Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook Discourses of Mourning in Dante Petrarch and Proust 1St Edition Dante Alighieri Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Discourses of Mourning in Dante Petrarch and Proust 1St Edition Dante Alighieri Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
https://textbookfull.com/product/creation-mage-6-1st-edition-
dante-king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/bone-lord-3-1st-edition-dante-
king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/bone-lord-4-1st-edition-dante-
king-king-dante/
Bone Lord 5 1st Edition Dante King King Dante
https://textbookfull.com/product/bone-lord-5-1st-edition-dante-
king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/immortal-swordslinger-4-1st-
edition-dante-king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/ink-mage-1-1st-edition-dante-
king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/monster-core-2-1st-edition-
dante-king-king-dante/
https://textbookfull.com/product/immortal-swordslinger-3-1st-
edition-dante-king-king-dante/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
OX F O R D M O D E R N L A N G U A G E S A N D
L I T E R AT U R E M O N O G R A P H S
Editorial Committee
a . ka h n k. m . ko h l
m. l. mcl aug h li n r. a . g. pe a r so n
j. t h acker w. wi l l i a m s
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
Discourses of Mourning
in Dante, Petrarch,
and Proust
J E N N I F E R RU S H WO RT H
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Jennifer Rushworth 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939028
ISBN 978–0–19–879087–7
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
Acknowledgements
My thanks first and foremost go to my two supervisors, Manuele Gragnolati and
Ian Maclachlan. I could not have asked for more supportive or learned interlocutors
and first readers. Without Ian’s guidance I would never have dared to venture into
the dark wood of Derrida’s writing, and without Manuele’s passion for medieval
engagement with modern theory the original thesis would not have been possible.
I would also especially like to thank the Arts & Humanities Research Council for
their generous funding of this project, as well as Worcester College for their kind
bestowal of a Martin Senior Scholarship (not to mention providing a friendly home
throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate studies). More recently, I am
immensely grateful to St John’s College, Oxford, where as a Junior Research Fellow
I was able to turn the thesis into the book you are now holding. I would also like to
express my gratitude to my two DPhil examiners, Elena Lombardi and Adam Watt
(the latter in particular for suggesting I spend more time with Roland Barthes), to
Rachel Platt and Eleanor Collins at OUP, and to the anonymous readers.
Throughout my time as a postgraduate and beyond, I have been lucky to have
the constant dialogical support of David Bowe, and Julia Hartley with whom to
share my enthusiasm for Dante and Proust, while Alexandra Hills and Elizabeth
Ward have always provided the kindest encouragement and comradeship from
further afield. During the writing of the thesis, the weekly forum of the Petrarch
Reading Group, founded and led by Nicola Gardini, was a pure joy to attend. Anna
Elsner kindly let me read her thesis on mourning in Proust before its publication
and generously shared her expertise with comments on the present work. Francesca
Southerden also most helpfully read parts of this thesis; her intimate understanding
of Petrarch has always been a source of inspