revenge upon her relatives, venting her bitterest anger against uncle Romeo, also known as the “Ballet-dancing Architect” (“Architetto Ballerino”), and her phoney mother, the “acrid and knowingly mawkish dame Ester” (“sulfurea e sapientemente svenevole donna Ester” [104]). In the last pages of the book, which take the reader through the most farcical episodes, the narrator candidly reveals that Delfina was not the ghost-teller of her story from the hereafter; instead, the real author is her former lover, Caterina, with Busi himself acting as the editor. Caterina seems to pursue the intent of restoring her former partner’s dignity, lost due to the calumnies of her relatives, but maybe she nurses much less admirable ambitions. Significantly, both novels tackle sexuality as both an intimate and public phenomenon, usually blurring the dividing line between these two dimensions. Before exploring the relevance of gender, sexuality and eroticism in further detail, a provisional definition of these terms is necessary. Sexuality is an ambiguous term: here it is intended as a set of actions aimed at inducing sexual arousal or anything that could be perceived as sexually suggestive (gestures, forms of courtship or seduction, etc.) regardless of how well or badly these actions are acknowledged. This definition isolates the more specific meaning of “sexual nature, instinct or feelings” and “the possession or expression of these” from its other meaning of “sexual orientation”, emerging in compound terms like hetero-sexuality, bi-sexuality, etc., a connotation which partially applies to the word “gender”.7 Gender, on the other hand, is a more or less variable component of the individual’s affects and impulses, only partly defined by physiology and sexuality;8 gender is hinted at by sexual behaviour, but external agents are capable of causing unexpected twists or infractions of the common ‘rules’. 7 8

7 I refer to www.oed.com: “sexuality” definitions 2 and 5. The theoretical outline of these concepts is based on three essays by the American social theorist Erving Goffman: Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); “The Arrangement Between the Sexes,” Theory and Society, 4 (1977) 301–31; “Gender Display,” in Gender Advertisements (London/Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1979) 69–77. 8 Erving Goffman provides a rather amusing example to clarify the difference between sexuality and gender: “it should be perfectly clear that gender and sexuality are not the same thing; by my understanding, at least, a seven-year-old boy who manfully volunteers to help his grandmother with her heavy packages is not trying to make out with her” (“The Arrangement Between the Sexes” 304).

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Eroticism is a rather different matter again. In The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism,9 Octavio Paz highlights a significant distinction between ­sexuality and eroticism: “Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexually socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings.” (8). Further on, he exemplifies this distinction: “The human race, subjected to the perpetual electrical discharge of sex, has invented a lightning rod: eroticism.” (11). To Georges Bataille eroticism is a distinctive human domain, where prohibitions and taboos restrict sexuality, but these restrictions are the clearest evidence of the necessity of transgression.10 These two aspects – the rule and its infraction in sexual behaviour – differentiate human and animal sexuality. Traditionally, this opposition between sexuality and eroticism has been branded as the difference between ‘sound’, nature-oriented, and ‘depraved’ sexual conduct: both aspects will emerge in the representation of the female picaresque protagonist – referred to as pícara. What is more, gender identity in the picaresque is far from an immutable quality of the individual; rather, the representation of gender very often downplays many certainties about definite categories or groups. As will be explained in greater detail with regard to some traditional female picaresque figures and to the protagonists of the contemporary novels examined here, the relationship between sexuality, eroticism and the moral boundaries imposed on sexual behaviour either by nature or by s­ ocial circumstances are dissimilar, not only to de Sade’s libertine leanings, but also to the classical, orthodox reading of sexuality and love from Plato on to courtly literature, canonical neo-platonic Renaissance thought, and up to the romanticisation of women and the more recent women’s rights movements.

Platonic Love and the Pícara

The picaresque does not aspire to trace an exhaustive philosophical analysis of the possible correlations between sensual and sentimental love; it nonetheless sidelines the commonly accepted views of sexuality and platonic thought that have moulded Western civilisation, thus trying to sketch a more contradictory, sceptical lesson. In order to clarify the characteristics of this displacement, it can be useful to compare the picaresque representation of sexuality with one 9 10

9 10

Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (New York/San Diego/London: Harcourt Brace, 1995). Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Walker, 1962) 256.

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of the earliest classics of love literature: Plato’s Socratic dialogues, especially the Symposium and the Phaedrus.11 A first element of confusion, amply exploited in the picaresque, lies in the ambiguous meaning of the ancient Greek term êros, which already holds a strong sexual and erotic connotation, while the term philia is reserved for filial or parental love.12 There is then no specific term for sentimental love between partners;13 the verb philein is used in this context, but the ambivalence has often remained unresolved in other languages or in subsequent centuries. Nonetheless, Socrates’ discourses on love tend to separate and, mainly in the Symposium, see the true essence of love as being the achievement of contemplative beauty, where “the beauty of people’s soul is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies.” (71). In that sense, a basic conflict occurs between two godlike personifications of Love: Urania, the Heavenly Aphrodite, who releases man from the debauchery of youth, and Common Aphrodite-Pandemos, who presides over bodily instincts and lust. On the whole, the picaresque seems to focus on the second representation of love: the vile impulse of the flesh. Pícaras are portrayed as depraved creatures exploiting their attractiveness in order to deceive both simple and experienced gentlemen, preferably of high social standing. Picaresque women seem to delight in sexual promiscuity and do not aspire to climb the “stairs of knowledge and beauty.” (Symposium 72). Still, one very important aspect clashes with this apparent denial of any experience of transcendental love: the narrative voice in the feminine picaresque is usually a woman who has reached a stage in her life where she feels less subjugated by sensual instincts. She has given up ensnaring new suitors or pampering her own sensual inclinations in preference to more durable pleasures. For example, Mother Courage, one of the most unabashed pícaras, reflects on this inevitable rite of passage to mature age, when desire has been superseded by other needs: “though even in those days [my youth] I was assailed by lewd urges it would have been easier then to resist the call of the blood than it is now to combat the influence of the other three fluids – bile, phlegm and 11 12 13

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Plato on Love: Lysis – Symposium – Phaedrus – Alcibiades, with selections from Republic and Laws, ed. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006) 26–153. Similarly, in Carter’s novel, Dora uses the word “love” to define her sister’s unequivocally lustful impulse, or a sort of procreative urge, an eagerness to “know about Life” (82). Dora rejoices in this ambiguity, and ironically denies any interest in that kind of “love”, which to her has become a quasi-legalistic term: “The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it. I might have reached the age of consent but that didn’t mean I had to consent to it, whether I wanted to or not.” (82). This remark is formulated by C.D.C. Reeve in his introduction to Plato on Love (xvi).

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melancholy.”14 Even as a young girl, Courage separates pleasure from procreation, so that one of the first lessons she learns from her hostess is to become ­“impregnable” and “capable of blocking a man’s musket so that it would not fire.” (44). While she claims to have once borne a child, she later confesses that she had simply forged her pregnancy in order to take revenge on an insolent suitor, Simplicissimus, the protagonist of yet another well-known picaresque tale. Courage’s trade name has nothing to do with nobility of conduct, but is, rather, a wayward allusion to a man’s private parts. By acknowledging the loss of sexual attractiveness, the pícara seems to deny the principle of the Heavenly Aphrodite because being excluded from reproduction means to be denied access to real Platonic beauty and to renounce what Diotima considers a primary manifestation of immortality: childbearing (Symposium 67).15 Yet, in comparison to the more prosaic world of Carter’s Wise Children, Dora is “pleased as Punch” (11) when she becomes fertile; later on, pondering the fact that her menopause started at the same age as her sister’s, she admits she was glad to find out that “the tap turned off” (74). All civilised societies have inevitably come to terms with the issue of assigning a distinct role to women outside the cycle of fertility. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead reported that in traditional Balinese society pre-pubescent girls and post-menopausal women enjoy similar privileges; they are allowed access to rituals that are forbidden to fertile women because they have been respectively preserved from, or divested of, the ability to reproduce, which is commonly considered an impure state. In particular, Mead explains that older women are justified in breaking some rules imposed on female decency, for instance they “may use obscene language as freely as or more freely than any man.”16 Even in those societies where they are not privileged categories, pre-pubescent girls and post-menopausal women are granted a peculiar status; they are “treated very much as men” (215).17 Freud relates how, in some native Australian tribes from the Portland and Glenelg area, old women were 14 15 16 17

14 15

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Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Mother Courage (London: The Folio Society, 1965) 25. “Pregnancy, reproduction – this is an immortal thing for a mortal animal to do, and it cannot occur in anything that is out of harmony, but ugliness is out of harmony with all that is godly. Beauty, however, is in harmony with the divine” (Plato on Love: Symposium 67). Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) 174–75. Discussing the position of a post-menopausal woman in Western society in the 1950s – a condition that often occurs in current times – Mead observes that, being usually longerlived than her male partner, she may ultimately devote her caring and experience to social service, to “a larger body of mankind” (22). It seems that only when women lose their potential for procreation, are they socially entitled to concentrate on other activities that

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entitled to deflower brides, a seemingly sacred task that was usually accomplished elsewhere by male priests.18 The pícara appears to stand in an awkward position: apparently, she has tamed her sexual urge but this, however, does not guarantee her ascent to immortal love because her beauty has faded away; not only her physical beauty, but the beauty that would have enabled her to participate in the flux of mortal life towards immortality. Does the pícara experience love as a sort of recollection of immortality? It is a question that may be tackled only after defining the concepts of love the pícaras consider as compatible options in their compromised lives. In this sense, Carter’s and Busi’s heroines differ quite substantially, but, in both cases, their experiences of sentimental love are episodic, fragmented and flimsy. Another element in the picaresque that conflicts with Plato’s doctrine can be inferred in the metaphor of the androgynous, described in the speech of Aristophanes (Symposium 46–51). This poetic parable explains the essence of love, where the two components of the pre-human beings who had been separated by Zeus long to reunite, creating a single unity, in which “the soul of every lover longs for something else” rather than the “intimacy of sex.” (49). Elsewhere in the dialogues Socrates denies the possibility that like may be attracted to like (see Lysis 17),19 and confutes the idea of the complementary nature of love and attraction; no matter what, this idea of the soul-mate has pervaded Western sensibility for centuries. The picaresque, once again, seems to upset the logic of the androgynous, in its unserious way: for example, by practising cross-dressing and disguise. The pícaros do not need to look for a complementary being, even less a complementary soul; they find it within themselves. “You are as a man what I am as a woman, and that is the greatest compliment I can pay you”:20 this is how Laura, a servant disguised as a countess, praises the rogue Gil Blas for his perfect masquerade as a hidalgo in Le Sage’s novel The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane. She refers to her admirer as if he were a 18 19 20

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do not relate to career. A further point of interest is Mead’s comparison between menopause, a process which takes place “as irrevocably and unmistakably as the beginning was once signalled at menarche” and men’s “gradual, indefinite, reversible” loss of “potential paternity” (333). Sigmund Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, compiled and edited by Angela Richards (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books: 1977) 267. “‘But if,’ I said, ‘something is a friend to something because it is its opposite, then these things must be friends.’ […] ‘So like is not friend to like, nor is opposite friend to opposite.’” (Plato on Love: Lysis 17). Alain René Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, trans. by Tobias Smollett (New York: A.L. Burt Company, 1902) 146.

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mirror image, but not exactly an alter ego of herself. At times, concealment of one’s identity is mainly a question of appearance. Mother Courage acts as a soldier and has learnt to fence in order to put up with the hardships of the Thirty Year’s War; Moll Flanders, not univocally ascribed to the picaresque ranks,21 commits some of her crimes dressed as a man, presumably in order to appear more menacing, but also, psychologically, to put some of her mischievous actions down to the dark, uncanny side of her personality.22 Robert Alter, on the contrary, holds that the incongruity of her behaviour emerges especially in the episodes in which she wears men’s clothes: [P]utting on different clothes does not mean for her putting on a new identity, or even playing a new role. […] It is instructive to note that the two disguises in which Moll feels most uneasy – almost guilty – are a man’s clothes and a beggar’s rags. Of the various costumes she puts on, these are the two which most contradict her own fixed nature; the one denies her sex, the other her constant need to preserve personal propriety. This point of view glosses over the fact that dressing up as a man does not necessarily imply a denial of her original sexuality, but it does add to the ambiguity of her feminine complexity. In Wise Children, disguise is often a means of achieving a more liberated sensuality, as in the passage when Dora, shy and inexperienced, dares put on Nora’s perfume and clothes to fool her sister’s boyfriend into having intercourse with her, with Nora’s consent. In her new look Dora can feel free to “kiss the boys and hug the principals […] because all that came quite naturally to her [Nora]. To me, no.” (84). Disguise brings further potential for sexual liberty to both incumbents and, consequently, seduction in the picaresque almost always pairs up with deceit. A few pages later, when Dora stumbles upon her ‘hired’ lover for the second time, she could have a chance to reveal her own identity without being reprimanded, but she is terrified by a much more dangerous threat to her personal freedom:

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I only had to speak, to say: ‘Not Nora, my darling, but Dora, who loves you only.’ And there would have been one more happy housewife behind Robert Alter, for instance, defines Moll as a quasi-picaresque heroine who lacks the “nimbleness of imagination,” the “lightness of heart” of the picaresque character; she acts cynically, according to her one-sided, businesslike nature. Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard up, 1965) 42. In folklore witches are often androgynous creatures, revealing disfigured female features and manly attributes, “pendent breasts and abundant body hair.” (Mead, Male and Female 217).

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some garden fence in Slough or Cheam, and a bellyful of kids. Those words that would have changed everything were on the tip of my tongue, would you believe. (100) The reader’s reliance on Dora’s sincerity is clearly put to the test here, in the ­pícara’s tongue-in-cheek aside: the discovery of her guiles would not be a reason for reproach, but it would cast her into the pitfall of an ordinary existence as a ‘happy’ housewife. This menace is more than enough to induce the roguish seducer to renounce all her ambitions since her choice would condemn her to a virtuous, child-consecrated family life. Surprised by a sudden fire that metonymically evokes the consuming flame of passion, Dora is even outwardly stripped of all the devices of her disguise, so that she finds herself “naked as nature intended” (101). Despite this symbolic revelation of one’s genuine self through the ultimate truth of nakedness, Dora will nonetheless give herself away: this is an extreme example of how the picaresque game of concealing identity even defies nature, to the extent that a pícara does not hold on to her disguise as a second skin. Like all versatile improvisers (see Chapter 2), she does not adhere to an appointed role, she is not enslaved by any accessory or optional traits. In Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, the Earl of Surrey, Jack’s patron, encourages his picaresque page to feign his identity because the gentleman had expressed the desire to “take some liberty of behaviour” (298), a misdemeanour his position could not otherwise allow him to enjoy. The pícaro, on the other hand, makes the most of the short-lived privileges of being revered as an aristocrat, while being unable to abandon his lecherous conduct: for example, he travels in the company of a courtesan. Half-seriously reproached by the earl for breaching his pledge to embrace sobriety, Jack does not hesitate to recover his lower social rank, and, what is more significant, reinstate his precious free will: “My earldom I would sooner resign than part with such a special benefactor [Diamante, his courtesan].” (314). But transvestism is not an exclusively picaresque disguise. In Busi’s novel, non-picaresque men dress up or act like women, not necessarily out of their sexual leaning, nor in order to find their own matching self, nor to conceal their identities; the purpose of transvestism or ambiguity is to establish one’s persuasive power over public opinion. Delfina’s uncle, Romeo, also nicknamed “Romeo La Nuit,” for example, displays a feminine attitude in order to conquer women and infuriate men, who can only rely on their supposed manliness: L’Architetto ha sbaragliato il suo secolo con le sue arti di seduttore crudele e determinato rivestito di affabilità da meretrice, di ambiguo glamour sodomita, di artefatte inclinazioni muliebri frutto di studio a tavolino. (163)

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The Architect laid waste to his own age through cruel and determined seductive arts cloaked in meretricious amiability, in the ambiguous glamour of a sodomite, in artificial womanly inclinations that were the fruit of elaborate invention. Romeo’s attitude has no direct truck with the concept of the androgynous; the feminine side of Romeo is not a complement of his personality: it is simply a hoax to exert power. In a farcical way, he resembles those priests or shamans in traditional societies (but also in our own times) who display both male and female traits, claiming a privileged contact with the archaic deities, an authority which is accepted indisputably by the whole community. In “Il sesso in maschera” [“The Masked Sex”], the cultural anthropologist Gabriella D’Agostino provides examples of both male and female ritual transvestism which does not necessarily involve an inverted sexual orientation. D’Agostino concludes that the change-over of sexual roles may be tolerated as an exception to the customary cultural order of things as long as this anomaly is somehow framed, by means formalised gestures, within an ordered system of values and attributions.23 In brief, what then is the ultimate meaning of this acceptance of a double gender role within oneself? Along with a sense of rebellion against the puritanism of social conventions and a kind of retaliation of the carnivalesque chaos against the external strain imposed by religion and morality, the androgynous within oneself is also a provocative message aimed at Plato’s doctrine of the twin souls. In the cynical picaresque view of a socially manipulated intimacy, the only twin soul is to be found within oneself. Once again, the transcendence of this encounter with the desired other half is miserably scorned or downsized by the reality of circumstances. This is also an instance of how the myth of nature, as a shadow line between the mortality of human love and the immortality of divine love, is wiped out. Nature cannot be claimed as being the inspiring principle and instigator of feelings and instincts (such as sexual drive, procreation, etc.) because social limitations and rules have been interfering with this natural course. Human beings have to redefine the function of nature as a strength presiding over their instincts, and even over the awareness of their sexual identity:24 this is what the sarcastic picaresque voice challenges the reader to do.

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Franco Castelli, Piercarlo Grimaldi (eds.), Maschere e corpi. Tempi e luoghi del Carnevale (Roma: Meltemi editore, 1997) 146–67. In her comparative study of the anthropological status of male and female in different cultures, Margaret Mead maintains that “In every known society, mankind has elaborated

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Furthermore, in Carter’s novel disguise is not only related to the idea of the androgynous, but also to theatricality (see further). Re-enacting the Shakespearian leitmotif of mistaken identities, Dora is determined to turn the set of a bad film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the stage of a “substitute bride” farce (149). In an extreme reversal of roles, the pícara has to come to terms with her unfathomable essence, since she does not only become the protagonist of disguise; she ends up being taken, unwillingly, for an object of imitation and, even, of identification. She acts as a topsy-turvy role model for the jealous first wife of Genghis Khan, Dora’s producer and unloved fiancé: this time, however, disguise resorts to one of its most up-to-date apparatus, plastic surgery: I saw my double. I saw myself, me, in my Peaseblossom costume, large as life, like looking in a mirror. […] The trouble she’d gone to! She’d had her nose bobbed, her tits pruned, her bum elevated, she’d starved and grieved away her middle-age spread. She’d had her back molars out, giving the illusion of cheekbones. Her face was lifted up so far her ears had ended up on top of her head but, happily, the wig hid them. (155) Dora looks at her imitation as into a mirror reflection, which, in turn, gives back the asymmetrical reflex of a “lovely bride” (159), who had fallen back on all her guiles for love. Paradoxically, the bride’s disguise, rather than disrupting the customary relationships between the sexes, contributes to reinstating the respectability of the legitimate first marriage that the forgotten wife is trying to reclaim. Non-picaresque characters, then, temporarily dress up as picaresque ones to restore order. In this situation Dora, who watches her wedding from behind Bottom’s stage mask, an ass head, cannot help weeping for the spouse, but she allows herself to sympathise with the respectable side of herself (the faithful bride) only insofar as she has taken her distance from its consequences and, at the same time, from the vivid reality of a movie which, surprisingly, reveals the “spontaneous nature of the unexpected marriage ceremony.” (158).25 To the pícara’s mind, the most successful disguise is one which has been so well contrived as to startle and reveal the true nature of the reality that lurks in 25

25

the biological division of labour into forms often very remotely related to the original ­biological difference that provided the original clues.” (Male and Female 30). On the ethic-aesthetic duality regarding the topic of emphasis or a distanced approach to the artistic object, delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin, see pages 52–53.

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the background. With this rejection of the good side of themselves, the complementary bright side of their personality, the rogues seem to detract from the platonic belief in an androgynous complementariness of the souls, and the ritualised component of disguise. In a further crucial Socratic dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato sanctions the dominance of the soul as a receptacle of an immortality experienced in a prenatal state – the anamnesis – over the body, which entraps the soul “like an oyster in its shell” (Phaedrus 115). In his fascinating discussion on love, sexuality and eroticism, Octavio Paz observes: “The severe condemnation of physical pleasure and the preaching of chastity as the path to virtue and bliss are the natural consequence of the Platonic separation of body and soul.”26 The picaresque appears to demote the subordination of the body to the soul as an everyday, mutable, non-transcendental experience. On the other hand, it seems to suggest a celebration of bodily pleasure for its own sake: the pícara indulges in a variety of licentious acts. However, there is no clear admission that pleasure should necessarily prevent her from toying with the idea of the supernatural. At times, the liberation of her sexual force and the accumulation of erotic knowledge, recollected through narration, lead to a mature insight into the ways of the world and the liberation of the soul, as if sexual excess were a necessary stage in the individual’s growth and self-awareness. For example, in Carter’s book characters with complicated, mysterious sexual lives are endowed with sensitivity and genuine compassion, as in the case of the sisters’ godmother Grandma Chance, who “never lost a rakish air” (27) and Dora’s stepfather Peregrine, an affectionate surrogate parent, but, at the same time a “naughty boy” with a “wicked streak” (73), looking “every inch a pimp, but one who’s risen to the top of his profession.” (114). As a consequence, sexually inhibited characters in rogues’ tales are mostly described as unfit for life, despicable, sham. For instance, Delfina’s merciless portrait of her aunt Mafalda, Uncle Romeo’s wife, shows her frustrated intimacy: Mafalda, diciamolo, provava schifo per le sue parti intime che la contraddistinguevano quale essere umano e femmina, una combinazione troppo poco mahleriana. Per lei, andare al bagno, constatare che non era solo collo e testa […] era una maledizione divina fatta alla etereità della sua linfa umana, puro plasma immaterico. (164) 26

26

Octavio Paz, The Double Flame 50–51.

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To tell the truth, Mafalda felt sickened by her private parts which marked her as a human being and a female, an insufficiently Mahlerian combination. To her, going to the toilet, facing the truth that she was not simply neck and head […] was a divine curse upon her ethereal human lifeblood, pure ineffable plasma. Mafalda rejects any form of ‘recreational’ sexual behaviour; moreover, she blindly endures the ritualisation of the sex act, which in the Pastalunghi Family’s system of values is cemented by procreation, another target of picaresque sarcasm. The aunt’s submission to the clan’s rules is extended to her children, who “disgusted her, reminding her too much of her nature as a mammal.” (“la disgustavano, ricordandole troppo la sua animalità di mammifero.” [164]). Similarly, to Sigmund Freud, neurosis is the result of an act of repression induced by disgust, shame, pity or moral contempt towards the sexual sphere meant as a merely reproductive function: by paradox, repression may escalate into various forms of aberration, where the genital organs lose their priority as sexually active components and are replaced by secondary or apparently asexual objects; in Mafalda’s case, her obsession with her neck and string of pearls. In general, parental repulsion plays a pivotal role in both novels. Describing the state of the art of psychoanalytical studies in the early twentieth century, Freud observes: The significance of the factor of sexual overvaluation [inducing aberrations] can be best studied in men, for their erotic life alone has become accessible to research. That of women – partly owing to the stunting effect of civilized conditions and partly owing to their conventional secretiveness and insincerity – is still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity. (63) If this presumption of unreliability may be unacceptable to real women, it is less likely so for most fictional ones: for example, picaresque female narrators, even those that are the creation of a male author, delight in exposing the sexual frailties of their rivals of both sexes because, as will be explained in a later section, they do not take procreation seriously enough to fall prey to perversions. In this, the pícara definitely stands at the opposite pole to the sombre figure of the “persecuted virgin”, one of the archetypes Mario Praz identifies with reference to Western pre-romantic sensibility.27 Nor is the Gothic ­obsession with

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Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1956).

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eroticism and violence an element that is even remotely reminiscent of the picaresque representation of sexuality. In short, the female rogue does not seem to side with any of the above-mentioned female characters: she is not pure enough to be a platonic heroine, she is not haunted enough to be a persecuted victim, and not rebellious enough to be a Sadeian libertine. A better delineation of her attitude towards sexuality can then be obtained from another classic: “The Tale of Cupid and Psyche” by Apuleius.

Cupid, Psyche and Curiosity

The tale of Cupid and Psyche is a novella interpolated into books iv-vi of one of the most ancient novels in existence, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, commonly entitled The Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus;28 ii century ad).29 The hero, Lucius, turned into an ass as a punishment for his curiosity about the secrets of witchcraft, overhears the story of Cupid and Psyche from an old lady, a “crazy, drunken, old hag” (The Golden Ass 113), who is the doorkeeper of a group of bandits. The narrator of the Cupid/Psyche story is a totally unreliable character, by no means endowed with the embellishments of rhetoric; even Apuleius seems to perceive this discrepancy, and abruptly meddles in the narrative by attributing the authorship to himself as the “author of this Milesian tale.” (78).30 Psyche, 28 29 30

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St Augustine claims, with no clear evidence, that this was the original title attributed by Apuleius to his work. Augustine, The City of God (CD18.18.2), quoted in The Golden Ass xix. Augustine accuses Apuleius of worshipping demons, creatures that mediate between the gods and human beings (cd 8.18 and 9.3) and condemns Apuleius for practising witchcraft (cd 8.19). 29 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated with Introduction and Explanatory Notes by P.G. Walsh (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1995). This work is widely considered as a literary predecessor of the Spanish picaresque. See, for instance, Walsh, The Golden Ass xlv; Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro 26; Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1993) 14; Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1999) 168, 209 (note 13, where she mentions Blackburn, and other scholars in favour of a plausible influence of The Golden Ass on Lazarillo de Tormes: Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Jean Molino, Antonio Vilanova, Michael Zappala). 30 Although scholars such as Walsh, Griffiths and Kenney attribute the story of Cupid and Psyche entirely to Apuleius (Cupid & Psyche 9 and note 39), the work’s narrative structure could have been inspired by a previous Greek model. The abundance of wry anachronisms recalling Roman customs, along with Apuleius’ own style, accord the narrative a distinct Latin flavour.

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a Greek princess, has attracted the envy of Venus for her irresistible, almost divine beauty. The goddess contrives a plot to make her fall for “the lowest possible specimen of humanity” (77), the most “barbaric, snake-like monster” (78) to punish her ambitions, and entrusts her son Cupid with this task. Cupid unexpectedly falls in love with Psyche and, ever concealing himself from his lover, secretly marries her. Their encounters only happen in complete darkness, and Psyche can only hear and touch her spouse, but she promises him she will never try to discover his real identity. Instead, exhorted by her envious sisters, Psyche cannot resist casting some light on Cupid’s face and body in his sleep: at the sight of his beauty, she yields to ardent passion. Unfortunately, she drops wax on Cupid and he wakes up; the god, enraged with Psyche’s disobedience, rejects her. In the meantime, Venus discovers her son’s unreasonable passion for a mortal wench, who is also expecting a child from him. Psyche implores the goddess’ mercy, but Venus imposes four labours upon her, until she emerges from Hades with a box from Persephone. Once again, her curiosity takes hold of her: she opens the box and falls into a death-like sleep. Awakened by Cupid, she is once again rescued by the intercession of the deities and, finally, the couple celebrate their official wedding in heaven. Psyche is reconciled with her mother-in-law and rewarded with the gift of immortality. She will give birth to a little girl, Voluptas (6.24; “Pleasure” 113). The tale appears not to have any real correlation with the rest of Apuleius’ narrative but, in the overall texture of this romance, it anticipates the climax of book xi, in which Isis, the supreme Egyptian goddess of all creation, manifests her saving grace to Lucius. Fulgentius and Augustine characterised the tale as an allegory (Cupid & Psyche 16), where Psyche impersonates the mortal soul which is doomed to fall again and again, until it finds salvation in divine intervention. E.J. Kenney laments the “blindness of some modern scholars to its obvious character as ‘an Odyssey of the human soul’.” (16). The allegorical intent of the story is undeniable, but the way this allegory should be decoded still allows for a variety of views rather than a simplistic revisitation of a myth. First of all, the narrative is interspersed with parodies of numerous literary sources and episodes which somehow downplay the grandiosity of a purely mythological representation. First of all, the insistence on the Roman corpus iuris, which should not be applicable to deities, even less to Greek deities, adds a tone of allusive familiarity for the common Latin reader. For example, Jupiter has to impose a penalty of ten thousand sesterces on the “heavenly citizens” who will not attend an assembly, so “the theatre of heaven at once filled up through fear of this sanction.” (The Golden Ass 112). Secondly, it is possible to argue that the whole myth presented in a quite realistic tone – by a not-toorespectable source – could be read as a parody, leading towards the final aim of

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the romance, namely a compromise between the teachings of Platonism and the doctrines imparted by the esoteric cult of Isis, Apuleius’ tutelary goddess. The character of the vengeful Venus is itself a parody, not only because of her role as jealous mother-in-law, but also for the ambivalence of her position as both primeval creative impulse – “en rerum naturae prisca parens” (Cupid & Psyche 42)31 – and destructive lust,32 which Plato had kept separated in the Symposium (see above). Cupid is depicted by Venus as a “good for nothing, loathsome seducer” (The Golden Ass 97), a portrait which imitates humorous Hellenistic sources. However, the further, unusual quality of being a devoted, passionate husband gives him an allure of composed sensuality, his wings recalling those of the winged souls elevating to the divine in Plato’s Phaedrus (111). Cupid wavers between his common connotation as god of irrational passions and that as a simulacrum of fertility. In short, all the deities’ appointed roles are either misrepresented or parodied.33 For example, Psyche confuses the light of sensual desire for Cupid with the light of spiritual knowledge by using an inappropriate prophetic tone (5.13, 88); one of Psyche’s sisters, far from being a loyal wife, uses with Cupid the same form of address that the virtuous Evadne had dedicated to her husband (“accipe me…” in Ovid, a.a., 3.21-22), retold exactly by Apuleius, in a slightly farcical context (“Take me Cupid” 5.27, 96); Venus’ obsessive protectiveness towards Cupid, considered too young to be tempted by love (“puerum ingenuum et inuestem” translated as “my innocent, beardless boy”: 5.28, 97); in these brawls between mother and child, Kenney notes, “Venus sounds more like a matron in comedy or mime than an 31 32 33

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Kenney retraces this attribute of Venus in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (Eros & Psyche 121). Venus is driven by irrational whims and desires; she even seduces her own son to punish Psyche. Moreover, Apuleius alludes to Venus’ violent origins: she was born from the foam dispersed by Uranus’ genitals, severed and thrown into the sea by his murderous son Kronos. See Hesiod, Theogony, translation, introduction and notes by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins up, 2004) vv.183–210, 15–16. Further instances of parodying jest or authorial irony in “Cupid and Psyche”: the worshippers neglect Venus’ shrines as Venus herself had done when she was overcome by passion for Adonis, an episode narrated by Ovid (Met. 10.529.31), and recalled in The Golden Ass (4.29, 75); the insertion of typically Roman details in Cupid’s characterisation, e.g. “matrimonia corrumpens” (“undermining […] marriages”; 4.30, 76); Venus’ all-too-motherly reproaches to her son (“parricida”, not translated in Walsh’s version, “parricide” in Kenney’s: 5.30, 85); the use of unusual elegiac metre in Apollo’s oracle, suggesting that Cupid blackmailed the god of prophecy to his own advantage (4.33, 78). All these examples are derived from the aforementioned Kenney edition of Cupid & Psyche. For major coherence, all page references, unless otherwise specified, are to Walsh’s edition of The Golden Ass.

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Olympian goddess” (Cupid & Psyche 183); Venus’ reference to Mars as Cupid’s stepfather (appraised from Ovid), ironically justifies the goddess’ infidelity to her legitimate husband Vulcan as if it were an irreproachable second marriage (5.30, 98); Juno and Ceres define Venus’ household as “muliebrium publicam […] officinam” (“the manufacture of women’s weaknesses”, 5.31, 99). Psyche is the victim of this mayhem among the gods, but at the same time she succeeds in deceiving them and in obtaining immortality. In this respect, she resembles the picaresque heroine since she extends her curiosity towards life to the farthest frontiers of knowledge by means of her active and passive sensuality; she attracts veneration and she is as well attracted by her unseen husband. In Phaedrus (120) Socrates claims that the eyes are a pathway through which beauty penetrates the soul: but what happens when beauty is only imagined, not seen, and maybe what the eyes are eager to watch has nothing to do with conventional beauty? This is Psyche’s dilemma. She cannot silence her curiosity, she needs to see her husband’s real features and use the lamp of knowledge to disclose the nature of her own desires, but, as foretold by the oracle, she must be made to believe her lover is a monstrous creature – she was betrothed to a “marriage with death” (78); yet, her disgust does not stop her from investigating her husband’s real features. On the contrary, disgust is, along with the sense of death, a latent component of eroticism: human beings are both revolted and attracted by the transgression implied in repulsion and death.34 This peculiar symbiosis emerges in later adaptations of picaresque themes. For instance, Felix Krull, the wayward protagonist of Thomas Mann’s last novel (1955), finds a fascinating connection between disgust and desire when the theatre idol Müller-Rosé discloses his disfigured features concealed underneath the heavy make-up: Our capacity for disgust, let me observe, is in proportion to our desires; that is, in proportion to the intensity of our attachment to the things of this world. A cool indifferent nature would never have been shaken by disgust to the extent that I was then.35 Moreover, Psyche’s rebellion against Cupid’s sexual limitations leads to the discovery of eroticism, the tormented human side of sexuality. As a pícara ante 34 35

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This theme is paramount in Mario Praz’s previously quoted study on romantic literature. Eroticism and the grotesque had a strong impact in what we commonly associate with romanticism, an age of noble ideals and unsullied passions. Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man [The Early Years] (New York: Random House Inc., 1965) 26.

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litteram, Psyche had suffered from the solitude of her beauty (78); her attractiveness is so absolute that no man can approach her. Only when she is able to accept her own physical awareness and that of her lover can she really start on her journey of self-discovery and, later, the achievement of a spiritual, immortal soul.36 It can be argued that most traditional, puritanical pícaras like Moll Flanders purchase their “redemption” at the price of inevitable aberrations of sexual knowledge, incurring adultery and incest. Other female rogues such as Mother Courage do not obsessively regret their past life, but their sexual exploits have taught them to disclose the infamies of worldly life. In Wise Children, Dora and Nora are seized by an irresistible curiosity about their own father when, at the age of seven, they get to know, through Grandma Chance’s generously detailed descriptions, what the reproductive function of a father (not even of a man!) really is all about. This curiosity, far from generating phobias or perversions, gives rise to a sense of “yearning” and a “longing” for their father, a feeling that borders on eroticism, but still retains a sense of “romance” (57), a glimmer of spirituality. Octavio Paz discusses the revolutionary impact of “Cupid and Psyche” on the ideas of love and eroticism in Western civilisation, starting from the actual subject matter: I emphasize, first of all, that their love is mutual and returned: neither is an object of contemplation for the other; nor are they rungs on any ladder of contemplation. […] There are countless stories of gods who fall in love with mortals, but in none of these loves, invariably sensual in nature, does attraction for the soul of the beloved play a role. Apuleius’s story 36

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According to Ward Hooker, “Beauty was for both Cupid and Psyche the necessary condition of falling in love… Psyche did not fall in love with Cupid until she saw him and could recognize his beauty… What she had experienced before the recognition of Cupid was mere ‘pleasure’…; what she felt after falling in love was an overwhelming urge to pursue Cupid forever… It was an ambition that could only be fulfilled by immortality in his divine company”. See Ward Hooker, “Apuleius’ ‘Cupid and Psyche’ as a Platonic myth,” The Bucknell Review 5, 3: 24–38, quoted by Kenney in Cupid & Psyche, 171. Elsewhere, Hooker defines the tale as an “allegorical myth” (38): I find it difficult to agree that Psyche’s visualisation of Cupid’s features instils absolute platonic love into the bride’s sensibility. It is my contention, instead, that from the moment Psyche identifies her lover as an individual, regardless of his divine origin, she is not in the least dispossessed of her sensual awareness; quite the opposite: she is no longer prey to blind sexual desire. Psyche has not detached herself from her sensual nature, and no sense of denial of her or her lover’s body seems to have intervened. See, for instance, 5.26, “nimia voluptatis copia” (Cupid & Psyche 80; “sense of overwhelming delight”, The Golden Ass 95).

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presages a vision of love that a thousand years later will change the spiritual history of the West. The Double Flame 29

Psyche knocks down the barriers between the human and the god-like without climbing the “rising stairs” of absolute knowledge of Beauty described by Plato (Symposium 72); her elevation to the divine is the result of a purely human sequence of mistakes, downfalls and misplaced requests for help from the deities: when, for instance, she entreats Ceres and Juno, the goddesses of motherly love and of marriage respectively, to obtain their mercy, they derisively suggest she should ingratiate herself with Venus instead. In a symbolic way, Psyche has to recognise that her roles as a wife and as a mother are secondary; first, she has to come to terms with her sensual awareness and reconcile with the Venus-like part of herself. Once she obtains her mother-in-law’s acceptance, Psyche can overstep the impediments of social convenience and “legalise” her unbalanced human/divine union, in keeping with what Jupiter terms, in rather peculiar Roman republican jargon, “the civil law” (The Golden Ass 113; original: “iure ciuili”, 6.24). In her social disruptiveness, she ends up forcing human rules on the gods: this attitude bears a clear resemblance to the pícara’s own disregard for conformism. Like most pícaras, moreover, Psyche is accused of practising witchcraft because she wavers between mortality and the hereafter, between what is human and what is supernatural, the sensual and the sublime. As mentioned earlier, Psyche’s daughter is called Pleasure, which does not sound appropriate for the progeny of a god and an immortal creature. But this is, once again, the contradiction existing between the transcendental and the mortal mystery behind sensuality, eroticism and procreation. The epilogue of Apuleius’ romance, restoring Lucius to humankind through a series of purifying rites, suggests a mystical experience, mediated by the senses, culminating in the physical union of the protagonist and the goddess, a plausible echo of Psyche’s ascent to heaven.37 37

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A similar episode may be found in Novalis’ philosophical novel fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Novices of Sais, 1798–99), which reaches its poetic climax with the revelation that the Egyptian goddess Isis at the temple in Sais actually personifies Nature. The inspiring idea, with a possible influence from Apuleius, is then the reconciliation of soul and body within the mysteries of nature: “The epitome of what stirs our feeling is called nature, hence nature stands in an immediate relation to the functions of our body that we call senses. Unknown and mysterious relations within our body cause us to surmise unknown and mysterious states in nature; nature is a community of the marvellous, into which we are initiated by our body, and which we learn to know in the measure of our

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The Constraints of Nature

Nature and social make-up are both crucial in the definition of sexual behaviour and gender identity. As Erving Goffman notes in his essay on sex-class arrangement – a category encompassing courtship, seduction and courtesy38 – natural and social premises are a primary framework to delimit and deconstruct situations occurring in human experience. Provocatively, Goffman holds that informal relations, potentially including sentimental or sensual displays, are certainly less dependent on external rules compared with formal relations, while non-formalised kinds of experience are more subjective and difficult to frame; however, they are not by necessity more sincere or genuine than formalised behaviour.39 At the same time, Goffman emphasises the primacy of the social frame in sexual behaviour and gender identity: although the natural objective frame is often uninfluential in gender relationships, it is simply exploited as an excuse to justify an inherent male/female differentiation. Nevertheless, the pretext of nature has engendered most of the reciprocal prejudices of the sexes. Early picaresque narrators have followed this tendency by disclosing a stark misogynist contempt, and associating women’s seductive powers with an inborn propensity for witchcraft and profanity.40 This malevolence towards women draws on the prejudice of their physical inferiority, and this is also delineated in de Sade’s view of ‘the weaker sex’ through the eyes of the depraved Count of Gernande: 38 39 40

body’s faculties and abilities.” See Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), The Novices of Sais, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim (New York: Archipelago Books, 2005) 77. For the original version see Novalis, Werke, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Gerhard Schulz (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1969) 115. 38 Erving Goffman, “The Arrangement between the Sexes” 301–31. 39 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis 458: “formal relations might be less subject to the play of doubts than are intimate ones.” This quote is mentioned in Ann Branaman’s essay “Goffman’s Social Theory,” in Erving Goffman, The Goffman Reader, edited and with a preface and introduction by Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman (Malden, Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000) lxxvi. Branaman comments on the previous sentence: “Informal social relations are more subject to the contingencies of subjective framing because there is not [sic] formal institutional apparatus to constrain the way individuals frame themselves, others, and the social situation” (lxxvi). 40 In El Buscón, for example, Pablos draws an irreverent portrait of his own mother’s sacrilegious dealings, which finally cause her to be sent to Toledo as a convict sorcerer. See Francisco de Quevedo, La vida del Buscón llamado don Pablos, edited by Domingo Ynduráin (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980) 196.

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a being three-quarters of her life untouchable, unwholesome, unable to satisfy her mate throughout the entire period Nature constrains her to childbearing, of a sharp turn of humor, shrill, shrewish, bitter, and thwart; […] a being so perverse that during several convocations the question was very soberly agitated at the Council of Mâcon whether or not this peculiar creature, as distinct from man as is man from the ape, had any reasonably legitimate pretensions to classification as a human.41 Justine 647

Leaving aside this exaggerated, half-serious boutade on women’s biological ineptitude, the bias of an influence of nature on gender relationships and sexuality is still paramount in the contemporary forms of the picaresque, but with a more critical, myth-crushing approach. A few examples from Busi and Carter will illustrate how instances of discrimination through nature are still surprisingly recurrent, even though they do not concern women only, but also men’s own threatened confidence in their manliness.42 In this respect, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead conducted a fascinating study of seven Pacific island peoples, observing principally the transition from childhood to adolescence in male and female members within different communities. She compared her findings with the stages of puberty among modern American youth and came to the conclusion that females are born without a complete awareness of their biological role, and they can only predict that it will culminate in future child-bearing; males, on the contrary, acquire their sense of belonging to manhood from the very beginning. This, however, does not exempt men from giving constant evidence of their vigour and fecundity; women, conversely, do not have to demonstrate anything. Their gender awareness is incomplete in early years but later, as soon as women understand their appointed function in society, they are forced to inhabit an immutable state, a position that does 41 42

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Curiously enough, Carter does not hesitate to accuse the ribald Marquis of “ingrained puritanism” for his all-pervasive view of sex as crime, where “the libertine’s entire pleasure is the cerebral, not sensual one, of knowing he is engaging in forbidden activity.” See Carter, The Sadeian Woman 146. Quite sardonically, Goffman lists the requisites of the ideal American man, including some purely biological fortuities: “In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports.” See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Touchstone Books, Simon and Schuster, 1986) 128, quoted in Erving Goffman, The Goffman Reader lix.

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not protect from discrimination, rather the opposite.43 In a sense, biology is an undercurrent providing a justification for the most variegated stores of sexual differentiation practices. On this matter, the prologue of Simone de Beauvoir’s most celebrated book about the history of femininity seems to contradict this view: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”44 To de Beauvoir, femininity is a social construct, the product of civilisation, whereas biological differences and psychological disparities with men have very little or no role whatsoever. Describing female sexuality, Freud attests how children of both sexes consider their mother as their love-object in the first years of their life but then, all of a sudden, girls start investing their father with the role of object of attachment: this ‘change-over’ is not only the result of what Freud describes as a physiological passage to a more mature sexuality – a changed priority in the erogenous zones from the active (the clitoris) to the passive genital component (the vagina) – but also dictated by an apparently psychological motivation that makes the little girl reject the mother figure, accused of repressing the girl’s aspirations to active sexuality. Young females have then to cope with two opposite forces, the Oedipus and the castration complex; therefore, in later years, they may experience a strong hostility towards their mothers or various neurotic, or even paranoid symptoms.45 To Freud, then, differentiation between the sexes is not universally sanctioned by biology or society but, to various degrees, by the processes of the mind: this formulation clashes, of course, with de Beauvoir’s concept of a gender differentiation decided by the social context. In literary terms, the framing and discrimination of gender as the result of distinct natural propensities appears to reflect itself quite clearly in two aspects of human life: procreation and parental instinct. Procreation In the aforementioned essay on de Sade, Carter distinguishes between a childless woman by nature and one by choice: There is a world of difference between a helplessly barren woman and a purposely infertile one. A woman who remains childless in spite of her 43 44 45

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Margaret Mead, Male and Female, A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1964) 170: “The [Balinese] little boy learns that he must act like a boy, do things, prove that he is a boy, and prove it over and over again, while the little girl learns that she is a girl, and all she has to do is to refrain from acting like a boy.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) 267. Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” Freud on Sexuality 371–78.

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own wishes may feel herself bereft and uncompleted, a sub-standard product of the assembly line of nature, who is only a passenger in the world because she has been denied a fertility she feels is part and parcel of her own nature. […] This theory of maternal superiority is one of the most damaging of all consolatory fictions and women themselves cannot leave it alone, although it springs from the timeless, placeless fantasy land of archetypes where all the embodiments of biological supremacy live. […] A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option. So a woman who feels she has been deprived of motherhood is trebly deprived – of children; of the value of herself as mother; and of her own self, as autonomous being. But a woman who has chosen infertility does not feel this deprivation. All the same, she is not a surrogate man. The Sadeian Woman 106–07

The limits imposed by the expectations deriving from female fertility are forcefully violated and discounted in the picaresque. Not only does the pícara frequently deny her reproductive role, she also denaturalises the most biologically unequivocal aspects of her sexuality. In a society where fertility is a measure of someone’s relevance, and men may be justified in considering childless women as a race of in-betweens, “imperfect men, […] partial males,”46 or “odd women”,47 all measures are legitimate to contradict these views and reveal their deviations.48 For instance, Delfina describes her uncle Alfio’s ­preference 46 47 48

46 Mead, Male and Female 92. This view of women’s inferiority resembles de Beauvoir’s concept of femininity, as Kate and Edward Fullbrook poignantly summarise: “Men, she says, do not feel the need to declare their sex: the masculine is assumed to be so utterly primary that it is equated with the human, in an absolute sense. The feminine, in turn, is treated as deviant from the absolute human type, which is, by implication, always masculine.” See Edward and Kate Fullbrook, Sex and Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2008) 208. 47 This expression was coined by the English writer George Gissing whose novel The Odd Women (1893) deals with women who find themselves not “making a pair”, like an “odd glove”; quoted in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 19. 48 In an enthusiastic review of Christina Stead, Carter highlights how through a hopelessly bleak portrait of family lives (e.g. in The Man Who Loved Children, For Love Alone, and Letty Fox: Her Luck, itself a masterly piece of female picaresque), the Australian novelist covertly implies that her women protagonists find it reasonable not to compromise themselves with motherhood: “These are families in a terminal state of malfunction, families you must flee from in order to preserve your sanity, families it is a criminal folly to perpetuate – and, on the whole, Stead’s women eschew motherhood like the plague. (Stead’s loathing of the rank futility of home and hearth is equalled, in literature, only by that expressed by the Marquis de Sade).” See Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted, (London:

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for artificial insemination to guarantee respectability and conceal his homosexual leanings. His wife is ready to accept all sorts of humiliations for the cause of reproduction: Di che avrebbe mai potuto lamentarsi, poi? Per essere incinta lo era. […] Intanto, per nascondere l’essenziale, era d’uopo rivelare il superfluo: far fare cioè dei figli a qualche placenta con la fede al dito e il décolleté ingioiellato di perle. (68–69) What did she have to complain about? She was pregnant, wasn’t she? […] Meanwhile, to hide the essential, it was convenient to reveal the unnecessary, namely, to entrust some placentas, a ring around their fingers and their décolleté adorned with pearls, with the task of making children. Later on, Delfina bluntly explains that her cousins were made with a teaspoon (“sono stati fatti col cucchiaino,” 100). The patriarch, Nonno Nasino, has imposed a “quorum” on each of his six heirs – that Delfina’s paternal grandmother does not hesitate to define as “quorum della portulaca”, a euphemism for a much more explicit expression, and a sarcastic identification of the Pastalunghi offspring with a type of fast-growing plant. Here, fertility has become a question of family prestige, a quasi-legalistic requisite and a reason for competition among the siblings: Secondo il Senatore, tutti i e le Pastalunghi dovevano essere prolifici come conigli, cioè quanto lui e Lucy, che non so dove l’ha mai trovato il tempo di fermarsi, distendersi e sgravarsi. “Siete in sei, mi merito trenta nipoti, cinque a testa come quorum e già vi faccio lo sconto” aveva detto ai suoi bambini appena in fasce. (62) According to the Senator, all the Pastalunghi, men and women, had to breed like rabbits, exactly as he and Lucy had. I do not know how she ever found the time to stop, lie down and give birth. “There are six of you, I deserve thirty grandchildren, a minimum of five each, and that’s giving you a discount” he used to say to his newborn babies. Natural laws are pushed to the extreme of hyperbole and discriminate between winners and losers in the family. Vintage, 1992) 179. It seems appropriate to point out a direct influence of Stead on Carter’s fictionalisation of motherhood.

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In Wise Children, on the other hand, the revelation of one’s sexuality is marred by the curse of being illegitimate. In the following passage, Dora recalls the day of her and her sister’s first menstruation, exactly the same day their half-sisters were born: I always think there was a sort of mean connection between their birth and our puberty. Typical dirty trick that Saskia might pull on us, that we should turn into women just at the very moment when they turn into babies. Always a different generation. That’s the rub. […] They’ve always had that final edge on us. So rich. So well-connected. So legitimate. (74) Paradoxically, the Chance sisters are dispossessed of their role as potential daughters of a reluctant father and instead become potential mothers, both roles precarious and imposed, apparently by the untimely laws of nature, although, as Dora humorously insinuates, there must have been some ill-fated human will behind this: a perfect example of how the picaresque tends to see beyond the inescapable chain of natural events, even in the sexual sphere. Moreover, Dora recalls the loss of her virginity as a most unusually non-traumatic experience: “I never bled or hurt; a decade and a half of fouettés, jetés and high kicks had done in the membrane without leaving a trace.” (85). The picaresque woman succeeds, once again, in defying nature and its rites of passage. Carelessly, she tramples on the set of ancestral reasons that induced most civilisations to sanction the taboo of virginity, namely the cruelty of defloration and the repugnance for blood, with its multiple obscure symbolisms.49 For  ­instance, a notorious forerunner of many female rogues, the Spanish C ­ elestina from the Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea (1499) is an aged procuress, healer and sorcerer who, among many a guile, has acquired the expertise to restore virginity. In her grotesque maternal solicitude, she becomes the caricature of a typically literary stereotype: the mother as custodian of her daughter’s purity.50 From a male viewpoint, virility often becomes a source of humiliation. Men are frequently downgraded to reproductive tools: Delfina’s father Fabrizio Unno Cavamarmi is labelled as “fattore da monta” (“inseminator”), but he has no other relevant personal quality, he is a “useless couch potato of a picaro.” (“inetto picaro pantofolaio” [103]). Ditie, the scoundrel hero of Bohumil

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A dated, yet insightful study of virginity can be found in Freud’s essay “The Taboo of Virginity (Contributions to the Psychology of Love iii),” in Freud on Sexuality 265–83. Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, trans. Peter Bush (Cambridge: Dedalus Ltd, 2009) 39: [Pármeno]: “when the French ambassador paid a call she sold him one of her wenches three times as a virgin. […] And for charity’s sake she would cure orphan and wayward girls who were sent her way.”

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Hrabal’s novel I Served the King of England (1989),51 undergoes a similar fate, since he is forced to become a biological guinea pig for his Nazi wife’s experiments to conceive the “New Man”, the “founder of the New Europe” (145): once again, the picaresque reveals the degeneration of a natural process of conception and reproduction. Despite these infallible scientific procedures, Ditie’s child does not bear the slightest perfection. In Wise Children, in addition, nature’s degeneration is hinted at in the episode of Nora’s fortuitous encounter with a man acting as a goose in a pantomime. The identification of the man with the animal – Dora says that if Grandma had known about this liaison, she “would have plucked him” (80) – gives this unsuccessful procreative act the appearance of an infraction of the laws of nature. Reflecting on her sister’s repeated miscarriages, Dora defines her as a “martyr to fertility” (81), thus pointing out at the same time the sacredness of motherhood and the irrational ritual sacrifice Nora has been enduring, time and again, for its sake. This view of procreation constitutes the main dissimilarity between two otherwise complementary characters: Dora, the pícara in her own right, who does not regret her infertility,52 and her more outspoken, but less rebellious sister. Where other non-picaresque women are concerned, in Vendita galline km 2 Delfina’s mother decides to have children from her legitimate husband, not out of moral restrictions – she is unfaithful to him anyway – but because she wants to provide the best progeny to immolate on the Family altar; therefore she is determined to “squeeze completely dry the aristocratic kelp from the AustroHungarian, Napoleonic-Palatine, Prussian as well as Maremman progeny of the Unno Rossi.” (“spremere fino in fondo il nobile fuco della austro-ungarica, napoleonico-palatina, prussiana nonché maremmana stirpe degli Unno Rossi.” [101]). With this cynical remark, species selection merges into aristocratic ambitions – Fabrizio belonged to a family of noble descent, although he was himself the illegitimate son of Laudomia and a peasant from Maremma, and had been forced to leave Italy with his mother and wife because of his fascist connections. In Wise Children legitimacy is not dependent on an aristocratic lineage but, in a similar way, purity of blood is guaranteed by evidence of being part of a dynasty of first-rate Shakespearian actors, implying a class division even upon the stage, while illegitimate “side-blows” like Dora and Nora have to make do striding the boards of a vaudeville music hall. 51 52

51 52

Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England, trans. by Paul Wilson (London: Vintage Books, 2006). Relating her own problematic pregnancy in a letter to Lorna Sage, Carter is outraged at the way a consultant at the clinic, implying that her patient was well beyond the customary child-bearing age, even suggested she should “contemplate adoption” (Lorna Sage, Angela Carter 51–52). This episode shows how Carter despised the fact that a woman’s freedom could be compromised in the name of presumed conformity to the dictates of biology.

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How does the pícara respond to this chaotic disruption or degeneration of the natural process of procreation? As previously mentioned, both Delfina and Dora decide to eschew procreation, perhaps in order to avoid transmitting to their children the same dreadful experience of neglect that they had endured. For instance, the young Dora Chance comments on her branding as Melchior’s “natural child”: “We are his natural daughters, as they say, as if only unmarried couples do it the way that nature intended.” (5; author’s italics). Here the adjective ‘natural’ associated with progeny does not only mean “born outside marriage, illegitimate” but, according to an old-fashioned usage, it can mean quite the opposite: “born in lawful wedlock, legitimate.”53 A further element of disarray is provided by the legal repercussions of being a natural child: in Common Law non-marital children are deprived of the right of inheritance. Yet once again, language use is slightly different, since ‘natural’ as an attribute for powerful individuals implies that their right of authority has been sanctioned by birth – “having a status […] by birth; natural-born”; “hereditary; possessed by right of birth.”54 In a later stage in her life, Dora engages in cursory sexual experiences, but the most significant, life-changing episode is narrated near the end of the novel as she yields to passionate lust for her uncle, who had covertly acted as a father to the sisters and is by now a hundred years old – Nora is twenty-five years his junior. In a way, the celebration of sexual instinct, devoid of any reproductive aim ends up effacing the prohibitions of familial conventions. The picaresque very often challenges the reader to face the issue of incest and poses a basic question: are these prohibitions dictated by moral restraint, social reasons, or intrinsic natural bonds between individuals of the same family circle? Still, the angle of this representation is so variably focused that it cannot allow for any tailor-made answer. The social order expects Delfina, a lesbian, to disregard procreation. She does not only reject it, but is also forced to deal with the consequences of unwanted motherhood in the most shocking manner, by mutilating herself after being the victim of two episodes of rape. She describes the first episode with disturbing tolerance: the rapists taught her “the things of life, with pedagogic determination.” [“le cose della vita, con determinazione pedagogica”], they must have been “real professionals in the field” (“dei veri professionisti del mestiere.” [226]). The fact that sexual violence does not receive any consideration from the authorities that should impose punishment on its perpetrators makes the tragedy of rape even more appalling, as Delfina remarks: 53 54

53 See Oxford English Dictionary Online, “natural”, respectively definitions 15a and 15b: www .oed.com. 54 Oxford English Dictionary Online, “natural”, respectively definitions 14a and 14b.

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dopo la seconda volta che da vittime vengono trasformate in imputate sul banco dei tribunali, alla terza subiscono lo stupro e acqua in bocca, preferiscono fare direttamente un concorso alle Poste & Telegrafi se proprio devono rivolgersi a un organo istituzionale. Quando la rabbia e l’umiliazione per i doppi e tripli torti subiti comincia a mischiarsi con la furbizia, il dolore è stuprato per sempre e non osa più esporsi per reclamare una cura: ha troppa vergogna di sé. (200–01) after being transformed for the second time from victims into suspects on trial, the third time they suffer the rape and keep quiet, they prefer to apply for a position at the Poste & Telegrafi straight away, if they really have to resort to institutions. When rage and humiliation for the double or treble wrong they have endured begins to blend with cunning, the pain is raped for good and does not dare expose itself to demand a cure: it is too ashamed of itself. Paradoxically, the picaresque woman has to fight her way through these horrible acts of violence by using her cynical view on the world: she transforms them into common topics of conversation, she makes them sound ordinary, in order to counteract them with her regained awareness of departing from what nature has in store for a woman.55 Delfina completely rejects her natural attributes: “I do not even remember what the inside of a female’s uterus looks like, so loathsome is it to me to even think she has one.” (“Non ricordo più nemmeno com’è fatta una femmina all’interno dell’utero tanto mi fa ribrezzo il solo pensare che ne abbia uno.” [228]). Her uncle Romeo dismisses her as a “filthy desexed bitch” (“lurida cagna disovarica” [197]), highlighting how her infertility has erased her from the human race. Instead, her act becomes an extreme refusal of the tyranny of nature on her because, as she explains, she wants to give up being labelled as a woman and be invested with the universal features of a “human being that clings to whatever gives the most hope of staying afloat.” (“essere umano che si aggrappa dove ha più speranza di non affondare.” [284]). Later on she refers to herself as a “supernatural creature” (“creatura sovrannaturale”), a “castrate” (“castrata” [287]).

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With reference to rape literature, Goffman notes: “faced with forced attentions from strangers or persons known, and with the failure of other dissuasions, victims tend to beg and plead for mercy, employing the term ‘please’ – a term that presupposes a claim of some sort that one’s plight is to be given consideration, a claim that any woman ought to be able to invoke in regard to any man.” (Goffman, “The Arrangement” 311). Most unfortunately, the woman’s all-too-easily acquiesced position as a weak, submissive creature in Western society implies that the only way for her to prevent rape is to remind her assailant of this basic truism.

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Moreover, the protagonist’s name, Delfina, bears very interesting anthropological connotations: the term dolphin, whose morphology closely resembles the Greek delphys, ‘womb’, symbolises sexual vigour (72, 173); it is the noblest of all sea creatures and an intermediary between gods (especially Poseidon and Venus) and men. In her search for the reasons behind her name, Delfina discovers that her grandmother Laudomia imposed it on Ester as a gesture of defiance towards her daughter-in-law’s own family, a reminder of how the Pastalunghi built their fortune on the killing of thousands of dolphins entrapped in nets that were meant for tuna only. As in most picaresque novels, where naming imparts not only an identity to the character, but a whole fate that will unfold ahead of him/her, Delfina is marked with the seal of revenge. Killing a dolphin is a blasphemous gesture of transgression of the human order of things, a sacrifice that borders on the sacred. The Family keeps this ritual hidden from view because they want to suppress any possible connection between the killing of the dolphin and the killing of what the dolphin represents: sexual strength. Galimberti explains that the primitives sacrificed to the gods “to disclose the horizon of the sacred” [“per dischiudere l’orizzonte del sacro”; author’s italics].56 Confessing that the dolphins were sacrificial victims would force the Pastalunghi to justify a transgression of the order of things which the Family utterly abhors. In this sense, Delfina’s death itself could be read as a sacrifice that instead of purifying the family’s reputation, actually breaches their false moral barriers in both matters of love and death. In a later passage in the novel, Delfina acknowledges her unsafe situation: like the dolphin, she is a hybrid creature:57

56 57

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l’uomo, come il delfino, ha molte nature e rinunciare a una sola gli è fatale, perché è proprio in quest’una che stanno tutte le altre. La delicatezza della sua pochezza, chiamata complessità, rende preziosa ogni sua singola briciola di umanità. (383) Umberto Galimberti, Le cose dell’amore (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010) 25. The Italian philosopher also argues that “there is a deep affinity between sacrifice and the act of love, an affinity that even Christianity could not ignore, even though this religion has done everything it could to disguise what these two acts of transgression bring to light: the flesh of the sacrificed animal and the flesh which, in the act of love, exceeds the limits imposed by social prohibition.” (“C’è una profonda affinità tra il sacrificio e l’atto d’amore, un’affinità che non è sfuggita neppure al cristianesimo, anche se questa religione ha fatto di tutto per mascherare ciò che in questi due atti trasgressivi viene in primo piano: la carne dell’animale sacrificato e la carne che nell’atto d’amore eccede i limiti posti dal divieto sociale.” [27–28; original emphasis]). The precariousness of human happiness is associated with the dolphin’s changeable fate in a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, “Dauphins”: “Dauphins, vous jouez dans la mer,/ Mais le flot est toujours amer./Parfois, ma joie éclate-t-elle?/La vie est encore cruelle.” See

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the human being, like the dolphin, has many natures and giving up one of them is lethal because it is precisely that single nature that contains all the others. Through the frailty of its meanness, called complexity, every single grain of humanity becomes precious. Parenthood Common sense wavers over deriving the social implications of parenthood primarily from a natural instinct or from convention. Patrilineal or matrilineal families or clans do not seem to comply with a strictly biological principle, and economic or rank-related reasons seem to prevail. Some anthropologists have confirmed the conventional component in the creation and consolidation of kinship: for example Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his monumental work Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté explores the reasons why, since prehistory, incest between direct-line cousins (e.g.: with the daughter/son of the father’s brother) has been forbidden, whereas collateral-line cousins (e.g.: with the daughter/ son of the father’s sister) were allowed to marry and procreate – a code of behaviour still in force in many modern societies. He concludes that the essential law determining this diversified treatment of kinship is socio-economic: a woman who is destined to a collateral branch of the family circle establishes new bonds outside the group, thus creating new wealth, while a marriage with­ in the same branch would negate the object of marriage itself, the exchange/gift of a bride. Thus, “Exogamy provides the only means of ­maintaining the group as a group, of avoiding indefinite fission and segmentation which the practice of consanguineous marriages would bring about.”58 To Lévi-Strauss, the prohibition of incest marked the line of separation between nature and culture in the human race (24). Georges Bataille acknowledges these remarks, but he points out how the prohibition of incest is one of the first limitations mankind has imposed on its unlimited right to sexual exuberance, and this marked the passage from animal to human behaviour, a sacrifice for the sake of the gift/exchange: “The brother giving away his sister is less concerned to deny the value of sexual union with somebody closely related to him than to assert the greater value of marriages that would unite his sister with another man or another 58

58

Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée”, in Oeuvres poétiques, préface par André Billy, texte établi et annoté par Marcel Adéma et Michel Décaudin (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1965) 21; English version: “Though, dolphins, you sport in the sea,/Ever bitter is the surf./At times, does my joy burst free?/And yet merciless is life.” See Guillaume Apollinaire, The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus, translated by X.J. Kennedy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins up, 2011) 38. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) 479.

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woman with himself.” (Death and Sensuality 207). Sigmund Freud contends that incest has been ruled out of social conduct as a way of preserving the interests of “higher social units” from being “swallowed up by the family.” (On Sexuality 148). In a rather frivolous tone, instead, de Sade expresses his contempt for all sorts of prohibition arising from consanguinity ties since they proceed from unjustified human laws and regulations, while impartial Nature radically ignores them (Justine 521). It could be argued that maternal or paternal instincts must have a nature-induced component; however, a look at the chaotic layout of the family trees of both female protagonists (Illustrations 3.1 and 3.2) clearly suggests that the bonds imposed by nature between parents and children, or vice versa, are misplaced or bypassed so as to maintain a convenient relationship within the household. The solid lines describe socially adequate family bonds, regardless of their actual legitimacy. The broken lines indicate extra-conjugal liaisons or illegitimate offspring; the arrows indicate sons and daughters, while the characters’ names in bold identify twins. Finally, the dotted arrow shows Peregrine’s possible, yet not confirmed, illicit paternity of Tristram and Gareth.59 Estella m. Ranulph Hazard (4th wife) (affair with Cassius Booth) Peregrine Hazard

Melchior Hazard Dora and Nora Chance

Kitty

m. Lady Atalanta Lynde (Wheelchair) - 1st wife Saskia and Imogen

Tristram Gareth (Jesuit Priest)

m. Delia Delaney (Daisy Duck) - 2nd wife m. Lady Hazard (My Lady Margarine)-3rd wife Mixed Twin Brothers

Illustration 3.1  Wise children: the chances-hazards family tree60

59 60

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Both books provide a list of the Dramatis Personae and their mutual, intricate relationships. Busi adopts a seemingly theatrical introduction of the characters, their names and nicknames, at the beginning, whereas Carter wraps up all the actors in the story at the end, adopting a typical filmic make-up and, presumably, with the intent of challenging the reader to reconstruct the maze of familial and extra-familial bonds and alliances. No precise mention is given in the novel to Melchior’s and Peregrine’s real father, presumably a young American actor, Cassius Booth, whose “splendid gift of gravitas” (21) eventually played a vital role in providing the Hazards with new descendants, even

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The Pastalunghi progeny extends into more generations and, as for the Hazards, it has its roots in conjugal infidelity and illegitimacy:

Illustration 3.2  The Pastalunghi family tree

The dotted lines indicate that Antonio and Lorenzo were conceived by in vitro insemination. As this bizarre, unbalanced genealogy shows, Ester is the first born of the dynasty; however, she is completely omitted in the transfer of power from the patriarch, even though she is the only one who follows the rule of numerous progeny imposed by her father (Nonno Nasino). A similar set of patriarchal rules can be traced in Wise Children, where women yield to men’s whims and oddities, but eventually take revenge. This process of explaining social differences between parents of either sex and their distinct relationships with their male or female children as a result of some unavoidable, primeval biological disparity is described by Goffman as “sexual placement”: “From the start, persons who are sorted into the male class and persons who are sorted into the other are given different treatment, acquire different experience, enjoy and suffer different expectations.” (“The Arrangement between the Sexes” 303). Still, most attributes of these though Dora cannot corroborate her suppositions. She warns the reader that the issue “remains a gigantic question mark” (21). In spite of all appearances of respectability, she insinuates her own droll version of the story: “I like to think both of them had a hand in it, if you follow me.” (22).

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distinctions are the result of debatable principles, dictated by a disputable “doctrine of biological influence.” (304). He explores how the “parent–child complex” (“Gender Display” 4) – a combination of protectiveness and open violation of one’s autonomy and space – also impinges on the relationships between adults, sanctioning superiority or inferiority in terms of gender, age, rank, etc.: in our society whenever a male has dealings with a female or a subordinate male (especially a younger one), some mitigation of potential distance, coercion, and hostility is quite likely to be induced by application of the parent–child complex. Which implies that, ritually speaking, females are equivalent to subordinate males and both are equivalent to children. (5) The “parent–child complex” justifies the disparity in treatment as a necessary evil that has to be extended to social life in general, as if responding to an atavistic, archetypal principle. The protective attitude of men towards women reflects a parent-induced behaviour that seems to permeate the essence of sexual differences too. Does this arrangement apply to the picaresque representation of parental relationships? The connection between parent and child is rather unusual in the picaresque (dis)order of things, where many assertions about normalised male–female interaction are abruptly dismantled. In the case of the pícara, with even sharper intensity, her behaviour does not follow parental patterns, since parents do not accommodate themselves to the requirements of their institutional roles: picaresque heroes are inevitably either orphans or undesired children. For instance, the second of the three epigraphs in Carter’s book mentions the saying which inspired the title, “It’s a wise child that knows its own father,” an “old saw,” a piece of common wisdom that is a prelude to the complexities of parental and filial recognition and acceptance. In a passage commenting on her sense of bereavement at Melchior’s negligence in taking up his parental role, Dora discovers the real meaning of wisdom: “I may never have known my father in the sense of an intimate acquaintance, but I knew who he was. I was a wise child, wasn’t I?” (196). To Dora, wisdom means an u ­ nderstanding of how frail the biological bond becomes when other more pressing obligations intervene. Thus, comparing the unreciprocated filial affection that Peregrine cannot contain towards Saskia and Imogen, with the indifference Melchior has always flaunted to Nora and herself, Dora realises how momentous conception is; in fact, it only awakens in their father a “vague affection that seemed to puzzle him as to the cause.” (174). Moreover,

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on an inter-textual level, the copious references to King Lear in Carter’s book are another clue to the significance of a love-hate bond between a father and his children (see further). From the side of their mother, Dora and her sister are raised by Grandma Chance, a substitute parental figure who escapes any traditionally appointed role: although she proves affectionate and caring towards her foster-children, she is a naturist, a heavy drinker, a vegetarian and a pacifist, attributes that do not exactly represent an idealised submissive mother, especially in the 1920s. In fact, as Dora admits, “she looked a bit of a funniosity.” (55). The parent–child complex that Grandma imparts to her adopted children is totally uncommon: she deliberately eludes the gender trap that imposes on a mother the task of instructing her daughter about the sense of a woman’s position in society, and this rebellious attitude is mirrored more clearly in Dora, who instantly deflects any limitations imposed on her. In Vendita galline, parents behave as mere reproductive agents: for instance, the protagonist refers to her almost unknown siblings as the “exploits of our mother’s uterus” (“trascorsi dell’utero di nostra madre” [171]), or, in an even more distanced manner, the offspring of a famous tycoon are written off as “a pair of new umbilical cords” (“un paio di nuovi cordoni ombelicali” [232]); moreover, her distracted mother, Ester, “had missed the ‘coming of age’ problems along the way” (“si era persa i problemi ‘di crescita’ per strada” [208]), relating to Delfina’s sexual orientation; what is more, her role as mother, seen as an institutional task imparted by the logic of the ‘quorum’, is the only possible expression of her femininity. Whenever Ester abandons her false religious scruples to indulge in conjugal infidelity, she does not completely recover her femininity: she looks for “slightly decadent, feminine, platonic men” (“uomini un po’ decadenti, femminei, platonici” [238]), she claims a masculine role in the partnership which, once again, responds to the wrong premise of male superiority which she evidently endorses and takes on for herself. In short, to Ester, being a mother is the only way of being a woman, but it is definitely an option she accepts out of self-interest, hoping she will inherit the family wealth. Moreover, the mother role cannot by any means be refuted; it is an institutional role that stays with a woman forever, she cannot replace it with another title (Ester was both mayor of Punta Ala and senator); on the contrary, as Delfina explains with a sentence that could have figured in Carter’s ­meditations on a child’s wisdom, “a legitimate daughter can become nobody’s daughter.” (“una figlia legittima può diventare una figlia di nessuno.” [196]). In defiance of any expectation, Delfina is assailed by motherly instincts as well, and twice. The first time, with her lover Caterina: “this motherly instinct […], easily took over and gave me a dizzying anaesthetic effect when we made

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love.” (“questo istinto materno […], aveva facilmente il sopravvento e mi dava un’anestesia vertiginosa quando facevamo l’amore.” [225]). The fact that she may somehow take after her mother suddenly deprives her of all sexual involvement with Caterina, because admitting a mother/child protective agreement will end up confirming the slavery of conventions. As a rebellious pícara, the protagonist rejects being involved in the vicious mother/child circle. The second circumstance where Delfina utterly obliterates her sense of motherhood is during the cruel episode of her second rape, when she kills her aggressor, not out of revenge for the humiliation he has inflicted on her, but because he keeps staring at her with the eyes of a child holding on to his mother’s breast (272). Her own disgust for any instinctive inclination towards maternity does not allow for a social justification of the mother’s role either: more likely, it is a denial of both framings of motherhood. A final reflection should be devoted to the father figure. While Delfina’s father is reduced to his reproductive faculties on behalf of Nonno Nasino’s family, Dora’s father is surrounded by a halo of myth, suggested both by his fascinating appearance – his aloofness, the surprising circumstances in which he appears – and his sublime acting skills. The very first encounter between the twins and their biological father is characterised by the two orphans’ blatantly indifferent reaction because, as Dora explains, “we still weren’t sure just what it was that fathers did.” (56). Since Melchior’s role is not clearly defined in his institutional sexual ‘task,’ the Chance sisters have little interest in him. They are still too young and innocent to understand any form of parent– child complex; they do not inquire about their father’s identity as such, but they simply wonder what kind of creatures fathers are. Even later, when the protagonist has experienced the disappointment of constant rejection, Dora, like most pícaras, does not follow the common sense that pinpoints sex-class arrangements as a requisite in the definition of relationships of parenthood. In short, whenever she is tempted to apply the biological urge as a reason to justify fatherly instinct, she bitterly discovers that this principle is far from adequate in her particular case. Pondering on the inextricable ties that bind a father and a child, Dora a­ cknowledges that the rules of nature do not benefit her: “But then, again, a person isn’t flesh of its father’s flesh, is it? One little sperm out of millions swims up the cervix and it is so very, very easy to forget how it has happened.” (174; author’s italics). The distinction between fatherhood and mere procreation is taken to extremes by the end of the novel when Tiffany, Dora’s goddaughter, lashes out at her former boyfriend Tristram, Melchior’s son, who is willing to marry her because she is pregnant: “You’ve not got what it takes to be a father. There’s more to fathering than fucking, you know.” (211).

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Later on, recalling the reasons behind her infidelity to Melchior, Lady A. echoes Tiffany’s outspoken remarks in more polished language, but the essence of the contradiction between procreating and fathering is put across clearly: You couldn’t fill my womb, Melchior, although you’d been so profligate of your seed before me, seduced and abandoned an innocent girl, left her to die, alone, and then, to compound the betrayal, you abandoned her daughters – […] Your blood, the Hazard blood, runs in their [Saskia’s and Imogen’s] veins but the ‘darling buds’ never sprang from the seed of Melchior Hazard! (214; original emphasis) In Melchior’s decadent patriarchal view, infidelity could be accepted as long as the purity of blood was retained. Therefore, Melchior cannot accept Dora and Nora as his daughters because they were conceived with a maidservant. In this paradigm, blood is more important than paternity, and the two elements do not need to coexist. This aspect is reminiscent of Delfina’s father’s task as little more than an inseminator.

The Constraints of Society

Although gender, along with race, class and age are identified by Goffman as “structural valuables,”61 namely elements that do not depend on a particular situation, further external elements – “attributes” – influencing one’s position in the collective may end up altering the integrity of these structural elements. For instance, in de Sade’s Justine, the female protagonist, a victim of circumstances, still remains stubbornly fettered to the structural ideal of gender, and that determines her defeat. Contrary to this, her sister Juliette, protagonist of the sequel Histoire de Juliette, allows all circumstances to loosen, disrupt or even dismember the structural imperatives of gender: she progresses inexorably in her career as a sadistic libertine, flouting conventional male– female ­distinctions.62 As previously observed, in everyday society the difference ­between the sexes is only superficially determined by biological issues; a 61

61 Goffman, The Goffman Reader lxxxi.

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sociological distinction surreptitiously sets in, trying to sustain itself on the biological foundations of gender. What then is the place of social habits and customs in the representation of gender in these two novels by Busi and Carter? Is the definition of sex differences somehow affected by social or anthropological circumstances? The pícaro constantly gambles with the inducements from the external social environment at the limits of mainstream culture (see Chapter 2), but the attitude of the woman protagonist towards these impositions is even more poignantly defiant. Women have traditionally been restricted to a household – as wives, servants, unwed members of the family, etc. – and this seclusion has not helped establish solidarity or possible sympathy with other women outside this circle; women in the household were more likely to sympathise with the male members of the family. In the picaresque, however, the woman protagonist does not belong to an ordinary family or clan. Necessity forces her to leave her ‘nest’, or to be discarded by cruel, greedy, or careless parents; her husband is usually nothing more than a figurehead, more readily identified as a ‘cuckold’ by public opinion than as a conventional partner. ­Rejecting motherhood also prevents the pícara from enjoying the support of any eventual male progeny. With regard to Busi’s novel, men and women are endlessly involved in callous disputes to claim an equal right to succeed in society at each other’s expense. According to logic, then, the pícara could be expected to bond with other female characters, but this does not happen, and it is in this incompatibility among women that the social constraints related to gender prove even more dire than between men and women. All ambitious characters, be they men or women, strive to do away with their specific gender distinctiveness. As discussed before, Ester is a seductress who prefers the company of effeminate poets, she is a “poet-eater” (“mangiatrice di poeti” [349]); her sexuality is aggressive, described ambiguously as “prostatic” (“prostatica” [127]). In order to be rewarded for her gestures of abnegation to the Pastalunghi, she is even willing to be “feminine on the inside too” (“femminile anche dentro” [98]), implying that her inner, less visible self, has been transformed by the necessities of her social situation into a sort of protean sex-class. This mutability clearly reduces gender identity to nothing more than what Goffman describes as “frame trap,”63 a state of coercion depending on the individuals’ incapacity to adjust to the expectations society harbours for them. 62 63

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In de Sade’s transcendental atheism, libertines are meant to ascend to the rank of new titans challenging God’s supremacy. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis 480.

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Furthermore, Ester blames Delfina’s homosexuality on the fact that her daughter has not reached full sexual maturity. According to her view of gender, a woman has to experience marriage in order to define her own female role, but she places no moral value on being a model wife. She endorses the idea that primitive cultures presumably had of marriage: when sexual licence was generally proscribed, marriage represented the only context for socially authorised sexual behaviour. From an anthropological viewpoint, this controversial point on marriage as the only justification for sexuality could be extended to modern cultures with strong ethical principles; it is most likely that the taboo imposed on unruly sexual behaviour may have originally contributed to the creation of the institution of marriage, and not vice versa.64 The life of a successful woman is signposted by socially recognisable acts – including religious rituals: nascita e battesimo, comunione e cresima, fidanzamento e matrimonio, maternità e vedovanza, funerali di Stato e, unica svista un tête à tête con Ernest o una Wallis o una Wally all’Harry’s Bar a tumulazione avvenuta. (52) birth and baptism, communion and confirmation, engagement and marriage, maternity and widowhood, state funerals and, the one and only oversight, a tête à tête with an Ernest or a Wallis or a Wally at Harry’s Bar when the burial is over and done with. To Ester, only a mother can be a complete female; otherwise she is simply a “cross between bitches and sows” [“incrocio fra cagne e porche”], unworthy of interest, even as a political persona – paradoxically, Ester is also the minister for Opportunities for Women, “dedicated to women only so as to sound modern.” (“intitolato alla donna solo per far moderno.” [349–50]). Conversely, a single woman belongs to a remote, prehistorical age: 64

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For an interesting discussion of this aspect, see Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality 109: “Marriage in the first place is the framework of legitimate sensuality. ‘Thou shalt not perform the carnal act except in matrimony alone.’ […] This may seem a contradiction at first, but we must remember other cases of transgression entirely in keeping with the general sense of the law transgressed. […] I take marriage to be a transgression then; this is a paradox, no doubt, but laws that allow an infringement and consider it legal are paradoxical. Hence just as killing is simultaneously forbidden and performed in sacrificial ritual, so the initial sexual act constituting marriage is a permitted violation.”

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Ogni volta che muore una single di nome e di fatto, una castrata come me, è come se andasse a gambe all’aria l’ultima mammuth di un’intera dinastia che affonda le sue ovaie nella preistoria. Se muore un maschio, fa niente. (58) Every time a woman single by name and by nature, a castrate like me, dies, it is as if the last mammoth of a whole dynasty, its ovaries rooted in prehistory, was going belly-up. If a single male dies, no big deal. According to the Family’s code of values, a lesbian does not deserve any identification of her role in society other than the one expressed by her unproductive gender: once again sexuality, seen as an exclusively natural propensity, impinges on the socially valued construct of gender dignity. Delfina would like to be remembered as a “pioneer of feminism” [“pioniera del femminismo”] or “a first-class writer despised nevertheless by academia” [“una scrittrice di altissimo livello invisa però all’accademia”], but the anti-picaresque society she is condemned to live in does not allow her the same versatile sexuality that the supposedly ‘normal’ ambitious men and women of the Pastalunghi lineage are permitted to display. Even though their sexuality may appear strange, they are the custodians of procreation; therefore, they can easily trample on gender identity and dignity. This is what the pícara tries to condemn in her comical forays. Ester is by the same count a victim of her own preconceptions because, according to family tradition, only men are entitled to inherit the family business; thus, by family decree, Uncle Romeo is bound to be the absolute leader. In fact, Romeo is another champion of gender manipulation: as mentioned earlier, he disguises his own virility – and anatomical protuberances – underneath the costume of a willowy ballet dancer, not with the purpose of violating the boundaries between male and female rules of conduct, but because he is aware of the benefits he can obtain from a strategy of ambiguous self-presentation. Playing on the double meaning of “cordoni” (literally, “ropes”, “strings”) and “pacco” (“package”), allusions to the male reproductive organ, enables the association of manliness with gender freedom and social/economic power, as this example shows: “The boy had understood perfectly where the purse hides its real strings […] his most valuable asset was not in his Purse [the stock ­exchange], but in his Package.” (“il ragazzo aveva capito tutto di dove la borsa nasconde i suoi veri cordoni [...] la sua più autentica qualifica non la teneva in Borsa, ma nel Pacco.” [121]). A similarly ridiculous description of male genitalia concealed behind a stage costume is given in the episode of the unsuccessful staging of a movie inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Wise Children. Determined to e­ xport

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the theatrical excellence of Shakespeare to the new world, and mindful of his own father’s failure to do so in the past, thus engaging in a “titanic contest” with him (215), Melchior’s sexual arousal reaches the point of erection: with euphemistic candour Dora witnesses “a positive disturbance in Melchior Hazard’s perhaps not wholly well-functioning jockstrap that boded ill for marital bliss all around.” (137). In fact, this over-excitement attracts the attention of the producer’s wife, Daisy Duck, who instantly becomes the actor’s lover and then his second wife. This bawdy seduction scene stems both from Melchior’s sense of being an emissary of British cultural superiority and from his ambition to marry “not into Hollywood but Hollywood itself, taking over the entire factory, thus acquiring control of the major public dreaming facility in the whole world.” (148). Another crucial instance of how the pícara despises the link between politics and male sexual exuberance is the characterisation of Gorgeous George, a pantomime player whose routine tastelessly combines lustful innuendos and British chauvinism. His body displays a colourful tattooed map of the world: George was not a comic at all but an enormous statement. If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never have believed it. Displayed across his torso there was, if you took the top of his head as the North Pole and the soles of his feet as the South, a complete map of the entire world. He flexed his muscles and that funny little three-cornered island with appendages on the right bicep sprang out, the Irish Free State giving a little quiver. […] Amply though the garment concealed his privates, now you could see the Cape of Good Hope situated in his navel and observe the Falkland Islands disappear down the crack of his bum65 when he did his grand patriotic ninety-degree rotation […]. We gazed enraptured on the flexing pecs. ‘Rule, Britannia’ accompanied his final turn, which revealed how most of his global tattoo was filled in a brilliant pink, although the limelight turned it into morbid, raspberry colour that looked bad for his health. (66–67) The twins are enchanted by George’s blend of obscenity, patriotism and strength but Dora immediately perceives that the pink bits, the colonies that 65

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Lingering on the undignified position of the Falkland Islands tattooed on George’s bum, Carter is perhaps deriding the controversial way Britain dealt with Argentina during the Falklands crisis in 1982, a touch of historical irony (Chapter 1).

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belonged to the British Empire, were not reserved for the illegitimate, for the “offspring of the bastard king of England” (67–68), so there was no chance of ever inheriting any of this enormous wealth. Later in the story, when M ­ elchior’s delirious project to export Shakespeare and British manliness to the States is plainly doomed to founder, Gorgeous George makes a sudden reappearance. He is supposed to play the part of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but he misunderstands his role: while the Shakespearian actor would like the pantomime comedian to take off his clothes as a sign of Englishness (151), Peregrine warns him that Shakespeare’s comedy was set in Athens, where it was very unlikely people displayed maps of the British Empire on their chests! ­Gorgeous George’s sex appeal vanishes along with the anachronism of the pink on the map. In an ironic gesture of pity, Dora covers the unconscious George lying drunk on the floor of the movie set: I didn’t want our nation’s shame out in the open for all to see so I rolled him under an imitation bush, picked off a handful of imitation leaves and covered him up. It felt like the end of something, when I did that, but there was no time to ponder as to the end of what. (157) The final act of this sexual/political dispossession is played out near the end of the novel, when Dora has a fortuitous encounter with Gorgeous George. ­Almost centenarian, he has been reduced to begging, and the pícara cannot help making another cutting remark about the legitimate centres of power, exhorting the tramp to “‘Cry God for England, Harry and St George. Go off and drink a health to bastards’.” (197). The pink patches have almost faded from the old man’s skin. In Vendita galline, nationalistic pride is often vilified by the logic of power: Ester and Nonno Nasino are senators, but that does not guarantee their commitment to the higher cause of the state; quite the opposite. Unlike Carter’s attacks on Englishness, there is no such criticism of ‘Italianness’ in Aldo Busi; instead, manliness here adopts sexual diversity as its designated victim. The previous examples from Busi may suggest that this family, evidently devoted to what is socially unacceptable, is more subversive, somewhat more picaresque than the pícara can put up with. In fact, exploiting sexuality as a weapon to obtain social relevance is supposed to be a point of strength of the picaresque woman: she takes pleasure in deceiving and humiliating innocent suitors or imprudent lovers. Mother Courage, for instance, makes public display of her ridiculously cruel revenges: on the one hand, the pícara is certainly proficient in the art of “sexual scandal” but on the other hand her greatest merit is to portray the world through her corrupted eyes. The sexual affairs that the ­family

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keeps hidden by a sort of tacit agreement among themselves are, from the pícara’s point of view, the outcome of a twisted slant on what nature and social relationships mean in sexuality. Delfina clearly states that her mission is not to blackmail her family for their irregular sexual behaviour (158), but she wants to condemn the opportunistic use of erotics and gender identity as a means to monopolise people’s will. Her family has lost touch with the idea of transgression because they have lost touch with the fear of prohibition: the only transgression they cannot accept is when eroticism is not used as a means of coercion and submission. In addition, there seems to be a tacit form of gender democracy among the three main representatives of the Pastalunghi oligarchy: Romeo Senior, Romeo Junior and Ester. In fact, they play with gender ambiguities to dazzle and manipulate their audiences, while they judge any display of gender ambiguity on the part of the younger generation (the “inept”) as morally contemptible, since this confusion of sexual roles is mainly self-destructive, not an instrument of oppression. Delfina refuses to surrender to this secret covenant by declaring her abnormal sexuality as being not a natural inclination, but a spiteful choice, a whim: esclusi gli uomini, non vedevo alcuna altra alternativa per poter baciare qualcuno. In questo sono rimasta sempre una donna inguaribile: non ho mai visto che esistevano anche le mie simili. È stata una vera scoperta, non tanto sessuale, ma antropologica. […] Non sono propriamente una lesbica, sono solo una un po’ disubbidiente che ha scoperto che tutte quelle pozzangherine lì intorno in gonnelle e pantaloni […] erano l’altra metà del cielo disposta a tutto pur di allargare le cosce e rimettere per intero i piedi per terra. (107–08) Apart from men, I could not see any other alternative for kissing somebody. In this respect I have always been incurable. I never realised there were other women like me out there too. It was more of an anthropological than a sexual discovery. […] I am not exactly a lesbian, I am just a bit disobedient, a woman who discovered that all those bimbos around me in skirts and trousers […] were the other half of the sky, eager to do anything to open their legs and get their feet firmly back on the ground. Delfina not only scorns the false code of sexual decency imposed by the ­ astalunghi – a code that they constantly breach –, she also disputes their maP nipulation of erotic behaviour. She preaches a form of unselfish eroticism and knows that there can be no transgression without the experience of prohibition. A comparable attitude is reflected in Carter’s novel, especially in those passages where the carnivalesque reversal of values and conventions leads

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to the reinforcement of the norm, even though normality is more and more difficult to identify and restore: for instance, to Melchior only the transgression of his marriage commitments can lead, quite oddly, to the acceptance of a new marriage bond. To his brother Peregrine, instead, transgression derives essentially from breaching the prohibitions imposed by fraternal codes of conduct: he presumably copulates with all of Melchior’s wives; better still, he is the suspected father of all of his brother’s progeny. Though at opposite poles, both male characters embody what Bataille describes as a paradox of excessive transgression, in which the forgetfulness of the prohibition leads to the denial of eroticism (108). The pícara is at variance with such a denial: she is a champion of erotic energy because she is constantly wavering between what is forbidden and what is worth disobeying. In fact, near the end of the story, it is Dora who reminds Peregrine that life cannot always be ruled by carnivalesque anarchy (222), one has to go back to reality, otherwise the sense of transgression and renewal that the carnival conveys will inevitably vanish. Discussing the reversible process of carnivalesque representation in literature, Carter maintains that “The carnival has to stop. The whole point of the feast of fools is that things went on as they did before, after it stopped.”66 This could be the main reason why the term ‘dissent’ more aptly describes this conflict. Dissent implies a rebellion from within the system or the leading ideology. Instead, ‘anarchy’ extended to the sexual sphere is, as Elaine Showalter specifies, a radical repudiation of the traditional sexual roles, or at least an intention to disrupt the established order.67 In this respect, sexual anarchy goes beyond the pícara’s wildest prospects of a gender vindication, given her unstable moral/ sexual code of values. Yet, although her self-interest may even justify a connivance with gender-based injustice or sexual discrimination, the end result of this alliance is always desecrating. Moreover, the distinction between dissent and anarchy also leads to a common predicament about sexuality: strangely enough it is through the social implications of sexual conduct that the individual is defined and framed, while the more intimate, sacred part of the individual is only superficial, a mythology that justifies the existence of a dynasty. A noteworthy example of the embarrassing connivance between the sacred and the profane, or between what Roger Caillois defines as the “time of labour” and the “time of the sacred”68 – a complicity that emerges in Apuleius’ 66 67 68

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Lorna Sage, “Angela Carter Interviewed by Lorna Sage,” in Malcolm Bradbury and Judith Cooke (eds.) New Writing (London: Minerva Press, 1992) 188. See Chapter 4 for a further discussion on the carnivalesque. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy 3. Caillois hypothesises two opposing dimensions of time: the time of labour, implying prohibitions and regulations, and the time of the sacred, based on feast and transgression

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c­ haracterisation of Psyche – is the picaresque demystification of women in both literary and socio-anthropological terms.

Demystified Women

Goffman contends that the gender trap imposed on women also encompasses those situations when women become idealised: Women may be defined as being less than men, but they are nonetheless idealized, mythologized, in a serious way through such values as motherhood, innocence, gentleness, sexual attractiveness, and so forth – a lesser pantheon, perhaps, but a pantheon nonetheless. “The Arrangement” 308

Women are trapped in the paradox of being sanctified and submissive at the same time, privileged members within the “disadvantaged adult groups” (309). Idealising women’s virtues or even their sexual charms equals segregating women in the sacred sanctuary of humanity, while the profane, considered the realm of deceit and role playing, must necessarily violate the space of what is considered genuine femininity. Thence, in a social context, women who do not conform to their idealised representations are simply dismissed as deceitful, fake. The point, as Goffman relates, is that even what we call the “sacred” part of an individual is as deeply undermined by the playing of a role as the so-called profane dimension.69 The picaresque anti-heroine is firstly a woman; she is subject to the common mystifications of her gender, since even being a rogue provides a halo of myth. However, the pícara strives to dissolve the confines of sacred and profane: she is at times, or even simultaneously, a thief, a 69

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(quoted in Bataille, Death and Sensuality 257). Even in our times, the profane world includes the time of labour, but we associate the profane with leisure as well, while the sacred is relegated (if ever) to a suspended time in our lives; nevertheless, in a not-too-recent past the time of the sacred sanctioned both the interruption of work and the celebration of festive rituals, often conniving with rule-breaking pagan rituals. This intertwining of sacredness and transgression suggested Bataille’s fascinating theory of a common driving force behind eroticism and ascetics (even sainthood). For the treatment of objective and subjective time in Stefano Benni’s Saltatempo, see Chapter 4. Goffman, “Role Distance,” in Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961) 152: “if an individual is to show that he is a ‘nice guy’ or, in contrast to, one much less nice than a human being need be, then it is through his using or not using role distance that this is likely to be done. It is right here, in manifestations of

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witch, a prostitute, an uncared-for child. In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud establishes a somewhat daring parallel between sexual perversions induced in a child by seduction as compared with those of a prostitute, because both groups ignore the mental limits imposed by morality. He holds that “Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession; […] it becomes impossible not to recognize that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic” (109). This passage does not really explain whether a prostitute willingly uses the stratagem of supposed innocence to excuse her perverted behaviour, or if she naturally adopts the same unaware attitude of a child. However, Freud’s notion of prostitution as a form of sexual perversion, and not as a socially induced behaviour, seems biased and narrow-minded: it shows how difficult it is, even for a scientist, not to succumb to the gender trap trammelling women’s roles. That said, how can the female rogue achieve a balance of roles and attributions? The answer lies in the way she makes use of provocative, demystifying gestures. Demystification encompasses here three main aspects belonging to the sphere of intimacy: religion, sentimental love and primeval innocence. Religion Picaresque writers tackle religion from a very polemical standpoint: in fact, they condemn the misdeeds of the religious institution, along with its endemic corruption. Yet only few of them openly criticise or object to its doctrines and creed. Early Spanish picaresque writers like Matéo Alemán or Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the alleged author of Lazarillo de Tormes, belonged to converted Jewish families and several scholars contend that their Judaic background is noticeable in some of the pícaro’s unconventional opinions about Christianity.70 This is not the case with Aldo Busi, who does not primarily reproach the clergy’s dishonesty and hypocrisy, because this is merely a piece of machinery in a generally corrupt society. What the author really deplores, through Delfina’s outbursts, are the subterfuges of the church in constructing faith on the basis of a tale or practical joke. Thus, Delfina’s explanation of the nativity of 70

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role distance, that the individual’s personal style is to be found. […] role distance is almost as much subject to role analysis as are the core tasks of roles themselves.” For instance, Michael Alpert points out a plausible connection between the author of Lazarillo and the Jewish minority: see Michael Alpert, Crypto-Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001) 42–45. Joseph V. Ricapito maintains that the Jewish question is a crucial ingredient of early Spanish picaresque: see his critical appraisal of Peter N. Dunn’s Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 14.2 (1994) 170–76.

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Jesus as the result of parthenogenesis is utterly blasphemous (192). In another novel by Busi, Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman), Arturo Bazarovi meets a priest in his sumptuous parish home and, to the churchman’s exhortation that he confess his sins, he gives a harsh Busi-esque retort: “Lei crede al segreto professionale della confessione? Sono in cerca di garanzie, se possibile” (“Do you believe in the professional secrecy of confession? I’m looking for guarantees, if possible”).71 At the same time, the Church’s belief in the afterlife is dismissed in Vendita galline as farcical, in accordance with Ester’s feigned decency in the face of the inexplicable event of death: Ester Pastalunghi è come la Chiesa Cattolica: non ti fa mancare niente nella morte ma ti toglie tutto prima e ti dà il minimo indispensabile dopo: l’Aldilà. […] Diventa punitiva solo se fai il Lazzaro e, dopo tante inutili cure e estreme unzioni, ritorni in vita a spaccarle i marroni. (356) Ester Pastalunghi is like the Catholic Church: she does not deprive you of anything in death, but she takes everything away from you beforehand while providing the absolute minimum afterwards: the Hereafter. […] It [or she, Ester, or either of them?] becomes punitive only if you act like Lazarus and, after many useless cures and last rites, you return to life to bust her balls. While not denying the existence of the hereafter, Delfina experiences a metaphysical dimension that is totally different from the one Catholicism preaches: she ends up confusing life after death with the same wretched vicissitudes human beings experience in their earthly existence. Moreover, Delfina replaces appellations for God with the term “Anguillone” – a large (female) eel, but also vaguely suggesting the male genitalia, the most suitable complement to an already abundant fish or cetacean symbolism, e.g. the name Delfina, the filming of a tuna massacre (the mattanza), Catherine’s nickname “sarda”, a synonym for sardine, etc. In this irreverent mythology, the archaic iconography of Jesus Christ as fish degenerates into a mocking “Little Baby Eel Jesus” ­(“Anguillin Bambino” [228]). In Wise Children, by comparison, the topic of religion is tackled cursorily, emerging every now and then as the target of Dora’s sceptical digs. In addition, religion is associated with one of the minor characters, 71

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See Aldo Busi, Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (Milano: Mondadori, 1985) 497. See Aldo Busi, The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990) 359.

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­ ristram’s twin brother Gareth Hazard, a Jesuit missionary whose loyalty to T the order is questioned quite often in the story, until Dora and Nora receive the u ­ nexpected gift of twin babies who are allegedly Gareth’s progeny. Gareth’s religious calling and his fatherhood strangely become two faces of the same intimate search for a father, both heavenly and earthly, a surrogate for the totally absent father figure of Melchior. With an ironic jibe, Carter correlates humanity’s lack of a mortal father with its desire for an indisputable transcendental one: the question [of paternity] has been so pressing it has even resolved itself in metaphysics, in the invention of an omnipotent but happily non-­ material father to whom everyone can lay claim as a last resort. Expletives Deleted 203

Dora seems to echo this remark when she notices how Gareth has introduced a new type of father figure into the family, the “holy father”, ascribing it to “liberation theology.” (Wise Children 227). In Vendita galline, on the other hand, members of the Church, including popes and cardinals, duly and precisely named, are involved in all sorts of unpleasant scandalous affairs. Ironically, Delfina is the owner of the top-story apartment in Palazzo Borromeo in Milan, the fictional residence of the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini, a.k.a. “Holy Patience and soon to be His Holiness” (“Santa Pazienza e presto Sua Santità” [356]). The pícara also describes how sister Luisita Bahamonte, a nun who has been inexplicably beatified, used to harass her when she was a child, turning a religious principle into an affirmation of God’s intrusion into human life, transmuting the omniscience of a supernatural being into a case of voyeurism (305). Delfina’s amused account of this otherwise unpleasant episode is not meant to justify such misbehaviour, but it is a strategy to avoid any representation of herself as a victim, hence dismissing any attempt to exalt the corrupted, innocent child to an object of futile mystification. Sentimental Love Does a pícara ever fall in love in a ‘conformist’ sense? The answer to this question is not straightforward, as hazy and unclear as the meaning of love itself. What is certain about the pícara is that she has gone through enough sentimental tumult to enable her to demystify and disclose its illusions and ­sufferings, verging on cynicism. To Dora Chance love is always retrospective, something that was there, tangible, in the past but hardly noticed at the time when the protagonist was experiencing it. For instance, her love story with the writer Ross ‘Irish’ O’ Flaherty, “a.k.a. the Chekhov of Southern California” (120):

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Dora’s feelings for him are usually filtered through what he has written about her, so that the reader struggles to come up with an overall convincing portrait of Dora. Thus one of the few moments when ‘Irish’ seems to have expressed a devoted, almost idolatrous fondness for her, she had been putting on a false appearance of herself: [From ‘Irish”s short stories:] ‘She wore something sheer and white and deceptively virginal, that emitted a hard glitter when she moved, a subtle, ambiguous cobweb softness veined with a secret of ice. […].’ The very frock! He never knew I’d borrowed it from Daisy. (188) What remains of the love affair between Dora and ‘Irish’ is a string of quotes, the literary dénouements and the alphabetical references to writers which are disseminated throughout Dora’s narrative tour de force, which, thanks to ‘Irish’, has disclosed what Dora calls “lyricism” (119), real feelings conveyed through the written word (see further). In Vendita galline love, according to Delfina, is by necessity an egocentric, selfish experience: Spesso avevo pensato che l’amore a due è tempo rubato all’amore, che è sempre a uno, a nessuno, l’amore in cui il nulla si sublima sino a diventare la più vuota delle emozioni: il più intenso dei sentimenti degli uomini vivi. (305) I had always thought that love shared between two people is time stolen from love, which is always for one, or for nobody, love where nothingness sublimates to become the emptiest of emotions: the most intense of the feelings living human beings experience. According to Umberto Galimberti, this self-discovery through love is one of our time’s most striking contradictions: conflicting with the Platonic concept of lovers as irreplaceable halves, the loved one simply becomes a projection of our own ideals and expectations about that person.72 This is how the pícara deals with her ‘lessons in love’. In an outburst of philosophical speculation, Delfina even subverts the platonic body/soul dichotomy:

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A volte cominci col conquistare l’anima quale succedaneo del corpo che sai non ti verrà mai concesso; non fai in tempo a esserti abituata, che Umberto Galimberti, Le cose dell’amore 11 and 14.

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purtroppo l’anima ti cede il corpo: a quel punto che cosa te ne fai? Abitua­ ta a godere dell’ipocrisia degli spiritualismi, poi non sai più che fartene dei compromessi della corporeità. (286) Sometimes you start by conquering the soul as a substitute for the body that you know will never yield to you; you do not even get used to that when, unfortunately, the soul gives the body up to you: at this point, what do you do with it? Accustomed to enjoying the hypocrisy of spiritualism, you do not really know what to do with the compromises of corporeity. Conquering the lover’s soul before his/her body becomes the real transgression, so that the soul is no longer the final purpose of love, but it can be the starting point and, most likely, a real barrier to the complement of physical contact. Dora feels an unexpected physical attraction to Peregrine after she wonders Did I see the soul of the one I loved when I saw Perry, not his body? And was his fleshy envelope, perhaps, in reality much the same sorry shape as those of his nieces [Dora and Nora] outside the magic circle of my desire? (208) Going back to Busi’s novel, the consequence of this estrangement from the body is the perception that the connection between love and death is the ideal dimension of eternal love, because the thought of death dispels any need for corporeal ‘compromise’. In her own terms, Delfina reverts to what Ugo Foscolo depicted in his poem Dei sepolcri as the “communion of devoted hearts” (“corrispondenza d’amorosi sensi”) between the living and the dead.73 Accordingly, Delfina’s affection for Caterina in private is not matched by the same caring attitude in public: she hopes that Caterina will intervene as an “avenging angel” (“angelo vendicatore” [315]) against the Pastalunghi now that she is no more and the Family is hastily consigning her to oblivion. Once again, love is subverted by a self-centred, posthumous thirst for recognition. As a matter of fact, 73

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Ugo Foscolo, Dei Sepolcri, in Opere I: Poesie e tragedie, ed. Franco Gavazzeni (Torino, Einaudi-Gallimard, 1994) 24, lines 29–33: “celeste è questa/corrispondenza d’amorosi sensi,/ celeste dote è negli umani; e spesso/per lei si vive con l’amico estinto/e l’estinto con noi.” (“This communion of devoted/hearts is a spark of the divine, a gift/of heaven, and often through it we live/with a dead friend, and the dead friend/lives with us.”). See “Ugo Foscolo: Sepulchers,” translation with an introduction and notes by Peter Burian, Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, 4.1 (2002) 20, lines 30–34.

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the only possible form of love for Delfina is in absentia of the loved one and from a mockingly supernatural perspective; therefore, it only happens sub specie æternitatis, above and beyond the living. Albeit very differently from Dora’s point of view, they share the idea that the ‘here and now’ of sentimental love is unattainable, the timing of either sexual or sentimental/intellectual attraction is too wrong for both lovers to find a point of convergence. In a paroxysm of post mortem recollections, Delfina concludes that only the dead can be persuaded to believe in the truth-revealing power of love (364–65); the living endure so many disillusions in their existential quandaries that they reject any possible sublimation of sentimental love. Primeval Innocence One of the archetypal extremes of female representation is women’s unblemished innocence. Although endowed with physical frailty, women become guardians of morality or, at times, are shrines on which virtue and modesty are heroically immolated. The picaresque avoids any such edifying portrayal of women, whatever their importance in the plot. Instead, innocence as such is nothing more than a disguise for hypocrisy, and even when it is granted as truth, it has the appearance of a half lie, like the well-known oath of fidelity that Lazaro proclaims on behalf of his own wife: “I’ll swear on the consecrated Host that she’s as good a woman as any dwelling within the gates of Toledo.”74 Pristine innocence, untarnished by social impediments, is even more unattainable. For example, in Vendita galline, Caterina seems to be the most suitable candidate for sainthood in the story: her stern principles are not upset by the social environment into which she is reluctantly introduced by her lover: Le persone moralmente integre sono quasi sempre riprovevoli perché ­pagano la loro moralità con un’incurabile lentezza di riflessi: Caterina era troppo sbadata e pigra per non essersi votata all’onestà e al perbenismo. (248) Morally upright people are nearly always reprehensible since they trade their morality for an incurable slowness of the reflexes. Caterina was too careless and lazy not to be devoted to honesty and respectability. 74

74 Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, n.y.: Dover Publications, 2001) 103. Spanish original: La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades, edited by Francisco Rico (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1988) 134–35.

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Innocence is a quality that pairs with clumsiness, laziness, inability to cope with society’s corrupted moods. Yet after nursing the impression that Caterina is a forged character, a creature of Delfina’s own demiurgic imagination, in the last few pages of the novel the narrator awakens the reader to a new ­reality: “I have always had to pretend to be your shadow, now I have also enjoyed becoming your body and your mind and your heart and your, let’s say, soul.” (“Ho sempre dovuto far finta di essere la tua ombra, adesso mi sono divertita a diventare anche il tuo corpo e la tua mente e il tuo cuore e la tua, be’, anima.” [387]). In fact, Caterina has always been the narrating persona behind Delfina. Apart from being an instigation to engage in a second reading of the book in order to reconsider how the point of view and the reliability of the revealed voice may change the identikit of the pícara, whose ‘real’ existence can only be filtered by the consciousness of her former lover, this new perspective may suggest that Caterina is the real picaresque heroine, the innocent turned rogue for narrative purposes. Paradoxically, then, Caterina ends up betraying all the mystifications Delfina created for her: Caterina subscribes to the greedy logic of evil, which inevitably thrives on mythmaking and mystifications of reality. The narrator’s new identity casts doubt on the actual existence of Delfina’s so-called “PLAN” (“PIANO”), a posthumous scheme to restore her dignity and reputation as a writer despite her family, because, arguably, Delfina may never have mentioned her intentions to Caterina. Regardless, the extreme demystification of innocence is not attained through a revealed fact (the discovery of a mischief, etc.) but through a narrative superimposed on another narrative, without any clue about which one is more likely to have happened. Similar instances of narrative ambiguity abound in Wise Children too. Dora’s narrative consistency is often marred by her leaps from one narrative time to another, revelling in anticipations that do not spoil the plot because they appear so unrelated to the story line that they only make sense after further events are revealed. In many passages the narrator addresses her audience, inserting the disruption of a polemical ‘you’ (see Chapter 1) to warn the reader about her own unreliability: for instance, when asserting that Genghis Khan, the film producer, and his newly-wed wife would live happily ever after, she insinuates that “if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” (161). Near the novel’s epilogue, as a sort of corollary to the storyteller’s fallibility, she indulges in too many conjuring tricks and gimmicks to drag the story towards a happy ending: Well, you might have known what you were about to let yourself in for when you let Dora Chance in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor, accost you in the Coach and Horses and let her tell you a tale. I’ve got a tale and a half to tell, all right! (227)

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Indeed, Dora turns the figure of the wise, old storyteller of fairy tales, the Mother Goose of children’s literature, into a barbed, profane caricature, and with the providential aid of gaudy clothes and make-up she seems to revamp the “crazy, drunken, old hag” of the Apuleian story. Another form of sceptical revisitation of primeval innocence for both male and female characters in Vendita galline explores a well-known locus in Italian literary history inspired by the celebrated Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. His poetics celebrating primeval innocence was condensed in an essay delineating the archetype of the “fanciullino,” literally the little child, although La Valva suggests the more contextual translation of “eternal child”.75 This term is familiar to all Italian literature students because it sums up Pascoli’s idea of a genuine, time-transcending poetic inspiration. Pascoli clarifies that the idea of the innocent child reuniting humanity with its pristine innocence is largely inspired by Plato’s previously discussed dialogue Phaedrus. Yet, as Augusto Vicinelli observes,76 Pascoli was not the only writer of his time to invoke the poetical inspiration emanating from an uncorrupted child: in his poem “Il fanciullo”, Gabriele D’Annunzio exhorts us to revere the innocent child, “flower of the innocent and godlike art” (“fiore della divina arte innocente”), as “we pray to see in you our naked soul,/beseeching it to form (…)/(…) a shape that looks like you!” (“la nostra anima nuda/si miri in te, preghiamo/che assempri te maravigliosamente!”).77 The nineteenth-century Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi comments that “through his excessive simplicity the child is often as subtle in his meditations, as the philosopher with his great doctrine and wisdom and judgment.” (“il fanciullo per eccessiva semplicità è talvolta così sottile nelle sue quistioni, come il filosofo per grande dottrina e sapienza e sagacità.” [2913, 7. Luglio 1823]).78 75 76 77 78

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Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie – Il fanciullino (Milano: Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno: 1986). A critical appraisal, along with the first English translation of Pascoli’s essay by RosaMaria La Valva, was published in 1999. See RosaMaria La Valva, ed. The Eternal Child. The Poetry and Poetics of Giovanni Pascoli (Chapel Hill: nc Annali d’Italianistica, 1999). The page numbers of both Italian and English versions refer to this edition. Augusto Vicinelli, Le tre corone: Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio (Milano: Mondadori, 1969) 263, note 2. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alcyone, “Il fanciullo”, edited by J.R. Woodhouse, (Manchester: Manchester up, 1978) 35, lines 67–70. English version: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Halcyon, trans. by J.G. Nichols (New York: Routledge, 2003) 25–26. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, edizione critica e annotata, edited by Giuseppe Pacella (Milano: Garzanti, 1991), vol. ii 1542–43. Giacomo Leopardi also describes the child’s thirst for enjoyment in life: “Whole years go by and we hardly feel a lively pleasure, or at least a momentary feeling of pleasure, while the child hardly spends one day

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In a polemical defense of his work, frequently accused of empty sentimentalism, Pascoli asserts that all human beings should listen to the voice of the innocent, curious child that inhabits their soul. The “fanciullino,” dictating his lines to the disillusioned old poet, is capable of re-awakening the spirit of primordial innocence, restoring new life into what seems trite and ordinary, like a new “Adam who gives the name to all that he sees and hears.” (The Eternal Child 13) (“Adamo che mette il nome a tutto ciò che vede e sente.” [12]). Following this, Delfina’s father appears to put the Italian poet’s metaphor into practice within himself, creating a sort of split personality: although he is a ruthless criminal, his soul enjoys the state of innocence of a child – a dualism that, in the light of his decadent double entendre of the concept of innocence, even Pascoli claimed admissible (38 and 39). No surprise, then, that the black sheep of the family exposes the hypocrisy of this Peter Pan syndrome, when describing her father’s nefarious misconduct: “It is easier to confess being a monster than to confess you have done monstrous things under the influence of a part of us called ‘the little/eternal child’.” (“È più facile confessare di essere un mostro che confessare di avere fatto cose da mostro spinti dalla parte di noi chiamata ‘il fanciullino’.” [109]). Sadistic violence is not condemned, but justified by an obscure return to childhood, not as a recollection of lost innocence, but as an age of self-acquittal and gratuitous cruelty. Her father was an “adult facing the impunity of the long-gone child” (“adulto messo di nuovo davanti all’impunità del bambino di una volta” [109]). Immersed in these contradictory meditations, Delfina clearly compares herself with Pascoli when she says: “I am even more innocent than my father and my desire is thus even more shamefully monstrous to confess, more difficult, more Pascolian” (“Io sono ancora più innocente di mio padre e il mio desiderio è pertanto ancora più vergognosamente mostruoso da confessare, più difficile, più pascoliano” [110]). In literary terms, this elective affinity with the tormented poet reveals the false expectations surrounding the ethereal, life-giving essence of the eternal child. In fact, innocence, with its cluster of meanings – how can the pícara’s father be without that feeling. What is the reason? Knowledge in us, ignorance in him. It is true then that the opposite happens with pain.” (“Passano anni interi senza che noi proviamo un piacer vivo, anzi una sensazione pur momentanea di piacere. Il fanciullo non passa giorno che non ne provi. Qual è la cagione? La scienza in noi, in lui l’ignoranza. Vero è che così viceversa accade del dolore.” [1262, 2. Luglio 1821] [vol. I 767]). The above translations are my own; the admirable project to produce an annotated translation of this monumental miscellany of Leopardi’s thoughts and aphorisms into English has been recently completed by the University of Birmingham (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Research/ activity/leopardi/projects/index.aspx).

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even remotely described as ‘innocent’? – turns into a desire that she cannot confess; innocence nestles in the deepest recesses of a diseased conscience. Delfina underlines, most unwillingly, that demystifying the ‘fanciullino’ does not mean depriving him of his significance; on the contrary, it even extends his philosophical depth. In a passage of his essay, Pascoli expounds the redemptive presence of the little child in man’s experience of death and loss: “He is the one who, at the death of a loved one comes out with that little word which makes us burst into tears and saves us.” (13) (“Egli è quello che nella morte degli esseri amati esce a dire quel particolare puerile che ci fa sciogliere in lacrime, e ci salva.” [12]). The consolation of poetry is even more intense at those times when the individual, beset by disillusionment, turns to what remained of childhood sensibility; however, suffering is the obligatory passage to sublimation of guilt, a kind of existential felix culpa. From a similar stance, Psyche had to face horrors and persecutions in order to ascend to heaven. Pascoli also points out that the little child distracts the poet from the temptations of sensuality and profane passions, because the child disdains love and women, despite their beauty and divinity (6 and 7): a clearly platonic view of love and passion. Still, as in the case of poetic representations of death, with which it shares mysterious affinities, eroticism makes the presence of the innocent voice much more tangible and lyrical in those verses where the Italian poet is describing the transition from a serene, carefree childhood to mature age, when sensual experience threatens to enslave mankind. For example, in the poems “L’aquilone” (“The kite”), “Digitale purpurea” (“Crimson Foxglove”), “Il gelsomino notturno” (“The Night Jasmine”), “La tessitrice” (“The Weaver”), among many others, the subtly evoked erotic theme emerges from the limbo of shame and guilt to intensify the sense of a less conventional innocence through sensuous poetry. In sum, the similarity of Delfina’s innocence to that of the ‘fanciullino’ is not expressed by the stereotypical motive of the unaware child – personified by her schizophrenic father Fabrizio – but by way of parallels with the innocent child who is able to bring consolation to poets tormented by their own mistakes. Reversing the process of guilt/regained innocence, and putting aside the myth of Pascoli as the poet of the new ‘arcadia’,79 the ‘fanciullino’ would not resound loud and clear in the dishevelled poetic soul if this soul had not experienced the aberrations of life. Remarkably, Pascoli maintains that poetry has to exalt what is good and beautiful in the world (38 and 39). Nevertheless, he later admits that “beauty in everything and everywhere is totally anti-­poetic.” (59) (“questa bellezza in tutto e per tutto è totalmente antipoetica.” [58]). ­Perhaps 79

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The poet mentions the malevolent critic’s attempt at dismissing a genuine discovery of purity in nature as a mere exercise in imitative Arcadian rhetoric (279).

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this admission of the non-poetic essence of pure beauty also explains why Delfina can proudly assert that she is more ‘innocent’ than her father.

Literature, Ambition and Transcendence in Vendita Galline km 2

Busi’s novel is not only the pilgrimage of a dead soul into a life where every single event is in the present tense, “an accumulation of present after present” (“un accumulo di presente dopo presente” [53]), but it is also a stroll through the realm of literature and a reflection on its power of manipulation. First of all, the novel is a sort of Chinese box containing another narrative: what the reader thinks is a collection of random memories turns out to be reported, unreliable fiction from someone different from the narrating ‘I’. In fact Caterina, the genuine narrator, argues: “I had to slip things in here and there and I realise some things have been completely misrepresented, but I have absolutely no inclination to amend them.” (“ho dovuto integrare qui e là e mi rendo conto di alcune cose completamente travisate, ma che non ho nessuna voglia di correggere.” [389]). Moreover, Busi cannot prevent his own sharp egocentricity from appearing as a character, the editor of Caterina’s novel, inserting direct comments on his friend’s language slips and blunders. Actually, the competition between Delfina, the forsaken writer, and Busi, becomes the turning point that dooms the pícara to face a premature death. Busi definitely shares a common feeling of hostility towards the intellectual fringe of Italian literati, and his love/hate relationship with the media has alienated him from both the presenzialisti (“omnipresent”) intellectuals who like to sermonise on television, and from cultural opinion-makers who despise modern ways of turning culture into a show. Following a controversial appearance on a reality tv show where he was criticised for his anti-Catholic views regarding homophobia, Busi firmly declared that he would not write in Italian any longer, for lack of faith in his country.80 In fact, his 2012 book, the first novel in twelve years, has a Spanish title, El especialista de Barcelona, but is in Italian. In a newspaper interview, Busi revealed that Mondadori had been attempting to censor preventively the original manuscript and announced that his new novel had not yet found a suitable publisher. A new negotiation with the publisher Giunti proved unsuccessful, apparently due to an excess of encroachment from the publisher in the promotion strategy of the book. Later news updates assured readers that the novel would be released by the publisher Baldini & Castoldi Dalai. Finally, 80

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See “Sono un pazzo. Su quell’Isola volevo morire,” [I am crazy. On that island I felt like dying], an interview by Antonio Gnoli, la Repubblica, 23 March 2010.

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­publication took place in November 2012.81 In a video interview, while discussing the universal import of his work, Busi laments that, being written in Italian, it will surely be condemned to oblivion outside Italy.82 His latest autobiographical ‘novel’, Vacche amiche (un’autobiografia non autorizzata) (Cow Friends [An unauthorized autobiography]) and the corollary book, L’altra mammella delle vacche amiche (un’autobiografia non autorizzata) (The other udder of the cow friends [an unauthorized autobiography])83 – both published in 2015 – mark once again the writer’s aesthetic quest for an ethically charged, yet terse and sanguine literary language which aspires, in Nicola Lagioia’s own words, to the unmediated greatness of Boccaccio, in contrast with the academic, curial style of Petrarch, clumsily appropriated by obscure politicians and tv presenters.84 Literature to Delfina is an assault against her family: from a biography of her father, revealing his insane obsession with fascism and the mass murder of innocent victims, to her intended story of Ester’s life, allusively titled Le pale di Esterina (“Esterina’s propellers”), all her previous books are meant as boisterous incursions into her family’s private lives. Understandably, Ester is worried about what her daughter will write about her (353): to Delfina, literature means a revelation of the inner selves of those surrounding her or, rather, it is an intellectual journey setting out from a cynical, destructive outlook on the world. For instance, when discussing her literary calling, she says: “I sense the subtle conviction of being in the right that literature gives you when it immolates on its altar the most sacred and dearest, the most unassailable affections of those closest to you” (“Sento il sottile convincimento di essere nel giusto che dà la letteratura quando al proprio altare immola gli affetti più sacri e più cari, più inviolabili dell’intimità” [108]). At the same time, the family circle succeeds in laying their hands on Delfina’s books by buying them directly from her publishers, who conveniently make money out of bribery, and do not even have to bother about distributing them. In this desecration of literature to a disposable commodity, only Delfina can rely on its function of immortalising the author and his or her creations, even though it is entirely her presumption, since 81 82 83 84

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Maurizio Bono, “Il calvario di Busi” [Busi’s ordeal], la Repubblica, 2 October 2012; Maurizio Bono, “Dalai, accordo con Busi. ‘Usciremo a novembre’” [Dalai, agreement with Busi. ‘We are releasing in November’], la Repubblica, 9 October 2012. 82 Website: www.bcdeditore.it. 83 Aldo Busi, Vacche amiche (Venezia: Marsilio, 2015) and L’altra mammella delle vacche amiche (Venezia: Marsilio, 2015). 84 Nicola Lagioia, “Nel mondo di Aldo Busi” [In Aldo Busi’s World], www.internazionale.it, published on 02.05.2015 (http://www.internazionale.it/weekend/2015/05/02/ nel-mondo-di-aldo-busi).

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very few people could have access to her writings at all. In fact, the pícara’s “PIANO” is meant as a defence of her reputation as a writer, in the hope that Caterina will stand up for her cause at the conference Uncle Romeo has hastily organised to ‘honour’ her memory once and for all, choosing the captivating headline “The rise and oblivion of Delfina Unno’s literary output.” (“Ascesa e oblio dell’opera letteraria di Delfina Unno.” [321]), from which her second surname, Pastalunghi, has already been expunged. The already-neglected writer forestalls the nasty comments of the custodians of literary purity: Mi tacceranno daccapo di narcisismo delirante, di frascame linguistico, di infantilismo comico, mai una volta che ci mettano una esse in mezzo, che diventi cosmico, sempre e solo comico. (337) They will accuse me once again of delirious narcissism, of linguistic embellishment, of comic infantilism, they never, once put an ‘s’ in the middle to make it cosmic, it’s only ever comic. Noticeably, this preoccupation with the seriousness of their mission is common ground where writers of the picaresque have to confront their sceptical readers, or come to terms with their own unconfessed doubts about the ‘usefulness’ of comic style. For instance, Alemán clearly states the moral intent of his Guzmán; the author of Lazarillo even cites Pliny the Elder to exemplify how even bad books can hide secret treasures of knowledge. Defoe makes clear that Moll Flanders’ indignities have been inserted with the sole purpose of instructing his audience not to fall prey to the same sins and, in Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett warns his readers to take his characters’ harsh language as nothing else but a way of discouraging his audience from imitating it (5). While Wise Children explores the mutual contamination of serious theatre and vaudeville, drama and pantomime, in which “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people” (213), Busi’s defilement of the edifying mission of literature escalates into an inextricable muddle of high and low literature, of unpublished works and the literary best-sellers associated with the publisher Delphy, an ironic allusion to the dolphin and, obviously, to the real, elitist Adelphi publishing house. The sophisticated publisher proves to be as prone to greed and business manoeuvring as all vanity publishers specialising in hard-boiled, low-cost volumes. In a similar guise, Wise Children develops a slant on literature as an instrument of retaliation on the part of the narrating/ narrated self, deprived of literary dignity, in Dora’s ambiguous literary relationship with the aforementioned Irish-American writer. Here the pícara trades her part as an object of literary representation, or misrepresentation, for an

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active one as creator of her own fictional ego. While ‘Irish’ helps her develop and refine her grammar and “grasp of metaphor” (120), he also ignites in her a desire to restore her blemished reputation, especially after the writer portrays her as a “treacherous, lecherous chorus girl.” (119). She bitterly remarks: “Such turned out to be the eternity the poet promised me, the bastard.” (120). Dora, as opposed to Delfina, has already suffered the consequences of being incorporated as a time-transcending literary character; she can only counter this with her matter-of-fact existence as an author of herself, attempting an ironic self-portrayal. Delfina’s intentions, instead, seem more ambitious yet equally unattainable because, as with her British counterpart, they have both grown to mistrust the myth of transcending mortality through art,85 just as they have discarded the myth of the irreplaceable moment, the carpe diem. Dora makes fun of youth’s tendency to worship every single instant in life: When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment […]. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you. (125; original emphasis) Even when the quasi-supernatural presence of Grandma seems to encourage the sisters to live for the present, their present and that of other figures (such as Lady Atalanta/Wheelchair) is firmly set in past splendours. At the end of the novel, the mistreated female characters achieve their final revenge on their family by recapturing flashes of that glorious past. Dora, like most pícaras, fluctuates in this incongruous twilight zone between the denial of unforgettable times past and a craving for abiding notoriety. Only the past which is stored on celluloid, according to Dora, can guarantee eternal life on a screen. Literature does not benefit from the right amount of precision to make episodic moments immortal, unless literature trickles through the time-expanding filter of readership. A similar disbelief pervades Vendita galline: Delfina’s expectations of a revival as a literary persona are soon frustrated when the reader discovers that 85

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Angela Carter formulates her skepticism about fame in a rather sarcastic remark on Walter de la Mare’s literary success, which probably contradicted her personal experience: “[De la Mare] enjoyed the pleasantest, but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime.” (Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted 52). This sentence was quoted in Rosemary Hill, “Hairy Fairies” (London Review of Books, 10 May 2012) 15, a review of a newly-published book by Susanna Clapp, A Card from Angela Carter (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

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Caterina has formed an alliance with the Pastalunghi to erase her ex-lover both from the bookstores and as a character: the novel itself “will stay between me and me… except for your mother, to whom I have sent a copy […] It means so little to me that I am going to burn the manuscript immediately.” (“resterà fra me e me… a parte tua madre, alla quale ho inviato copia […] io ci punto cosí poco che brucio subito l’originale.” [387]). Once again, the mother, above all a “godmother of literary awards” [“madrina di premi letterari”], has the final say in summing up her daughter, even in literary terms. After an endless feud with Ester, being consigned to her mother’s consideration is certainly the biggest humiliation the protagonist could ever suffer. And what is more cynical in this story of maternal revenge is the fact that the book did not disappear, it still exists, someone is reading it. Perhaps Ester consented to its publication? Perhaps this unexpected salvage was carried out by Busi (the character), who secretly photocopied the original draft in the process of editing it but, as Caterina states in her only footnote in the text, “he would never dare publish it against my will” (“non arriverebbe mai all’oltraggio di pubblicarlo contro la mia volontà” [391]). The book is mockingly received as a second-hand plagiarised version, whereas the final revelation of Caterina’s despicable about-face at Delfina’s expense is plagiarism within plagiarism from the point of view of Caterina as a fictional character/fictional author. What better demystification of literary realism than this game of illegitimate appropriations of a creative process which, on the whole, should guarantee, if not its genuineness, at least its source of information? This let-down is one of the many metanarrative gimmicks in Busi’s crowded fictional cosmos.

King Lear’s Pasteboard Crown

The tragedy of King Lear is a key to interpreting the depiction of the conflicts between a father and his daughters in Carter’s novel. On the whole, Shakespeare crops up more or less obviously on almost every page of Wise Children, and on two parallel planes: firstly, the Hazard family harbours a sort of idolatry towards him, which often degenerates into ludicrous fanaticism; secondly, the Shakespearian subject matter becomes, through its demystification, one of the keys to accessing the symbolic undertones in Carter’s book. One of the epigraphs of the novel is a provocative quotation from Ellen Terry (1847–1928), a famous British Shakespearian actress: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, never mothers and daughters.” Mothers are the great absentees in Angela Carter’s novel: they are either unidentified – as is the case with Dora and Nora’s mother – or, like Lady Atalanta, utterly disowned by her

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twin daughters Saskia and Imogen for her adultery, even though, paradoxically, the two daughters are the fruit of that infidelity.86 The first point, involving the cult of Shakespeare, derives from the identification of the Hazard patriarchs with some of the Bard’s characters, and each enacted character marks a stage in their life as well. For instance, Ranulph Hazard, Melchior’s and Perry’s father, plays the role of King Lear quite convincingly because of his advanced age; when it comes to acting Hamlet, “nothing if not a juve role” (16), he has to renounce it for that of Hamlet’s father. This degradation to a secondary, ghost-like figure is reflected in Ranulph’s fall from grace with his much younger wife Estella, who takes up the role of Hamlet in drag, marking a subversion of man’s dominance on the stage and, presumably, off it. Estella falls for the actor playing Hamlet’s friend, a well-endowed American youngster with the “gift of gravitas” (12), an allusion to his physical prowess, and falls pregnant, presumably to the latter admirer. Recounting this embarrassing episode, which throws a shadow of doubt on Melchior and Peregrine’s legitimacy as sons of Ranulph, Dora points out how “a female Hamlet is one thing but a pregnant prince is quite another.” (16). Later on, Ranulph will impersonate Othello and, inspired by the jealous Moor, or perhaps in a fit of selfrecognition, ends up killing his wife, her lover and himself. Dora remarks that “Old Ranulph couldn’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and living.” (21). The typically Shakespearian stage direction calling for a change in scene, “exeunt omnes”, is sardonically associated with the violent death of the lovers and the cuckolded husband’s suicide. Ranulph’s son Melchior, instead, recites Lear impeccably, but he staunchly avoids any entanglement with the role of Othello and, later, of Hamlet, since, as Dora sharply deduces, “he was nervous the critics might think he wasn’t half the man his mother had been.” (89). According to Melchior, performing Hamlet would compel him to confront the circumstances of his enigmatic conception and face the paradox of gender confusion, where a woman dressed as a prince conceives a child without renouncing her manly qualities as an actress in disguise. Although only a fleeting presence, Estella personifies the protean nature of a typical pícara, an attitude which Dora seems to have inherited from her. Melchior’s sentimental life literally unfolds on the stage, from his first marriage to Lady Atalanta, who generously funds her husband’s acting company, to his second wife, Daisy Duck, a liaison that 86

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The relationship between mothers and daughters attracted Freud’s attention because female sexuality seems to stem from a different dynamic, bordering on hostility, between mother and daughter. Similarly, Felix Krull is fascinated by the mysterious alchemy spellbinding mothers and daughters: “mother and daughter represent the most enchanting double image on this star.” (302).

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comes to an abrupt end after the flop of a clumsy attempt to turn A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a Hollywood movie, an episode reminiscent of Ranulph’s fiascos during his own tour across America. Melchior’s third and last wife used to be an acting class-mate of his daughter Saskia, and later becomes Melchior’s partner as King Lear’s daughter Cordelia, thus insinuating not so much a natural as a cultural form of incest, alluding to an embarrassing age gap between Melchior and his third wife: “Marrying your Cordelia, evidently something of a Hazard family tradition.” (37). This acting gift, or curse, of transferring one’s life onto a stage, has not been inherited by Melchior’s brother Peregrine, who, on the contrary, when forced to play the part of a young Macduff, appears on stage with a “piss-pot on his head.” (22). Peregrine loves to upstage his brother in various solemn occasions and, deriding the cult of Shakespeare, he will produce a parody of Shakespearian highlights titled What! You Will!, a nickname for ‘William’ and a change of punctuation from the subtitle of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night: Or What You Will. How do women connect with Shakespeare and acting conceived as a lofty mission? Probably actresses take the dramatist’s philosophy of the world as a stage more literally than their male counterparts: they prioritise the chaotic acting technique of a typical Globe ham, blending solemnity with the grotesque. For instance, Estella is a very skilled performer but, occasionally, she overplays her appointed role and her humanity utterly flouts the conventions of the stage, as in this description of the lugubrious banquet in Macbeth: “his wife [Estella], caught by a fit of giggles, had her back to the audience, her shoulders shaking (Peregrine said she’d told him she thought the Macbeths ought to sack the cook).” (14). In spite of her husband’s impeccable role-playing, Estella takes the myth of Shakespeare to the streets where she impresses the passersby with a monologue, while Ranulph’s enterprise in exporting his idol to the lower echelons by travelling all over America with an itinerant theatre proves a memorable blunder. On the other hand, the pícara Dora does not take acting as seriously as her professional ancestors did; she belongs to the world of curtain-raisers, where performing is essentially a manual job. As a narrator, nonetheless, Dora succeeds in encompassing some of the basic motives of inspiration from the Elizabethan playwright, above all in matters of sexuality and gender characterisation. In this respect King Lear relates quite closely to Wise Children for various reasons. In Shakespeare’s tragedy the opposition, not always unambiguous, but still quite perceptible, between good and evil characters concerns two aspects of human identity: its natural and its cultural essence. Facing the resolution of a father-son relationship, the villains appeal to the tyranny of nature’s laws and the power of natural elements to upset any biological links according

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to their whim and convenience. To this category belong the two treacherous daughters of Lear, Goneril and Regan, as well as Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester. The essentially good characters, Cordelia and Edgar, instead, perceive filial bonds not as the result of any fatalistic submission to the laws of nature, but as an interchange of affection and respect that can only derive from the civilised side of mankind, represented by culture, as opposed to barbarity.87 “I love your majesty/According to my bond, no more, nor less.” (I, i, 90–91):88 Cordelia’s uncompromising defence of her filial commitment to her father shuns irrational animal instinct. Even animals defend their offspring, but they do not create a legalised bond of loyalty among themselves. In Lear’s eyes, this modesty does not conform to the image he has built of himself through the years, namely the father/sovereign by right of birth and natural privilege. Lear stands at the meeting point of good and evil, and this precarious position will cause him to regain his sense of reality through folly, that state suspended above morals, where instinct and irrational thought disclose unexpected glimmers of wisdom. How do these contrasting ideas of nature, culture and the middle ground of folly, reflect in the picaresque demystification? In the first place, one element is particularly relevant: Lear’s attitude to fatherhood and power. When Lear resigns his title and unexpectedly divides his kingdom between two of his three daughters, he ambiguously hands in his “coronet” (I, i, 137): in Shakespeare’s times, a coronet was a sort of informal, purely decorative crown – princes wore them too.89 This gesture may thus symbolise his renunciation of formal power but not of the authority kings are entitled to exert by natural decree. Instead, this simply iconic, theatrical gesture is the beginning of his decline into folly. Lear’s mistake lies in the fact that he believes his rule is justified by nature and is, therefore, as indisputable as his patriarchal supremacy. He will understand at his own expense that even the love of a daughter is not dictated by the laws of nature, but has to be 87 88 89

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Lévi-Strauss attributes to culture the task of categorising sexuality and imposing limitations and rules on nature (The Elementary Structures of Kinship 26). Umberto Galimberti underlines the strong relationship between human beings and the culture they foster: “l’uomo ama solo la sua creazione, quindi non la natura, ma quella natura coltivata che siamo soliti chiamare ‘cultura’.” (Le cose dell’amore 39) [my translation: “mankind only loves its creation, hence not nature, but that tamed nature we are accustomed to calling ‘culture’.”]. The quotations refer to the following edition: William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Grace Ioppolo (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). For this remark on the meaning of “coronet”, see Shakespeare’s King Lear, edited by A.J. Spilsbury & F. Marshall, (London, Folkestone and Hastings: Oxford and Cambridge Edition, 1952) 133.

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won at the cost of rediscovering one’s own humanity, or even more extremely, by violating nature’s course, by descending into madness. “O sir, you are old./ Nature in you stands on the very verge/Of her confine” insinuates Regan (ii, iv, 142–44). Lear, paradoxically, has to forget who his own daughter is, he has to get rid of all the constraints imposed on his own fatherhood by the natural order so as to regain the stature of a real father, the father of Cordelia who, as she asserts, loves her majesty according to her “bond”. On the other hand, once Lear realises that the natural ties he created between a father and his children are not enough to guarantee himself love and respect, he does not hesitate to call Goneril, one of his ungrateful daughters, a “degenerate bastard” (I, iv, 235), as if denying his part in conceiving her. At the same time, though, Edmond, the Earl of Gloucester’s bastard son (“Loyal and natural boy”, ii, i, 85) – the antagonist of the legitimate one, Edgar, whose father calls him “son […] by order of law” (I, i, 18) – is the most genuine example of natural instinct on the rational mind. A natural son is conceived out of wedlock, following the instincts of perpetuation, beyond the rules of social convenience. He is a “by-blow” (as Dora defines herself, recalling her illegitimate birth), a creature who always reminds rational, civilised men of their dark, socially indecorous side. The instinct for revenge instilled in the child by this state of aberration encourages Edmund to invoke nature as his “goddess” (I, ii, 1). Therefore, the evil characters in the play embody the irrational, destructive force of nature, a menace to the logic of human civilisation. Lear’s belief in the predatory order of all things, wherein good and evil are the outcome of a struggle between natural forces, can be shaken and dismantled only when he compares a treacherous child with a “sea-monster” (I, iv, 243), and Goneril’s face has become a “wolfish visage” (I, iv, 292); consequently, the order of nature deteriorates into aberration (“Crack nature’s moulds”, iii, ii, 8), but not into denial. By way of example, Lear acknowledges that Goneril is his offspring, but he salutes her as “a disease that’s in my flesh,/ Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,/A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle/In my corrupted blood” (ii, iv, 219–21). Lear’s memorable curse directed at Goneril is an invocation of the destructive forces provoking natural calamities: the enraged king does not wish her to lose her power or wealth, but to become infertile or, if she does bear a child, to give birth to nature’s utmost aberrant creature, a monster, as these disconcerting lines express: Hear, Nature, hear dear goddess, hear Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase,

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And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her. If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. (i, iv, 258–66) Lear’s descent into the abyss of madness has just started because he still confides in nature as his avenger, but he will subsequently come to terms with the illusory power of nature, which had already deceived him into presuming eternal power over his kingdom and kin. As to Wise Children, what kind of demystification is insinuated in Melchior Hazard, a modern-day King Lear who also shares some affinities with Gloucester? Melchior seems to have learnt a lesson from his idol: though in a farcical way, he wants to prevent his own overly close identification with a character who appears to be his best performance and, following a line of inheritance, his own father Ranulph’s favourite role. Trying to change the course of Lear’s tragedy in his own life, Melchior does not give up his coronet; in truth, the crown he has stolen from his father’s wardrobe is an essential part of his acting ‘gear’. In fact, the crown he is so proud of is simply a cardboard ring, a makeshift piece of equipment that Ranulph’s wife had improvised after her husband gambled away the original one in a bar in Arizona (20). Melchior adopts the crown as the insignia of his leadership. Just as his father had fallen in love with his future wife when she was signed up for the role of Lear’s faithful daughter Cordelia, Melchior falls in love with his future third wife (Lady Margarine), who is the same age as Melchior’s legitimate twin daughters; Lady Margarine had been assigned the part of Cordelia in a production with Melchior as Lear. As a kind of Lear who always wears his crown, Melchior is nevertheless conscious that the natural order of things is essential to maintain power, authority and sanity. His attitude towards his natural daughters is similar to Gloucester’s view of his bastard son: he accepts him as a mistake of his self-indulgent lust, but not as a “son by order of law”; therefore, according to the regulations of the clan, Edmund “hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.” (I, i, 30–31). Like Gloucester, Melchior is aware of his natural dark side, but he keeps it concealed; in this sense, Carter’s character is a Lear who decided not to give up his throne and preferred not to put his offspring’s loyalty to a risky, unsettling test. The actual process of demystification following Melchior/Lear’s disgust for nature is that Melchior’s younger twin daughters Saskia and Imogen – farcical Doppelgänger of Goneril and Regan – have been conceived out of wedlock, but shun their own natural mother (Lady Atalanta) in favour of their unnatural father, who will probably afford them prestige and celebrity. They implicitly represent the revenge of social convenience over the constraints of nature: all

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the same, these daughters “by order of law”, contrary to Nora and Dora, are at the same time someone else’s legitimate daughters. Considering the fact that Melchior’s first wife has begotten Saskia and Imogen with Melchior’s brother Peregrine, this kind of incestuous relationship proves anthropologically inadequate because, as illustrated before, with reference to Lévi-Strauss’ observations on kinship, it fosters an endogamous family structure. The Hazard family, pivoting around its own progeny, is inevitably doomed to extinction. Another example of this endogamous degeneration is the apparently incestuous affair between Melchior’s son Tristram and his paternal aunt Saskia – both Tristram and Saskia are Hazards by name, and they might even share the same father, Peregrine. When Melchior’s mansion is razed to the ground by a fire accidentally started by a cigar, his instinctive despair is aimed not at Nora, one of his missing daughters, but at the precious crown, his “old Hazard heirloom” (104), making him forget all his protective obligations as a father. Finally, out of nowhere appears his brother Peregrine, who salvages both Nora and the crown. This gesture carries a symbolic relevance in the story since through Peregrine the twin brothers’ roles as Estella’s “by-blows” are continued and revived in the new generation of bastards, represented by the rescued Nora. Teasing Melchior who makes childish attempts at retrieving his coronet, Peregrine is the recipient of a predictable retort from his brother: “‘Give me that crown!’ he [Melchior] rasped, having suddenly transformed himself into Richard iii. ‘Give me the crown, you bastard!’” (107) In a way, the crown fetish reflects a desire to feel legitimate, even when this desire leads Melchior to misconstrue his actual biological ties. Peregrine’s treatment of Melchior’s obsession with Shakespeare is again demystification, but instead of downplaying the extent of Lear’s despair, he consistently lays bare the deepest essence of the king’s tragedy: He [Peregrine] didn’t care one way or other about the crown. It was a toy, he was playing a game, Melchior was a fool to take the game so seriously, a fool to clasp the thing as if it were alive, and kiss it. A fool. (108) This scene is reminiscent of Lear’s reply to Gloucester who stoops to kiss his king’s hand: “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.” (iv, vi, 131). Melchior has become, unconsciously, what Lear was meant to become, a fool who is not aware of the insignificance of mankind’s struggle for power and everything it involves, including legitimacy and purity of blood. Significantly, the quest for legitimacy is paramount throughout the picaresque: for instance, it emerges quite significantly in the Spanish pícaro’s obsession with the ­“limpieza de sangre”, seen in his attempt to be admitted into nobility or, in the case of Jewish characters, converted to Christianity. In Mother Courage, a supposed

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q­ uasi-aristocratic ascent is considered a password to obtain credibility, while in a later picaresque story, Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, the search for legitimacy explains an inbred propensity to “enjoy life”. It can be argued that the general trend of the modern and contemporary picaresque struggle for recognition has shifted from a desire to be socially acknowledged, to a more intimate, personal search for identity and essence, a legitimacy to be alive. How do the ‘good’ characters react to their privilege of legitimacy in King Lear? As mentioned before, Cordelia firmly rejects the laws of predestination embedded in biology. A comparable disbelief in nature resonates in Dora and Nora’s attitudes, even though the sisters perceive the notion of family as being devoid of any encumbrance or duty: a family to them is a “club” uniting derelict people – especially women – who have been enduring a common ordeal. “There is a persistent history of absent fathers in our family” (35), comments Dora, identifying family as an oddly matched group. Extending the comparison to Vendita galline km 2, the denial of blood ties and the way these ties erroneously impinge on someone’s position in the world is common to both Dora and Delfina. The only connection Dora can recognise with her father is dictated purely by physiology: at the age of seventy-five, for example, she can still dance because she inherited sturdy, vigorous “Hazard bones” (37) from her father. The irony in this assurance of a distinct Hazard pedigree is that, according to unproven rumours, Melchior and Peregrine could be illegitimate sons. Therefore, who is the real Hazard, who can boast an immaculate family descent? As in Busi’s novel, only the clan’s patriarchs, basing their dominance on procreation and virility, could still be able to champion the principle of biology, but their imperfect, flawed offspring prove their own failure in perpetuating themselves in their progeny. Surprisingly, the only genuine, yet very atypical, father figure in Wise Children is the volatile Peregrine in spite of his remote kinship with the Chance sisters. Only by the end of the book, when Melchior publicly acknowledges Dora and Nora as his legitimate daughters, can the pícara alter her view of Peregrine, from a surrogate father to a love object. The pasteboard crown theme is sustained until the exuberant, carnivalesque end of the novel, when, after engaging in passionate intercourse with Peregrine, Dora realises how symbiotic the relationship between Melchior and his (presumed) father had been, with the result that the son undergoes a change of role, becoming, for once in his hundred-year life, a real father to someone, “he’d chosen to become his own father […], the man had waited to become the father of himself.” (224). This exchange of roles had been foreshadowed in King Lear as well, when the fool makes clear to the king that “thou/madest thy daughters thy mothers” (I, iv, 180–81). Finally, picaresque demystification

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of Shakespeare occurs in a further comical episode, when Dora and her sister have to carry an extremely valuable relic all the way to America: Earth from Stratford-upon-Avon, dug out of the grounds of that big theatre by some reverential sidekick and then entrusted to Nora and myself, a sacred mission, to bear the precious dust to the New World so that Melchior could sprinkle it on the set of The Dream on the first day of the shoot. (113) The silliness of this cult of the Bard degenerates when the sacred earth is disrespectfully used as cat litter and the revolting smell of droppings forces Dora and Nora to get rid of the nauseating soil and, unbeknown to Melchior, replace it with some American earth collected on the movie set. The unaware Melchior celebrates his propitiatory rite on the movie set, transformed into a ritual shrine and a pulpit for his untimely celebration of Britain’s past glories. The ultimate purpose of this parody is not to vilify Shakespeare; on the contrary, it targets Melchior’s egocentrism and his subconscious belief that, by acknowledging Shakespeare as his auctoritas, a kind of tutelary god, he will at the same time assert the legitimacy of his birth along with the inheritance of a typically Shakespearean talent from his legal father, although his outlook may in all likelihood be reminiscent of another, less talented actor – the American lothario who wooed Estella when her company was touring around the States: admitting his illegitimacy would inevitably mean renouncing his theory of an inborn talent. The following chapter will delve into humour and ironic verve in the picaresque and consider the relationship between the rogue antihero and rational thought as it emerged from the Enlightenment and further.

chapter 4

Humour and the Muffled Voice of Reason Quello che volevo dalla politica, e non solo da quella, era già racchiuso in una frase: bisogna assomigliare alle parole che si dicono. Forse non parola per parola, ma insomma ci siamo capiti. benni, Saltatempo1

...

I was ready to die myself – I was banking on it – but I’d still been hoping to get a few quid into my pocket in case the worst came to the worst and I lived. doyle, A Star Called Henry2

∵ Foreword Discussing the future of literature in the 1930s, Georg Lukács contends that the novel, Hegel’s epic of the bourgeoisie, has irreparably eclipsed both aristocratic and low-popular forms of creativity,3 with the result that middle-class novelists have dissolved the bond between individual and universal principles, the roots of classical pathos and civic heroism; what is more, the optimism extolled by the novel in the 1700s has culminated in a celebration of the private dimension of life, giving in to moral weakness and the refutation of the epic side of 1 Stefano Benni, Saltatempo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2001) 185. English Translation: Timeskipper, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (New York: Europa Editions, 2008) 268: “What I wanted from politics, and not just from politics, could be summed up in a phrase: ‘You need to resemble the words that you say.’ Maybe not word for word, but I think we both understand what I’m trying to say here.” 2 Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999) 89. 3 Georg Lukács, “Poмaн кaк буpжуaзнaя эпoпeя,” in Литepaтуpнaя Eнциклoпeдйя, Vol. ix, Moscow, 1935, 795–831; Italian translation: “Il romanzo come epopea borghese,” in György Lukács, Michail Bachtin, et al., Problemi di teoria del romanzo: metodologia e dialettica storica, a cura di Vittorio Strada (Torino: Einaudi, 1981) 133–78.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_006

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literary imagination. Only a few exceptional figures, like Cervantes, dared challenge in a single-handed effort both the agonising heroism of knighthood and the threats of an ensuing prosaic tone (151). It must be clarified that, despite these considerations of uniqueness, the Spanish author has been regarded as an absolute aesthetic model for later novelists like Henry Fielding, who led the way in the exposure of the potentials and failures of an emerging British middle class.4 Nevertheless, according to the Hungarian thinker, the novel as surrogate epic has caused a proliferation of works based on mediocre, morally indefinable protagonists, amongst whom are Moll Flanders, Gil Blas and Tom Jones5 (156–57)– the latter only marginally ascribed to the pícaros owing to Fielding’s vast authorial intrusions, which compromise the purely biographical connotation of a typical rogue’s tale. In truth, even Gil Blas’ legitimacy among traditional picaresque fiction has been disputed. In his short compendium on the French novel, Malcolm Cook contends that Gil is not a genuine pícaro because he is more a victim than a perpetrator of ruses, “a sympathetic victim of fortune” (16). Actually, even Spanish picaresque characters are faced with as many excruciating humiliations as they are themselves capable of concocting, since this give and take of misfortunes responds to the moral code of a farcical crime-punishment muddle leading to an abrupt conversion. Cook also asserts that, in antithesis with the pícaros, Gil is never in control of events, he is modified by them (17), and is not “equipped to deal with reality” (60) as a real pícaro (e.g. his valet Scipion) should be. These objections cannot be justified, since picaresque narrators are rarely in control of their story and the moral purport of their ‘confessions’: the tricksters/narrators refuse to dominate reality from the very moment they decide to narrate their past in the form of a flashback of their life, rummaging through past and present events, and usually confusing them.6 Finally, Cook does not seem to allow for a development in rogue 4 For instance, on the title page of Joseph Andrews (1742) Fielding acknowledges his debt as an imitator “of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.” See Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, edited by Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961) 1. 5 In this respect, I fully agree with Robert Alter’s considerations that “in Fielding’s great novel the picaresque tradition merges with – or, better, is assimilated by – a way of apprehending and reporting reality quite distinct from the mode of narrative first developed in the Spanish novels of roguery” (Rogue’s Progress 81). I will however refer to this masterpiece with regard to some commonalities with mainstream picaresque. 6 Malcolm Cook, Gil Blas (London, Grant & Cutler, 1988). In another passage, Cook states that “as he ascends the echelons of society he [Gil Blas] remains, simultaneously, both his new self and his past self in the mind of the reader” (59). This Janus-faced trait of the protagonist does seem to confirm his picaresque nature rather than negate it. What is more, Cook considers Lesage’s irony as evidence that “we [as readers] remain external and critical towards Gil

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narrative across other literatures except to the extreme consequences of corrupting its initial scope (19); on the contrary, it seems plausible to chart the protean picaresque on several occasions in the history of letters, thus leaving behind a ‘family resemblance’ with its forerunners (see the introduction to this volume). Remarkably, these considerations on the moral stature of bourgeois characters put forward a host of ethical dilemmas that will impinge on further developments in the picaresque novel in recent years. Once the edifying intent of earlier Reformation or Counter-Reformation picaresque narratives is replaced by the disillusioned, unbelieving voice of the 1700s, is a universal moral goal still possible? Or actually intended? This chapter will demonstrate how the trickster is still capable of defending his/her raison d’être by means of humour and scepticism. Lukács appears to have phased out the possibility that these ordinary, mediocre characters have not emerged out of nowhere, but they could rather be descendants of a previous literary tradition established well before the advent of a bourgeois consciousness – as expressed, for instance, in Apuleius’ pre-picaresque narrative (see Chapter 3). Mikhail Bakhtin offers a different point of view about the modern novel: he evaluates both the impact of the past and the innovations the novel has brought and keeps on bringing to present literary discourse. To Bakhtin, the novel has not contributed to the destruction of traditional genres, but has very often incorporated and invigorated them, salvaging them from oblivion. Central in this principle is the parodying nature of the novel: Throughout its entire history there is a consistent parodying or travestying of dominant or fashionable novels that attempt to become models for the genre: parodies on the chivalric romance of adventure […], on the ­Baroque novel, the pastoral novel […], the Sentimental novel (Fielding7 and The Second Grandison of Musäus) and so forth. This ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre.8 This comment is highly relevant to the picaresque novel, whose roots might have included, to Thomas Hanrahan’s mind, the chivalric tradition and Blas, even on those occasions when he thinks he is closest to us” (41–42). I do not subscribe to this aspect of irony because by means of irony the author can create empathy with the reader, not separation. The novelist certainly wants to suggest that a deeper meaning should be gained from this suspicious alliance. 7 I would hardly ascribe Fielding to the sentimental novelistic tradition. 8 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2004) 6.

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­examples of popular devotional literature, such as mystery plays and hagiographic material (57).9 The vulgarisation of themes embedded in high literature and the farcical ennoblement of base, low-life aspects are duly manifested in post-Reformation Spanish and early-modern British picaresque authors.10 In fact, even eighteenth-century authors are expressly conscious of their own task as ‘parodists’ of the various genres. For instance, Henry Fielding’s mistrust of the literary dignity of the term ‘novel’ had prompted him to title his adventures of Tom Jones as “History” (1749).11 In his cognizance of the interface between genres, he even depicts his roguish tale as a “Heroic, Historical, Prosaic Poem” (iv, i, 138). In line with Cervantes’ sarcastic contempt for chivalric or exotic romances, Fielding also takes his distance from “those idle Romances which are filled with Monsters, the Productions, not of Nature, but of distempered Brains” (iv, i, 137). Neither is Tobias Smollett more lenient towards romances ­(“Romance, no doubt, owes its origin to ignorance, vanity, and superstition”; Roderick Random 3); moreover, he seems very reluctant even to mention the word ‘novel’, favouring more general terms like “work” or “these sheets”. I­ nterestingly, even those authors who are enthusiastic about comical, crass picaresque narrative defend the dignity of their work from any degrading affiliation with the novelistic genre. A not well-known, yet influential master of humour in late eighteenth-century prose, Robert Bage, makes one of his 9

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The influence of hagiographic literature on the picaresque is also acknowledged by F­ rancisco Rico, among others, in La novela picaresca y el punto de vista and by David Boruchoff in “La malograda invención de la picaresca,” in Deja hablar a los t­extos: ­homenaje a F­ rancisco Márquez Villanueva, edited by Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez, Vol.  2 (Sevilla: ­Universidad de Sevilla, 2005) 497–512. With regard to Guzmán, Judith A. Whitenack ­asserts that the novel stems more directly from confessional literature than from hagiography. See Judith A. Whitenack, The Impenitent Confession of Guzmán de Alfarache (Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Ltd., 1985). A case in point is the amusing episode of Lazarillo’s encounter with a gentleman whose stern code of honour is doomed to succumb to the new logic of money and post-feudal society (Lazarillo de Tormes 49–65). In The Unfortunate Traveller blunt objectivity merges with elements of tragedy and farce: for instance, the terrible episode of the rape of Heraclide, observed by Jack Wilton through a hole in the ceiling, degenerates into a tasteless, grotesque tragedy of errors (333–39). Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, edited with explanatory notes by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (London: Penguin Books, 2005). In the Introduction, Keymer and Wakely point out that, in Fielding’s age, novels were no more than “perishable stuff of a dumbed-down literary marketplace, […] written and read for enrichment or pleasure of only the lowest kind” (xiii). However, their lachrymose sentimentality, which Fielding censures in authors like Samuel Richardson and Aphra Behn, is widely exploited in Tom Jones as a source of wry satire and parody (xiii–xxii).

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c­ haracters proclaim his reservations against novels: “novels are now pretty generally considered as the lowest of all human productions”.12 The cognizance of the past reflecting on the creative present of the novel is made manifest, according to Bakhtin, in the inheritance and rehabilitation of classic forms of humour13 such as irony, satire, parody and the comic grotesque. In his well-known dissertation on Rabelais,14 the Russian philosopher also contends that the carnivalesque comic spirit, which originated in ancient pagan lore and is expressed in many varieties of grotesque realism, is a permanent feature that resurfaces at subsequent moments in literary history – e.g. the commedia dell’arte, or the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc. Even though Bakhtin does not devote much attention to the picaresque, it seems reasonable to suggest that the tale of roguery has borrowed elements from the carnivalesque tradition, though under different circumstances, as a further section in this chapter will illustrate. In spite of Bakhtin’s opinion that the ironic trope is an imitative category of humour, “a form of reduced laughter” (135), due to its rhetorical sophistications, irony has been elected as a dominant trait of movements like the Enlightenment and postmodern thought, interestingly one of its fiercest detractors. A study of the nature and scope of irony as a timeless figure of speech may help discover similarities and discrepancies between distant literary phenomena – in this case, between contemporary picaresque and its eighteenth-century predecessor. These two components of humour, irony and comic-festive laughter, will be compared and explained further, but it is essential to acknowledge all of them as substantial, at times conflicting, elements in a rogue’s story, including the two novels that will be investigated in detail: Saltatempo (2001) by Stefano Benni and A Star Called Henry (1999) by Roddy Doyle. As will be demonstrated with regard to the representation of the supernatural, the carnivalesque is more 12 13

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Robert Bage, Hermsprong, or Man As He Is Not, ed. Vaughan Wilkins (London: Turnstile Press, 1951) 50. Quoting an essay on aesthetics by Friedrich Justus Riedel, Luigi Pirandello espouses the hypothesis that the English term “humour” may have an Italian etymology. However, he differentiates between ‘humour’ and umore: while the first word relates to witticism, the Italian one embraces a vaster array of connections to human sensibility, even to illness, in phrases like “bell’umore, buonumore” [good mood] and “malumore” [bad mood]. See Luigi Pirandello, L’umorismo (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1993) 18; italics in the original. The English term ‘humour’ is also polyvalent (‘to be in a good/bad humour’; ‘to be out of humour’), relating back to the classical belief in the four bodily humours (phlegm, blood, black and yellow bile). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana up, 1984).

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prominent in Benni’s book, whereas Doyle tends to prioritise Voltairian irony. Not unlike previous works analysed in this study, the two novels’ settings, plots and style seem to discourage comparison. Some reasons for this choice will be argued later on in this chapter, but suffice it to say in the first place that a strong ironic, satirical and parodying vein definitely unites these two works as regards to common issues such as the place of the tricksters on the political stage, their positions in the debates concerning freedom and selfdetermination and, in general, their point of view on the progress of modern thought. Stefano Benni narrates the story of Lupetto, a country lad who does not hesitate to qualify himself, perhaps too harshly, as a “mischief-making, ­chronically-late scoundrel.” (19) (“malfattore cialtrone ritardatario.” [16]). He recounts his childhood in a small town in the mountains, divided between his impatience with a despicable schoolmaster, “a nasty piece of work by birth, training, and by personal preference” (21) (cattivo di nascita, di formazione e per libera scelta, [18]), the escalation of environmental disasters caused by the rampant new political speculators in the name of progress, the philosophical/ nonsensical discussions at the local bar and the hero’s encounters with a flock of supernatural creatures, including “a God”, a none-too-stately version of a pagan idol with a beard “the color of a dung heap and an entourage of flies, dressed from head to foot in layers and rags.” (15) (“color letamaio, scortata da mosche, tutto vestito di stracci e strati.” [14]). The God teaches Lupetto the difference between objective and subjective time: time as a measurable quantity and the time of someone’s life, which only the “duoclock” [“orobilogio”] can tick away. The young boy’s skills in surmounting the barriers of time earn him the nickname of Saltatempo, Timeskipper. After executing a series of rites of passage into adolescence, Lupetto leaves the village for the big city where he joins a group of politically active high-school students. There he experiences, from an almost proletarian angle, the 1968 student upheavals, although he does not let himself be carried away by ideological enthusiasm. He even fabricates a first-hand account of the French riots in Paris, whereas in fact, he had spent most of his trip frolicking with a Parisian girl. In the meantime, tensions mount in the village: exasperated by the acrimony of the political struggle between the defenders of integrity and a clique of ambitious businessmen-turned-­ politicians, Lupetto’s uncle Nevio finally resigns as mayor. The pícaro fantasises about killing Fefelli, the alleged instigator of all corruption, but death takes its toll on the politician before Saltatempo can fulfil his scheme. The novel ends with a touching recollection of the march against the terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana (12 December 1969), and the protagonist’s resolution to leave the village and try his luck in the city.

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Doyle’s novel is more classically picaresque15 in tone: the first volume of The Last Roundup trilogy,16 A Star Called Henry is a farcical account of the first twenty years of Henry Smart’s inglorious existence, starting with the introduction of his bizarre parentage – his father is a brothel bouncer and killer for hire with a wooden leg who had married a young, flustered woman working in a rosary bead factory. Henry recalls his childhood spent meandering through the streets of Dublin with his brother Victor, fending off hunger and poverty with whatever means possible, and bravely challenging all echelons of authority, from the Metropolitan policemen (familiarly called the “rozzers”), to the aldermen, or even King Edward vii (“the fat foreigner”, 52). In a sudden urge to acquire some education, Henry and Victor sneak into a crowded classroom in a Catholic school, where they are warmly welcomed by a teacher, Miss O’Shea, who will, quite surprisingly, become Henry’s wife. After being expelled from the school for misbehaviour and blasphemy, the two rascals go back to their street life. After the death of Victor, Henry is initiated into the Irish Citizen Army and joins the insurgents against Britain in the short-lived Easter Rising (1916), although he only reluctantly sticks to the rules imparted by the all-tooreligious Volunteers. Miraculously fleeing reprisals from the British armed forces, he escapes to the country where he starts instructing youngsters to fight for the Irish Republic with the help of Miss O’Shea, also known as “Our Lady of the Machine Gun” (269). The escalation of violence and an abrupt change of fronts between the “new boys” and the more radical fighters for independence finally force Henry to seek refuge in the United States, leaving his family behind: “I had a wife I loved in jail and a daughter called Freedom [original Gael. Saoirse] I’d held only once. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I’d get there.” (342). While A Star Called Henry features a better-defined trickster with a penchant for robbery and deceit, the anti-hero of Stefano Benni’s novel seems reluctant to adapt to the rogue paradigm. Where then is the picaresque element in Saltatempo? Benni’s rogue protagonist is a champion of verbal deception – he is often referred to as a cheat, a playful manipulator of reality 15

16

Maria Fengler detects a combination of magic realism and a picaresque mood – a “magic picaresque” (84) – in the novel, especially in the reconstruction of early twentieth-century Dublin. She considers both aspects as poignant, effective vehicles for satire. See Maria Fengler, “Revising the Rising. Irish History in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry”, in Liliana Sikorska [ed.], History is Mostly Repair and Revenge. Discourses of/on History in Literature in English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010) 79–87. The other two volumes of Henry Smart’s mock-heroic saga are Oh, Play That Thing (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), set in the prohibitionist United States of Louis Armstrong and Al Capone, and The Dead Republic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), recounting Henry’s return to his beloved home country.

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by means of jokes and absurdities, and this certainly contributes to portray him as an unreliable narrator. More clearly than in Doyle’s novel, Saltatempo draws a sharp line between sympathetic rogues and abhorrent criminals. In fact, as will be shown later, Lupetto’s caricatures of the people and situations around him are tailor-made to his victims: close acquaintances in the village are depicted in a salacious but affectionate tone; on the other hand, the exponents of authoritarianism are the target of unsympathetic, corrosive attacks.17 The present chapter is articulated along two main lines: first of all, a description and evaluation of varieties of humour in the picaresque; secondly, a comparison between pre- and post-Enlightenment picaresque texts and their distinctive insights into the art of laughter, and how the Age of Reason has contributed new directions to the comic in contemporary picaresque literature. This parallel investigation aims at mapping out a series of relevant connections between the tale of roguery in the 1700s and its subsequent developments in contemporary literature.

Varieties of Humour in the Picaresque

Humour is an essential ingredient of a rogue’s story, and indispensably one of the main reasons why a book like Lazarillo had become household reading in aristocratic manors as well as in the market place, in a modest merchant’s house, or perhaps even in a boudoir. Laughter in the picaresque knows no social barriers and could be identified as one of its universal characteristics. Comic-satirical techniques and situations can fit into two separate but correlated categories: the aforementioned carnivalesque, comic-grotesque laughter, or the “culture of folk carnival humor” in Bakhtin’s own words (Rabelais 4) and what Robert Darnton describes as the “Voltairian smirk”, a less blatant version 17

See, for instance, the ferocious description of schoolmaster Naselli, alias Testuggine: “Testuggine […] non s’abbottonava mai bene le braghe da cui spuntavan mutande di lana e a volte anche scorci del lumacone. […] aveva altre sgradevolezze: usava un dopobarba corona da morto, aveva le unghie gialle e una moglie che non usciva mai di casa perché aveva l’esaurimento nervoso […]. Infine Naselli Testuggine Catarrone Puzzadimorto era un crociato della corrente di Fefelli Federico detto Fefè.” (18) (“Tortoise […] never buttoned up his trousers properly; woolen underpants stuck out, occasionally offering glimpses of the old, slimy slug. […] (he) had a number of other unpleasant characteristics: he used an aftershave that smelled like a funeral wreath, his fingernails were yellow, and he had a wife who never left their house because she’d had a nervous breakdown […]. Last of all, Naselli Turtoise Loogie-Hocker Funeral-Wreath-Stench was a political crusader, a follower of Federico Fefelli, nicknamed Fefè.” [21–22]).

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of the “thigh-slapping rib-cracking Rabelaisian kind”.18 Significantly, Voltaire, one of the most eminent figures of the Enlightenment – and a relentless critic of Rabelais’ burlesque – typifies this witty approach to hilarity in works like Candide, Zadig or L’ingénu, even though the philosophe merely carried on a well-established tradition. Nevertheless, two of the earliest tracts in defence of the comic grotesque, namely Justus Möser’s “Harlequin, or the Defense of the Grotesque-Comic” (1761), and Carl Friederich Flögel’s History of the Comic Grotesque (1788) do confirm Pre-Romanticism’s fascination with folkloric laughter (Rabelais 35–36). Besides, the argument for or against the literary value of popular festive humour was still lively, and had created opposing factions even among Enlightenment’s advocates in Germany: classicists like Gottsched resolutely slated burlesque as unsuitable for the stage, whereas Lessing was an admirer of the commedia dell’arte (34–35). In this mood, Bakhtin’s condemnation of the Age of Reason as the epoch characterised by “lack of historical sense”, “abstract and rationalist utopianism”, preoccupied solely with “generalization and typification” (116) and indifferent to the folkloric roots of the comic spirit, ought to be reconsidered, especially in the light of its exploits in fiction. The following sections will attempt an enquiry into three of the fundamental sources of comic imagination, although their areas of influence may often intersect: irony, satire and parody. In general, irony is more congenial to a Voltairian approach to humour, parody fits more appropriately in the carnivalesque, while satire accords equally with both. Irony Irony has already appeared in previous parts of this study: it was at the centre of the dualism in a linguistic sign in Riffaterre (Chapter 1) and, to a greater extent, it rattled the reader’s faith in official history when filtered through a trickster’s seamless narration (‘historical’ irony: Chapter 1). A further aspect of irony that has not yet been considered here is the amount of intentionality on the part of the speaker. What is an ironic expression meant to communicate? Is the ironist simply playing with words, as Pirandello maintains, or is s/he striving for a higher point of appreciation from the reader or listener? The i­ncreasing semantic breadth of the term “irony” through the centuries testifies to its struggle to achieve literary dignity from neglected comic or farcical domains. 18

Darnton points out this distinction in his account of an episode of superstition and political upheaval in a printing shop in eighteenth-century Paris: “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin”, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1984) 110. This duplicity of humour has definitely been a provocative tool, but also a buffer against censorship in the siècle des lumières.

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Norman Knox19 has reconstructed the semantics of the term ‘irony’ in the English language between 1500 and 1755, but similar considerations may apply to the Italian language as well.20 Knox delineates four main occurrences, partially inherited from ancient sources: first of all, irony takes on the disguise of “saying the contrary of what one means” (9; for example Cicero, Quintilian, the medieval rhetoricians); secondly, Myles Coverdale (1488–1569) and John Lawson (1674?-1711) used irony to signify a discourse that hides a different (not necessarily contrary) idea; thirdly, irony can draw on the technique of censuring an interlocutor by way of excessive praise, or vice versa (for instance Socratic irony, although this category of deceptive self-deprecation was only tagged much later by Quintilian). In its most general and recent meaning, irony came to express any turn of phrase aimed at “mocking or scoffing” (10). Revealingly, a key factor in the growing popularity of the term irony was its circulation in the 1700s, when parodies, pamphlets, occasional satires, hack-writing and so on, became a literary and non-literary phenomenon. Knox specifies how the term ‘irony’ acquired its dignity not from sophisticated literary texts, but mostly from extemporary, second-rate works. This contrast between a rather complex type of humour and its prevailing pseudo-literary sources is reminiscent of the low consideration irony enjoyed in the ancient classical period, where it was relegated to comedy or, in subsequent ages, vigorously discouraged. Even Quintilian and Cicero asserted that the ironic trope was relatively disparaging, specifying that in order to be tolerated, irony should never abstain from taking a moral stand, regardless of its jocose tone.21 The moral implications of irony

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Norman Knox, The Word Irony and its Context, 1500–1755 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke up, 1961). In the first part of his investigation, Knox refers to an unpublished PhD dissertation by Garnett Gladwin Sedgewick, “Dramatic Irony: Studies in its History, its Definition, and its Use Especially in Shakespeare and Sophocles,” Harvard University, 1913. Sedgewick investigates in considerable detail the origin of the word in ancient Greece. The Dizionario degli Accademici della Crusca, whose first edition was published in 1612, has 14 occurrences of the term “ironía”, but only provides two definitions: “E la ironía, cioè, quando alcuno dice di se meno, ch’ e’ non è.” [“Irony is when someone says less about himself than he is.”]. As a corollary, the dictionary states that to the philosopher irony equals “iattanzía”, ‘boastfulness’. Link: http://vocabolario.sns.it/html/_s_index2.html. Knox explains how “irony for Quintilian may act as an indication and expression of that ethos ‘which is commended to our approval by goodness more than aught else and is not merely calm and mild, but in most cases ingratiating and courteous’” (6; emphasis by Knox). Notwithstanding this ethical undertone, Quintilian elsewhere posits that “irony seemed to carry with it the grave and reasonable cause of offence”. Aristotle, on the other hand, mildly deprecates irony as a form of bland deceit in his Ethics, whereas in his later Rhetoric, he recommends the use of ironic eloquence, but with parsimony (4).

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create a peculiarly dissonant collision of principles when the ironist inhabits a picaresque conscience. One of the first dictionaries quoting examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian texts, the Dizionario della lingua italiana by Niccolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini (1861–79) indicates the statement of the contrary as the primary meaning of irony, followed by a list of other ironic uses, such as self-deprecation, understatement, attenuation of a reproach, Socratic irony, irony based more on the accent than on the sense of the words. Finally, and perhaps recalling Quintilian’s categories, Tommaseo and Bellini attribute to eye-contact, facial expressions and gestures the quality of being forms of irony.22 Early modernist intellectuals have taken their debate on the comic onto a metaphysical terrain. In his essay L’umorismo [On humor],23 at first glance Luigi Pirandello falls in with the classic rhetoricians; in fact, he discriminates between irony and humour in a fashion that somehow recalls Bakhtin’s categories of Rabelaisian laughter and Voltairian smirk. The Italian writer sees irony as a purely rhetorical gimmick based on dissimulation between what is said and what is meant (5, 34–35), the locus of a purely verbal pun, whereas humour is the result of a conscious reflection by the artist on the contradictions of laughter. Quoting Giordano Bruno, Pirandello forges the following dictum for humour: “In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis” (97; italics by the author). Pirandello decries the ‘vicious’ nature of irony: even when used with a noble purpose, it cannot dissociate itself from a sense of “mockery and mordancy” (8: italics by the translator); what is more, he condemns the constraints rhetoric had imposed on the artist’s subjectivity and humour until the romantic period, thus condemning more classicist ages for promoting an “intellectualistic poetics founded solely on abstractions and logic” (29); he may refer to eighteenth-century neoclassicism as well. Elsewhere, defending the not exclusively northern European prerogative for humour, Pirandello cites Cervantes as the quintessence of the humourist (102); but, arguably, Cervantes lived in an age when rhetoric was the principal rule of literature, yet still, and maybe by virtue of these constraints, he was able to affirm his originality. Moreover, citing Friedrich Schlegel as the undisputed authority, Pirandello accepts the former’s restricted view of irony as the artist’s exposure of the fictitious nature of art – what may be called ‘dramatic irony’.

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Niccolò Tommaseo, Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana, volume undicesimo, (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977) 11–12. Luigi Pirandello, On Humor, introduced, translated and annotated by Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa (Chapel Hill, nc: The University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

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Wayne C. Booth has brought the issue a step further. His A Rhetoric of Irony24 focuses on irony as a trope, an instrument of rhetorical persuasion “in every conceivable kind of literature […] – to say nothing of everyday speech.” (xiv). Nevertheless, he proposes a fundamental separation between two poles of the ironic discourse, namely stable and unstable irony. Stable irony conveys a concealed message in which the hidden meaning is ultimately univocal, there is no alternative explanation attached to it: the riddle of stable irony permits only one single answer. Booth specifies this condition of stability: “once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions.” (6). Stable irony is not only fixed but also covert, since its meaning is cloaked beneath the literal surface of an expression: for instance, Dante’s ironic invective, “Fiorenza mia, ben puoi esser contenta/di questa digression che non ti tocca” (Purg. Canto vi, 127–28: “My Florence, you indeed may be content/that this digression would leave you exempt” [The Divine Comedy 242]). Furthermore, stable irony is intended, “deliberately created by human beings to be heard or read and understood with some precision by other human beings.” (5). An example from both novels may help explain the straightforward message conveyed through stable irony. In the following aside, Lupetto acknowledges his lack of loyalty to his girlfriend Selene: “‘You’re a swine without any sense of restraint or remorse,’ I thought to myself. ‘At last.’” (226) (“Sei un porco senza remore e senza rimorsi, pensai. Finalmente.” [156]). The initial self-reproach about his infidelity becomes, by way of ironic inversion, a necessary quality in a basically cynical, ethically distracted society. This trivial wisecrack entails the purpose of the narrator, a sense of empathy with the reader and a univocal allusion to the inevitability of betrayal: stable irony strikes at the root of common wisdom. On the other hand, Henry Smart also indulges in stable ironic comments as when he describes his father’s far from honourable profession: “Costello cracked heads for a living. So did my father” (14). Costello is a local guard/policeman, therefore the irony lies in the perfect symmetry between violent behaviour at a ruthless criminal’s behest – Henry’s father is a hired killer – and the same behaviour exercised in the name of law and justice. Although these instances may initially suggest a series of restrictions imposed on the status of stable irony which detract from the expressive possibilities of the trope by reducing it to a single dominant intention, on the contrary, it is only through this narrowing down of its contents that irony can be associated with core principles, regardless of a simplistic moral lesson, and despite any self-complacent message. The assumption of a universal component of 24

Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974).

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irony is clearly discarded by G.W.F. Hegel in The Philosophy of Fine Art.25 He argues that irony instigates what he calls “the absolute principle of negativity” and the expression of a “god-like geniality” (90), whereby all universal and infinite ideas are reduced to the particular and finite; thus in order to overcome their negativity, the particular and finite are sanctioned as universal truths. Irony, “this art of universal destruction” disputing the “true Ideal” (217), is made even more detrimental by the fact that it is “directed quite as often against everything else excellent in itself.” (217). Hegel concludes that irony in art is a menace to its own idealistic scope, for “it betrays a secret lack of proportion and restraint which is detrimental to the artist.” (217). Hegel’s argument asserts the primacy of a good infinity over a recreated, self-referential, semi-serious one, yet it tends to draw a value judgement that hardly harmonises with the sceptical mindset of the ironist. In The Concept of Irony,26 Søren Kierkegaard poses a polemical response to what he defines as Hegel’s “partiality” (262) towards irony. He agrees that irony is infinite absolute negativity, but he maintains that “it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.” (261). He admits that intentionality is not only a necessary but also a substantial component of irony, as the ironist must be willing to enjoy what he defines as “negative freedom” (263). In sum, through irony the personality of the humourist liberates itself from the obligatory connection between word as phenomenon, on the one hand, and meaning or thought, as its essence, on the other; in a more general sense, irony overcomes the contingency of history. The Danish philosopher places the contradiction “between essence and phenomenon, between internal and external” (257) at the core of irony. As Kierkegaard observed, “Irony […] lies in the metaphysical sphere, and the ironist is always only making himself seem to be other than he actually is […]. Only remember that the moral categories are actually too concrete for irony.” (256). Writers are notoriously more lapidary than philosophers: in the words of the brusque narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, irony stands for “the Holy Ghost of this later day.”27 Unstable irony, on the other hand, refuses to attain a single-minded truth. The author, Booth explains, “refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for 25 26

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G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, translated with notes by F.P.B. Osmaston, vol.1 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975). Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, together with Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, nj: Princeton up, 1989). Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Mineola, ny: Dover Publications Inc., 2002) 1.

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any stable proposition, even the opposite of whatever proposition his irony vigorously denies.” (240; emphasis by the author). Instability in irony enables not only a tangle of more or less viable interpretations, but it also hinders any judgement about the hidden meaning, since most interpretations will be acceptable. At the same time, unstable irony does not finally converge towards a primary truth – given that, as Booth assures, the final truth need not be a unanimous dogma everyone must accept. An example may help illustrate this point. In his afterword to The Name of the Rose, Eco glimpses a touch of irony in a lover who declares his feelings by appealing to Barbara Cartland – or Liala, for an Italian amoroso – as an undisputed authority in the field: “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” […] Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love. (68) Eco designates irony as the vehicle of a postmodern way of questioning tradition and the quality of this irony has to be unstable because it plays a game, it deliberately leaves value judgements unresolved: for example, could the suitor legitimately identify with the same kind of love Barbara Cartland described in her books? Or is love such a hackneyed value that it needs to resort to a reappraisal of the past to find new modes of expression? Or, perhaps, is love simply a play on words, “a four-letter word”, as Bob Dylan derisively called it? In short, from a diametrically opposite slant in comparison with eighteenthcentury authors, Eco and many postmodern thinkers tend to configure irony as an unfinished source of associations and indifferent truths. In A Star Called Henry and Saltatempo unstable irony does not prevail; when it does appear, it is often associated with the unsympathetic ‘baddies’ of the story. In Doyle’s book, Alfie Gandon, the future minister of the republic, voices his own philosophy of killing via Dolly Oblong, the madam of a Dublin bawdyhouse: “– These men do not like each other, Henry, she said. – Mister Gandon thinks that this is what they would want.” (49). Irony here pulls the strings of many fabricated truths: murder is a form of induced death that would have happened anyway; it becomes a measure with which to prevent unnecessary violence; it is a morally justifiable solution, and it adheres to the rules of cause and effect. Similarly, unstable irony in Saltatempo is marked by an unfriendly tone at the expense of Lupetto’s enemies: they are unwillingly ironic and their irony has no finite meaning. Saltatempo associates unrelated, futile qualities with sensibly execrable vices, as in this example, in which, introducing

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­ ssobuco, the butcher, he says that he is an “inveterate Fascist, and magician O of the barbecue.” (45) (“fascista inveterato e mago del barbecue.” [34]); or, in regard to the evil Pastori brothers, he explains they were “drivers, gophers, and all-purpose hoodlums.” (48) (“autisti tuttofare e malaffare.” [37]). The narrator playfully exploits the ambiguous gradations of language to reflect the shady conduct of some figures. On the other hand, likeable characters often flaunt idiosyncrasies that, despite their ludicrousness, are reliable, stable signs of moral constancy. This is the case with Caprone, “professional peasant” (40) (“contadino professionista” [31]), who can only be addressed through a series of quiz-like questions; Carpaccio, one of Lupetto’s fellow students, speaks in a purely Marxist-Maoist argot, with expressions like “bourgeois urbanisation” (138) (“inurbamento borghese” [98]) or “false indulgence to the big property owners” (142) (“falsa accondiscendenza dei padroni” [100]), etc. Comparing the different degrees of commitment of ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’ irony, it follows that an ironic talent must exceed the scope of a pure verbal game: in the light of Booth’s categories, some aspects of what Pirandello had marked as umorismo are more aptly encoded among forms of ‘stable’ irony; for instance, his brilliant anecdote of the old lady as a subject of humorous considerations: I see an old lady whose hair is dyed and completely smeared with some kind of horrible ointment; she is all made-up in a clumsy and awkward fashion and is all dolled-up like a young girl. I begin to laugh. I perceive that she is the opposite of what a respectable old lady should be. Now I could stop here at this initial and superficial comic reaction: the comic consists precisely of this perception of the opposite. But if, at this point, reflection interferes in me to suggest that perhaps this old lady finds no pleasure in dressing up like an exotic parrot, and that perhaps she is distressed by it and does it only because she pitifully deceives herself into believing that, by making herself up like that and by concealing her wrinkles and gray hair, she may be able to hold the love of her much younger husband – if reflection comes to suggest all this, then I can no longer laugh at her as I did at first, exactly because the inner working of reflection has made me go beyond, or rather enter deeper into, the initial stage of awareness: from the beginning perception of the opposite, reflection has made me shift to a feeling of the opposite. And herein lies the precise difference between the comic and humor. (113; author’s italics) The depiction of the old lady striving to look attractive is not meant to prise out the spectator’s laughter; on the contrary, it manifests the tragicomic

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c­ ontradictions, rather than the contrarieties, of life – a topicality of stable irony. Further on in his essay, Pirandello describes hypocrisy as one of the main targets of humour: “Reserve, secrecy, the practice of letting others believe more than one says or does, even silence when not separated from the knowledge of the signs that can justify it […] are all artifices frequently used in everyday life.” (133): this harks back to one of the qualities of irony, markedly of stable irony. Pirandello’s point that irony attains an illusory contradiction, as opposed to the real contradiction of humour (5) is hardly defensible, since he not only relies on a limited definition of irony, but elsewhere, with regard to Francesco Berni’s comic verve, he also admits that “irony successfully reaches a comic dramatisation beyond wit, jest, and sheer pleasure” (41), an argument that places irony above the idle quibbles of verbal dissimulation. It is now interesting to verify whether or not, and how, picaresque humour responds to this “feeling of the opposite”; the task is now to pinpoint which of the two main categories of irony best applies to the picaresque sense of humour. Irony in the Picaresque: Benni and Doyle The assumption that pícaros are dissimulators by nature should, at first sight, suggest that the object of their ironic efforts is anything but stable. They are reluctant servants of many masters, hence they might be expected to change sides and ideas. In fact, as Henry Smart begrudgingly admits, he had been both freebooter and pawn, fighting an unknown enemy for the sake of his country’s privileged leaders: They were looking for a strange mix of man – dissident and slave, a man who was quick with his brain and an eejit. They knew what they were ­doing when they chose me; I was quick and ruthless, outspoken and l­ oyal – and such an eejit it took me years to realise what was going on. (240) Despite appearances, the pícaros, strong individualistic figures in pursuit of a convincing agenda for their audience, are more inclined to follow the lead of stable irony, be it by choice or for convenience’s sake. Picaresque irony is radically intentional, in the sense that not only is narrating to be a deliberate, almost arbitrary act of communication; what is more, the tricksters place their storytelling within a confessional or spoof confessional agreement with the reader, they engage in a polemical dialogue with the audience (see, for example Chapter 1 about the polemical ‘you’). This intentionality resembles that of stable irony: in fact, Booth identifies an important philosophical thrust driving stable ironic discourse: “Often the predominant emotion when reading

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stable irony is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits.” (28). Irony is a spark that ignites a sort of complicity with the listener and, in this respect, the picaresque narrators inform their speech with a communing purpose. Rogue mock auto-biographers are outcasts who strive to grab the audience’s attention and, hopefully, their benevolence. They use irony to garner sympathy or, in the worst of cases, a resentful reaction. Saltatempo resorts to as many platitudes as possible to gain the reader’s supportive consideration: he recalls elements that constitute part of a recognised Italian imagery, for example the humorous recollection of young people’s holidays at a typical resort on the Adriatic Sea (190–91; 273–75); he employs the formulaic, threefold structure of the joke – “I have to have three ways of dying immediately.” (102) (“devo aver subito pronti tre modi di morire.” [73]). He delights in the comedian’s asides or hypotheses on unlikely situations – “It was as if…” (29) (“era come se…” [23]). The joke itself is a form of popular ironic deceit in which the solution to the riddle turns out to be the most trifling commonplace. Satire differs from irony for it is inflicted on singled-out individuals or, most frequently, human types. An example of irony joined with satire is the mocking appellation given to Queen Victoria in A Star Called Henry: “the Famine Queen Victoria was still our one and only.” (7). Famine Queen was a satirical pet name suggesting the inadequate measures adopted by the British government to eradicate the great Irish famine (beginning in 1845), while an ironic remark is aimed at the Irish population – including Henry and, ideally, his ­listeners – which was too accepting of British hegemony: the queen was not exactly their “one and only”. An analogous moniker re-echoes in The Dead Republic, Doyle’s final episode of the trilogy, with regard to Margaret Thatcher (276) who, in the protagonist’s own words, “had awoken seven hundred years of racial hatred” (259) by taking a hard line on the political hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland (1981), where ten prisoners starved themselves to death. Among them, Provisional Army member Bobby Sands was elected to the ­British Parliament during the strike (“men dying on polling day” 254). ­Henry comments on this political strategy with his usual dry sarcasm: “Only the middle class could come up with starvation as a form of protest.” (242). By comparison, the following example from Benni’s novel also combines stable irony and political satire: here, the journalist’s use of euphemistic phrases conceals both blame-by-praise derision and censure of the manipulative power of the media and their surrender to hidden political goals, even in the case of local newspapers: se in consiglio comunale si sono presi a cazzotti in faccia si deve scrivere “seduta accesa ieri in consiglio”. […] se un disgraziato viene accusato si

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scrive “pesanti accuse a carico” e non lo si intervista, se è uno potente si scrive “avviata un’indagine” e si intervista l’indagato perché possa subito difendersi. (160) if a city-council meeting actually degenerated into a fistfight, then you have to report that there was “a vigorous debate during yesterday’s citycouncil session”. […] if a poor person with no influential connections is indicted, then you report that “he is facing serious charges,” and you don’t interview him. If, on the other hand, the person being indicted is powerful, you report that “investigations are underway,” and you interview him immediately to give him a chance to provide his side of the story. (231) What makes the irony more pungent is the fact that these euphemisms28 feature as the staple of Lupetto’s apprenticeship as a reporter. What is more, these tips on how to put your message across with no distinction between significant and superfluous items of news teach the journalists how to disrespect ethical priorities in forming judgement. Both instances show how irony usually includes the ironist and his audience in a common bout of laughter, whereas satire is focused on a distanced target of mockery. All in all, picaresque irony conceals the author’s intentions beneath the voice of an unreliable speaker29 who is elected to vouchsafe for a plurality of goals, for example: revenge on various forms of injustice; a challenge to the concepts of rightful and dishonest conduct, or to traditional hierarchies; a debate on tradition and its collapse into modernity; a more insinuating dig at the readers’ trust, etc. Besides, an essential point is to what extent roguish narrators are able to convey stable irony between the lines of their altogether misleading testimonies without losing their prerogative as antiheroes. Can a pícaro take up the task of preacher of an indisputable truth by means of humour? This method of captivating the audience’s favour is exerted in a different guise from the usual direct ironist/reader empathy: the rogue raconteur’s artful tricks also manipulate irony in ways that call to mind the external stance of the authors with respect to their subject. In other words, an ironic statement cannot be accepted literally; on the other hand, the unreliability of the picaresque narrator may also constitute an obstacle to the acceptance of irony as the opposite of what is stated – for instance Epimenides’ paradox of the Cretan liar can be

28 29

For the relevance of euphemisms and their reversal in the picaresque, see Chapter 2. A Rhetoric of Irony 106. This view contrasts quite sharply with Eco’s contention that irony could be accepted without being assimilated or comprehended.

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accepted as an ironic sentence only if one presumes that it may not be taken at face value. Trapped in the impasse of disbelief, the reader is encouraged to look for a suitable figurative meaning as opposed to the literal meaning. Contradiction Booth asserts that stable irony is steeped in a thought-provoking game of contrasts with respect to a literal expression. He quotes a passage from Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, in which the narrator is an unquestionable paradigm of unreliability: “If anything I have said seems sharp or gossipy,” Erasmus has “Folly” say at the conclusion of Praise of Folly, “remember that it is Folly and a woman who has spoken.” His title has in itself warned us from the beginning that irony will be at play: nobody, we infer, can really build his castle on the belief that foolishness is praiseworthy. But when such warnings as this quotation occur, condemning folly as in fact foolish, how do we decide whether to discount them too? (57; italics by the author) In the face of his fine analysis, Booth seems to have missed a significant point about Erasmus’ Praise. With his ironic aside, the narrator does not retract the idea that a certain kind of folly should be considered praiseworthy, but she points out that the nature of folly as such needs to be reconsidered. In a famous passage from the book,30 Jesus is mentioned as being among the greatest fools because he placed love – the most foolish of human feelings – above his own life. Thus, irony does not deny its initial statement, i.e. that ‘foolishness is not praiseworthy’, but it debunks and contradicts the actual significance of folly by reversing the axiom into a query: are we sure that what we call sanity is really sanity? In a similar guise, the picaresque ironist engages in a different play of contrasts: the underlying truth is not simply an opposing idea – with opposition being itself a common, but not the only category that describes polarities31 – but, instead, a contradictory one. Aristotle had formulated the 30

31

Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, translated by John Wilson (Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008) 88: “And Christ himself, that he might the better relieve his folly, being the wisdom of the Father, yet in some manner became a fool when taking upon him the nature of man, he was found in shape as a man; as in like manner he was made sin that he might heal sinners. Nor did he work his cure any other way than by the foolishness of the cross and a company of fat apostles, not much better, to whom also he carefully recommended folly but gave them a caution against wisdom.” (my emphasis). See, for example, what Hayden White asserts with reference to Roland Barthes’ criticism of modernity’s reliance on opposing dichotomies: “What modernism envisions, in

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distinction between a pair of contrary and contradictory statements: in the former pair both components could be false, whereas in the latter pair at least one of the two propositions must be true. As he asserts, contradiction requires the underlying truth of a universal statement: I call an affirmation and a negation contradictory opposites when what one signifies universally the other signifies not universally, e.g. ‘every man is white’ and ‘not every man is white’, ‘no man is white’ and ‘some man is white’. But I call the universal affirmation and the universal negation contrary opposites, e.g. ‘every man is just’ and ‘no man is just’. So these cannot be true together, but their opposites may both be true with respect to the same thing, e.g. ‘not every man is white’ and ‘some man is white’. Of contradictory statements about a universal taken universally it is necessary for one or the other to be true or false; similarly if they are about particulars, e.g. ‘Socrates is white’ and ‘Socrates is not white’. But if they are about a universal not taken universally it is not always the case that one is true and the other false.32 A further reworking of the principle of contradiction, opening new frontiers to metaphysics and logic, ushered in a breakthrough in Enlightenment scepticism regarding the primacy of Aristotle’s syllogisms about negation and contradiction. Remarkably, one of the most prominent Enlighteners, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, opposed Aristotle’s view on contradiction – but did not dare publish his findings – by asserting not only that analytical propositions33 are Barthes’ account, is nothing less than an order of experience beyond (or prior to) that expressible in kinds of opposition we are forced to draw (between agency and patiency, subjectivity and objectivity, literalness and figurativeness, fact and fiction, history and myth, and so forth) in any version of realism. This does not imply that such oppositions cannot be used to represent some real relationships, only that the relationships between the entities designated by the polar terms may not be oppositional ones in some experiences of the world.” See Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth” 49. 32 Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, translated with notes by J.L. Ackrill (Oxford: Oxford up, 1968) 48, italics by the editor. Contradiction has become one of the lynchpins of modern logic since the Enlightenment. The principle of contradiction becomes one of the co-ordinates in Greimas’ semiotic square (Chapter 1). 33 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1946) 615: “Leibniz based his philosophy upon two logical premisses, the law of contradiction and the law of sufficient reason. […] The law of contradiction states that all analytic propositions are true. The law of sufficient reason (in the esoteric system only) states that all true propositions are analytic.”

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true but also that all true enunciations are analytical. Analytical propositions, in Bertrand Russell’s definition are those propositions “in which the predicate is contained in the subject” as in “all white men are men”. Thanks to this assumption, Leibniz even arrived at the justification of the soul’s immortality as originating from the coexistence of all predicates within a person.34 He also contends that “every soul is a world apart, independent of everything else except God; that it is not only immortal and so to speak impassible, but that it keeps in its substance traces of all that happens to it.” (Russell 616). Although philosophy strictu sensu cannot be regarded as an explicit source of inspiration in eighteenth-century literature, even less in picaresque fiction, a possible awareness of the disruptive potential of contradiction on the part of Enlightenment authors, especially with regard to humour, can be reasonably elicited, and it is evidently one of the hallmarks of future developments in trickster literature, including the recent examples illustrated here. In the face of all complex logical sophistries, the roguish narrators have their own penchant for falling into comic contradiction. Contradictory irony takes the upper hand in A Star Called Henry. In this excerpt, some of the Easter Rising insurgents, fighting against the British army, do not fall in with the prospect of letting the local population ransack shops during the riots: – – – –

They’re Irish shops they’re robbing! Good for them, said Paddy35 Swanzy back at the Volunteer. It’s all Irish property! It’ll still be Irish after it’s taken. (114)

Literally, this gag seems to infer that the two adjectives “Irish” are used to mean exactly the same thing, a community where everyone is concerned with defending one another’s rights, including personal possessions. Yet, these punchlines may be read ironically: like all other nations, the Irish too will have to brave social disparities. Therefore, stealing is not limited to foreigners (the 34

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“We said that the notion of an individual substance includes once for all everything that can happen to it, and that by considering this notion, we can see in it everything that can truly be stated about it, just as we can see in the nature of the circle all the properties that can be derived from it. […] in fact we do maintain that everything that is to happen to a person is already included virtually in his nature or notion, just as the properties of a circle are included in its definition.” Quoted in Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann (eds.), Modern Philosophy (Upper Saddle River, nj: Prentice Hall, 2000) 255. Paddy is a typical Irish name.

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British), as the idealist Volunteers wish. On the other hand, Paddy’s empathy with the looters leads him to defend their rights to equality at the price of tolerating a crime. Henry’s sceptical accomplice holds that wealth does not bow to moral concerns, he does not discriminate between good and bad Irishmen as opposing realities but as reciprocally contradictory terms. Earlier, Henry had observed, quite bluntly, that he was not fighting for Ireland; he was fighting a “class war” (108). A similar conclusion could be drawn in reference to an episode in Saltatempo, when some of the protesters gathered to demonstrate against terrorism turn to window-breaking and ransacking shops: “A plateglass window shattered into a thousand pieces, and there were a few marchers stealing shoes and other marchers saying angrily: ‘What does that have to do with the dead?’” (351) (“Una vetrina che andò in frantumi e dei ragazzi che rubavano delle scarpe, e altri incazzati che dicevano, cosa c’entra questo con i morti?” [243]). To the innocent protesters against violence, another violent act sounds illogical, whilst idealism is forced to deal with contradictory assertions like ‘not all the protesters are against the use of force’ and ‘not all the violence is condemned in the same way’. Benni’s contradictory irony resonates in his recurrent use of paradox. In Waldenfels’ terms, paradox is an enunciation that does not deny another more ordinary assertion, since it does “presume a normal state of things”, unless the paradox “conflicts with its own preconditions”, as in the case of Odilo’s representation of the Shoah as a ‘weak’ paradox (­Chapter 2). A term like ‘paranoia’ implies the existence of a normal state of the mind (noos: mind); but this dual opposition, or contiguity between normality and its degenerations – for example feelings of persecution, uncontrolled sense of grandeur, etc. – can be contradicted by allowing for intermediate states of the mind where degenerations are not yet pathological but already beyond the limits of a normal noos, with normality as another disputable parameter. Thus, the paradox of ‘noia’ and ‘paranoia’ is weakened by possible intermediate states of mind, like some kinds of milder neuroses. A similar interference is traceable in Saltatempo, where the use of paradox appears as the only remedy against the incongruities of reality. In this passage, Lupetto’s father is transferred from a mahogany to a walnut coffin during his funeral, and a shoe drops off his foot.36 36

Remarkably, in his “Translator’s Note” to Timeskipper, Anthony Shugaar associates this passage of the lost shoe with another disconcerting event that happened in Milan three days after the bombing of Piazza Fontana – the putative suicide of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who fell from a window on the fourth floor of the police hq: “The official story was that he jumped, and one of the policemen present, trying to prevent his fall, grabbed his foot, and was left holding one of Pinelli’s shoes. The problem with that story, of course, is that the body was found in the courtyard below, with both shoes” (389). Camilla Cederna

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Lupetto and his friends meditate on the convenience of wearing shoes in the afterlife: Pensammo: se è in paradiso ci sono le nuvole e non servono scarpe. Se è all’inferno ti bruci anche con le scarpe. Nei grandi pascoli si va a cavallo. Nel paradiso islamico ci si toglie le scarpe prima di entrare. Buddha va notoriamente a piedi nudi. E se dopo c’è il nulla, nel nulla non si cammina. (220) We all thought: if he’s in heaven, there are clouds, and he won’t need shoes. If he’s in hell, you burn with or without shoes. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, everyone rides a horse. In Muslim paradise, you take off your shoes before entering. Buddha famously went barefoot. And if, in the afterlife, there is nothing, then it’s safe bet he won’t be walking. (318) Lupetto snubs common burial conventions and interrogates himself, instead, about his father’s journey in the hereafter: not wearing shoes is not quite an obstacle to reaching whatever kind of eternal life the deceased will possibly enter. At the same time, Saltatempo shows the contradictions between different religions and their depiction of heaven and hell as places where perceptions and senses are still totally human (“you burn with or without shoes”). In this, paradox may be conceived as the mocking product of an extreme, unbending faith in rational thinking. The same belief in the potential of rational thinking as a source of illusions is conveyed by Baudolino in his attempt to transform his father’s goblet into the Holy Grail (Chapter 1).37 The subtle use of an ironic content represents an element of textual coherence in picaresque humour wherein irony is oriented towards a sceptical, ambiguous, but strictly anti-relativistic blueprint.38 Many of the ironic associations in both novels derive from a context arising within the narrative

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reports how the Milan police provided three different accounts of the suicide, and a journalist from the newspaper Il Giorno testified that Pinelli’s corpse had both shoes on. See Camilla Cederna, Pinelli. Una finestra sulla strage (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2009) 28. As Stefano Tani observes, Casaubon, the protagonist of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, accepts the forgery of a ‘league’ of Templars in order to justify its creation. Tani also argues that the unacceptable choice between declaring the failure of rationality and the compulsion to perceive a secret message behind uncanny events and situations is a recurring theme in the Italian novel of the 1980s and is paramount in works like Leonardo Sciascia’s Il cavaliere e la morte [The Knight and Death] (Il romanzo di ritorno 92–97). This slant on cohesion is reminiscent of one of Booth’s analyses of Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub”, where, Booth maintains, rationality contradicts the rules of human ethics and decency

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­discourse: for instance, the title of Doyle’s book does not relate to the protagonist’s own celebrity but to his homonymous older brother, “the first real Henry in the sky,”39 one among his “still and shooting siblings” (A Star 35), whom Henry’s mother devotedly looks up to in the smoggy Dublin night sky, refusing to recognise the living Henry from his proper name. This lack of identification, along with the fact that his father’s name was also Henry, leads the protagonist on a desperate quest for a place where he could ‘be’ Henry Smart. Even as an Irishman, he is more of an exception: his surname has a marked tinge of Englishness, as a Catholic nun wickedly observes (77); what is more, he knows very little Gaelic. In Oh, Play That Thing, on his way to Chicago, he reckons he has finally restored his identity and come to terms with his previous multiple lives (and aliases), but something halts the process: A travelling salesman, a happy father, the second son of a big, big farmer. These men and more men, I’d crept into Dublin as all of them. But never as me. Henry Smart had never gone home. He was now, though. Going home. Henry S. Smart. Henry the Yank. (264) Certainly, Henry Smart is the most aliased character in this selection of texts, as his ‘reward’ poster shows: “Henry Smart aka Fergus Nash aka Brian O’Linn aka Michael Collins. Is not to be confused with the other Michael Collins.” (A Star 209–10). Later on in the story, he renames himself Reggie Nash, while in the second part of the trilogy he assumes even more identities and occasional nicknames: Henry Drake, Henry Glick (‘glic’: smart), Mr Dalton, Brother Flow, One-Leg O’Glick, One-Leg Hickock, One-Leg Lewis, Hop-along Jethro Dupree. All the three episodes end with the self-assurance of being Henry Smart, but the constant disruption of his multiple alter egos makes the certainty of this claim strikingly ironic. Henry is not yet himself; he is a Yank, another compromise with his integrity. To make his identity even more problematic, the protagonist discovers that Dublin did not even know he existed: “(I found out later, I was American. There were no records in Dublin; I’d never existed.)” (The Dead Republic 86). This confusion of identities brings to mind another comic component in Henry’s narrative: the mockery of history through self-derision. For instance, the protagonist persists in the humorous ruse of passing for Michael Collins, even in the most life-threatening circumstances: (A Rhetoric of Irony 115–16). The quality of Swift’s pamphlet lies in his half-serious lampooning oscillating between acceptable principles and insane, unacceptable proposals. 39 Doyle, The Dead Republic 41.

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– Michael Collins, he said once in answer to a young, fresh rozzer’s enquiry. I was with him. He laughed. We laughed. They laughed. – I’m just having you on, he said. […] – Michael Collins, I said to the same question. They laughed again. They let me away with it because I was with Michael Collins. – Keep it up, lads, said Collins as we passed through the block. – You’ll soon catch the bastard. (192) Collins was a very controversial figure in Irish Republican history: one of the leaders of the I.R.A., he convinced the other group of separatists, the I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood) to accept a ceasefire and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which sparked the civil war, which ended with the final defeat of the Anti-Treaty party in 1923. In this brief dialogue between Collins, Henry and the policemen, disguise is clearly tolerated in the name of some secret allegiance between the republicans and the pro-Treaty faction: Henry avoids reprisals because he is with the real Collins. In the course of the story, Henry’s humour escalates from slight hostility towards the I.R.A. leader, who sends him back to work as a stevedore at the docks (187), thwarting the pícaro’s ambitions to become a political hero, to a bout of mockery or disrespect for a figure that, Henry comments, looked “like a lawyer or the Castle official in charge of deporting Shinners.”40 (194). Collins looked like an official of the British government entitled to expel members of the Sinn Féin, the republican independentist organisation. Ironically, though, it is probably Collins’ own cunning that puts Henry in the typically picaresque twilight zone separating history and anonymity: “I was bang in the middle of what was going to become big, big history, I was shaping the fate of my country, I was one of Collins’ anointed but, actually, I was excluded from everything.” (208). As in the case of Henry Smart, Saltatempo lives two parallel existences, the time of the watches, the sum of one’s learning experiences – “the time of 40

The Sinn Féin, is “an Irish movement founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith (1872–1922), Irish journalist and politician, orig. aiming at the independence of Ireland and a revival of Irish culture and language and now dedicated to the political unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.” See “Shinner”, oed online, Oxford up, web site: www.oed. com. Originally a derogatory term for the members of the republican Sinn Féin party, ‘Shinner’ then became a more neutral colloquialism.

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l­ earning” (194) (“il tempo dell’imparare” [135]) – and the time of the ‘duoclock’, proceeding “in leaps and gales” (61) (“a balzi e bufere” [45]), where cause and effect do not matter. It is a subjective as well as an eternal time: I miei due orologi funzionarono molto quell’anno [1969], a volte alleati, a volte conficcando le lancette appuntite uno nel quadrante dell’altro, in un duello tra i miei terremoti e quelli del mondo. Se quell’anno durò molti anni nella storia, altrettanto a lungo durò nei miei dolori e nelle mie passioni. (171) My two clocks worked hard that year, sometimes in concert, at other times one jabbing its sharp hands into the dial of the other, in a running duel between my personal earthquakes and the temblors shaking the world at large. If that year lasted for many years to come in history, it lasted just as long in my own world of griefs and pains and passions. (247) The two pícaros reflect two perspectives on history from a similar observation point: they are both outsiders, somehow alienated from the great advances of world history. Henry is excluded by the presumed heroes of a free Ireland; ­Lupetto is a spectator living “in the center of a vast galaxy of transformations and discoveries” (“all’interno di una galassia di trasformazioni e scoperte” [171]), in which the gravitational force of freedom suppresses any other choice. In the case of the Irish rogue, he decides to jump off the galaxy of attraction of Irish history, but he realises how this centre of gravitation always progresses along the same plane, history is doomed to repeat itself. In Saltatempo, instead, historical time enters the sphere of his own subjective time, and in the process history loses touch with causality: history in the novel is not a series of experiences but a series of events that each individual is allowed to reshape and change, a notion of time where, as Lupetto puts it, “the future demands my attendance, it admonishes me sternly, telling me that maybe I can change it.” (61) (“il futuro mi chiama, mi ammonisce, mi dice che forse posso cambiarlo.” [45]). Self-irony Irony does not always build a mutual correspondence between ironist and audience. Henry’s funny impersonation of Collins receives mixed reactions from his enemies: from sympathetic laughter (237) to a much more brutal response by the Auxies, the diehard auxiliary British paramilitary troops that had been sent to Ireland to repress the civil war – in fact, Collins’ collaborative role with the British Commonwealth has made him a surreptitious ally of the queen. This and other episodes show how Henry’s irony is doomed to be ­misunderstood by

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his listeners, and the fact that his sense of humour can be appreciated only by his readers constitutes a process of proselytism by the picaresque hero aimed at a well-disposed, appreciative readership, who can of course reconstruct the inner textual connections. As Lawrence J. Taylor contends, self-irony and selfsatire in an Irish context function as a defensive weapon against an instrumental depiction of Irish nationalism or folklore represented, for example, by the anachronistic Bard conventions – the “parlor nationalism”.41 Taylor emphasises that Irish jokes quip about stereotypical Englishmen or, more recently, American or Irish-American visitors, by creating a cultural split between local and alien realities, nourishing the conviction that only a specific group will actually enjoy and share the humour, while others will inevitably be left out. The self-ironist, then, is on the lookout for confrontations with foreign cultures, therefore s/he adopts humour as a “preemptive strike, beating the enemy to the punchline.” (185). Susan Bassnett cites a passage by Patrick Kavanagh in which the Irish poet differentiates between “provincialism”, in which public opinion is manipulated by the voice of the metropolis – in the case of Ireland, by the British – and “parochial mentality”, which is “never in doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish.”42 In this, picaresque self-irony may work as a preventive blow against the outside world and a defense of parochialism at the same time. In particular, the two novels place parochialism and provincialism at opposite ends of the spectrum. In Saltatempo, the city is the radiating point of ideology and supposedly new political ideals, but public opinion is far from independent, it is constantly at the mercy of the latest fashion. Lupetto takes advantage of this self-illusion of novelty by inventing a ‘scoop’ about his experience among the Parisians during the French May Riots in 1968: [I suoi compagni di scuola] Non lo sapevano ma sul treno avevo studiato tutti i giornali, italiani e transalpini, e mi ero preparato benissimo. I francesi hanno la bocca più larga degli italiani, iniziai, e il rumore era assordante. Il corteo era aperto da uno striscione rosso alquanto stinto per le numerose battaglie, il colore era diventato rosa pesca, e sopra c’era scritto “Parlez-moi d’amour”. 41

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Lawrence J. Taylor, “Paddy’s Pig: Irony and Self-Irony in Irish Culture,” in James W. F­ ernandez, Mary Taylor Huber (eds.), Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 179. Patrick Kavanagh, “The Parish and the Universe”, in Mark Storey (ed.), Poetry and Ireland since 1800: A Source Book (London: Routledge, 1988) 205, quoted in Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 63.

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Mormorio. Scherzo: c’era scritto “Ce n’est que un début”. (185) No one knew it, but on the train coming back from Paris, I had carefully read all the newspapers, both Italian and transalpine, and I had cribbed quite thoroughly. “The French have bigger mouths than the Italians,” I began, “and the noise was deafening. At the head of the procession was a long, red banner, somewhat faded from the many battles it had survived. The red had become a sort of pinkish peach, and on it was written: Parlez-moi d’amour.” A murmur arose from the audience. “Just kidding. The banner said: Ce n’est qu’un début.” (267) The protagonist demystifies the enthusiasts of ideology by a series of sexual allusions that conflate political struggle with one of the unspoken intents of most student activists of both sexes at that time: experiencing a more liberated sexuality. In his derision of ideological quibbles, Lupetto asserts his personal parochial mentality, that is, his right to stand for his own ideals, despite all preconceptions: Io ero a volte quello che leggeva Eliot, a volte quello del maggio francese, a volte l’anarchico apartitico, a volte quello col babbo Pci. Un cocktail che mi permetteva di litigare con tutti, ma anche di discuterci. (185) I shifted my identity and was seen, variously, as the guy who read Eliot, or the one who had seen the French May of 1968, or an unaligned anarchist, or the kid with the Communist dad. This cocktail of affiliations and identities allowed me to argue with everyone, but also to converse with them. (267–68) Being parochial means feeling authorised to argue with anyone for the sake of one’s ideas: in this sceptical though affectionate portrait of the left it is possible to discern Benni’s response to typical criticism aimed at his works, namely of promoting one-sided social optimism. In another episode, when the students invite some workers from the trade unions to an assembly, the impression is that workers and students belong to completely alien worlds: the guest speakers are hailed as “genuine blue collar workers” (288) (“veri operai ­metalmeccanici” [200]), celebrities who, Lupetto comments, nearly had to sign autographs for the ecstatic audience. In fact, while the city is the place of provincialism, the small town is the vibrant centre of political conflicts and

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acts of bravery, where the effects of political decisions have strong repercussions on every ­individual’s life. The common dualism which perceives the city as the hub of new ideals and the country as a passive, reluctant receptacle, is regularly reversed in the story. Mirko Zilahy observes how the protagonist of Benni’s novel exposes the village’s backwardness and isolation from the city, in which great events take place.43 To be true, the countryside appears to instil in Lupetto a genuine, first-hand, interiorised perception of his role in the world. A passage is quite revealing of this reversal: Baruch, the village sage,44 encourages Saltatempo to reconsider without prejudice the violence perpetrated between neighbours in the years of the Italian Resistance: it was a time of confusion, the difference between heroes and killers was so slight during those cruel years that only time will tell what role everyone had in the massacre and the amount of suffering or relief everyone brought about in the world. In this meditation, individual responsibility is the key principle of a parochial mentality (251; 363). Quite the reverse in A Star Called Henry, in which the polarities are inverted: the city, with its rebellious spirit, the hassle and wrangle of the crowds, the mephitic, cough-infested air of change, is the place where the anti-treaty opposition still nurses the expectation it can free Ireland from the British intruders. The third part of Doyle’s trilogy reveals how this aspiration is not shared by all Irishmen, specifically by those who migrated from Ireland in search of a better life, like director John Ford, who still holds on to an imaginary motherland, a cinematic Arcadia where Dublin and its inhabitants are completely out of place. Ford declares: “Dubliners are not really Irish. They’re scum” (The Dead Republic 89). In rural Ireland, ironically called “leprechaun Ireland” (122), history seems to have come to a halt; people have not even realised that “their postboxes had been painted a different colour.” (158). Moreover, the countryside is the cradle of the astute fiddlers that led to the treaty with Britain, sanctioning the surrender of parochialism to the logic of provincialism. In a few circumstances, self-irony may not succeed in showing how apparent personal abasement hides a corrosive attack against the enemy’s presumed superiority. Analogous episodes of misunderstanding are frequent in Saltatempo too, most remarkably when the protagonist defends his anti-capitalist 43

44

Mirko Zilahy De’Gyurgyokai “Saltatempo e il suo doppio: natura e psyche, tramiti dell’irrealtà benniana,” in aavv, Narrativa italiana recente/Recent Italian Fiction (Dublin: Department of Italian, Trinity College; Torino: Trauben edizioni, 2005) 97. Shugaar finds some resemblance between Baruch and late Sandro Pertini, former Italian President of the Republic and, at the time of the antiterrorist protest, president of the chamber of deputies (“Translator’s Note” 389).

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o­ riginality by means of laughter: “Whenever the climate of political tension heated up, it was a twofold pleasure for me: the battle is hard and the sleeping bag is soft.” (216) (“Se il clima politico si scaldava per me era un doppio piacere, lotta dura e sacco a pelo morbido.” [150]). Lupetto is homeless and his enthusiasm for the school occupation is notably bolstered up by his need for accommodation and the opportunity to associate with female fellow students. Some characters in Benni’s novel have built an impermeable barrier to Lupetto’s humour: the generation of rampant capitalists emerging from the post-World-War-ii reconstruction are bereft of any sense of the comic; they take themselves too seriously while avoiding any sense of duty towards themselves or others. When, for example, Saltatempo decides to divulge his father’s notebook containing lists of names that would incriminate some political personalities in the village, the lawyer who is in charge of his case dismisses it as ideological material, and when the disillusioned pícaro leaves the office cracking a joke about justice absconding, the secretary chokes a laugh. “Perhaps laughing” concludes Lupetto “was one of the worst crimes that you could commit in that office.” (319) (“Forse lì dentro ridere era uno dei reati peggiori.” [221]). The new trailblazers do not share any principle with their egalitarian, working-class neighbours, nor do they seem to have acquired the same humorous argot. In fact, they hoard their mischief under a blanket of respectability – the protagonist calls them “respectable soldiers, Fascists, and politicians” (320) (“militari, fascisti e politici per bene” [222]) – while their illegal manoeuvrings become more and more legitimised, until Fefelli’s transactions are carried out in the open and without nominees (230; 331). Drug pills and alcohol are two of Fefelli’s collateral activities, a trade that will cause the death of one of Lupetto’s friends, Gancio. Villa Meringue, in spite of its dainty name, is the headquarters of the corrupt right wing, and an unauthorised building which should be destroyed for “saccharine defacement of the viewshed” (240) (“deturpazione dolciastra del paesaggio” [165]). Even the poisonous fumes of a cement factory are sold as “good smoke, the smoke of money” (65) (“fumo buono, fumo di soldi” [48]). In a paradoxical refusal of anything vaguely scatological, Fefelli even robs the till of the funds that were to be allocated to build the sewerage (81; 114). The paladins of the economic “boom-boom” differ from the rest of the small-town people in that they do not discriminate between different levels of misbehaviour: they qualify the means to their personal ends as good deeds. The village people, instead, commit minor infringements or acts of intemperance, but they also know their moral shortcomings: they actually make a public apology for their flaws by means of self-irony. For instance, Lupetto’s uncle Nevio reveals the affairs going on among the least suspect couples:

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Come vedi questo paese è un covo di perdizione. Tuo padre e la cartolaia. Io e la regina delle guêpière. Carabelli e il farmacista. Maghino e la moglie di chi so io. Karamazov e una mucca. (118) As you can see for yourself, this village is a den of iniquity. Your father and the news vendor. Me and the queen of lacy corsets. Dr. Carabelli and Nicola, the pharmacist. Maghino the electrician and the wife of … well, that’s for me to know. Karamazov and a cow. (168) Moreover, even the instinctive face of laughter, the grotesque-carnivalesque spirit, does not seem to inspire the cynical Fefelli and his clan of nouveaux riches. Osso, one of Lupetto’s ex-schoolmates who has chosen an easy life of smuggling and bribes, is invited to refrain from farting in public, an action that used to be a sign of affiliation in his circle of friends. Farting belongs to the carnivalesque creed of the village kids, but Osso cannot suffer the joke any longer; he retorts resentfully. As Bakhtin stresses, genuine popular festive laughter requires that the jesters become involved in the same fate as their spectators, since carnival grotesque unveils the universal inconstancies of human behaviour;45 but this is an impracticable language for the greedy, uprooted speculators. Renouncing the carnival dimension of time and existence means at the same time a repudiation of a system of timeless moral values that communal laughter still treasures (see further). In Doyle’s text, the inconsistencies caused by the inner political division lead to a twofold impact on the ironic discourse: at times, then, Henry appears to be able to share the norms of ironic laughter only with the readers. The incommunicable irony between him and his interlocutors – as in the Collins quibble mentioned before – denotes two distinct political fronts: the new Irish republicans (Collins’ “young men on the make”, 313) and the old Irish Citizen Army members, Henry’s faction, whose leader, James Connolly, had been executed in retaliation for the Easter Rising, a charismatic figure that, Henry observes, was “one of the martyrs, dangerous alive, more useful washed and dead.” (318). The new boys, self-designated guardians of the Irish Free State of 1921, deliberately bypassed the stern nationalistic principles of the First Dáil (1919–21) – the constituency of the Declaration of Independence – and, by adopting 45

“The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it” (Rabelais 12).

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a lenient policy towards the British, have now become the new ‘peelers’, the custodians of order while the old boys, like Henry, are branded as anarchists.46 This struggle for control of the island degenerates into utter nonsense when Ivan Reynolds, a leader of the new generation, proclaims himself the “king of the Republic”, the ruler of a motherland he bluntly describes as “a dollop of muck” (341). The deepest level of humour, in the form of dramatic irony, assumes that the kingdom (England) and the republic (Ireland) are not opposites, but compatible, interchangeable alternatives. The element of contradiction is the missing link here: freedom, peace and equality are alien to both power structures. What is more, in the progress of these complex political conflicts, the Provisional I.R.A. unionists, the more violent faction, will look up to the ‘old boys’ as examples of irredentist obstinacy; however, as Henry sarcastically observes, the new ­Unionists had lost contact with history and its actors: I hadn’t been there in January 1919, in the Round Room of the Mansion House, when the Dáil had ratified the 1916 Proclamation and adopted the Declaration of Independence. What they thought I was, I wasn’t: the sure, tight link, the man who’d actually voted. There was no Henry Smart M.P. […] I was their walking legitimacy, but – for now – I was the only one who knew it was a lie. The Dead Republic 185–86

A comparable instance of dissent is described by Saltatempo as he discovers that the high-school he attends already counted its left-wing leaders, and their idea of communism was somehow different from that of his father and the members of the “Doofuckallian Philosophical Circle” (39) (“Circolo filosofico fancazzista” [30]) back in his native small town. He is surprised at how intricate politics could be, claiming that things political looked much easier in his home-town (115; 165). The political front at school is absurdly fragmented among the communists according to their different level of enthusiasm (236): Saltatempo is affiliated with the more amphibious circle of the “anarchic intimists, or as some put it, the fucking anarchic intimists.” (236) (“anarchici intimisti, di merda, aggiungeva qualcuno.” [163]). Lupetto’s fellow political activists share a peculiar jargon: in fact, journalist Carlo Rossella underlines how the language of the 1968 protests in Italy was characterised by emblematic e­ xpressions 46

The lacerations produced by the Irish civil war and the sudden change in the political line-up among the supporters of the republic are masterfully depicted in Ken Loach’s film The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Pathé Distribution, uk, 2006.

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like ‘agilità politica’ (political accessibility), ‘verticismo’ (verticism, meaning a concentration of power into a privileged hierarchy); foreign terms like ‘dazebao’ (Chinese for a political placard), or ‘hombre’, a popular word among the angriest Statale university students in Milan to set up their enemies; turns of phrase, such as ‘cioè’, similar to a colloquial use of ‘like’ or ‘sort of’, ‘cazzo’ (shit), ‘a monte, a valle’, to indicate the cause or the consequence of an issue, etc.47 Small wonder, then, that some of these expressions would be de-contextualised and recycled by the radical-chic politicians who followed, and even by the conservative Christian Democrats, who became the promoters of what would be later identified with the derogatory term politichese, obscure political lingo. In a sudden flash forward, Saltatempo predicts some of the young communists’ future careers. Riccardo, the ideological guru who had flunked two years in a row, is bound to become a renowned academic, reluctant to take a clear stand on anything and, therefore, esteemed for his qualities as a “thoughtful and moderate intellectual.” (165) (“intellettuale riflessivo e moderato.” [115]). Paolo Lingua, the activist who wants to sabotage the system, will transform himself into “the most rabidly right-wing journalist on a right-wing television network.” (165) (“il giornalista più di destra di un’emittente tivù di destra.” [116]).48 Another pasionaria of the movement, Tamara, becomes a trade unionist, but then gives up her career for the family, whereas Lussu, the most determined supporter of the proletarian struggle, ends up being sentenced to twenty years in prison for armed assault – Saltatempo does not specify if it was a political crime. Have all these young energies expended in the 1968 cause gone to waste or been misspent? Benni seems to look back at that idealistic time of history, and his own youth, with a nostalgic sense of disillusionment and cautious retrospection. The equivocation between political ideals and everyday practice in both novels not only corresponds to a clash of ideologies in search of legitimacy, but it also reveals an incompatible view of what lies beneath an ironic statement. As part of his own apprenticeship, Henry was instructed to train small platoons of country lads for the civil war, facing more than one episode of plain derision at his own expense; in the following passage, after improvising his expertise by skimming through the pages of a handbook titled Small Wars: Their Principles

47 48

Carlo Rossella, “Lessico assembleare,” Panorama, 7 February 1988, 133. Paolo Lingua, to some extent, resembles the journalist and political transformist Giuliano Ferrara, a committed member of the Communist Party (pci) during the 1968 protests, but later affiliated with the Socialists (psi) and, from 1994 to 1998, a member of Forza Italia and one of its ministers between 1994 and 1995.

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and Practice, the pícaro-turned-army-instructor warns one of his soldiers, Ivan, to enquire about people’s identities, since everyone could be a dangerous spy: You know the fucker’s name. Even that’s useful to know. – It wasn’t a hard name to find, Captain, said Ivan. – He’s my father and he’s off for his feed of porter. (223) Later on, Henry gives the lads instructions to dig two graves for a couple of English neighbours, even though he does not mean to kill them: – Is this one here for the ol’ fellow or the young fellow? – I hadn’t given it much thought, I said. – You choose. – The young fellow. He’s not as big a man as the ol’ fellow, so we’re finished. There’s room for his horse in here with him. (224) The contrast of ideals is also a contrast of ironic viewpoints. The power of irony stands in the uncompromising deconstruction of official history and mythology surrounding the turbulent years of Ireland’s independence and the ensuing civil war. In this self-contradictory scenario, the protagonist struggles to find his role as fighter, or to give it an allure of heroism: I was ready to die for Ireland. I was ready to die for Limerick. Ready to fall dead for a version of Ireland that had little or nothing to do with the Ireland I’d gone out to die for the last time. (171) The new Ireland is not the opposite of the previous one, it is a contradiction of the old Ireland. Both concepts of state become incompatible: only one proposition is supposed to be true, but there is no hope of identifying which of the two may approximate truth. In this tug-of-war, the trickster chooses the weapon of irony and self-mockery to stay afloat in the opposing currents of history. Summary The previous discussion concerning a few humorous instances in Benni’s and Doyle’s novels has highlighted how both books favour stable irony, but assuming the unreliable stance of the narrator, the reader is left with a concealed meaning proceeding not from a contrary, but from a contradictory statement. This series of gradual readjustments in the implied meaning of stable irony within the text (for instance, the ‘Collins’ catchphrase, or Saltatempo’s gibberish) might resemble what Booth describes as unstable irony, when the “internal cancellations” of two unacceptable interpretations of the literal expression are

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expanded so that “we finally lose all sense of stability and sink into the bogs of unstable irony” (A Rhetoric of Irony 62). This trap is avoided in the picaresque because the readers are made so instinctively alert to the treacherous nature of the narrator49 that they cannot take the literal expression at face value, and these inverted semantics, based primarily on a contradictory principle, exert a more disturbing yet more clear-cut impact on the cautiously sympathetic audience.50 The audience knows it is dealing with a language swindler, therefore it expects the narrator to exert his/her penchant for ironic double entendre. In the picaresque the gap between the articles of faith the reader assigns to the writer – the ‘author’ in Booth’s terms – and the belief expressed by the narrator is so unexpectedly eccentric that it will force the reader to find a sort of via media, accepting a sceptical mindset enforced by irony. Illustration 4.1 highlights this interaction of personalities: AUTHOR’S BELIEF (in the reader’s eye)

NARRATOR’S BELIEF

[c]

[ IRONY ]

READER’S BELIEF

[r]

contradiction [c] = ironic construction [r] = ironic reconstruction

Illustration 4.1 The author-narrator-reader ironic interaction

In this process of encoding/decoding, the readers’ certainties about any consistency between the narrator’s and the author’s views become more questionable, especially in comic-farcical situations. Another point should be considered here: Booth contends that “Every reader will have greatest difficulty detecting irony that mocks his own beliefs and characteristics.” (81). In the case of the picaresque, belief does not become the object of scorn but of 49

50

See Booth’s definition of unreliable narrator in The Rhetoric of Fiction 158–59 and 294–95, where he identifies the protagonists of Albert Camus’ The Fall and Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull as typically unreliable, “Janus-faced” narrators. To Dante della Terza, meaning is simply a conventional label (“things do not mean, they are”), and the humourist succeeds in undoing this convention. See Dante della Terza, “On Pirandello’s Humorism,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Luigi Pirandello (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989) 33, quoted in Ruth Glynn, Contesting the Monument: The Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2005) 33. I do not subscribe entirely to this point of view because I presume humourists prefer to show the ambivalence of meaning but they cannot completely dissociate themselves from it.

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d­ isplacement. If someone says “It is so warm out here” referring to a windy wasteland in Antarctica in the middle of a blizzard, she is resorting to some sort of irony, but if she says “It is not as warm as I expected out here”, she introduces contradiction deriving from her own experience – “I expected that place to be hotter” – into the conversation, without poking fun at her own certainties. An example from Saltatempo will help explain this point. When the protagonist finds a job at the grocery market, he gets to know workers from all over the world; he explains that this experience was a remedy for racism (147; 211); then, however, the ironist trickster/tricked changes his mind: “at least it was until someone stole my shoes and a sweater, and I swore furiously: ‘Fuck them all, and their respective countries.’” (211) (“almeno finché non mi fregarono le scarpe e un maglione e li mandai tutti a ’fanculo loro e i rispettivi paesi.” [147]). The foreign worker who pinched Lupetto’s clothes eventually returns them, except for the sweater, because, as he candidly admits, the weather is too cold (211). The ironic principle Lupetto wants to express here is that racism is not so easy to divorce from everyday practice since absolute honesty becomes a negotiable value in the face of a compelling necessity. Satire As mentioned earlier, satire deploys the same rhetorical devices as irony, primarily the blame-by-praise approach. Originally satire was meant as a propitiatory formula to subdue, harm or curse an enemy, a custom that, Vivian Mercier contends, persisted up to the nineteenth century.51 Despite this resemblance to irony, satire’s extent and range of comic exposure is usually more circumscribed – in Booth’s own words, more “finite” than that of irony. Consequently, satire’s object is more contingent, evoking personal, political, moral considerations that might sound obscure to a reader who is unfamiliar with the sociohistorical circumstances in which that satire was conceived. Bakhtin observes that Rabelais’ imitators tend to suppress their model’s colourful humour and relapse into a “watered down” universalism, in the form of satire: “In this case a weakening of the ambivalent image’s positive pole [of the comic grotesque] takes place.” (Rabelais 62). To Bakhtin satire obliterates the true ambivalence of laughter through the ruse of a moral intent. Thus, while a satirical meaning could remain intelligible over the years, or even the centuries, its significance (see Chapter 1) may vary considerably, or even become cryptic or inconsistent. In his preface to Roderick Random, Smollett promises his readers that he will

51

Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) 145, quoted in Irony in Action 174.

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refrain from indulging in “personal satire” (5),52 trying to direct his humour at types rather than identifiable, real figures – for instance, by means of vaguely Juvenal-like eponyms. Notwithstanding this self-restraint, some occurrences and characters in his story are clearly recognisable: this is the case with Admiral Edward Vernon, who was one of the culprits in the disastrous naval defeat of Cartagena against Spain in 1741. Despite this personal attack, Smollett favours a narrative depiction of life on board the Thunder man-of-war as a miniature portrait of society’s inequalities. In his “Author’s Declaration” to another picaresque book, Gil Blas, Lesage invites the readers not to identify with any of the caricatures he has portrayed, for these types are so common everywhere that their identity is not easily ascertained. At the same time, though, the author mocks the readers’ vanity in attempting to discover themselves between the lines, regardless of the good or bad service this identification would do to their reputations (8). A similar salacious comment is inserted by Busi in the guise of an apology to those socialites that have not been mentioned in the book due to their irrelevance to the public eye (Vendita galline 8). Satire in the picaresque has lost any trace of magic evocation since it often lambasts customs and mores rather than real personalities. However, satire as curse occasionally takes the form of narrative camouflage, for example in Guzmán de Alfarache, in which the scoundrel Sayavedra, an unfortunate character facing an ignominious death, is named after the pseudonym of the forger of the novel’s second part, namely Juan José Martí, whose sequel to Guzmán anticipated Alemán’s own by two years.53 Even in more recent fiction, though, real historical individuals stand out among the narrator’s merciless caricatures. In Benni’s novel historical figures are not clearly outlined, though events like the 1968 student riots and the bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan (1969) are milestones in the protagonist’s life. Undoubtedly, the character of Fefelli, 52 The oed entry for “satire” underlines how the use of the word in the sense of a personal attack on somebody’s flaws – “a speech or saying in ridicule of some person or thing” (1b) – is considered archaic. The more common definition indicates satire as a “poem, or in modern use sometimes a prose composition, in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule.” An improper use of the term applies to “a composition in verse or prose intended to ridicule a particular person or class of persons, a lampoon.” See “satire”, oed Online, Oxford up, website: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/171207? result =1&rskey=IOoSsS&. 53 For the consequences of this hoax on the genuine second part, see Edward H. Friedman, “Insincere Flattery: Imitation and the Growth of the Novel,” Revista Cervantes, Volume xx, Number 1, spring 2000, 106. Online version: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra -visor/cervantes-bulletin-of-the-cervantes-society-of-america-52/html/0279298 6-82b211df-acc7-002185ce6064_18.html.

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with his connections with the building industry and his entrepreneurial effrontery, are reminiscent of more recent political leaders, as are the hints about the manipulative power of television – “the balcony from which the future Benitoes would be addressing the nation.” (107) (“il balcone dei beniti futuri.” [76]). The politician’s insinuations about the unreliability of the judges, the criticism of the connivance between sports and politics, or the catchy populism of ­mottos like “get yourselves a mini-mansion and a car” (62) (“fatevi tutti la villetta e la macchina” [46]), leave very little doubt as to the target of the satire. A Star Called Henry, instead, features a cluster of celebrities, from the abovementioned Collins, to Éamon de Valera, leader of the moderate to conservative movement of Fianna Fáil and, later, third president of Eire; the esteemed James Connolly; Daniel ‘Dan’ Breen, a callous I.R.A. volunteer involved in the Soloheadbeg ambush against pro-British officers, etc. However, with few exceptions satire directed at historical figures does not seem to belong to the picaresque since its content, motives and scope tally with a more universal, deep-rooted vision of comic verve. A more common source of satire, then, involves not individuals but social categories, from notables down to beggars, scourging their vices and idiosyncrasies, a tendency deriving from the imitation of the comedy of manners which, time and again, returns to the limelight in the history of dramaturgy, adopting the improvisation of the commedia dell’arte or the tradition of the lower, unofficial playhouses, in the form of pantomime, farce, vaudeville, burlesque, rehearsal plays, pageants, etc. In Doyle’s novel, for instance, satire of manners flares up in the pages where the Irish Volunteers are depicted as sanctimonious cowards with no sense of reality. Henry is shocked and amused at their familiarity with the rosary in the most inappropriate situations: Some of the Volunteers had their beads out and were down on their knees, humming the rosary. […] Like a come-all-ye, the prayer was taken up by other men and others up and downstairs; some of our lads too, down on their socialist knees. […] What sort of a country were we going to create? If we were attacked now, we were fucked. I didn’t want to die in a monastery. I’d made up my mind to jump. (111–12) In the case of Saltatempo, the excessive idealism of Lupetto’s school-mate comrades is satirised through a mocking yet friendly tone which targets their ideological snobbery by introducing the hilarious figure of the charismatic French philosopher, who turns out to be a homeless French alcoholic. The students

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are convinced that a deep truth lies hidden beyond Paponnard’s gabble, and Saltatempo cautiously translates only the most edifying parts of the philosopher’s speech. In order to justify their prank, Saltatempo and his faction confess that their intention was to nurture a bit of “self-deprecating irony” (291) (“autoironia” [202]), which is itself irony within irony. Benni’s satire unfolds then in smirking criticism of catchwords like democracy, justice, progress, ­exposing the faults of both right- and left-wing ideologies.54 The Italian right has failed to hold on to the sound ideals of togetherness engrained in a longstanding liberal tradition, especially in the rural areas, and has been espousing the cause of the most aberrant of customs: institutionalised religious practice, accumulation of profit, and a rigorous, unrealistic household model. Saltatempo cites the right-wing mayoral candidate’s motto, “In a man’s life, there’s three things that count: family, barn, and church.” (22) (“Nella vita di un uomo c’è tre cose importanti: la famiglia la stalla e la messa.” [18]). As observed earlier, the new capitalists also lack one of the bonds of social harmony, a common sense of humour and a carnival-like kinship. Doyle’s satirical darts are mainly aimed at the foundations of freedom and democracy in Ireland as being easily underestimated and just as easily lost. In this sense the significance of the expression “to die for Ireland” and the ideal of dying for a cause become fraught with contradictory feelings. First Henry, a survivor of the slums, equates death with the end of misery; during the Easter Rising he experiences the uselessness of dying to please one’s betters when he looks at the devoted Christian Volunteers and, on the other side of the barricade, the desperate Dubliners trying to grab whatever they need from the damaged shops. Later on, when he has an affair with Piano Annie, the widow of an Irish fusilier who had served in the British army, Henry ‘inherits’ her late husband’s jacket, and even when Annie’s man surprisingly returns, the trickster keeps calling the veteran dead because he had been fighting for the king, for a dead cause, “spitting away his life for every country in the world except Ireland.” (161). Further on, when the returned British soldier, who had lost his arm in battle, joins the I.R.A., demanding to be granted indemnity against fighting for what is now the enemy, he actually signs his own death sentence: Henry himself is appointed by a secret instigator to kill Annie’s dead husband. A few pages earlier, the designated victim had sworn he was ready to die for Ireland 54

Among Stefano Benni’s commitments in the cultural-political arena is the establishment of what he called the “Pluriversità dell’immaginazione” [Pluriversity of the imagination], dedicated to the memory of his friend Grazia Cherchi. It is a wide-ranging cultural foundation organising courses and seminars on literature, philosophy, cybernetics, politics, ecology, etc.

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but, in this confusion of roles, it is now impossible to distinguish which Ireland is worth dying for, if any. In this circumstance, Henry starts to comprehend how his own fate resembles that of Annie’s twice dead husband: There was no Annie’s Dead Husband M.P. And none of the other men of the slums and hovels ever made it on to the list. We were nameless and expendable, every bit as dead as the squaddies in France. (208) Death is charged with ideological innuendos in Saltatempo too. For example, a certain Lutilio Bisacconi, a victim of fascism, features on the commemorative plaque of Lupetto’s school as “caduto” (fallen), with no other specification. The intended tribute to Bisacconi as a war casualty is therefore sarcastically cloaked under a more neutral, unstated meaning of the word: “They don’t say whether he fell in combat, or fell fighting in the Resistance, or fell in the prime of his life. Nothing. He just fell, period.” (11) (“Non è specificato se in guerra, per la Resistenza, nel fiore degli anni, niente: caduto e basta.” [11]). The new order of things, glossing over unpleasant memories, is gradually reducing language to its simple, literal substance. The lack of sensibility towards figurative language is reflected in the solicitor’s comment about the landslide that had caused some casualties in the village due to building speculation: “an avalanche is made of soil and mud, not the two names you so recklessly mentioned.” (310) (“una frana è fatta di terra e fango, non dei due nomi che così frettolosamente ha fatto.” [215]). For the servile lawyer it is easier to see only the factual matter of the natural disaster rather than investigate responsibilities. The angry young people of the liceo Giosuè Pascoli (sic),55 however, cannot help but see images and abstractions behind even their most explicit or futile mottos and far-fetched quotes. As mentioned earlier, Saltatempo jostles with the literal/ figurative meaning of words such as “caduto” (fallen/dead) or “circolare” (to move forward/to walk in circles). He also reports other people’s manipulations of the purely symbolic power of words: for instance, in order to have a black African soccer player accepted in the local team, uncle Nevio puts forward a Brazilian name, as Brazilian players are popular, despite their skin colour. Once again, Benni explores the deceits of language from opposing directions. Going back to the ambivalence of the term death in Doyle’s novel, when Collins’ fighters become more and more similar to Randolph Churchill’s loathed 55

Giosuè Pascoli, Guglielmo Volta, James Din, Edgar Allan Puck are some examples of humorous misnomers in the novel. Nor does Benni spare one of the real fulcrums of the students’ protests, the liceo Parini, which he rhymes with “ricchi e cretini” (46) (“Hogarth High School for the Dumb Rich” [62]).

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Black and Tan troops sent over to stop the rioters, Henry realises that his war has come to an end. In the meantime, other dissenters face death for Ireland by voluntarily starving in Brixton Gaol (1920), while a new puppeteer like Mr O’Ganduin – a fictional character – manages to have his dinner sneaked in “over the [prison] wall at the same time every evening.” (311). The principle of dying for the homeland deviates dramatically from a voluntary gesture aimed at instigating freedom to become merely a political, indiscriminate act of suppression of the troublemakers. When Henry, of his own accord, finally executes Minister O’Ganduin in a brothel, the politician is exalted as the latest ­designated victim of the dawning generation of republicans; once again, death is an instrument of propaganda that borders on worship. In The Dead Republic, the Provisional branch of the I.R.A. elevates the already octogenarian trickster to the heights of “Celtic mythology” (174), cherishing him as “our republican dead” (182), a survivor amongst a pure breed of agitators who, in truth, had been in discord from the beginning. Saltatempo, on the other hand, tries to oppose this cult of the dead by resenting, for instance, the killing of Che Guevara (1967): he admits that these heroic tolls are political trappings to amplify the ideal image of the martyrs and to keep the revolutionary potential of their legacy at bay. As he explains, “I wanted a living man to admire, not a paper hero to mourn. I couldn’t imagine how Che’s memory would be celebrated, even by those who had betrayed him.” (208) (“Volevo un uomo da ammirare, non un eroe di carta da compiangere. Non potevo sapere quanto sarebbe stato celebrato, anche da quelli che lo avevano tradito.” [145]). Lupetto senses the equivocation between myth-making and reality, but still he cannot outplay it. Self-satire Citing Mercier, Taylor emphasises a substantial foundation of traditional Irish satire, a “community of understanding” which, he notes, encapsulates a “shared world of meaning.” (Irony in Action 175). Pícaros have a particular propensity towards satire because their identification with some of their victims’ faults makes their exploits extremely biting. They know how to chastise human weaknesses because they most likely share blame for them; inevitably, they trek over the dangerous ground of self-satire. Self-satire extends the sense of connivance between the satirists and their listeners to a larger community, a whole nation; it becomes a catalyst for national identity, or at least for a peculiar outlook on it, as in the case of Doyle’s depiction of the newly-born Irish state. The author seems to entertain the idea that Irish national awareness was a manipulated construct, within which a few leaders make big history and infuse their endeavours with an epic glow. In fact, several figures in the book see Ireland in totally different ways: to Jack Dalton,

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the poetaster/architect of the revolution, Eire “was a very small place”, it “was going to be a few blameless pockets, connected to the capital by vast bridges of his own design.” (171); to the countryside lads instead, “Dublin was too close to England; it was where the orders and cruelty came from.” (212). Ireland was “everywhere west of Dublin, the real people were west, west, west, as far west as possible, on the islands, the rocks off the islands, speaking Irish and eating wool.” (212). Ivan Reynolds, Henry’s improvised best man and future successful political chameleon, tries to sell an image of a country that will be “free in some shape or form” (315), a “new Ireland” that would be much like the old one: sardonically, Henry comments that among the many veterans marching at the Easter Week Golden Jubilee in 1966, only a few were actually present at the riots; still, they had been awarded medals and I.R.A. pensions (The Dead Republic 158). On the other hand, the British, made lazy by more than seven hundred years of uncontested supremacy on the island, had censured the “Irish nation as an illegal assembly” (A Star 236; original italics) in 1919. The bigger picture of Ireland is full of inconsistent details then, but Doyle appears to intimate that only by observing all the concomitant fragments of the mosaic, can one make sense of the overall collage. Therefore, in order to contemplate every facet, it is imperative to take a step backward and adopt the estranged attitude of selfreflected humour. In the final pages of Doyle’s trilogy, the “bearded man”, one of the Provo enthusiasts, who had hired Henry as the “living proof” of the ongoing spirit of Irish independence, seems to have discovered the rationale behind the brutal struggle between Ireland and its northern enclave: – The armed struggle has been about ownership of the definition of Irishness. It has never been about territory. Republicans do not want to send unionists back to Scotland […]. – There’s room for us all, he said. – Now. – Why the war then? – I told you, Henry. The copyright. The brand. Who owns Irishness, hey? He was looking for an answer. – All of us. – No, he said. – Not at all. We do. – We? – Aye. We. Us. Sinn Féin. The Dead Republic 313–14

The Fenian takes in all the stereotypes about the Irish people, and even professes his coalition’s right to be the “only oppressed people” (314). He finally

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asserts that “There’s only one Ireland” (314): his theorising about the true essence of his country culminates in the praise of an ideal, the Technicolor green Ireland of The Quiet Man, a film by the Irish-American director John Ford, and the dismissal of “the true story of Henry Smart” (317). Henry reacts to this fabrication with an ironic remark: “I knew I’d have died for him [Gerry Adams] if we’d known each other seventy years before.” (320). This could not have possibly happened, as Gerry Adams was born much later, in 1948. This highly controversial Northern Irish republican politician, despite a series of incarcerations for sedition, had been elected to the British Assembly in 1982 and had become, the following year, mp for West Belfast, where he, along with his Sinn Féin fellow members, pursued a policy of abstentionism. Arrested during a campaign canvas in 1984, he was summoned to court in Belfast, and on the same day, survived an armed raid by the u.d.a. (Ulster Defence Association). Adams denied being part of the I.R.A., although he defended the use of violence as a “necessary form of struggle against the British administration and in pursuance of national independence.”56 Once again, to both the real and the fictional characters the principle of dying for a cause is laden with contradictory traits. In Benni, self-satire achieves the purpose of establishing an alliance with the reader but in a different direction. In fact, Lupetto satirises the compromises left-wing groups had accepted in order to be more competitive in the political arena: from uncle Nevio’s idea of establishing a soccer team to gather 56

Gerry Adams, Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland (London/Dingle: Mount Eagle Publications, 2003) 32. The Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985 seemed to re-establish the ­British control of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, but it sparked new censure from the I.R.A. and Sinn Féin. At the Sinn Féin annual meeting in 1986, Adams declared the end of abstentionism, stating that “[m]any republicans have deep and justifiably strong feelings about abstentionism. I share and I understand those feelings. But none of us, regardless of the strength of our views, has the right to present the establishment and our opponents with the opportunity to project internationally the spectacle of yet another republican ‘split’.” [Extract from the Presidential Address by Gerry Adams, then President of Sinn Féin, on the issue of abstentionism (Resolution 162), Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Dublin, (1 N ­ovember 1986); http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/sf/ga011186.htm]. The threat of a ‘split’ was confirmed by the birth of the Republican Sinn Féin, which supported abstention from British parliamentary activity and pursued the project of a 32-County Ireland. Also, this faction of the republicans denied any connivance with the I.R.A. An enquiry by Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the ira (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002) investigates the role of Adams in the paramilitary organisation, attesting that he was a “well known ira personality”, who showed remarkable pride in emulating the stature and personality of Michael Collins – one of young Henry Smart’s “puppeteers”. Adams vehemently denied these allegations.

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more consensus among the villagers, to the first signs of the “corrupting influence of advertising” (179) (“corruzioni pubblicitarie” [125]), consisting of three new shop signs, the censorship of some unpleasant episodes in the life of a former partisan, the internal clash of the “fancazzisti” after the invasion of Prague by the Soviet troops, etc. What really differentiates these breaches in the purity of the communist ideal from the misconduct perpetrated by the capitalists on the opposite front? It is perhaps the satirist’s refusal to p ­ erpetuate a ­Marxist myth that ignored the individual and endorsed tyrannies and brutality: through self-satire, Benni attempts to replace the Marxist theory of an anonymous multitude marching along the historical pathway to liberation from capitalist slavery with an image of a community wherein every individual has the right to be different in the here and now of current circumstances,57 but with consideration for his/her responsibilities in the progression of events. In one of the final moments in the novel, Saltatempo finds the legacy his father has bequeathed to his community: “twenty-seven carved wooden statuettes; each one stood about eight inches tall. It was a secular crèche scene, but without a manger and a Christ child.” (358) (“Erano ventisette statuine di legno, alte ognuna una ventina di centimetri. Un presepe laico, senza capanna e bambino.” [247]). His father had been hiding this miniature village “from the greed and fury of the outside world in order to preserve some essence of those people, to keep the avalanche of the passing years from sweeping them away.” (362) (“alla ferocia e all’avidità, perché qualcosa restasse di loro, perché la frana degli anni non li portasse via.” [250]). Only the new generation, including Lupetto and his gang of the river, are carved on the same pedestal, as if they still belonged to the same circle of friends, but they have already experienced divisions and clashes which, despite defining their differences, actually confirmed their common unsettled destiny. In sum, the discord Lupetto witnesses between city and country and that between aggressive capitalists and the lower classes, has created a localised “community of understanding”. Self-satire intensifies solidarity within the group, it becomes the most vital resource to save the pícaro’s clan from extinction, but, at the same time, it causes a more intense fracture with the rest of the nation, either identified with the big city or with the political oligarchs, entrenched in their sumptuous villas. Parody Parody reflects a concern with the flexibility of literary styles or language registers. In the previous chapter some emphasis was given to the spoof revisitation 57

In a way, Benni espouses Rousseau’s distinction between general will and the will of all (see further).

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of Shakespearean drama, especially King Lear, in Wise Children. As Booth maintains, parody is “the mocking imitation by one author of another author’s style”, and “no kind of irony dramatizes more painfully the difference between experienced and unexperienced readers.” (A Rhetoric of Irony 71–72) – parody is then a sort of elitist delight. Significantly, he counts parody among the types of irony because it suggests a deeper meaning showing through the backdrop of literal sense. Interestingly, this view of the value-judgement conveyed through parody, as in the case of stable irony, has been one of the bones of contention between modern and postmodern thought. The latter holds that parody and irony represent two pledges of intellectual freedom in subverting the ideologies and preconceptions dictated by the “great narratives” imposing their cultural blueprint from the end of the nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. Commenting on Richard Rorty’s thought, Stuart Sim seeks the reason behind a postmodern appropriation of irony and parody: Ironists are those who recognize ‘the contingency and frailty’ of our existence in the world, and therefore cannot take the claims of grand narratives very seriously; they know that other descriptions, other narratives, are always available to them. (70–71) To Linda Hutcheon, instead, parody cannot be confined to the “ridiculing ­imitation” of a previous text, but it implies “critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity”.58 Booth’s appreciation of the author’s intent underlying parodying banter clashes with the postmodernist departure from the author’s primacy,59 along with its denial of the subject-object dualism as the accretion of an unfeasible empiricism, a position that will lead post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida to affirm that a stable meaning in language is pure illusion in that its ever-changing nature can never be fully grasped or immobilised, but only deferred.60 As a matter of fact, the postmodern view assays the principle of irony and parody as the voices of the anarchy of signification. In contrast, anti-postmodern thinkers censure the abuse of “self-regarding, 58 59

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Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) 5–6. See also 32–36. See, for instance Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image – Music – Text, ­essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977) 142–48; otherwise, on post-structuralism, Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester up, 1998) 147. In this respect, see the cutting-edge classic by Derrida, Writing and Difference (see also Chapter 2).

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self-congratulating” ironic discourse verging on “the most superficial of responses to the problems that beset our culture.” (Irony and Crisis 109). Irony becomes then a paradigm of postmodern nihilism or relativism;61 Paul Hodgkin talks about a tendency to “credicide […] the active killing of belief rather than just its simple demise.” (176).62 In the previous chapter, reference was made to the demystification of some stereotypes concerning the social and cultural role of women in the picaresque: should this act of desecration be considered in a postmodern light, namely as a relativistic onslaught on the commonplaces which rule society? Considering the use of irony in the picaresque as a vehicle of scepticism and contradiction, it could be argued that even a demystifying gesture does not aim at equalising all values on the scale – a kind of ‘anything goes’ refrain – but it contests the ready-made system of values in order to explore the possibility of an alternative, less accommodating, or less convenient truth – Henry calls it “a different truth.” (The Dead Republic 323). Presumably, in its chaotic, impish tone, parody delivers a constructive, anti-relativistic view: in this sense, picaresque humour comes close to the Enlightenment comic approach; at the same time, the Age of Reason is one of postmodernism’s bêtes noires. It is plausible, then, to allow for a higher degree of familiarity between the picaresque and enlightened scepticism than between the picaresque and postmodern relativism. In the above-mentioned study of parody, Linda Hutcheon appears to devalue the non-artistic (“extramural”) text as a source of the “ironic transcontextualization” of parody (12). On the contrary, it seems very plausible that parody even results from non-artistic, non-literary sources, though in keeping with a literary-artistic intent. If parody uncovers the conventions behind previous art forms, does it not as well reveal the conventions of a text regardless of its provenance? Hence parody does not only hunt down conventions, it reveals how the model which parody itself has chosen to imitate had become the origin of a degenerated view of things. If parody is not directed against literature only, there must be some areas in human knowledge where the literary or artistic inspiration has been replaced by a surrogate. For instance, literature and rhetoric have been irreplaceable subjects of erudition for centuries, but this cannot be asserted anymore with absolute certainty about contemporary education. In this sense, parody is a yardstick of what human culture c­ onsiders essential in a 61

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See Stephen Crook, “The End of Radical Social Theory? Notes on Radicalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi, eds., Postmodernism and Society (London: Macmillan, 1990) 68, quoted in Irony and Crisis 119. Paul Hodgkin, “Medicine, Postmodernism, and the End of Certainty,” British Medical J­ ournal, 313, 21 December 1996, 1568–69, also quoted in Irony and Crisis 177.

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defined era, namely what it deems worth parodying. An example of the urgency of extra-literary areas to cross the “mural” boundaries of art is represented by Benni’s multifaceted parody which tackles first of all the terrain of language and register, where alien terms invade different contexts. In a brilliant welding of popular argot, school-book wisdom, rephrased proverbs, journalistic formulae, and so forth, Saltatempo, like practically all of Benni’s fiction, can be compared with the medieval and Renaissance vogue of m ­ acaronic style. As Pirandello remarks, citing Giovanni Zannoni, the dialect forms or deformations of the macaronic challenge the technocrat’s Latin language, as well as the vernacular which, “academic, grave, and awkward” (36) as it was, did not prove versatile enough to express a more genuine humorous vein. Applying the comparison between Latin, vernacular and macaronic to Benni’s eclectic style,63 it is possible to relate Latin as the privileged language of culture to today’s ­abstruse jargon of politics and bureaucracy, highbrow intellectuals and ­incomprehensible academics. The vernacular, on the other hand, seems to resemble the simplified, prototypical argot of television and the media. Regarding parody of the first order, Benni mingles technical terms with the most unsuitable, at times indecent, situations: for instance, describing the intelligentsia of his small town, Lupetto defines them as “men and women of average levels of education” (43) – the original version, “ambosessi mediamente acculturati” (33), sounds more bureaucratic. The furtive affair between a teacher and the school bus driver is annotated as “an interclass sexual act, love between a college graduate and a teamster.” (81). Once again the Italian text is more concisely ‘administrative’: “atto sessuale interclassista tra laureata e automedonte.” (58). In another passage, the protagonist depicts the sexual encounters between students in a pseudo-scientific, political tone: Ma la notte smussava le polemiche e arrotondava le ideologie, nei giacigli improvvisati e dentro i sacchiapelo fiorivano accoppiamenti vari, anche tricuspidali e col turnover, grandi liberazioni, scene di gelosia con lacrime e dubbi laceranti tra il personale e il collettivo. (198–99) And when night came, it took the edge off the polemics and evened out the ideologies. In the jury-rigged alcoves and in the profusion of sleeping 63

Benni’s innovative hybrid style was vividly praised by Renato Barilli in “Ricercare e la narrativa nuova-nuova” in Narrative invaders! panorama critico e pratico, Volume 1 of La bestia (Roma: Costa e Nolan, 1997), quoted in Monica Boria, “I romanzi di Stefano Benni,” in Franca Pellegrini, Elisabetta Tarantino (eds.), Il romanzo contemporaneo. Voci italiane (Leicester: Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2006) 57–58.

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bags, couplings flourished of all and every sort, including tricuspid lovemaking, with turnover, huge scenes of liberation, and dramas of jealousy, with floods of tears and lacerating doubts, as we were all torn between the call of the personal and the collective. (286) Regarding the parody of the vernacular as lingua franca, Benni often relegates terms borrowed from journalism and the media to less obscure, revealing ­expressions: for example, Karamazov, the devotee of Stalinism, is identified as “village ideologue, Kremlinologist, and liar.” (40) (“ideologo, cremlinologo e bugiardo.” [31]), a diminuendo from the resonant technical designation, implying authority, to the much more disqualifying title of liar. What is the ultimate goal of these verbal parodies? Firstly, they identify a kind of language creativity that defies both high and low Italian sociolects. Secondly, the use of neologisms, surreal etymologies or terms which take on unexpected meanings is meant to mock the preciseness of language and, at the same time, sarcastically dispels the illusion of language as an all-pervasive, universal instrument of communication and knowledge.64 For example, inventions like “lesbocattononmeladaismo” (198) (“lesbo-Catholico-cut-me-off-ism” [286]), to distinguish some girls’ strictly virtuous conduct; “barista” (79; 111), to identify a coffin maker; terms out of their normal context, such as “un abito firmato” (34; 45), meaning a suit that has been paid for by signing bills of exchange with the tailors. Saltatempo delights in citing invented notions, nonexistent characters, such as the vaguely biblical prophet Nabumelech (83; 117) or Saint Putilla of the “Order of Our Lady of Little Trollops” (75) (“ordine delle Disgraziatine di Maria” [54]), to give credence to his own considerations, undermining knowledge as a body of generally accepted wisdom. To the trickster, knowledge is as flimsy a certainty as any subjective opinion, and vice versa (for the pícaro’s rejection of experience as cumulative knowledge, see further). Reflecting on the entrapments of historical vogues, Lupetto comments about a bad mark he was given for an essay about Ghigna, a local partisan: Io non sapevo che in futuro ci sarebbe stato un periodo che quel tema avrebbe preso otto e mezzo e poi sei e poi tre, pensavo solo che Ghigna la sua parte rischiosa l’aveva fatta e che la storia, una volta che dà un voto, lo mantiene fisso. Nove a Dante, otto a Garibaldi, sette meno a Ghigna per quella sbavatura nel finale. Invece no, si cambia valutazione. Comunque il mio quattro sul registro c’era e sarebbe rimasto, nella storia trimestrale e secolare. (61) 64

For some remarks on the illusory power of naming, see Chapter 2.

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Little did I imagine that there would soon come a day when that same paper would have received first an A minus, then a C plus, then F. All I thought was that Ghigna had done his part, at considerable risk, and that once history gives you a grade, that grade should stay the same. A for Dante, B plus for Garibaldi, B minus for Ghigna, maybe, for that wobble with the firing squad in the finale. But no; judgments change. In any event there was my D minus on my permanent transcript, and there it would remain, a blot through all the school years and centuries to come. (85) Another general aspect in Hutcheon’s approach that does not conform to the idea of parody expressed in Saltatempo is her principle, derived from Henryk Markiewicz, that “[o]ften the works of the past become aesthetic models whose recasting in a modern work is frequently aimed at a satirical ridicule of contemporary customs or practices.” (11). Further on, she argues that parody is “one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past.” (29). Benni’s comic crucible of argots, colourful neologisms and slapstick jokes does not claim a radical break with the past but the sceptical view of the intellectual who has to build up his present literary language coping with the limited instruments with which his current society is providing him. For example, Lupetto manifests this mismatch between sophisticated culture and everyday reality when he needs to itemise Poe, his literary model, in a priority list along with much more prosaic components: il mio scrittore preferito non era più Allan Poe ma Aaa Affittasi, leggevo annunci per ore, poi giravo tutta la città a piedi cercando una stanza. (146) my favourite reading matter was no longer the works of Edgar Allan Poe but the collected writings of the classified ads; I read them for hours, and then I’d walk all around the city in my search for a room to rent. (210) Later on in the story, when the happy God discloses to Lupetto that a meeting of the supernatural creatures had been called to decide his fate, a certain Edgar Allan Puck was attending too: even God parodies human knowledge by misspelling the American author’s name. Compared with Benni’s extended parody of languages, Doyle’s de-­ contextualisation seems more consistent with a literary model. As observed by Taylor, Roddy Doyle’s works have followed a tradition of humorous revisitations, beginning with Flann O’Brien’s comic verve, of a centuries-long vestige of literary Irish parodies from the Gaeltacht autobiography, a traditional bucolic-folkloric genre in Gaelic that used to be revered and canonised as

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­ igh-standard literature. The purpose of this parody is possibly the critique h of an artificial traditional substratum that does not reflect any genuine Irish identity. This is the case with A Star Called Henry, whose protagonist has a typically British surname, Smart, and can barely speak any words in Gaelic; moreover, to a homeless child like him, the political motives of Home Rule sound like a bad joke. To him country people are not the defenders of political revolt. On the contrary, they vote preferably for the village authorities rather than for the more experienced fighters (226): peasants had been fighting an endless battle for survival, hence civil war was simply another episode in this battle, with no real revolutionary political justification, as “their traits and talents were the stuff that made warriors.” (221). With reference to one of Doyle’s best-sellers, The Commitments (1987), Taylor observes that this novel began the author’s exploration of an “alternative ‘real Ireland’ in the council housing of peripheral Dublin, where every rural virtue is stood on its head.” (Irony in Action 180). As remarked earlier in regard to self-satire, Doyle reveals how country people lack the sense of genuine, naïve devotion to the Irish cause; on the other hand, the city of Dublin, although crowded with spies, still offers Henry the chance to be himself, to be at least a spectator of big history. In Saltatempo, instead, the city is the place of corruption, bureaucratic barriers, complicated ideological quibbles that only the urgency of a common struggle for freedom against terrorism will temporarily mend. For the Italian pícaro, the country is the place of a patient but heartfelt resistance to indiscriminate progress, in which simple pragmatism helps solve friction, and where solidarity is often manifested through humour and self-satire. Most remarkably, the country is Lupetto’s chosen meeting place with God and the supernatural (see below). In response to a strange magnetism, though, Henry will be forced to flee from a relatively provincial city to New York where, in a sort of escapism à la Georg Simmel, he expects to bury himself among the throng of the metropolis and avoid retaliations. Paradoxically, however, the big city keeps reminding him of country life, and Henry will end the second episode of his life half-dying in a far-off desert. Similarly, Saltatempo moves to a not-well-identified big city – the “Cittàgrande” – most likely Milan. In both transitions, the protagonists seem to return to the places where their parodying exploits had been more ruthlessly contested and defrauded. Doyle’s parody not only debunks Victorian sentimentalism for what Taylor defines as “parlor Ireland”, in which the Irish were easily categorised under the tag names of primitives or uncouth rustics (176). Moreover, it demystifies the bard’s lore perpetuated by the maudlin local ballads commemorating past heroes – similarly, the picaresque appears to have started as a mocking imitation of the classical exempla celebrating famous personages. Jack Dalton, Henry’s

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dreamy utopian friend, is a modern songwriter who devotes his presumed talent to honouring the new martyrs of the republic; through Jack, cheap poetry has invaded the political agon with a Sinn Féin pared down to “a little gang of cranky nuts and bad poets.” (208). Historically, Patrick Pearse, one of the first victims of the British reprisal after the Easter Rising, was a poet, but, as Henry ironically remarks, “his arms had no more muscle than his poetry.” (124). The two tricksters react to the enticements of poetry rather differently: while ­Saltatempo has a dry-eyed view of the illusions of poetry – he holds that “behind a poet dressed as a poet, a great emptiness may lie concealed.” (235) (“dietro un poeta vestito da poeta può nascondersi il vuoto.” [162]) – Doyle’s trickster is enticed by the flattering power of lyrics because Jack Dalton makes him believe people have created a song about him, “The Pride of all Gaels was young Henry Smart” (170). By the end of the book, when his life is in serious jeopardy, the Irish pícaro realises he was the victim of self-delusion: his popular ballad did not exist, it was only a couple of lines, and he was the only author of it (326). The parody is here even more caustic, for Jack, the utopian bard, is himself a non-existent character. However, Henry is capable of exploiting the ephemeral nature of myth-making later on, divulging a sort of fireplace saga of himself so as to keep in touch with his wife and children during his wanderings in America. When the vox populi ceases to mention the wondrous deeds of a “thin man who could have been any age, from young to dead” (Oh, Play That Thing 358), Henry understands that his son has died.

The Enlightened Grin

So far, the analysis of Benni and Doyle has delved into forms of humour defined or resonating within the text; the following sections will consider a few extra-textual elements that may have inspired the humourist, and this will connect with the investigation of some radical transformations in the picaresque temper following the age of Enlightenment, and their repercussions on contemporary fiction. The polemical dispute that ensued after the postmodernist repudiation of enlightened universalism as a tyrannic superstructure has corroborated once more the need to broach the question of the legacy which the siècle des lumières has bequeathed to contemporary thought and its impact on contemporary rogue tales, considering the fact that the picaresque has been a more or less enthusiastic supporter of the enlightened creed.65 65

Among the firmest detractors of the Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) voiced their apprehension about what they call “the self-destruction of

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Humour in the picaresque is embedded in a feeling of scepticism towards the indisputable pillars sustaining the human covenant: the rogues feel somehow empowered, from their limbo as outsiders and bandits, to challenge the rules imposed on society by way of comic jests. This is especially true of those rogue tales that took in the surge of new ideas, or the revival of classical humanist studies, championed by the Aufklärer between the second half of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth century.66 In spite of being an era of absolute intransigence towards laughter, in the name of serious scientificempirical insight into a multitude of aspects of life, the Enlightenment made constant, original use of irony,67 satire and parody in order to put across a more

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enlightenment” (xvi): “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. […] What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless towards itself, the enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.” See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzilin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, ca: Stanford up, 2002) 1–2. An analogous disapproval of the Age of Reason and its consequences pervades the writings of many postmodern theorists. Jean-François Lyotard sees totalitarianism as a product of a despotic Enlightenment metanarrative (80–81), and invites a reconsideration of the Age of Reason’s claim of “a unitary end of history and of a subject” (73). See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester up, 1984). Edward W. Said maintains that the grand narrative of ‘orientalism’ arose in the eighteenth century: Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Michel Foucault advocates reason as a tool concocted in the eighteenth century to justify the suppression of the marginalised ‘other’: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001). On the opposite front, the most recent defenders of the Enlightenment include Terry Eagleton, author of The Ideology of Aesthetic (Oxford and Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1990), Jonathan Israel’s Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford up, 2006) and Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment, translated from the French by Gila Walker (London: Atlantic Books, 2009). For a gripping discussion of some aspects of the pro- and anti-Enlightenment debate, see Stuart Sim (ed.), Irony and Crisis. A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002). The historical periodisation of the Enlightenment is a thorny issue. Among several ­possible hypotheses regarding its duration, Roy Porter proposes the period between 1660 (the advent of Newtonian science) and the last years of the 1780s, that is the first years of the American Republic and immediately before the French Revolution. See Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 2–4. “Only in the twentieth century, when the true complexities of the relations between ideology and action have forced themselves upon us, have the subtle ironies of the ­Enlightenment come to be appreciated” (The Enlightenment 2).

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effective, non-conventional message. Roy Porter makes clear that, despite the Romanticists’ hasty condemnation of the Enlightenment as an irritatingly rationalistic movement, the “Age of Reason” hides a much deeper grasp of the contradictions of human life. In his biography of Antonio Casanova, Roberto Gervaso notes how the eighteenth century was far from being exclusively a siècle des lumières: in fact, besides Voltaire, Diderot or d’Alembert, the names of necromancers like Mesmer, Saint-Germain or Cagliostro echoed in all ranks of society.68 What is more, Casanova’s mixed feelings about the Enlightenment come to the fore in one of his pamphlets, the Confutazione della “Storia del governo veneto” d’Amelot de la Houssaie (1769) [The confutation of the ­“History of the Veneto government” by Amelot de la Houssaie], in which he decries Voltairian deism and elevates religion and even superstition as essential measures to keep social order among the populace (Casanova 134). Such a utilitarian view of religion, though, seems to have more to do with the illuminati than with spiritualism. Casanova’s memoir offers several humorous insights into this flesh-and-blood pícaro; for instance, in the preface he quips: “I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, with no other consolation than that of knowing I had erred.”69 Besides, on occasion humour and understatement were an effective strategy to infiltrate harsh satire and escape the censor’s fury: for instance, Voltaire’s Candide ou l’optimisme, published in 1759 as an anonymous translation from the German, was banned by the ­Catholic Church only in 1762, and only after more than twenty editions had been dispatched all over Europe; Candide is one of Voltaire’s thirty-eight works condemned by the Church between 1758 and 1800.70 Exemplary of this attitude is the celebrated incipit of Chapter 1 of Rousseau’s Contrat Social: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”71 In the same polemical guise, Montesquieu levels a sarcastic taunt about patriotic zeal: Plato thanked the gods that he was born in the same age with Socrates: and for my part I give thanks to the Supreme that I was born a subject of 68 69

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Roberto Gervaso, Casanova (Milano: Rizzoli, 1974) 85. Giacomo Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt, History of My Life, First Translated into English in Accordance with the Original French Manuscript by Willard R. Trask, Volumes 1 and 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966) 27. Margaret Bald, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, Revised Edition (New York: Facts On File, 2006) 186. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968) 49.

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that government under which I live; and that it is His pleasure I should obey those whom He has made me love.72 In order to chart the new approach to letters in eighteenth-century civilisation and its impact on contemporary thought, it is crucial to emphasise how the attitude towards knowledge had changed radically since the breakthrough of Galilean thought, shifting attention from an ontological view of the world wherein the exploration of meaning is grounded on a defining question, ‘What is it?’, underlying a religious or metaphysical answer, to an epistemological principle, in which the limits of science as an all-embracing discipline are promoted as one of its tenets, and the question human beings are supposed to ask is now ‘How does this world work?’73 Epistemology has become the main purpose of science after Galileo, and literature has taken a similar direction; in short, both literature and science have abandoned the ambition of explaining the essence of things, as was the case with works like the Summa, Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, Latini’s Li livres dou tresor, The Divine Comedy, and so forth.74 The empirical method asserted in the course of the Enlightenment 72

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Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent and revised by J.V. Prichard, in Robert Maynard Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, 38: Montesquieu, Rousseau (Chicago/London/Toronto/Geneva: William Benton, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.: 1952) xxi. Brian McHale illustrates quite clearly the epistemology/ontology dualism with regard to modern and postmodern fiction. Modernism in literature is based on epistemology; it attempts to tackle questions like “‘How can I interpret this world of which I am part? And what am I in it?’” (McHale quotes Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts [New York and Barton, vt: Printed Editions, 1978]). Mc Hale introduces further epistemological issues: “What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?” Postmodernist fiction is grounded on ontology; it faces totally different questions, such as Higgins’ “post-cognitive” questions: “‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” McHale also points out that “other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?” See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York/London: Methuen 1987) 9–10. McHale also admits that ontological questions, once pushed to the extreme, can lead to epistemological questions, and vice versa (11). Ontology in pre-Galilean society obviously differs from ontology in the postmodern, especially insofar as the postmodern rejects a final univocal response to ontological questions. Epistemology is the bulwark of modernism and, by affinity of intent, of the Enlightenment project. The contrast between ontology and epistemology has resurfaced in recent years. Stefano Tani points out the essential encyclopaedic content of Eco’s The Name of the Rose and

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and in subsequent ages carries the evidence that to describe a phenomenon is to provide an understanding of its processes rather than of its essence – which is, rather, the domain of metaphysical speculation. Porter attests how the Aufklärer’s humanism extolled the individual’s capacities but avoided the typical Renaissance view of man as a potentially perfect, god-like creature: “most Renaissance scholars felt confident enough in tracing human history back, through a continuous pedigree, to Abraham, to Noah, and ultimately to Adam, the first human. Man thus retained his divinely fixed place in time and space.” (The Enlightenment 12). Alemán’s goal of depicting the disobedience of a fundamentally perfect man (The Rogue iii 5; “hombre perfecto”) in Guzmán de Alfarache corroborates this belief. As a consequence, the Renaissance incorporated ancient classical wisdom into the Christian articles of faith; however, the disasters of the Thirty Years War (1648), the interreligious massacres, and the new astronomical discoveries smoothed the way for a more critical evaluation of man’s supremacy in the universe, and the Earth’s centrality in it (The Enlightenment 13). This disbelief in the past has interfered with the motives and scope of picaresque literature; in truth, the banishment of rogue literature to the ranks of pure recreation and diversion – a prejudice that also embroiled some of its authors – must have derived from its inborn lack of commitment as literature of knowledge in the ontological sense of the word. Only Alemán really stood up for the principle that his book could impart a higher moral lesson to the reader by taking very seriously Horace’s motto “delectando pariterque monendo”; in the second part, he even resents that his readers awarded his Guzmán the epithet of “Pícaro” rather than its full original title, The Watchtower of Human Life (The Rogue iii 127; “Atalaya de la vida humana” in the original). The Horacian maxim becomes a sort of gimmick in The English Rogue (1665) by Richard Head because his effort to justify what he calls “experimental observations” (1) has no effect, since the author, constantly mistaken for the actual scoundrel protagonist, did not dare compile a second part of the story for fear of compromising his reputation further. The task, along with that of a third and fourth part, was carried out by another writer, Francis Kirkman, who, with a tinge of irresponsibility or a gift for marketing strategy, still included Head as the co-author (1671).75 In sum, after Galileo literature is deprived of its

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Foucault’s Pendulum, both of them dealing with man’s incessant quest to confine God’s message inside a book and both of them facing the futility of human efforts (Il romanzo di ritorno 123–24). John Head and Francis Kirkman, The English Rogue. Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant: Being a Complete History of the Most Eminent Cheats of Both Sexes (London: Routledge, 1928) 269–70.

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­scientific, truth-revealing nature; therefore, as a minor literary mode, the picaresque became emboldened in its prerogative to describe rather than define reality.76 This descriptive approach brings a series of moral repercussions for the ­picaresque novel as well, in that it propounds the new interpretation of the sympathetic rogue. As Adam Smith asserts, sympathy […] does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality.77 These observations could encompass the idea of humour in literature insofar as one of its functions is to instil sympathy in the reader for the situation in which the character is involved rather than for the actual emotional state of the character/narrator. This at least allows the reader to derive irony from both the author and the object of irony without feeling compelled to endorse the moral assumptions behind it; moreover, this view leads once again to an epistemological rather than an ontological slant on humour, which appears to be the focus of picaresque comic talent – viz. how humour works and not what gives rise to it. A change in perspective between eighteenth-century picaresque and its predecessors is exemplified in Lesage’s preface to his translation, or, more accurately, his 1732 adaptation of Guzmán de Alfarache.78 While praising Alemán’s ability to instruct the reader by means of the comic, in the spirit of Horace, the French author nevertheless notices an excess of moral concern, of “écarts de morale qui font perdre de vue le Héros.”(xi) [moral digressions that make one lose sight of the hero; my translation]. He then proceeds to rid the text of “moralités superflues” [superfluous moralities] and expand those episodes where the comical better serves the Horatian purpose. A typical eighteenthcentury picaresque author,79 Lesage favours the descriptive element over the 76 77 78

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This difference between ontology and epistemology is reminiscent of Lotman’s notions of mythological and metadescriptive consciousness (Chapter 2). Adam Smith, “Of Sympathy”, in The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, From the Year 1759, The Eighth Edition (London: H. Bryer, 1802) 488. Alain-René Lesage, “Préface du traducteur”, Histoire de Guzman d’Alfarache, nouvellement traduite, & purgée des Moralités superflues par Monsieur Le Sage, Tome Premier (Maestricht: Jean Edme Dufour & Philippe Roux, 1777) iii–xvii. Interestingly, Porter asserts that not all authors who adopted the picaresque as their form of narrative were aiming at divulging the Enlightenment spirit: for example, Samuel

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sermonising tone of counter-Reformation picaresque – necessarily inviting the reader’s more immediate empathy with the protagonist. For the French translator, the need for an altered version proceeds from the differences between Spanish and French “génies”, notwithstanding which it might be argued that these differences also concern two distinct literary ages and sensibilities. Significantly, A.A. Parker argues that the French adaptations of picaresque classics by Alemán, Quevedo and Grimmelshausen around the eighteenth century imposed an element of optimism that was completely alien to the original texts. He points out that “The reform of Gil Blas, and the optimistic ‘disenchantment’ that motivates his withdrawal to the prosperous life of a country gentleman, would have aroused in all three [abovementioned authors] a sardonic laughter.”80 The following section will identify the main differences separating the picaresque before and after the Enlightenment watershed and how the new sensibility may have affected some aspects of contemporary picaresque, with instances from Benni and Doyle. As will be explained shortly, some aspects relating to content, philosophical stance and the representation of reality in recent rogue tales finds more significant affinities with those inspired by the Age of Reason than with earlier picaresque. The Enlightenment Watershed As argued above, the post-Galilean breakthrough from metaphysics to epistemology, from the study of the nature of reality as such to the study of how reality happens, opened new doors in the philosophy of knowledge, where the pristine cause of existence, religion, did not prevent human reason from exploring its potential. A first major contrast arises between the idea of knowledge in the Spanish Renaissance and in late sixteenth-century British picaresque, as compared to their later developments. In the Counter-Reformation picaresque, God’s creatures are originally corrupted and the justification for man’s salvation can only be found in an intense complementarity between faith and actions. In this view, reasonable behaviour can only be inscribed within the opposing categories of good and evil, within moral choices – in this sense, it

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Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) reflects the author’s refutation of religious scepticism, his revulsion for Voltaire and a sternly conformist religious stance. See The Enlightenment 58. Despite this exception, it seems to me that most picaresque authors in the 1700s were noticeably affected by enlightened thought. Alexander Augustine Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe 1599–1753 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 1967) 125.

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is more in tune with Cartesian metaphysics81 than with Lockean thinking, in which the human mind is a tabula rasa onto which experience imprints knowledge as onto a totally unexplored area – thus ruling out the question of original sin. The new science did not normally reject religion but proposed the experimental method as necessary to fully justify the existence of a Supreme Being. To Isaac Newton, for instance, God’s intervention in the universe cannot have stopped at the act of creation; God has to oversee the motion of the spheres, setting off a spontaneous chain of scientific phenomena. Nevertheless, there is no need for supernatural displays of his omnipotence, like miracles.82 In 1777, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing declared: “It is enough to hold to Christian love, what happens to the Christian religion does not matter.”83 The abovementioned advent of epistemology and of the idea of a secularised morality is welcomed by one of the main theorists of political justice in the eighteenth century, Cesare Beccaria. In his thought-provoking On Crimes and Punishments, he advocates that sin and crime should belong to two completely unrelated realms: some men have thought that the gravity of the sin plays a role in measuring the degree of criminality in an action. The fallaciousness of this opinion will be obvious to an impartial student of the true relations among men, and between God and man. The former are relations of equality. Necessity alone, from the confrontation of emotions and the opposition of interests, has given rise to the idea of common utility, which is the foundation of human justice. The latter involves relations of dependence 81

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Descartes struggled to reconcile his theory that certainty could be arrived at through personal reasoning (the cogito ergo sum of his Discourse on The Method, 1637) with the doctrine of the Church by reconnecting mind and matter to a supreme creator who, however, had provided human beings with enough clear-sightedness to arrive at faith by means of reason. The result of his speculations was the papal prohibition of his works in 1663. “Now, by the help of these principles [of motion], all material things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid particles above mentioned, variously associated in the first creation by the counsel of an intelligent agent. For it became Him who created them to set them in order. And if He did so, it’s unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of Nature; though, being once formed, it may continue by those laws for many ages.” See Isaac Newton, Optics, in Robert Maynard Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, Tome 34: Newton, Huygens (Chicago/London/Toronto/Geneva: William Benton, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952) 542. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence 98.

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upon a perfect Being and Creator, Who has retained for Himself alone the right to be at the same time Lawgiver and Judge, for He alone can be both without impropriety. […] The gravity of a sin depends on the inscrutable malice of the heart, which finite beings cannot know without special revelation. How, then, could it be used as a guide for the punishment of crimes? If such a thing were tried, men could punish when God pardons and pardon when God punishes. If men can run counter to the Almighty by blaspheming against Him, then they can do so also by punishing on His behalf.84 To Tzvetan Todorov the Age of Reason placed human conduct within three dimensions: the private, the legal and the social. The last includes religious practice, social behaviour, and all those activities that are subject to “public debate” (In Defence 62–63). Religious authority is therefore detached from the spheres of both legal dominion, exerted by the ecclesiastic magistrate, and private coercion of individual conscience, to become part of the debatable aspects of life. This prospect of a due distinction between human and divine law is one of the hallmarks of a renewed picaresque sensibility concerning repentance and redemption (see further). The eighteenth-century trickster grapples with the complexities of the private, the legal and the social spheres and their constant overlapping, a tension that even in recent times has produced severe controversies. Current discussions involve hot topics like euthanasia as a stateregulated practice, the abolition of the death penalty, the struggle between a secularised as opposed to a confessional concept of state, the spectacular display of dejection or disease, etc. These recriminations against heteronomy did not only concern the Catholic Church: in the Reformed churches, new ideas such as the principle of confessional uncertainty, brandished by John Locke as the key to tolerance,85 inherently contradicted traditional Protestant views concerning predestination and 84

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Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by Richard Davies with Virginia Cox and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge up, 1995) 22–23; emphasis by the author. “Those that are of another opinion [i.e., the intolerant] would do well to consider with themselves how pernicious a seed of discord and war, how powerful a provocation to endless hatreds, rapines, and slaughters they thereby furnish unto mankind.” See John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. by William Popple, in Robert Maynard Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, Tome 35: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Chicago/London/ Toronto/Geneva: William Benton, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952) 7. Locke contests the establishment of a spiritual hierarchy in all kinds of Christian churches as not mentioned in the scriptures, and he also supports the separation between spiritual and

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divine redemption awarded only through faith. The literary rogues from previous centuries had pondered over their mistakes as trespasses of a religious rule of conduct – or, in the most irreverent cases, they had polemically scorned religious observance, whereas their ‘enlightened’ successors tend to accumulate experience upon experience, even in their negative outcomes, without ascribing every action to the fulfilment of a divine plan. Similarly, the French philosopher Helvétius believed that the environment does not affect mental faculties, whereas education is decisive in the child’s intellectual development. Traditional picaresque authors, especially Alemán and Quevedo, were sagaciously explicit about the bad influence of corrupt parentage on the rogue-tobe. In Guzmán, for instance, education and culture do not help correct man’s corrupted disposition; on the contrary, education enables the protagonist to refine his own skills in taking advantage of his victims. In Roderick Random, instead, Strap, one of the hero’s friends, is remarkably (and, perhaps, ironically?) versed in Latin literature, despite being a humble barber – a less than honourable profession in the case of Lazarillo’s father. As a consequence of these debates, the contemporary eighteenth-century forms of picaresque seem to have embraced – with more practical repercussions on the literary sphere – some scraps of the Lockean lesson, arranging the pícaro’s turn of events around episodes where the accumulation of experiences traces marks of knowledge on the “white paper void of all characters”86 of his/her mind. The misleading nature of these experiences will be discussed later. Noticeably, in the three traditional Spanish picaresque novels the protagonists achieve knowledge of their roles in the world in three different ways, all of them imposed by external circumstances. Lazarillo acquiesces to habit: he has reached the peak of good fortune, although he has to pay the toll of submission to a higher religious authority and accept moral compromise. Guzmán goes through a conversion which takes the form of a revelation from above, wherein faith only, and not works, seems to have granted the hero an altogether undeserved redemption.87 In contrast with the others, in El Buscón the rogue’s progress towards knowledge is doomed by a constant confrontation

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s­ ecular institutions, especially in those cases when religious authorities “have the civil magistrate on their side” (7). John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Great Books of the Western World, Tome 35: Locke, Berkeley, Hume 121. This somewhat unorthodox conclusion seems to confirm what Benito Brancaforte asserts about Guzmán’s “más que dudoso catolicismo” [more than dubious Catholicism]. See Benito Brancaforte, Guzmán de Alfarache: ¿Conversión o proceso de degradación? (Madison, Wis.: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1980) 195.

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with social prejudice as a sort of personal and collective curse. In subsequent examples of the picaresque, the protagonists learn their way through crime and mischief, but they grow up as morally tormented individuals; they are encouraged by their circumstances to take a stand in the world, either for a good or an evil cause. This is the case with Henry Smart’s final resolution to quit the fight, regardless of the fact that civil war is still raging in Ireland, and as a subversive republican it would be easier for him to reconsider his role and consent, for the last time, to act like a “slave”. On the other hand, Saltatempo’s process of self-knowledge is marked by confrontation with a daily compromise of his own almost atavistic principles and the extent of these dealings with his own conscience, wavering between “a flame of rebelliousness along with an itch of conformity.” (136) (“un bruciore di ribellione insieme a un prurito di conformismo.” [97]). The following section will explore how some of the eighteenth-century ideals did not only permeate coeval forms of the picaresque, but they reappear in the more recent examples of rogue fiction examined here. Individualism, Common Good and General Will The trickster is the quintessence of opportunism, personal will to survive and mock-heroic hedonism. But there is more to it: in fact, being compulsive vagabonds in search of new encounters, rogues have to merge with the outside world; they have to renounce their solitude and act like social animals in order to ensnare their prey. The traditional pre-Enlightenment rogues were more devotedly self-centred – think, for example, of Jack Wilton, or El Buscón – with little or no concern for the consequences of their actions; their only landmarks were abstract religious or secular authorities. Following Descartes’ defence of human intellect, instead, many Enlighteners have exalted individualism as a weapon against repressive authority, superstition, or religious extremism. Consequently, the picaresque characters of the Age of Reason are individualists but, at the same time, they must measure and attest to the consequences of their own actions on themselves and on others.88 Individualism may turn into utilitarianism, as expressed by Adam Smith and Montesquieu, or self-love, in Rousseau’s terms; thus, on top of the negative considerations about selfishness, the renewed picaresque individualism tends to see self-preservation as 88

Defining some aspects of the eighteenth-century Russian picaresque, Lotman argues that its new purpose is not the tricksters’ survival against all odds, but the intersection between their personal benefit and that of the collectivity. I would not apply this view to the picaresque of the 1700s in general, for common good is sometimes a side effect, or an undesired outcome of the pícaro’s self-centredness. See Jurij M. Lotman, Boris Uspenskij, Tipologia della cultura 14–15.

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a precious human virtue. As a result, the confines between selfless and selfish behaviour in view of a higher cause become more and more undefined. Paradoxically, this twilight zone amplifies the existing contradictions: in the Enlightenment debate opposing truthful to good conduct, the trickster is an enthusiast in the name of truth, but truth does not necessarily coincide with a good or convenient ideal. In what way does this promotion of the individual affect the picaresque? The roguish anti-heroes in eighteenth-century fiction appear to embody the essence of free citizens who can choose their fate and aspire to a higher social rank, − the French term which underlines this social mobility is chevalier d’industrie.89 In truth, characters like Gil Blas or Roderick Random are life-long servants, therefore they seem to have little claim to individualism; in fact, Smollett’s hero leaves his subservient post onboard the man-of-war and becomes a wealthy tradesman only thanks to his fortuitous reunion with his father. At the same time, the pícaros’ advancement in society is evidence of liberalism, but the way they acquire a higher social standing is always disputable. Like most servant characters in Lesage’s comedies, rogues take advantage of the practical repercussions liberalism can bring to everyone, even to themselves. Furthermore, the representation of the servant in the eighteenth-century comedy of manners, for instance, differs quite substantially from previous characterisations: as James Magruder points out in his introduction to three French comedies, Molière’s valets outwitted their masters thanks to their power of persuasion and deceit, whereas Lesage’s Frontin (in Turcaret, performed in 1709) is “­completely guided by his cupidity” and intelligence. His “dry and cold hearted humour” prevails over any pretence of empathy with the audience, or any display of personal charms.90 Crispin, another servant in Lesage’s 89

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The expression, which is cited in the 1694 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, has entered the Italian language by way of a calque of translation as cavaliere or capitano d’industria. It was also established as a satirical appellative in British political hack-writing – i.e. the anonymous pamphlet ridiculously attributed to a certain “T. Understrapper, Esq., one of the L. of the A.”, titled The Chevalier d’Industrie turned Prime Minister; or, a faithful narrative of his conduct, in a dedication of the history of the antient and most renowned knighthood of industry (London: Dickenson, 1734) 1–2: “I will venture to affirm, this is the most antient Order in the World, and that it has produced more extraordinary Personages than all the others put together; […] a Man must necessarily be of it to rise in the World; so that it may properly enough be called The Real Fountain of Honour among us Moderns, who center all Honours, not in Probity and Virtue, but in Wealth and Power.” (original emphasis). James Magruder (ed.), Three French Comedies, trans. by James Magruder (New Haven/ London: Yale up, 1996) 17. Magruder maintains that Turcaret’s revolutionary impact was

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e­ ponymous play, e­ ngages in a competition with his master, defying the rules of social distinction; T.E. Lawrenson describes him as a “valet d’industrie”.91 This aspect of social flexibility marks an original twist in the role of the picaresque servant/protagonist even in more recent specimen. New ways of tackling the complex master-servant antagonism are gradually coming to the fore in modern and contemporary rogue tales in which ideologies, or the nerve-centres of political power, become the targets of mockery and ridicule: the notion of the master extends from single individuals to social or political structures. In Benni’s novel, for instance, Lupetto realises his subordinate role when he is hired as a reporter for a local newspaper; he soon abandons the illusion of becoming a front-line journalist fighting injustice (153; 221). Later on, his attempt to assert his rights by consulting a solicitor fails miserably as the lawyer assures him that he will defend his rights and the rights of his family on the condition that they support him in the next elections (214; 308); this episode is a mockingly Kafkaesque revisitation of the hopeless citizen pleading for justice and soon debased to a mere subject of power. In A Star Called Henry, the protagonist finds out he has fallen into the master-servant trap: “I was one of the Squad, one of the secret élite. An assassin.” (240); he even sarcastically compares himself to an apostle executing orders for a superior instigator. On the whole, contemporary picaresque figures remain servants, but they are usually unaware of their subservience until the story reaches a critical point. This conflict of ethical choices also raises the controversial matter of the individual’s responsibility towards the public, or what the illuminati called “party of mankind”. While Locke argued that pernicious forms of individualism would be naturally crushed by God’s willpower, fifty years earlier Hobbes had denied any possible coexistence of a shared intent between individualism and collective benefit. Can the pícaro, a classical advocate of utilitarianism, engage in a debate on the common good? Are the rogues expected to act selfishly, yet with a more or less intentional concern for the consequences of their actions on society at large and, above all, does this idea ever cross their minds? Surprisingly, a claim to self-interest as a positive contribution to the rest of due to its “lack of moral cynosure”, namely the fact that “Lesage places no value on virtue, scruple, ingenuity, or purity.” (10). Presumably, this stance can be extended to Gil Blas, and to most eighteenth-century sceptical pícaros. The modern rogues do not necessarily destroy morals – a criticism that has often been levelled, somewhat undeservedly, at the Enlightenment – but they reduce moral behaviour to its most neutral, intentionally ambiguous essence. 91 Alain-René Lesage, Crispin rival de son maître, edited with an introduction by T.E. ­Lawrenson (London: University of London Press, 1961) 40.

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humankind appears, with a tinge of irony, in more recent representations of the picaresque, such as the aesthetic-philosophical tirades of Mann’s Felix Krull or, more recently, the anti-racist outcries of Ditie, the protagonist of the aforementioned book by Hrabal (Chapter 3). This masquerade of good intentions is usually presented so as to reveal a degraded society crowded with wellwishers who only proclaim, but do not really believe in, human s­ olidarity. The revelation that selfishness may generate some kind of joint well-being draws a striking contrast with those categories of people who actually disguise their egotism behind a studied philanthropy. In Saltatempo, Mayor Fefelli’s optimistic slogans promising the equal distribution of wealth among the township in the name of private initiative are sharply satirised by the narrator, who reveals how, “in reality, if anyone tried, he would have knocked them out cold.” (86) (“in realtà avrebbe steso chiunque c’avesse provato.” [62]). Fefelli, a king Midas of politics, has established a winning connection between armed forces, entrepreneurship, culture and beautiful women (230; 332). He patrols the town surrounded by pseudo-Fascist civil guards, repeals the workers’ vindications and ultimately sabotages the construction of a monument in memory of the victims of a motorway building site, since, he explains, it “would only give the town’s children a bad attitude toward work.” (112) (“predisponeva male i bambini nei confronti del lavoro.” [80]), thus exploiting sensationalism for a political purpose. Saltatempo cites uncle Nevio and his partner Luciana as the only successful examples of businesspeople that still maintain their moral stature and sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the community. Both of them relate to two significant symbolic aspects in the novel: uncle Nevio sells creative, almost surreal fly-fishing baits, “fake flies out of the ass fur of wild hares.” (“mosche finte di pelo di culo di lepre.” [186]). Throughout the story, fishing is a metaphor for the inescapable fight for survival; God is identified with the “Great Fisherman” (28) (“Grande Pescatore” [23]) who keeps the reluctant souls trapped in his net; the river becomes the locus of the kids’ quests for the meaning of life, the place of regeneration and forgetfulness, where swimming downstream and going with the flow become necessary risks for self-discovery. As in Busi’s Vendita galline km 2, the water creature, either the tuna fish or the dolphin, perishing at the hands of the fisherman, will ultimately take its timely revenge while, in the eternal cycle of events, as Nevio puts it, “the worm [used as bait] has his revenge in the end, because he devours the fisherman, nicely tenderized in his grave.” (330) (“il verme alla fine si vendica perché si mangia il pescatore, bello frollato.” [228]). Nevio’s partner Luciana embodies sexual vitality in its most Dionysian form: she sells corsets and underwear that, apparently, restore harmony to the couple by the intercession of a comically pagan deity, Saint Guépière. The ­celebration

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of female sexuality leads to a moral climax when Nevio, visibly inebriated, presents the new wooden fountain erected by Lupetto’s father, portraying a naked Venus: “Avremmo potuto fare una Venere tutta coperta, ma non abbiamo niente da nascondere, posso anche dirvi chi è la modella.” (236) (“We could have sculpted a fully clothed Venus, but we have nothing to hide, I can even tell you who the model was for the statue.” [341]). Once again, the carnival element is not simply a form of passing insubordination but the essence of a genuine, self-aware moral conduct. Despite these exceptions, Saltatempo holds a very critical attitude to the encroaching of the individual on the common good and seems to justify it on an abstract, metaphorical level but not as a possible option in real life. Doyle’s novel, instead, follows an opposite pattern, more in accordance with enlightened optimism, by which Henry’s greed is justified as the well-earned reward for his egalitarian efforts. Thus, while redistributing money to the war widows claiming their pensions during the Easter Rising, he never forgets to deduct his ten per cent quota – a percentage that will increase according to the laws of the market in the subsequent stages of his life. In similar terms, the eighteenth century’s renewed fascination with money reflects on its function of assessing not only valuables but also human dignity or expendability. While in earlier epochs money was seen more as a reward for someone’s services, a recompense for a servant’s or a pícaro’s skills, in the 1700s monetary remuneration is at the centre of the authorised, widely tolerated practice of bribery. The idea of receiving money as an incentive to provide advice or information somehow puts informers, usually of a lower social rank, on the same rung of the pecuniary ladder as members of higher society. Bribery becomes, then, one of the major narrative motifs in the modern picaresque, with the rogue standing at the giving, as much as at the receiving end of the supply and demand of information acquired through bribery. The discourse on collective welfare concerns a fundamental issue that up to the present day has created controversies in several directions, namely the existence of the opportunity for a general will. Historically, the arguments in favour of an agreement between social strata and the sovereignty of the community as a body politic, heralded in Rousseau’s Social Contract,92 a view analogous to those of Hobbes and Locke, had met the staunch dissent of theorists 92

“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” (Quoted in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy 722–23). Russell asserts how this principle could be easily misread as legitimisation of tyranny based on the principle that each individual in this collective whole ought to share the same views and purposes as the rest of the community, and this would become sufficient guarantee of its

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like Edmund Burke who, for instance, dispelled all claims that socio-political upheavals like the Glorious Revolution in England had sanctioned the triumph of common interest.93 In its turn, Burke’s ideal of a national society immersed in its traditions and singled out from any other was dismissed as c­ onservative by philosophers like Thomas Paine94 and William Godwin. In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin also rejected Rousseau’s view of a general will as the sum total of every individual’s self-interest and a force driving sociopolitical behaviour.95 How do literary tricksters participate in this quarrel over the question of general will? Do they accept, even without applying it, a moral direction that is common to all humankind? Rogue narratives depict the fragmentation of society and, despite all the inequalities this heterogeneity may create, the fragmentation is usually accepted as a necessary evil: in fact, the rogue changes sides according to convenience, taking advantage of the divisions within society. On the other hand, whenever the protagonists come across a utopian design to unify society under an all-presiding will, they retreat into scepticism and disbelief. Tricksters appear to discriminate between what Rousseau described as two opposites of collective sovereignty: will of all and general will. Todorov illustrates the difference: The will of all is the mechanical sum of individual wills. Its ideal is to be unanimous but its reality is a majority of voices […] General will, in Rousseau’s sense of the term, involves, to the contrary, taking difference into account. […] General will is not the sum of identities; it is even opposed to each individual identity and consists in seeking a generality that encompasses differences. (141–42)

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infallibility. He adds that “The Social Contract involves that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to do so.” (723). See Israel’s Enlightenment Contested 334. Inspired by Baruch Spinoza, Paine adopted “common good” as the yardstick by which to evaluate good or bad governments, namely “governments that arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.” See Tom Paine, Rights of Man 70, quoted in Enlightenment Contested 560. Objecting to Rousseau’s theories, Godwin remarks: “The rules by which my actions shall be directed are matters of a consideration entirely personal; and no man can transfer to another the keeping of his conscience and the judging of his duties. […] No consent of ours can divest us of our moral capacity. This is a species of property which we can neither barter nor resign; and of consequence it is impossible for any government to derive its authority from an original contract.” See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, in two Volumes, Volume i (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1793) 148–49.

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The will of all authorises the repression of minorities, whereas general will treasures these differences and incorporates them into a plural organism. This opposition seems to arise very clearly in Saltatempo, when the protagonist describes the atmosphere of his schoolmates’ garage gatherings, where he manifests how, far from the contaminations the term has undergone in subsequent years, communist ideology ought to be interpreted in a variety of directions; in truth, divisions help create a useful, self-motivated plurality. As the communist ex-student-activist Vittorio Borelli maintains in his Diario di un militante [Diary of a Militant], a testimony of his political commitment during the years of the student contestations, “when there are no two people thinking the same way within the party, the only serious reason for disagreement is conformism”.96 To the politically engaged young radicals, differences keep the whole movement going. The same variegated political congeries forms part of Saltatempo’s narrative of the 1968 student rallies, under the eyes of the police “dressed for combat duty in Vietnam” (256) (“in tenuta da Vietnam” [177]), who erroneously treat the protest as a mere skirmish between right- and left-wing opponents. Actually, the barricaded students fight among themselves because Lupetto defends one of his teachers from accusations of being a slave to the system (177; 256). The contradiction between common will and the will of all escalates in a comic dénouement when one of the students, Fred, passionately kisses one of the policemen, who runs away in disgust. “It was the most unusual and effective street-guerrilla operation it was ever my privilege to witness.” (256) (“Fu una delle azioni di guerriglia più anomale ed efficaci che io abbia mai visto.” [177]), comments the narrator; this time differences pertaining to the sexual sphere end up interfering with the logic of violence and coercion. In a not-too-different manner, Doyle’s novel illustrates general will as a chimera or a make-believe strategy to instigate consensus. For instance, when Henry is requested to inspect the 1916 Easter Proclamation of Independence, he recommends inserting a clause on the rights of children, which results in a quite humorous equivocation in the final draft: “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty […] and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.” (96; italics by the author). Conversely, his plea that the word God be suppressed from the Declaration is firmly rejected by Connolly

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Vittorio Borelli, Diario di un militante (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979), cited in “Quella notizia terribile” [That was terrible News], La Stampa, Tuttolibri, anno V, n.19, 19 May 1979, 7. My translation of the quote.

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who, in spite of any claim for freedom of belief, does not want to lose his pious supporters: – I’d take out all that stuff about God. – Can’t do that, son. We need Him on our side. And all His followers. […] We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, […]. (97; original emphasis) Experience and Causation The Enlightenment placed the question of crime and its adequate punishment in the background, but this raised a corollary of moral considerations. Immanuel Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative viewed morality as selfsufficient, a synthetic aprioristic truth which can be inferred from experience but whose tenets can also be deduced by virtue of reflection.97 To Kant, good will – or the so-called “good in itself” (607) is an “indispensable condition even of worthiness to be happy” (606), a quality of human ethics that proceeds from reason, which in turn sees good will as its “highest practical vocation” (608). Hence, an action that defeats the premise of good will should be condemned as immoral regardless of the happiness or well-being it will ultimately bestow. In this respect the picaresque takes a polemical stance against the idea of morality as acquired experience: on the whole in the trickster’s mindset morality is finally achieved only after crossing the threshold of immorality – a kind of ironic, agnostic felix culpa (see Psyche’s sensuous curiosity in Chapter 3). In this upside-down perspective, revenge is often seen as a wrong measure adopted for a good purpose dictated by justice: Kant’s categorical imperative is thus inspected under the deforming lens of scepticism. On the other hand, good deeds on the part of the pícaro are usually misread and neutralised by a contrary effect. In the case of Henry Smart, for example, his moral standard is far removed from Kant’s: he practises revenge not only as a subterfuge to achieve justice with his own hands but also to break free from the immutable progress of generations: thus Henry murders the minister O’Ganduin, who had reduced him to a killer, as O’Ganduin had previously done with his father. By way of a macabre parody, Henry uses his employer’s ritual sentence “Alfie Gandon says hello” (49) and, replacing the sender of the greeting with the names of a few of Gandon’s designated victims, farcically avenges them and himself. 97

Immanuel Kant, Foundation for the Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd edition, translated by ­Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan/Library of the Liberal Arts, 1990), excerpt ­reprinted in Modern Philosophy 603–46.

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In Saltatempo, Lupetto harbours the intention of doing away with the ambitious Fefelli, the town’s mayor and, later, secretary for public works, in order to requite the death and devastation he had wreaked in the village. He trusts that he will break the cycle of mischief by punishing its main perpetrator. Nevertheless, many other sycophants are ready to take his place; thus Saltatempo carries out a different kind of revenge: Macchina, dissi accarezzando il cofano, non ce l’ho con te, tu sei bella e svelta, hai portato anche delle cose buone nel mondo. […] Tu sei disegnata nella bandiera di quelli che hanno distrutto ciò che c’era di più vivo e generoso nel mio paese. […] non è colpa tua, ma ora devi fare questo salto, devi provare cosa vuole dire l’ultimo respiro della vita. […] La montagna spalancò la bocca, sentii gli schianti, uno dopo l’altro, come morsi sulle lamiere, poi un ultimo tonfo sordo la inghiottì. (254–55) “O car,” I said, stroking its hood, “I have nothing against you, you are sleek and beautiful, you’ve brought good things into this world. […] You are an emblem on the banner of those who have destroyed all that was full of life and generosity in my town. […] it’s not your fault, but now you have to leap into the void, now you have to experience what it means to take the last breath of your life.” […] The mountain opened its maw, and I heard the succession of bangs and crashes, one after the other, as if giant jaws were gnawing at the metal body, and then a final dull thud swallowed the car up for good. (369) Lupetto finds a moral purpose by accepting the idea that personal revenge is worthless: the seemingly surreal execution of a Mercedes demonstrates how freedom from oppression can only be achieved by attacking not the despots, but the symbols of their power. Another contribution to the Enlightenment’s quest for a moral account of causes and effects is propounded by David Hume. Before Kant, Hume advocates morality as a posteriori truth, whereby the individual is not capable of predicting any kind of causality. He identifies two kinds of human reasoning: relations of ideas and matters of fact. The former include “every affirmation that is either intuitively or demonstratively certain.”98 This is the case with disciplines like Geometry or Algebra, whose statements can be demonstrated 98

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Great Books of the Western World, 35: Locke, Berkeley, Hume 458.

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without resorting to any element in the universe to explain them. Matters of fact, instead, are based on the principle of cause and effect, which operates beyond the senses or memory. He later explains how “in vain […] should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.” (460). The really innovative formulation of Hume’s meditations about matter of fact is that its contrary can be equally accepted because a matter of fact does not exclude its contradiction. He exemplifies this principle: That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind. (458; original emphasis) Here, Hume seems to insinuate the ironic tenet that an assertion and its logical contradictions may co-exist as possible components in the definition of matters of fact. In his search for the foundations of human understanding with regard to the relation of cause and effect, the Scottish philosopher seems to accept experience as the most accommodating answer. Yet, he delves into a quest for the way human thought organises experience: with an incredulous emphasis on the concepts of tabula rasa and the association of ideas, Hume boldly silences Locke, commenting how he “shall be entirely forgotten.” (452). Hume concludes that experience is not at all induced by, or founded on, some kind of reasoning; what he calls “the secret powers of nature”, dwelling underneath the surface of the laws of cause and effect, are inaccessible to understanding. What is more, past experience can somehow predict the secret powers of nature informing a similar phenomenon, like a piece of bread that nourished me the day before and will presumably nourish me today, or tomorrow. This is, however, no guarantee that the same experience will repeat itself accordingly. The similarity between two different experiences of a sensible object can be obtained through inference, but it does not result from a chain of reasoning. The final consequence is that experience is always limiting and, possibly, misleading. Although the picaresque will not soar to such complicated meditations, its slant towards the ephemeral value of experience is strikingly similar to Hume’s, especially in the coeval narrative examples by Fielding, Defoe or Smollett. In fact, pícaros are engulfed in a bundle of inextricable experiences, but their ability to infer a lesson from them fails regularly; expressly, the moral “secret powers” that should derive from a meditation on their misdeeds are constantly

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questioned. Furthermore, the cyclic repetition of an action, typical of a tale of roguery, shows how experience is ineffective in making sense of the relation between cause and effect. Moreover, a disturbance in the cause-effect process does not ultimately produce contradictions; in this, irony grafts into this logic of estrangement. In Hume’s own words, moral reasoning, striving to come to terms with matters of fact and existence, is doomed to collapse on its own reasons: We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relations of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question. […] It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so. (462–63) Can some hints of scepticism be traced in the recent picaresque novels examined here? In more explicit terms, what is the picaresque attitude to experience and how is morality perceived in both texts? In Saltatempo, the protagonist strives to situate his own life along a string of connected events with experience as the final stage of this sequence of acts of learning; however, these efforts are constantly frustrated.99 In his eagerness to make sense of his life, Lupetto often finds himself shaping more than one possible scenario following his actions, but none of them eventuate in reality. For example, Lupetto imagines three possible alternative endings to his farewell to Selene, several ways of replying to her salutations, three possible titles for a newspaper article in which his death at the hand of his landlady is described in sensationalist terms, three excuses to deny sexual favours to his hostess, etc. On other occasions, he escapes from unpredictable reality by means of paradoxical causation; yet, the fact that his story is narrated in retrospect makes his endeavour to 99

In a way, this logical delusion is reminiscent of Odilo’s desperate rebuilding of his life’s involution (Chapter 2).

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rationalise events even more futile. When the happy God introduces Lupetto to the subjective dimension of time, comprising “176 protological times, ninety eschatological times, and thirty-six forms of chaotic, romanticized time” (18) (“centosettantasei tempi protologici, novanta escatologici e trentasei tempi romanzati caotici” [16]), he forestalls a meditation which the protagonist will derive later on from his non-experiences: not all individuals are part of a logic of consequences, but they are the sum total of many unrelated causes, from an obscure past, where life keeps on swarming unobserved, to the fear of the unknown hiding behind a closed door. It is the triumph of epistemology: ask yourself how and not why things occur. At the same time, consequences appear as being disconnected from causes, as “destinies and culminations” (61) (“i destini e le conclusioni” [45]).100 As a result, past and present coexist in every single thing at the same time: “Potentially, the entire world is a ruin, a heap of rubble, nothing more.” (73) (“Potenzialmente il mondo è tutto una rovina e una maceria.” [53]) argues Galileo, a pretentious young intellectual. Things, however, come back to life, “[t]hings heal, things start over, things come back.” (93) (“Le cose guariscono, le cose ricominciano, le cose tornano.” [66]), they defy the rules of cause-and-effect. Saltatempo’s forays into the parallel dimension of the duoclock allow him to consider lack of experience as a childish inanity on a par with adult desires, arising from matter-of fact knowledge. In truth, Lupetto grows to mistrust the value of experience as the cause of his present sense of shame (105; 150), or his indifference to aspects of life he thought were essential (110; 156–57). What is more, experience does not determine priorities and value judgments; as in the case of the hero’s vain hope of obtaining justice for his father, experience consists in learning only the deleterious aspects of life (221; 319). In the final passages of the novel, Saltatempo seems to embrace, though in a fairly pragmatic manner, Hume’s scepticism about human experience when he announces that “every act I would perform from now on would have a special importance because afterward there would be nothing left for me to do.” (364) (“ogni gesto che avrei fatto d’ora in avanti sarebbe stato molto importante, perché dopo non avrei avuto altri gesti.” [251]). Without imposing an interpretation in favour of a complete adherence of the picaresque to enlightened scepticism, it is however plausible to see a common thread between the pessimistic philosophers of the eighteenth century and the exponents of existential doubt in modern and contemporary rogue fiction. In Doyle’s novel, Henry does not try to dispense with experience but he constantly lights upon breaches in the laws of causation: for example, he relates 100 The missing link of causality also characterises the relationship between human beings and God. See futher.

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how his grandmother “married her dead husband” (2); his own mother is fascinated by her future husband’s missing leg, “[s]he liked the space where the leg should have been.” (6); Henry’s father “made his life up as he went along” (7) and “filled the hole with many lives” (7), reshaping his experience by means of convenient hindsight. Recalling his contempt for his homonymous deceased elder brother, the only son who had the right to be called Henry in the family, the narrator comments: “I killed my brother every night.” (35): a form of ironic denial of consequentiality. Moreover, paradox and nonsense, examples of variance in the laws of cause and effect, exert a ripple effect among Henry’s acquaintances, as when Granny Nash, giving an account of Henry’s mother’s fate, observes: “She’s dead./– Where?/– Nowhere.” (167–68). Mrs O’Shea, the old lady who puts Henry up after a serious injury during a raid, expresses a peculiar moral self-indulgence that prevents her from falling into the trap of cause-and-effect: “I’m not going to ask you your name because then, when they ask me for it, I’ll be able to say I don’t know and it no lie.” (200). Similarly, but much more persistently, Benni’s novel is replete with nonsense and absurdities. As mentioned earlier, paradox and, by extension, hyperbole and nonsense may work as extreme tests of a statement’s rational content, ­supporting, by way of contradictions to the norm, a more genuine trace of common sense that grapples with the literal meaning of words, as these brief examples illustrate: Se la lampadina si fulmina è perché ha visto qualcosa che non le è piaciuto. (34) [A]rrivammo sul Pont Neuf che in realtà è vecchio. (182) [A]veva grandi aspettative dall’amante latino, nel senso non Cicerone ma Mastroianni. (184) [H]a sposato una padovana nel senso di donna. (217) [I]f a light-bulb blew it was because it had seen something that upset it. (44) We […] finally fetched up at the Pont Neuf, which is actually a very old bridge. (263) [S]he’d been expecting [a lot] from her Latin lover, and when I say, Latin, I don’t mean like Cicero, more like Mastroianni. (265) [He]’s married to a woman from Padua. (313) [padovana is also a kind of hen] Most of Lupetto’s puns are clearly nonsensical, but the literal content of the expressions he uses can also allow for some basic rational plausibility: in their

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flexibility of meaning, they appear to accept equally both a matter of fact and its own contradiction as rationally viable solutions. All in all, Doyle’s trilogy seems to be centred on Henry’s escape from causality, for instance when he kills his father’s employer in the abovementioned episode in the brothel, with the intent of escaping from the laws of causality and inheritance; nevertheless, Henry is once again trapped in the net of cyclical causality when, trying to save his son from falling off a train carriage, a wheel severs part of his own leg. As the protagonist ironically remarks, his mutilation is still different from that of his father: “I still have the knee, and it’s grand.” (Oh, Play that Thing 362): this sounds like a feeble remonstrance against any explicit identification with his loved-loathed parent. Suffering from an analogous physical distress, Lupetto’s father is described as “still limping from when his leg was caught in a trap” (26) (“zoppo di tagliola” [22]), but he is also a “Communist carpenter” (26) (“falegname comunista” [22]), hence a more idealistically rebellious figure than Henry’s father; he is at the same time Lupetto’s role-model and antagonist. Despite their generation gap, a hundred years’ distance between his childhood and that of his father, as Saltatempo admits (218; 315), the pícaro rediscovers his affinities with him as they both have the courage to face their misfortunes. On the novel’s last page, Lupetto imagines that his future son will perpetuate his fascination with the river and its symbolism (265; 385). Nevertheless, what relates the protagonist to his father is then not a sense of inheritance but the uniqueness of their rapport, for example their discourses on death that, as the father asserts, “have to be said once in a lifetime, and after this, we’ll never mention them again.” (120) (“si fanno una sola volta, e da oggi mai più.” [85]): this father-son relationship is not based on a process of sentimental growth but on a sequence of intense, outstanding, ‘non-experiential’ episodes. A final observation: in his section titled “Sceptical solutions of the doubts” Hume asserts that experience can only provide the illusion of a cause-andeffect correlation between phenomena. Therefore, inference should be determined by the principle of habit or custom: wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom. By employing that word, we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. (464) This meditation on the elusiveness of customs tallies with the picaresque defiance of a premeditated explanation of historical events (see Chapter 1): the

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tricksters, contradicting causation, also aim at undermining custom arising from an ultimate fallible surrender to the teachings one can construe from experience. In this, the rogue is willing to reclaim the singularity of every human life event and its prerogative to become an object of reasoning. This scepticism dismantles one of the moral justifications of a rogue’s tale in its earliest expressions, namely, to teach others by way of a negative example. Lupetto’s point of view on life is grounded on the belief that the accumulation of knowledge is nefarious: for instance, this role of subjective instrument of understanding is played by the “orobilogio” [“duoclock”], a randomly predictive device that helps Lupetto move back and forward in time and space, but with no apparent a priori meaning. It is a symbol of extreme freedom in experiencing life, and even God, who can only reveal the clock’s existence to the protagonist, confesses he has a personal one like everybody else. During his numerous fantasies conjured up by the “orobilogio”, the protagonist is overwhelmed by consequences that present themselves to him and that are illuminating for his present state, but they are not strictly connected. Near the epilogue, when life returns to its normal rhythms in the aftermath of the tragic explosion in Piazza Fontana, the protagonist senses how the city is trying to forget its past: Dimenticate per favore, dice, io sono una vecchia città, ho visto le guerre medievali e la peste, e duelli e invasioni nemiche e poi gli spari nelle strade e i carri armati, lasciatemi invecchiare in pace. (243) ‘Just forget about it, please,’ the city says to us. ‘I’m an old city, I’ve seen medieval wars and outbreaks of the plague and single combat and enemy invasions and gunfire in the streets and tanks – please, just let me grow old in peace.’ (352) In this case, the acceptance of causality as the corollary of experience – grief will be erased by other grief – becomes a form of fatalistic resignation to tragedy, a fatalism the pícaro tries to elude by distrusting experience. In short, claiming the uniqueness of every single episode in his life, the rogue rarely succumbs to customs, but this does not necessarily exempt him from feeling part of a commonality with others, especially while sharing laughter, but this commonality proceeds from the awareness of everyone’s unique existence. The Question of Happiness Among the supporters of utilitarianism in the Age of Reason, Jeremy Bentham proposed a more pragmatic vision of the moral question, asserting that

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individual well-being will instil public happiness.101 Moral restraint, then, is meant as a remedy for preserving collective happiness from the abuse of personal freedom by the individual. Picaresque heroes tend to exasperate this argument; in fact, they frequently use dishonesty to help themselves or others – for instance Gil Blas’ abuse of power to guarantee a position for his friends, or to reward their generosity – and pardon their wrongdoings when they lead to an unexpected common good. In what measure does the ultimate purpose of one’s actions, happiness, really appeal to picaresque narrators, and how does this perception eventually allow for an exemplary end to their tribulations? Assuming that a rogue’s story is an unfinished autobiography, how do the narrators reconcile themselves with whatever provisional conclusion? In the case of the three Spanish classics, the endings seem equally disappointing in terms of the self-fulfilment of the hero’s ambitions: Lazarillo has to weigh personal security against submission to power and conjugal infidelity; Guzmán envisages happiness in the distant prospect of atonement and repentance; El Buscón’s final lines hint at a gloomy escapism that will presumably drag him into new crimes. On the British front, The Unfortunate Traveller closes with the protagonist’s story dissolving into the more significant events of History. Mother Courage, a survivor of the devastating Thirty Years’ War, impassively recounts her fall from grace, and her latest exploits as a gypsy sorceress. ­Eighteenth-century picaresque, in contrast to, seems to offer a more self-contented epilogue: Gil Blas and Moll Flanders rejoice in the bliss of married life, while Roderick Random also reconnects with his wealthy father: this positive turn of events baffles the picaresque readers’ expectations. Are these three endings consistent with the idea of a relentless rogue, constantly struggling to stay alive, or do they tally with the trickster’s gifts of adaptation and compromise? What is more, is the happy ending a form of tacit redemption, or simply the exhaustion of the protagonist’s appetite for new incidents? The happy ending of most 1700s’ picaresque stories marks a sort of imbalance with the image the narrator has shaped throughout the preceding pages. In this sense, the Enlighteners, far from disputing the spiritual value of religion,102 dealt with the issue 101 “Now then, with respect to actions in general, there is no property in them that is calculated to readily engage, and so firmly to fix the attention of the observer, as the tendency they may have to, or divergency (if one may so say) from, that which may be styled the common end of all of them. The end I mean is Happiness: and this tendency in any act is what we style its utility: as this divergency is that to which we give the name of mischievousness.” Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (London: T. Payne, 1776) xlv–xlvi; italics by the author. 102 Todorov advocates that the onslaughts on religious authority during the siècle des lumières did not generally aim at dismantling spirituality: “Nothing was said […] about the

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of happiness as the result of atonement or purification in a not very obliging guise. Hume, one of the most uncompromising philosophers opposed to any pretence to justify spirituality, speculates thus on the supernatural: “The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from ­reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.” (An Enquiry 456).103 To Hume, God is an idea reproducing, on an infinitely larger scale, the human understanding of Him. As a consequence, religious revelation cannot be accepted in the traditional way; religion must derive, like all other ideas, from “impressions”, namely “all sensations, either outward or inward” that cross the human mind (457). Repentance can therefore only be an idea resulting from an impression of regret or punishment, and not by way of supernatural agents. This syllogism, although quite outlandish and self-referential, gives away the Enlightenment’s qualms about the age-old belief in good and evil as innate qualities of every human being. The two contemporary novels examined in this chapter seem to follow a middle path between the extremes of self-contentedness and atonement. Saltatempo meditates about the significance of happiness as deprivation: in the episode of the avalanche in the village, he realises how collective happiness cannot subsist when the individual’s serenity has been outraged. The bulldozers that smooth out the rubble will not be able to cancel the fragments of lost lives that lie underneath (210; 303); thus happiness cannot be regained at the price of forgetfulness. The novel’s open ending strikes an optimistic note in Lupetto’s determination to keep the memory alive and not to mistake “the whistle starting the match for the whistle that ends the match.” (385) (“il fischio d’inizio della partita con quello dell’ultimo minuto.” [265]). Happiness lies in the typically picaresque theme of a regenerating start to life. Henry, on the other hand, faces the open ending of escape as the only option for reclaiming his individual self: in all the novels of the trilogy the narrator re-asserts his existence, even his own full name and age, as if the happy ending were religious experience per se, or about the idea of transcendence, or about any of the various moral doctrines propounded by particular religions. The criticism was aimed at the structure of society, not the content of beliefs. Religion was withdrawn from the realm of the state but not from the lives of individuals” (In Defence 6). 103 Rousseau humorously decries religion that does not handle the question of God rationally: “I am the friend of every peaceful religion in which the Eternal Being is served according to the reason he gave us. When a man cannot believe what he finds absurd, it is not his fault; it is that of his reason.” See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theatre, translated and edited by Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth and Christopher Kelly (Lebanon, nh: up of New England, 2004) 258.

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entrapped in self-recognition, regardless of the fetters imposed by external circumstances. In this tension of seemingly opposing forces, self-interest and communal good, irony acts as a sort of anticlimax. Drawing attention to Giambattista Vico’s preoccupation with what he identifies as the recurrent ages of irony in which heroism is discarded as a mystified form of self-interest or hedonism, Fernandez and Taylor Huber argue that “what is produced in Vico’s scheme is a general tendency to undercut any set of categories of differentiation as always self-interested.” (Irony in Action 10). Vico is referring to his own age when he deprecates the consequences of refined ironic language, as opposed to the innocent age of metaphor and synecdoche: “Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth.”104 This attitude to scepticism from a thinker like Vico, who had been for many years a reluctant observer of the new thought, reveals a subtler form of irony, described by Fernandez and Taylor Huber as focused on the contradiction between “platitudes” and “attitudes” (11), between what one feels socially compelled to say or do and what one would want or desire to do. In this sense, once again picaresque irony formulates its own interpretation of the conflict between self-satisfaction and common well-being. Hesitating humorously between what is suitable and what is mandatory, the picaresque protagonist finally accepts a solution of compromise by acknowledging that what is obligatory or convenient for the collective is also desirable for the individual, a typical Enlightenment ideal which, however, cannot fulfil the trickster’s aspirations; this is why, perhaps, the optimistic epilogue of eighteenth-century rogue or pseudo-rogue narratives does not entirely convince the modern ironic reader. The inconsistency of this optimism is replaced in recent tales of roguery by the option of a suspended, unsettled epilogue, not resulting from outside causes, as in the earliest picaresque novel, but from inside reasons, wherein tricksters reveal their ineptitude to cope with happiness as an absolute ideal.

God’s Laughter in Saltatempo

Henry Fielding objects that in a genuine biography the supernatural should have no place whatsoever, in the spirit of Horace’s Ars poetica: “Let not a god

104 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. from the third edition (1744) by Thomas ­Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch (Ithaca, ny: Cornell up, 1948) para 408, 118.

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intervene unless the difficulty be worthy of his assistance.”105 Stefano Benni’s overflowing narrative exuberance appears to clearly run counter to this golden rule in many ways; in fact, Saltatempo is crowded with the most disparate deities, from the God who teaches Lupetto to appreciate his inner time, to the irascible forest troll Boleto; Saint Guépière, the patron saint of sexual harmony between the couple; Saint Putilla, a “hysterical and disobedient heretic” (74) (“disobbediente eretica isterica” [54]). These deities contrast with evil supernatural agents like the Holy Pilla, who brings financial discomfort, the devil on the clock-tower, inspired by Poe, who spreads daily hassles and headaches, witches of indescribable beauty, etc. The supernatural takes centre stage in Saltatempo, but it was not totally ignored in some of the other picaresque novels discussed so far. In Baudolino, the trickster narrator strives to preserve the sacred reputation surrounding Frederick I by concealing the real cause of his death. In Time’s Arrow, the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is exalted as a kind of monstrous prophet/healer. Wise Children portrays uncle Peregrine as a larger-than-life, ancestral father figure, but with no specific metaphysical intent. Even Busi’s agnostic novel presents a not-very-admirable example of sanctity in the brief mention of Sister Luisita Bahamonte. Finally, in an episode of A Star Called Henry the protagonist enacts a miraculous healing in Templemore, pretending that his leg has grown back by divine intercession. The crowd of “pinheads, hunchbacks, dwarfs, a couple of bearded ladies” (279) witnessing the wonder, cannot help commenting on the efficiency of providence: “Look at his foot. He got a boot with the leg that’s a perfect match for the other one!” (282). In all these examples, the supernatural element is rationalised or entrusted to the most unsuitable characters and situations. In Saltatempo too, God is r­ epresented as a flesh-and-blood character, a giver of life, even in his most repulsive epiphanies: Subito l’uomo nuvola mi sorride e io capisco che solo un Dio sorride così e si accovaccia sul poggetto, controluce, tra la valeriana e il radicchio, si tira giù tre o quattro tipi di braghe e mutande e comincia a farla, ma farla davvero, è come un anaconda che si srotola, o il granone che vien giù dalla mietitrebbia, o la polenta fuori dal paiolo, è un trionfo di merda tiepida che a contatto col suolo sprigiona una nube di vapore immensa e odorosa, e più la fa e più il vapore cresce […] 105 Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, edited by David Nokes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: ­Penguin Books Ltd, 1982) 117 and 273, note 68.

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E Dio prende da sotto la capparella una foglia di fico che si trova solo nei giardini dell’Eden, così bella pentalobata e lustra, senza peluria stracciaculo […]. Poi lancia la foglia biodegradabile che vola planando verso valle, e io immagino che se arriverà santa e immerdata fin sul piazzale della chiesa diventerà reliquia e verranno da tutti i paesi a vedere la Foglia di Dio e io diventerò come Bernadette, esclusa la castità. (14) The cloud-man smiles at me straight away, and it is clear that only a god could smile like that. Then he squats down on the hillock, silhouetted against the light, surrounded by heliotrope and chicory, and tugs down three or four different varieties of trousers and underpants, and then he starts taking a crap. And not just any old crap, the mother of all dumps: it looks like an anaconda unwinding, or kernels of corn pouring out of a combine harvester, or warm polenta being tipped out of a huge pot; it’s a spectacular triumph of lukewarm shit, and when it spreads out on the ground it unleashes an immense and aromatic mist of steam […] And God takes from beneath his cape a fig leaf that can be found only in the gardens of Eden, gleaming, five-lobed, and without any of that butt-scratching fuzz […]. Then he launches the biodegradable leaf into the air, and it glides away down into the valley, and I imagine that if it lands, holy and shit-covered, on the square in front of the church, it will become a relic, and people will come from all over to venerate the Leaf of God, and I’ll become a latterday St. Bernadette – leaving aside the chastity. (15–16) In this droll description, the narrator blends together pagan lore – the fecundity of nature, twisted biblical references – the fig leaf used as toilet paper, and Christian elements – the holy relic. This sylvan representation of the Supreme Being seems to refer back to Bakhtin’s revisitation of the folkloric-grotesque aspects of devotion, the farcical reversal of life and death and the corruptingregenerating virtue of the lower body. In fact, in his work on Rabelais, Bakhtin only refers to one author of picaresque fiction, Francisco de Quevedo, but with no direct mention of El Buscón. However, the popular festive humour of the carnival emerges, time and again, in many classic tales of roguery, especially the parody of religious dogmas and doctrines, the comic debasement of the solemnity of a ritual, essential components of what the Russian critic identifies with the Rabelaisian comic-grotesque world. Bakhtin’s point of view regarding

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the gradual loss of the essence of carnivalesque humour after the sixteenth century should perhaps be reconsidered since, although some of the folkloric roots of the carnival spirit have been lost forever, some forms of irreverent laughter based on the Dionysian theme are still discernible in recent literature. If the secularisation of today’s society does not seem to draw on religious conformity as a source of parody, it is possible to discover new forms of devotion that often replace religious beliefs. In Saltatempo, one of these surrogates for religion is certainly money/Mammon, personified by the Sacred Pilla – a slang term for “money”. The absolute trust in the infallibility of rational thought is another modern idol, with the extreme consequence that even deities refuse to admit their own perfection. For instance, when the happy God reveals that there are secret correlations between places and times, even a passage that joins the village with Maracaibo, Saltatempo thinks he is witnessing some sort of sublime revelation. Instead, the God self-ironically reveals that the missing links between parts of the world can be easily found at a travel agency (260; 378). God confesses that his own time is measured by the duoclock (15; 18) and he even declares, in a not-too-condemning tone, that the devil makes more sophisticated clocks than he does. With shameless honesty, the happy God seems to relinquish the role of ‘watchmaker’ that the philosophical tradition, from Descartes and Newton to Voltaire and William Paley, has metaphorically assigned to Him. In his analogy of the watchmaker, William Paley argues that while it is arduous to define the origin of inanimate natural objects like stones, which may have existed since time immemorial, some other more complex events must lead back to a creator, a “maker”. He uses the metaphor of the watch: “the watch must have had a maker; […] there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.” (6).106 Benni’s ‘happy’ God, instead, seems to elude, in a clownish manner, the encumbrance of being the ultimate cause of all phenomena, while the gods of this upside-down pantheon desperately 106 Later on, he infers that “if other parts of nature were inaccessible to our inquiries, or even if other parts of nature presented nothing to our examination but disorder and confusion, the validity of this example would remain the same. If there were but one watch in the world, it would not be less certain that it had a maker.” (44). See William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (Boston: Lincoln & Edwards, 1829). Richard Dawkins proposes an interesting and slightly humorous compromise between Paley and Darwin in The Blind Watchmaker (Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1986).

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aspire to resemble human beings, even in their most questionable attitudes. For instance, the happy God exhibits his spectacular diving skills to a couple of young German ladies, and has some earthly quibbles with Venus: [Venus:] – Se sei venuto a chiedere scusa, risparmiatelo. – Ho avuto da fare – balbettò Dio – riunioni, teofanie, apparizioni. ­Anche un ribaltone. Ti prego, perdonami. […] – Le dee… – sospirò il Dio. (261) “If you’ve come to apologize, save your breath.” “I’ve been busy,” stammered the god, “meetings, theophanies, apparitions. Even a palace coup. Please, honey, forgive me.” […] “Goddesses…” sighed the god. (379–80) A previous section has illustrated how the picaresque endeavours to rebut the rules of cause and effect, in the style of such a typical Enlightenment sceptic like David Hume. But how does this rejection of causality compromise the figure of an all-providing Supreme Being? Doubting Leibniz’s wise world full of grief and his blind optimism, Voltaire created the tragicomic figure of Doctor Pangloss, with his motto “all is for the best” in “the best of possible worlds,”107 a commandment that immunises him against the most gruesome calamities and personal tragedies. Voltaire had reflected on the theological justification of God’s will in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, about the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. To Voltaire, the moralist’s view of a divine plan for humankind brings a sarcastic ring to the tragedy: Oh worthless bliss! in injured reason’s sight, With faltering voice you cry, “What is, is right”? The universe confutes your boasting vain, Your heart retracts the error you maintain. Men, beasts, and elements know no repose From dire contention; earth’s the seat of woes: We strive in vain its secret source to find.

107 Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, translated by Burton Raffel (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale up, 2005) 17.

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Is ill the gift of our Creator kind?108 Voltaire envisages hope as the only escape from human misery but, as the poem’s last lines lament, hope brings a rather poor consolation. Suggestively, he observes religious faith from the point of view of a non-Christian: A caliph once when his last hour drew nigh, Prayed in such terms as these to the most high: “Being supreme, whose greatness knows no bound, I bring thee all that can’t in Thee be found; Defects and sorrows, ignorance and woe.” Hope he omitted, man’s sole bliss below. (569) Hope is compared to and closely associated with human faults, a feeling that seems to be unknown even to the divine being. Voltaire’s disillusion about ­experience as a way to understand man’s relation with the eternal is reaffirmed, in a less serious mood, by Saltatempo’s scepticism about wisdom as ­accumulative experience and infallible causation. What differentiates him from the French Aufklärer’s pessimism is the idea that God does not rule with an infallible iron fist over his creatures, but he at times succumbs to the anomalies of consequence, or at least has the discretion to feign some kind of inadequacy, which, in comparison, makes human beings look less hopeless in dealing with the supernatural. In a passage from Saltatempo, the council of the gods is to decide Lupetto’s destiny, but the happy God interferes with the normal course of the deliberation by proposing a die be cast. This appealing to fortune to decide a mortal’s fate seems to recall the blind providence of Voltaire’s God, but, once again, God frustrates Saltatempo’s quest for a rational explanation with a paroxysm of nonsense: – Il dado lo tiro io, bello, è questo il trucco. Ho tirato il dado e ho detto: che strano. Il dado dice che tocca a Fefelli. […] – Così vi giocate le nostre vite ai dadi. – Come voi ve le giocate in Borsa. Ma no, ma no. Abbiamo tenuto conto del tuo coraggio e delle raccomandazioni e del fatto che sei uno dei pochi fessi che ancora crede in noi. (263) 108 Voltaire, The Lisbon Earthquake: An Inquiry into the Maxim, “Whatever is, is right”, translated by Tobias Smollett and others (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1977) 565.

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“No, I’m the one who tosses the dice, sweetheart, that’s where the skill comes in. I tossed the dice and I said: ‘Hmmm, that’s odd. According to the dice, fate has chosen Fefelli.’” […] “So you play for our lives with a toss of the dice.” “The way you do in the stock exchange? No, no, it’s not like that at all. We took into account your courage and the recommendations you received and the fact that you’re one of the few idiots alive who still believe in us.” (383) God’s defence of the council’s decision calls to mind some suspect selection of a candidate for a job, when the right recommendations and the candidate’s declaration of faith in the company become the mandatory criteria for the pícaro’s salvation. Moreover, despite the fact that human beings are incapable of determining their own fate, the God comically offers the protagonist a choice of at least sixteen possible futures, including the fairly remote option of becoming Pope (265; 383). The carnivalesque improbability of Benni’s representation of an imperfect pantheon seems to offer, beyond its semi-serious tone, a quite fascinating approach to religion and spirituality that somehow befits today’s increasingly secularised society and clashes against politicised religious conformity.

Concluding Remarks This study of recent picaresque fiction in English and Italian has ventured into a relatively uncharted area of comparative studies: instead of proceeding from the investigation of the presence, or influence, of a theme in a selected corpus of novels, it has argued how the texts themselves acknowledged, championed or, at times, rejected some crucial topics that have animated the history of ideas for centuries, for example the question of historical reliability, the condition of being alienated from society or from one’s own self, the complications of sexual and gender identity, the conflict between the personal and the political sphere. In general, this analysis avoided delving too deeply into decades-old disputes about the picaresque as a genre, a subgenre, or even a more loosely normative mode of story-telling. The reason for this choice is that it seems that encapsulating the tale of roguery into a set of rules making up the ‘pedigree’ of a real picaresque story as opposed to imitations or hybrids of the genre would not help illustrate the wealth of meaning and significance – meant as a correlation with the extra-textual dimension1 – expressed by the picaresque novel throughout the centuries. It may be enough to say that examples of codified narrative categories, e.g. Scholes’ proto-novelistic forms, prove too arbitrary and archetypal to be accepted as a sustainable frame of analysis because they do not take into consideration culture-specific varieties and alterations of the rogue tale that still belong to its lineage. Richard Bjornson rightly observes that because every specific example of picaresque fiction is a mixed form, there is no such thing as an ideal picaresque hero or a pure picaresque novel; the picaresque myth or mode is an essential component of novels associated with the Spanish picaresque tradition, but nothing prevents it from reappearing in the lives of characters who possess a wide variety of personality traits and meet with diverse experiences.2 Bjornson’s idea of the picaresque as a type seems to be a more suitable way of discussing varieties of rogue tales whose common element is not the coexistence of formal aspects related to genre as such, but some formal, semantic or

1 This point is emphasised by Anna Trocchi in the above mentioned “Temi e miti letterari” 79. 2 Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison, wi: University of ­Wisconsin Press, 1977) 6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004311237_007

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even semiotic aspects deriving from the character of the pícaro which emerge, time and again, in different historical ages with several common, identifiable features. The study of the trickster as a quasi-mythological character has engendered a series of parallels: among the most representative, the view of the pícaro as a modern-day Prometheus who steals fire from the gods on behalf of humankind (Blackburn) or, in the previously mentioned essay by Richard Lewis,3 Pietro Spina, the protagonist of the novel Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, is interpreted as a saintly figure, a “rebel saint […] an outlaw saint” (159) partaking of human sufferings and re-enacting a farcical passion – Lazarillo’s frequent allusions to bread and wine as both nourishment and spiritual food seem to substantiate this theory. As observed earlier, references to food and greed are essential elements in the picaresque “epic of hunger”, but, presumably, they do not represent an archetypical reinvention of Christ’s sacrifice, but the more mundane significance of food as a metonymy of social climbing, selection of the fittest, or even the suppression of social or familial bonds – e.g. the macabre dinner where Pablos’ uncle serves the poor pícaro sausages presumably obtained from his father’s minced flesh. All in all, these two representations of the pícaro in a mythological light cannot amount to a general definition of the literary trickster who, as observed in Chapters 2 and 3 of this study, is often a champion of demystification. Before drawing a conclusion, a few more words ought to be spent on the content of each chapters in this study. Chapter 1 has highlighted the significance of history in the picaresque novel, not as an unquestionable given, a process delineated throughout the epochs by a supreme force – God, for Augustin and Tocqueville; the socio-economic revolution, for the Marxists, etc. – or by the cyclical fluctuation in the level of cultural and technical progress in a specific society (Vico), but as the object of a complex rhetorical construct, in which forgery and mystification of events play a meaning-subverting role. Through the picaresque voice of an unreliable chronicler, the writing of history has unveiled its patent vindication of objectivity in the guise of a third-person account on behalf of the dialectic, polemical tone of a first-person history maker. In that sense, the final scene of Eco’s novel, prior to Baudolino’s sudden departure, sees Niketas hesitating between the historian’s need to retrace Baudolino’s gesta, transforming it into a third-person account, the “discourse of the dead”, or simply forget about it. The astute Paphnutius makes his point very clear: “a writer of histories cannot 3 Richard W.B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960) 150–60: “Both Pietro Spina and the novel he inhabits have perceived the nature of life itself, and have taken possession of it: life as companionship, the peaceful sharing between two persons of intimate human reality” (152).

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put his faith in such uncertain testimony. Strike Baudolino from your story.” (520) (“uno scrittore di Istorie non può prestare fede a una testimonianza così incerta. Cancella Baudolino dal tuo racconto.” [525]). As argued before, the discourse of history requires a third-person account but, at the same time, a first-person figure will unwittingly leap out of the pages. And this is exactly what Paphnutius does not want to reveal, for the reconstruction of the past always weaves in references to the present; in this case, the outrageous smuggling of relics out of Byzantium by the Genoese forgers who happened to be hosting Baudolino and Niketas. The concluding comment becomes a metanarrative reflection on the arbitrariness of ‘old’ history: “‘You surely don’t believe you’re the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone – a greater liar than Baudolino – will tell it’.” (521) (“‘Non crederti l’unico autore di storie a questo mondo. Prima o poi qualcuno, più bugiardo di Baudolino, la racconterà.’” [526]). Baudolino did not leave behind any manuscripts of his adventures, and Niketas was the only audience who ever listened to his “uncertain testimony”; thus, who else will be able to record it? Moreover, Baudolino is supposed to belong to a timeless present since the narrator does not reveal his fate after he embarks on this new journey. It is then arguably a dramatic ironical reference not to Umberto Eco as a future liar, but to what Seymour Chatman identifies, in rather obscure, quasi-metaphysical terms, as the “implied author”, who “only empowers others to ‘speak’”, “a silent source of information.”4 This transcendence of the author is overlooked in historical accounts by the fact that history should proceed from an identifiable mouthpiece; thence, if a Historia is to be proclaimed to an audience, it will have to appropriate an author, therefore the almost mystical concept of historiography as the exclusive creation of an anonymous demiurge has to be reconsidered as only one of the possible ways of dignifying written history. The present also filters through the pages of Parrot and Olivier in America, wherein the state of democracy in the newly-born state, or of Western countries more generally, often unfolds in the background. In an interview at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne (24 May 2010), Carey mentions the fact that his novel had been written during the upheaval occurring in the last months of George W. Bush’s administration, a moment when debates about the use of violence in international issues and the ghost of a new form of colonialism were putting personal liberty and democratic institutional guarantees in ­serious jeopardy.

4 Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and in Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell up, 1990) 85.

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A close correlation may be established between the silent instance, giving vent to a narrator’s voice, and de Certeau’s principle of the “unsaid” (44) as the basis for a new significance in the writing of history. Both narrative and history converge towards two dimensions of time (the ‘now’ and ‘then’), hesitating between the ‘real’ (referential meaning) and the ‘unsaid’ (significance). Mikhail Bakhtin contends that the novel’s temporal-axiological orientation is firmly rooted in an ever-changing present, without a beginning or an end, a position that challenges the constraints time imposes on other literary genres (epic, tragedy, etc.). Thus, shifting this perspective towards the historical novel, the contamination produced by the present could not but influence remarkably the way history is retold and written, separating once and for all the discourse of history from the constraints of the epos, or heroic literature – including Hegel’s theory of the novel as a bourgeois surrogate for epic poetry – which lies encrusted in an absolute past (see also Chapter 4). In the novelistic transfer of the past into a present-day situation, history participates in an incomplete, unlimited sense of time.5 According to Lotman, even when they recount the remotest past events, novels restructure the process of becoming of an event, reliving it in the present and redirecting it into a future perspective (Cercare la strada, 80, note 3). This is even more plausible for a picaresque narrative, whose mock-heroic, derisory tone, insinuates a defection of the past as the only possible paradigm in historical fiction. Reconnecting with the initial remarks on the postmodern fancy for pastiche, the acceptance of a relativistic point of view concerning the infallibility of historical discourse becomes the basis of Fredric Jameson’s objection that the scope of a traditional historical novel is unattainable in postmodern literature: The historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only represent our idea and stereotypes of that past […] we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.6 As a result, instead of endowing fiction with the privilege of credibility, or a pretext for verisimilitude, historical detail finally yields to the presumption of 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) 4 and ff. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke: Duke up, 1991) 25. I owe this quotation to the already mentioned article by Margherita Ganeri, The Double Bind 45.

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history as a shared act of writing. And picaresque narrative implements this discovery with striking effects. Chapter 2 has dealt with alienation and estrangement from a cultural standpoint. Starting with Lotman’s theory of the interchange between the centre of the semiosphere and its boundaries, it has been possible to identify the role of the rogue as an outsider with respect to mainstream culture, but from a privileged position inside it. The stranger, whose main attribution is space, inhabits the self and raises doubts about the certainties of the semiotic centre, as ‘Odilo’ suggests by way of his separation from, and conflict within the self: this assumption has led to a definition of the ‘boundary’ as a gateway to new information. On the one hand, Lotman and Uspensky delineate a gulf between myth and metadescription, between naming as a way of establishing a close nexus between language and its object – “the world as text” – and synonymy as a way of eluding any form of labelling of factual reality – “the world as a non-text” – on the other. The pícaro, a stranger inside the status quo, engages in a semiotic dialogue where mirror symmetry, the recognition of the alien entity as a double, becomes the most effective instrument of new information. Consequently, the picaresque hero rejects the mythological conscience of proper names to embrace the logic of synonymy, of metadescription. The components of metalanguage that have been considered are circumlocution, inverted euphemism and synecdoche, in terms of style; improvisation, as opposed to acting as a ritual, e.g. the contrast between Carlo and Michele, in terms of behavioural text. Finally, a third category has been the pragmatic function of rhetorical questions. Waldenfels contends that questions from strangers already assert their due space in our conscience, regardless of our willingness to answer them. However, the present approach to rhetorical questions takes a different direction: a rhetorical question can be much more thought-provoking and controversial than a question that implies a broad range of possible answers, or a question that admits an affirmative or negative response. The high occurrence of rhetorical questions in both novels may allude to their significance in the interaction between mainstream and counter-culture. In Il talento, most rhetorical questions are addressed by the characters to the pícaro, and they frequently imply a ready-made answer that Carlo is unable to work out. In Time’s Arrow, instead, all questions coming from the characters are turned into rhetorical queries by the textual game of reversal, in which answers precede questions. At the same time, questions formulated by the narrator to himself or to an implied reader are predominantly without a predictable answer, therefore they verge on paradox. If the answer is given, it is completely out of focus, urging the reader to apply dramatic or historical irony to interiorise the topsy-turvy course of the events. In short, Carlo and ‘Odilo’ embody two distinct kinds of

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alienation: Carlo is an outsider in a society undermined by false mythologies, while ‘Odilo’ is isolated because, in a world that has reversed the arrow of time, he is the only one looking for some ultimate sense beyond purely ritualised actions. Comparatively, in Il talento history is a marginalised issue, it is beyond the hero’s reach, while in Amis’s novel history embodies an uncanny presence. Later in the story, when Odilo resumes his part in the events by participating in the Final Solution policy and transmutes actions told in reverse into a ritual, the picaresque pathos is spoiled and ‘historical’ irony stops being a shared experience between teller and reader. In Time’s Arrow historical facts, though so devastating in the reader’s conscience, have little direct influence on the protagonist: he rewrites and assembles single historical facts into events so that he does not succumb to them. Once history is retold, the only danger he has to shelter himself from is the “return of the repressed”: as Amis points out, it feels as though the burden of the Holocaust has been thrown entirely on the readers’ backs (see the interview at the Guardian Book Club, mentioned earlier). The moment Odilo transforms his experiences at Auschwitz into an esoteric ritual, he renounces both his picaresque ingenuity, and the reader’s sympathy. Chapter 3 explored aspects of gender and sexuality in two picaresque narratives featuring female protagonists and it attempted to trace several connections with the mainstream literary tradition, beginning with a basic example of a narrative picaresque outlook: Asinus Aureus by Apuleius. Presenting the tale of Cupid and Psyche as a parody of the Platonic image of eroticism where metaphysical curiosity has an essential role, this study has investigated the directions this demystification of the body-soul dualism could take in relation to further examples of the picaresque, with explicit reference to Busi’s and ­Carter’s novels. Pícaras contradict the stereotype of women as persecuted virgins, saintly creatures or deadly seducers to embrace an idea of woman as a willingly infertile, atypically anti-motherly rebel against the laws of nature, because it is precisely in the name of nature that the discriminations regarding gender and sexuality arise. A second stage involves the definition of the impact of procreation, of the expectations of motherhood and parental commitment as antagonistic forces which the female rogue constantly effaces in that they are justifications for an immutable female ‘gender trap’. Interestingly, both novels insist on depicting the evolution of masculinity within the story. Busi, who sarcastically dedicates his book to males (“ai maschi” [5]), investigates different expressions and degenerations of manhood, and the same criticism underpins Carter’s novel too. On the whole, the male characters vaunt the ideal of fertility as a justification for perpetuating their gender trap on women and on inferior men as well. Sexual subjugation equals power and the right to manipulate their victims’ will. But this infallible construction is destined to crumble

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to pieces, ­according to both narrators, for a single, devastating reason:  men cannot exist or assert their primacy without relying blindly on a set of ideals and abstractions. Busi’s male characters are obsessed with procreation and inheritance and, consequently, despise Delfina for her rejection of marriage, motherhood – which she tragically associates with rape – and patriarchy. At the same time, they resemble Carter’s men figures insofar as they revel in the myths and fables justifying family values, even though they are devoid of any real moral purpose: in Wise Children, for instance, legitimacy extends from biology and egotism to art and literature, the high culture of Shakespeare as opposed to the pantomime or the big screen, even involving British ­imperialism. In both novels, then, men emerge as dreamers, myth-makers of themselves, while women are the pragmatic, myth-crushing other half of the spectrum. Dora’s home in Bard Road swarms with women who followed the voice of rationality beyond instinctive behaviour, such as motherly instinct: women who refused motherhood (Dora), whose motherly devotion has been trampled upon (Lady A.), who rejected irresponsible fathers of their future progeny (Tiffany) and women who could not become mothers the ‘normal’, ‘easy’ way, but fulfil themselves in the new role of ‘ersatz’ parent (Nora and Grandma Chance). Emblematic representatives of this matter-of-fact attitude to life are the grandmothers in the two stories: Laudomia and Grandma Chance. The former opens Delfina’s eyes to the “abracadabra” of her name and its connection with the slaughter of dolphins – with its multiple symbolism – perpetuated eternally in the family name. On the other hand, Grandma Chance and her motto “hope for the best, expect the worst” is the first to introduce the twins to their illegitimacy, to explain what fathers do to mothers, and even though by way of magic revelations, near the end of the story, she reminds her seventy-five-year-old goddaughters to “pluck the day” (190): this is picaresque wisdom, the quality that makes a child ‘wise’. Finally, the demystification of literature is extensively discussed and enacted in both works: Busi’s book is sprinkled with references to Italian literary tradition (e.g.: Pascoli) and to a caricature of literature as an eternising force. In Carter’s novel, Shakespeare is depicted as an icon of theatre and pantomime (“2b or not 2b” is the title of a burlesque), television quizzes and B-grade movies, while his plays become both instruments of chauvinistic manipulation and magnifying lenses for human tragedies and farces. Carter polemically asserts that “Shakespeare just isn’t an intellectual”, and he should be reinstated as an example of popular culture: “our greatest writer is the intellectual equivalent of bubble-gum, but can make twelve-year-old girls cry, can foment revolutions in Africa, can be translated into Japanese and leave not a dry eye in the house.” (New Writing 186). Dora’s narrative reverberations of Shakespeare are

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full of ‘what ifs’: she wonders what would have happened if Hamlet had been an illegitimate son, or if Cordelia had been Lear’s natural daughter: would their heroism be diminished? Keeping Lear’s and Gloucester’s story in mind, these revelations would have meant a total disruption of the cultural order in favour of complete anarchy, where legitimacy would not imply purity of heart and innocence, and vice versa, as is often the case in Shakespeare, and illegitimacy would reinstate the principle of a pre-cultural stage in human relationships. It is essential to note Carter’s literary commitment to what she calls the “demythologizing business”, wherein myth is regarded as “extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree”.7 Her disdain for ideological barriers between high and low culture, and Busi’s ultimately ethical, polemical aversion to hypocrisies and conformism that enslave consciences, constitute the greatest affinity between the two novelists. Chapter 4 examined the interaction of two main themes related to a modern view of picaresque narrative: humour, with its bifurcation in Voltairian smirk and carnival-grotesque laughter on the one hand and, on the other, the repercussions of the Enlightenment way of thinking on the tale of roguery. With a relatively high degree of confidence, it is possible to assume that irony, satire and parody are three keywords in the definition of the Enlightenment spirit and in the supersession of a simplistic view of the Age of Reason as an epoch of rigorous non-dialectic rationalism. With its contradictory power, irony invites the reader to engage in a sympathetic dialogue with the narrator and opens up new alternatives in the comprehension of reality beyond the plain antagonism of opposites. In this strategy of irony, stability is a landmark of the pícaro, an unreliable narrator by disposition, but precisely because of that, the most suitable ambassador of scepticism and of a constructive play of contradictions, where one of the opposites must be true: truth must hide somewhere because it is the conditio sine qua non of contradiction. Irony and satire do not usually point towards designated victims but they often reflect on the narrating selves, or on the community they represent or contest; this is strikingly true in both novels analysed here. Doyle and Benni enjoy a wide and diversified readership, and they have produced a considerable corpus of best-selling fiction. One of the reasons for this diversity may lie in the captivating manner in which both writers deal with the humorous deconstruction of their own national myths, such as the patriotic struggle for Irish independence in the case of Doyle, and the resistance movement with its legacy to the subsequent political intelligentsia in Italy, in the 7 Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” in Wandor Michelene (ed.), On Gender Writing (London: Pandora, 1983) 71.

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case of Benni. A series of critiques have been aimed at Benni’s later f­iction – especially since the early 1990s – for representing a series of predictable ­antagonisms between good left-wing and bad right-wing characters.8 Nevertheless, this comment would sound inappropriate as regards Saltatempo, since the author’s aversion to the aggressive, money-driven capitalists-politicians is often counterbalanced by his sense of humorous disillusion and an admonition to overhaul the intemperance of some ideologically misled Communist groups. In both texts, the great manipulators of society try to replace parochialism with their own version of a provincial mentality, wreaking devastation and threatening an irreparable loss of a sense of humour and its “community of understanding”. In this anti-comic context, the trickster acts as both a gatekeeper of laughter and a sceptical denigrator of human experience as an indisputable moral guide. In more general terms, the picaresque style revels in a somehow specific grammar establishing a set of situational rules, based on, for example, the abundance of deictics of time and space, defying the timelessness of historical data, the use of a polemical, dialectic vocative pronoun ‘you’, the contrast between markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’, often in the same sentence. As to combinatory units, they include the extended use of synecdoche and metonymy, reducing, for example, the historical celebrity to a combination of details that disrupt the established, official picture. The pícaros represent the absurdities of the world around them through the amplification of grotesque details which, despite its implausibility, borders inevitably on hyperrealism. The tale of roguery is thus not a realistic narrative, as many scholars have maintained, but a sceptical, anti-experiential account where the real, somehow more chaotic than fiction (Chapter 2), is nothing more than one version of the possible, even in the presumably objective domain of historical facts – from the legend of Frederick Barbarossa (Eco) to Tocqueville’s exploratory journey to the United States (Carey). A further aspect contemplated by this study is the combination of rhetorical devices used in picaresque narrative with three major themes pertaining to the eight contemporary novels included in this book: the question of alienation; the tormented, rebellious nature of sexual relationships between the picaresque heroine and her surroundings; and the political-philosophical impact of the ideas of freedom, common good and utilitarianism. In their problematic segregation at the margins, the pícaros bring new cultural information 8 Monica Boria refers to Corrado Augias’ negative comment about Benni, described as a “­moralist” or a “Lenten preacher.” See “Sinistra dalle mani vuote”, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, 9 February 1996, cited in Monica Boria, “I romanzi di Stefano Benni,” 54.

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across the borders of mainstream society and, at the same time, they exploit the semiotic centre’s own obsession with empty rituals, its lack of flexibility and resistance towards novelty – see, for instance, the question of symmetry and asymmetry in Chapter 2 in relation to the works of De Marchi and Amis. In the battle of the sexes, the pícara defies most expectations her gender role is supposed to fulfil according to social constraints: she escapes motherhood and a formal role in the couple; she demystifies both the saintly and the sinful attributes tradition has inflicted upon women; she also vouchsafes the paradoxical logic of arriving at transcendence through the bumpy road of excess and transgression, as in the case of the novels by Busi and Carter. On the political-­philosophical front, the tricksters face, in their own quizzical way, one of the most ground-breaking events in the history of human thought: the Enlightenment. Interestingly, a new upsurge of picaresque stories starts the modern novel in the eighteenth century, in which the rogue character becomes, along with the germane type of the ingénu, a privileged observer of complex dilemmas like the role of man as a rational individual living amongst a not always reasonable community, the conflict between the supernatural – e.g. ­deism – and the doctrinal, or the defence of causation determining human actions against the chaos of irrationality. Since their appearance on the literary scene, the pícaros have embodied all these contradictions, but especially since the modern age, they have become the harbingers of a constructive scepticism, which finds a pointed expression in the novels of Benni and Doyle. This said, a final observation should be made about the future developments of studies in the picaresque. First of all, it is desirable to extend the study of the tale of roguery to non-European literatures, as already mentioned in relation to Vittorio Strada’s suggestions. Secondly, the picaresque is likely to produce new inheritors in more recent literature, as the themes of alienation and otherness, the emergence of sexual ‘minorities’, the renewed battle for civil rights in many areas of the world, global mobility, migration, the debate on the question of ius soli as a first stage towards integration in countries like Italy, and so forth, have only been temporarily silenced by an optimistic cry for globalisation on the economic as well as on the cultural front. The picaresque “watchtower of human life” is always vigilant, and the topsy-turvy perspective of an outcast with a sharp eye offers an effective insight into the complexities of today.

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Index Adams, Gerry 230, 230n56 Adorno, Theodor W. 238n65 Agulló y Cobo, Mercedes 72n18 Alemán, Mateo 13, 106, 165, 177, 224, 243, 247 Alighieri, Dante 39, 69, 89, 199 Alpert, Michael 165n70 Alter, Robert 2, 128, 128n21, 189n5 Alziator, Francesco 5, 6, 9 America 32, 33, 36, 38, 43, 45, 52, 53, 64 Amis, Martin 4, 6, 11, 67, 81n31, 103, 115, 277, 281 Androgynous 130 Folklore and the 128n22 Picaresque and the 131, 132 Plato and the 127 Aphrodite Pandemos 125 Heavenly 125, 126 Apollinaire, Guillaume 149n57 Apuleius, Lucius Madaurensis 1, 1n1, 134, 134n28, 136, 136n32, 138, 139, 172, 190, 277 Aristotle 19, 19n19, 72, 197n21, 206–207, 207n32 A Star Called Henry 4, 188–271 Augias, Corrado 280n8 Augustine of Hippo 55–56, 61, 134n28, 273 Auschwitz Concentration Camp 69, 77, 87, 100n45, 101n46, 113, 115, 119, 277 Australia 34, 35, 36 Bage, Robert 191–192 Bakhtin, Mikhail 18n12, 50, 190, 192, 195, 196, 198, 218, 218n45, 223, 267–268, 275 Barthes, Roland 206n31, 232n59 Bassnett, Susan 214 Bataille, Georges 124, 150–151, 158n64, 163 Baudolino 3n6, 13–65, 98, 210, 266, 273 Beauvoir, Simone de 142 Beccaria, Cesare 245–246 Beerbohm, Max 49 Bellini, Bernardo 198 Benni, Stefano 6, 6n10, 108n53, 193, 215, 227n55, 234, 266, 279, 281 Bentham, Jeremy 262–263, 263n101 Benveniste, Émile 21, 40, 41

Bjornson, Richard 272 Blackburn, Alexander 2, 3, 14, 273 Boccaccio, Giovanni 2 Booth, Wayne C. 2n3, 20, 30, 40, 199, 200–201, 202, 203, 206, 210n38, 221–222, 222n49, 223, 232 Borelli, Vittorio 254 Brancaforte, Benito 247n87 Bree, Daniel ‘Dan’ 225 Burke, Edmund 253 Busi, Aldo 4, 6n10, 11, 120, 151n59, 161, 165, 166, 175, 176, 177, 179, 224, 251, 266, 277, 278, 279, 281 Caillois, Roger 163, 163n68 Calvino, Italo 8 Carducci, Giosuè 32n36 Carey, Peter 3, 36, 274, 280 Carnivalesque 71, 102, 105, 130, 162, 163, 186, 192, 195, 196, 218, 226, 252, 267–268 Carter, Angela 6, 121, 125n12, 141n41, 146n52, 151n59, 160n65, 161, 178n85, 277, 278, 279, 281 Casanova, Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt 240 Cederna, Camilla 209n36 Certeau, Michel de 15, 16n10, 36, 40, 46, 50, 61 “Absent third party” 40, 42 Materia and ornamentum 55 Metaphor and allegory to 43, 46 Réel 36, 42 “Return of the repressed” 61 “Unsaid” in 50, 56, 60, 275 “Writing of history” 57 Cervantes, Miguel de 1, 11, 72, 72n19, 73, 189, 189n4, 191, 198 Chatman, Seymour 113 Chatman, Seymour 274 Churchill, Randolph 227 Cicero 197 Collins, Michael 211–212, 213, 218, 225, 227 Combination Comparison 52, 55 Figures of 21 Metonymy as 21, 22

299

Index Synecdoche as 21, 61 Conley, Tom 37 Connolly, James 218, 225, 254–255 Cook, Malcolm 189, 189n6 Corominas, Joan 4 Correa, Gustavo 2 Cortina Gómez, Rodolfo 18n13 Cross-dressing 127, 128 Nakedness and 129 Transvestism and 129 See also disguise Cultural interchange Asymmetry and 84–85, 109, 111, 281 Entropy and 113 Mirror symmetry and 86–87, 276 Symmetry and 83–84, 281 Culture Boundaries of 71–72, 73 Conventional 106 Definition of 70 Mainstream 68, 78, 82, 106, 107, 109, 114 Semiotics of 79, 83 Stranger and 81 Cupid 136, 136n33 Psyche’s rebellion against 137 D’Agostino, Gabriella 130 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 172 Darnton, Robert 195, 196n18 Dawkins, Richard 268n106 De Marchi, Cesare 6, 66, 69, 88, 90, 277, 281 De Valera, Éamon 225 Deduction 32 Enthymeme and 33, 48, 54 Induction and 32 Del Monte, Alberto 4 Delfina 149 Origin of the name 149, 150, 166 della Terza, Dante 222n50 Derrida, Jacques 79–80, 82, 232 Descartes René 79, 245, 245n81, 248 Disguise 131 Don Quixote 72, 72n20, 73 Doyle, Roddy 4, 22n25, 193, 237, 279, 281 Dublin 194 Dylan, Bob 201 Eagleton, Terry 239n65 Eco, Umberto 3, 3n6, 6, 15, 16, 34, 43, 88, 201, 205n29, 241n74, 274, 280

Il nome della rosa 14, 17, 43 Il pendolo di Foucault 210n37 “Language, Power, Force” 43, 45 El Buscón 2, 13, 140n40, 247–248, 263, 273 Elias, Norbert 70 Enantionmorphism See mirror symmetry Enlightenment 120, 196 Common good and 245, 265 Contradiction and 207n32, 208 Galilean thought and 241, 244 Humour and 238–244 Idea of happiness and 262–264 Metanarrative 239n65 Morality and 256, 263, 264 Nature and 120–121, 122 Picaresque and 6, 86, 192, 195, 233, 238–248, 249, 279 Postmodern and 201, 233, 238, 238n65 Project 241n73 Religious authority and 246, 263, 263n102 Scepticism and 207, 253, 255, 259, 265, 269 Semiosis in the 88 Spirituality and 263n102, 264 Epistemology 241–243, 244, 259 Enlightenment and 241, 245 Galilean 241, 241n73, 242–243 picaresque and 242 ontology and 241n74, 242, 244 Erasmus, Desiderius 206, 206n30 Eroticism 124, 137, 138, 139, 162 Death and 137 Denial of 163 Grotesque and 137, 137n34 Immortality and 138, 281 Innocence and 174 Repulsion and 137 Social convenience and 162 Transgression and 124, 138, 162 Eternal child (‘fanciullino’) 172, 173, 174 Exogamy 150 Fatherhood 155–156, 167, 182, 183, 186 Felix Krull 137, 180n86, 186, 251 Female demystification 164, 233 Literary realism and 179, 278 Primeval innocence and 170–175

300 Female demystification (Cont.) Religion and 165–167 Sentimental love and 167–170 Theatrical representation of 184 Femininity 142 Social construct 142, 154 Fengler, Maria 194n15 Ferrara Giuliano 220n48 Fertility 126, 144, 277 Fiction Happy ending in 68 Reality and 66–67 Fielding, Henry 12, 12n25, 189, 189n4, 190, 190n7, 191, 191n10, 265–266 Fishelov, David 10 Fitzgerald Francis Scott 200 Fitz-Maurice Kelly, James 73n21 Ford, John 230 Foscolo, Ugo 169, 169n73 Foucault, Michel 79, 239n65 Fowler, Alastair 10n22 Frederick I Barbarossa 16, 22, 23, 34, 39, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62–63, 280 French Revolution 24, 43, 44, 45, 49 Freud, Sigmund 61, 126–127, 133, 142, 145n49, 151, 165, 180n86 Friedman, Edward H. 224n53 Friedman, Edward H. 224n53 Frow, John 9, 9n20, 11 Frye, Northrop 19 Fullbrook, Kate and Edward 143n46 Gaeltacht 236–237 Galimberti, Umberto 149, 149n56, 168, 182n87 Ganeri, Margherita 15 Gender Ambiguity 162 Biology and 157 Definition of 123 Frame 142 Identity 121, 122, 124, 130, 140, 156, 157, 162 Picaresque and 158, 277 Role 130, 281 Trap 154, 159, 164, 165, 277 Genette, Gérard 47, 47n48 Gervaso, Roberto 240 Gil Blas 127–128, 189, 189n6, 244, 249, 263 Gissing, George 143n47

Index Glissant Édouard 7 Gnisci, Armando 7 God 193, 251, 254–255, 262, 264, 264n103, 265–271, 273 Happy 236, 259 Pagan deity 193, 251–252, 266, 267 Godwin, William 253, 253n95 Goffman, Erving 123n8, 140, 140n39, 141n42, 148n55 Formal and informal relations 140, 140n39 ‘Frame trap’ 157 ‘Gender trap’ 154, 164 ‘Parent-child complex’ 153 ‘Role distance’ 164n69 ‘Sexual placement’ 152–153 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 22, 47 Isotopes of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ 47 Semiotic square 47, 48, 63, 207n32 Guevara, Ernest Che 228 Guillén, Claudio 7, 7n13, 18n13 Guzmán de Alfarache 5, 13, 62, 68n7, 72, 73, 76, 106, 191n9, 224, 242, 243, 247, 263 Hahn, Juergen 72, 72n20 Hanrahan, Thomas 71n16, 190–191 Head Richard 242 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 188, 200, 275 Helvétius 247 Historical fiction First-person narrator in 40 Meaning and significance in 21–25, 50 Historical novel 15, 17, 20 History Anonymity and 212 Creativity and 15 Epistemology of 26 Fathers of the Church and 36, 56 Facts and events in 15, 43, 46, 57 Fiction and 14–15, 17, 19, 40, 275 Hellenistic tradition and 36, 59, 61 Irony and 26, 30, 33, 43, 55, 112, 196, 211–212, 221, 277 Istoria and 28, 28n31, 29, 36, 51, 274 Meaning and significance in 21–25, 50 Poetry and 19 Picaresque fiction and 15–21, 30, 34, 41, 54, 213, 261–262, 273

301

Index Réel and 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 61 Writing of 16, 37, 43, 46, 50, 57, 58, 273, 275–276 Hodgkin, Paul 233 Holocaust 69, 70, 96, 115–116, 118 Homosexuality 158, 159, 162 Hooker, Ward 138n36 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 242, 243, 265 Horkheimer, Max 238n65 Hrabal, Bohumil 146, 251 Hume, David 12, 256–258, 259, 261, 264, 269 Humour Comic-grotesque 192, 195, 218, 267–268, 279 Contradiction and 203, 206–213, 221, 222, 223, 257, 265, 279 Epistemology and 243 Jokes and 204 Parody and 196, 231–238 Picaresque 210–211 Pirandello on 192n13, 198 Rabelaisian laughter 198, 218, 267–268 ‘Umore’ and 192n13 Hutcheon, Linda 15, 232, 233, 236 Illegitimacy 147, 151, 183, 184, 186, 187, 279 See also natural children 147 Immortality Art and 178 Eroticism and 138 Incest 151 Infertility 143, 146, 183–184 ira (Irish Republican Army) 212, 219, 226, 228, 229, 230, 230n56 irb (Irish Republican Brotherhood) 212 Irony 196–203, 232, 233, 265 Complicity through 203–204 Dramatic 30, 41, 63, 198, 219 Hegel on 200 Historical 26, 30, 33, 34–35, 55, 112, 221 Kierkegaard on 200 Satire and 204 Self-irony 43, 213–221 Socratic 197, 197n20 Stable 199–200, 202, 203–206, 221 Unstable 199, 200–202 Voltairian 193, 195, 198, 238–244, 279

Isis 136 Israel, Jonathan 239n65 Jakobson, Roman 21, 46, 90, 110, 110n54 Jameson, Fredrick 275 Johnson, Bryan Stanley 66 Johnson, Samuel 243n79 Kant, Immanuel 88, 255 Kavanagh, Patrick 214 Kenney, Edward J. 135 Kirkman, Francis 242 Knox, Norman 197, 197n21 Lagioia, Nicola 176 Language Arbitrary choices of 88, 235 Encyclopedia and 88 Folly and 79–80 German 84, 87, 100 Latin 234 Metalanguage and 102 Reality and 80 Semiosis and 89 Vernacular and 235 La Valva, RosaMaria 172, 172n75 Lazarillo de Tormes 2, 5, 13, 18, 68n7, 71–72, 76n25, 78, 170, 177, 191n10, 193, 247, 263, 273 Legitimacy 146, 156, 185, 186 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 207, 207n33, 208, 208n34, 269 Leopardi, Giacomo 172, 172n78 Lesage, Alain René 72, 72n19, 189n6, 224, 243, 244, 249 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 245 Levi, Primo 68n10, 84, 84n33, 96, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119 Levinas, Emmanuel 68, 73, 73n22, 79, 102 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 150, 151, 182n87, 185 Lewis, Richard W.B. 273, 273n3 Lifton, Robert Jay 81n31, 101n47 Loach, Ken 219n46 Locatelli, Angela 18n14 Locke, John 245, 246–247, 246n85, 257 Lotman, Jurij [Yuri, Yuri] M. 8, 40, 49, 59–60, 67, 68, 79, 88, 276 “Caccia alle streghe” 119n66 Cercare la strada 15, 40, 49, 59–60, 275

302 Lotman, Jurij (Cont.) Semiosphere 70, 71, 85, 113 Culture and Explosion 67, 70 “Problems in the Typology of Culture” 88 “The Decembrist in Daily Life” 104, 104n51, 106–107 Universe of the Mind 68, 86 Lotman, Jurij and Boris A. Uspensky 82, 90, 276 “Il degradato e il degradamento” 80n28, 81 La semiosfera 80n28, 87, 87n34 Tipologia della cultura 248n88 Louis xvi of France 24, 25 Love 125 Eternal 169 Sacrifice for 149n56 Self-discovery through 168 Sentimental 125, 127, 167–170 Lukács, Georg 188–190 Lyotard, Jean-François 238n65 Mabbes, James 73, 106n52 Magruder, James 249, 249n90 Manliness 141, 159, 161, 277 British 160–161 Femininity and 142 See also virility Marriage 158, 158n64, 163 Martí, Juan José 224 Maslen, Thomas J. 34 McHale, Brian 241n73 Mead, Margaret 126, 126n17, 128n82, 130n24, 141, 142n43, 143, 143n46 Meaning and significance 21–25, 45–46 Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de 165 Mengele, Josef 101, 101n46, 102, 266 Mercier, Vivian 223n51 Metadescription 77, 86, 118 See also metadescriptive consciousness Metadescriptive consciousness 87–92, 276 Symbols and 92 Synonymy and 88, 91, 92–94, 119 Translation and 92 Mirror reflection 131 Moliner, María 4 Moll Flanders 128, 138, 177, 189, 263 Moloney, Ed 230n56 Monologue 113

Index Dramatic 113 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, Baron de 25n29, 240–241 Morelos, Leonardo C. de 72n17 Mother Courage 125, 128, 138, 161, 185–186, 263 Motherhood 143, 143n48, 146, 147, 154–155, 157, 179, 278 Mythological consciousness 87–92, 102, 104, 111, 118, 276 Emblems and 82 Homonyms and 91, 92–94 Nominalisation and 88, 90, 104 Renaming and 91 Ritual denomination and 97 Nashe, Thomas 18, 129 Nature 122 Culture and 130, 140, 181–185 Enlightenment and 120–122 Gender relationships and 141, 149 Procreation and 146, 155 Sexuality and 141, 145 Newton, Isaac 245, 245n82 Nicknames Historical protagonists and 22, 23, 49 Picaresque and 14, 22–23, 211–212, 278 Synecdoche and 23 Niketas Choniates 16, 39, 41, 48, 49, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 273, 274 Novalis (Fredrich von Hardenberg) 139n37 O’Brien, Flann 236 Otto of Freising 49, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61 Paine, Thomas 253, 253n94 Paley, William 268, 268n106 Parenthood 150–156, 157 Convention and 150, 153, 154 Natural instinct and 150, 151, 153 ‘Parent-child complex’ 153, 154 Parker, Alexander Augustine 244 Parochialism and provincialism 214–216, 280 Parrot and Olivier in America 13–65 Pascoli, Giovanni 172, 172n75, 173, 174 Patriarchal rules 152, 182 Paz, Octavio 124, 132, 138 Pearse, Patrick 238 Peirce, Charles Sanders 21, 22, 77, 87

Index Pertini, Sandro 216n44 Philip ii 71 Picaresque Alienation and 68, 74, 74n24, 76, 78, 83–87, 94–95, 114, 276, 280 Anthropology and 9 Autobiography and 176–179 British 18, 18n14, 72, 73, 191, 244, 263 Carnivalesque and 9, 218, 280 Causation in 86, 106, 213, 255–262, 269, 270, 281 Coherence and 67–68 Common good and 250–252, 263, 280 Counter-culture and 68, 70, 73, 92, 100, 101, 102, 104 Death and 227, 228 Deictics of time and space in 36–39, 42, 55, 115, 280 Demystified Female 164–175, 273 Dramatic irony and 30, 41, 63, 198, 219, 276 Dual sign irony in 28, 45–46 Enlightenment and 192, 195, 208, 233, 247, 279, 281 Epistemology and 243 Euphemism in 12, 98–101, 205, 276 Experience in 4, 11, 247, 255–262, 270, 280 Family resemblance and 10–12, 190 Female 124, 125, 127, 134, 139, 143, 145, 147, 153, 157, 161, 171, 180 General will and 252–255 Happiness in 262–265 Historical irony in 26, 30, 33, 34–35, 55, 12, 221, 276 History and 15–21, 30, 34, 41, 54, 261–262, 273, 276 Humour and 190, 195–248, 279 Hyperbole in 80, 260 Hypernym in 99, 101 Hyponym in 99, 101 Individualism and 248–250, 280 Inverted euphemism in 100, 101 Irony in 61, 189n6, 203–206, 211 Markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ in 46– 55, 105–106, 280 Meaning and significance in 22, 45, 50, 223, 275 Metaphors in 45, 55, 61 Metonymy in 22, 23, 43–46, 48, 54, 61

303 Morality in 255, 258 Myth and 8, 238, 273, 279 Narrative ambiguity and 171, 175 Open ending in 4, 263 Paradox and 48, 80, 96, 111, 112, 209, 260, 276 Parody and 191, 221–228, 231–238, 255, 268, 278 Postmodernism and 6, 192 Polemical “you” in 27, 39–43, 55, 114, 171, 203, 280 Rational thinking and 210, 268 Redemption in 245, 271 Renaissance and 242 Rhetorical strategies in 12 Satire in 19, 233–238, 224n52 Scepticism in 190, 222, 233, 253, 255, 258, 259, 262, 279, 281 Self-irony in 43, 213–221 Self-satire in 228–231 Stable irony in 199, 202 Synecdoche in 23, 54, 61, 80, 101–104, 276 Slang and 100, 119 Spanish 2, 134n29, 165, 185, 189, 189n5, 191, 244, 247–248, 263, 272 Unstable irony in 201–202 Pícaro alienation and the 83, 109 cultural boundaries of the 78 etymology of the term 3, 4–6 folklore and 9 history and the 25–28, 34 mainstream culture and the 68, 78, 82, 109 mythological character of the 273 saintly figure 273 servant 249–250 stranger 68, 73, 74, 78, 79, 82, 86, 98, 111, 112, 239 nicknames for the 14, 22–23, 211–212 Pinelli, Giuseppe 209n36 Pirandello, Luigi 196, 198, 202, 203, 234 Plato 124, 127, 132, 136, 168–169, 172 Anamnesis to 132 Beauty for 126, 126n15, 139 Immortality to 126, 127, 130, 132 Love and 124–134 Twin souls and 130, 168 Socratic dialogues by 137, 172

304 Porter, Roy 239n66, 240, 242 Postmodernism 232, 233 Modernism and 232 Postmodernism in the picaresque 6, 73, 192 Crisis of modern man and 73 Criticism of 6 Irony and 201 Ontology of 241m, 241n73, 241n74 Prawer, Siegbert 8, 8n17 Praz, Mario 133, 137n34 Pregnancy 126n15 Prester John 16, 38, 57, 58 Procreation 133, 139, 142–150, 155, 159, 186 Proper names 90, 93 Jakobson and 90 Russian culture and 90–91 Psyche 7, 137, 138n36, 174, 255 Immortality of 135, 137, 138, 139 Picaresque heroine 137, 139 Venus and 135, 139 Pushkin, Alexander 81 Questions Consecutio temporum and 108 Indirect 107, 109 Non-rhetorical 114 Reciprocity and 109 Rhetorical 107–114, 276 Tag 110 Quevedo, Francisco de 2, 4, 72, 247, 267 Rabelais, François 192, 196, 223, 267 Reality Art and 102 Deconstruction of 102 Fiction and 66–67 Language and 80 Religious rituals 158 Reproduction 126, 144 See also fertility, infertility and procreation Ricapito, Joseph V. 165n70 Rico, Francisco 191n9 Riffaterre, Michel 21, 28, 196 Roderick Random 5, 72n19, 223, 247, 68n7, 249, 263 Rojas, Ferdinando de 145n50 Rorty, Richard 232 Rossella, Carlo 219

Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 231n57, 240, 252, 253, 253n95, 264n103 Russell, Bertrand 207n33, 208, 252n92 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de 120, 120n3, 121, 140, 143n48, 157n62 Gender Identity to 156–157 Parenthood and 151 Picaresque and 121 Women and 121, 141, 141n41 Sage, Lorna 121n5, 146n52 Said, Edward W. 239n65 Saltatempo 6, 108n53, 188–271 Satire 196, 223–228 Menippean 18, 18n12 Political 204–205 Saussure, Ferdinand de 93, 93n42 Schlegel, Friedrich 198 Scholes, Robert 19, 19n17, 272 Sedgewick, Garnett Gladwin 197n19 Selection Aphasia and 46 Figures of 21, 46 Irony as 21 Metaphor as 21 Self-description 71 Semiosis 88 Sex-class 157 Sexual dissent 163 Sexual identity 130, 157 Sexual instinct 147 Sexual orientation 154 Sexual violence 147–148, 148n55, 155 Sexuality 121, 122, 128, 142, 162, 165, 277, 280 Aberrations and 133 Biology and 142, 146n52, 159 Definition of 123 Eroticism and 124, 139 Inhibitions and 132 Marriage and 158 Perversions and 165 Ritualisation of 133 Society and 156–164 Shakespeare, William 122, 131, 160, 161, 179, 180, 187 Hamlet 180, 279 King Lear 154, 179–187, 232, 278, 279 Macbeth 181

305

Index Midsummer Night’s Dream 159, 161, 181, 187 Othello 180 Twelfth Night 181 Shelton, Thomas 73 Shklovsky, Vladimir 23, 23n26 Showalter, Elaine 163 Shugaar, Anthony 209n36, 216n44 Silone, Ignazio 273 Sim, Stuart 232 Simpson, Helen 121n5 Sinn Féin 212n40, 230n56 Sinn Féin 229, 238 Smith, Adam 243 Smollett, Tobias 5, 72, 72n19, 177, 191, 223, 249 Soliloquy 113 Stead, Christina 143n48 Stein, Gertrude 59 Steiner, George 32, 115, 116 Strada, Vittorio 9, 281 Swift, Jonathan 95, 95n43, 210n38 Synonymy 118 Acting vs improvising as 104–107 Circumlocution as 94–98, 118 Euphemism as 98–101, 114 Rhetorical questions and 107–114 Synecdoche as 101–104 “Tale of Cupid and Psyche” 134–139, 134n30, 136, 136n33, 277 Allegory in 135, 138n36 Parody and 135, 136n33 Tani, Stefano 6n10, 210n37, 241n74 Taylor, Lawrence J. 214, 228, 236, 237 Terrorism 209, 209n36, 224, 262 Theatricality in the Picaresque 131 Acting/improvising and 73, 104–107, 110, 112, 184 Anti-ritual acting and 105, 181, 277 Behavioural texts and 107 Rituality and 53, 77, 88, 98, 104–105, 119, 149, 187, 276, 281 Symbolic staging gestures and 105 Comedy and 177 Tragedy and 177, 179, 181, 185

The Golden Ass 1n1 The Last Roundup 22n25, 194 The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (La Celestina) 145, 145n50 The Unfortunate Traveller 18, 68n7, 191n10, 263 Time’s Arrow 4, 66–119, 258n99, 266, 277 Tocqueville, Alexis de 16, 24, 25, 25n29, 26, 27, 29, 31, 64, 65, 273, 280 Ancien Régime 64 Democracy to 26, 31–32 Democracy in America 29, 32, 65 Idea of providence to 29–30, 273 Role of aristocracy to 64, 65 Todd, Richard 68n11 Todorov, Tzvetan 239n65, 246, 253–254, 263n102 Tommaseo, Niccolò 198 Trousson, Raymond 7 Ûrodivy [fool for Christ’s sake] 81 Vendita galline km2 4, 120–187 Venus 135, 137, 139, 269 Parody of 135, 136n33 Ambivalence of 136, 136n32 Vernadsky, Vladimir 70 Vicinelli, Augusto 172 Vico, Giambattista 70, 265, 273 Virginity 145, 145n49 Virility 145, 159 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 12, 96, 240, 244n79, 269–270 Waldenfels, Bernhard 68, 73, 74, 74n24, 78, 82, 96, 107, 109, 209, 276 Webb, Kate 122n6 White, Hayden 14, 15, 20, 20n20, 206n31 White, John 8n17 White, Patrick 36n39 Whitenack, Judith A. 191n9 Wiesel, Elie 116 Wise Children 120–187, 232, 266 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10, 11 Zilahy De’Gyurgyokai, Mirko 216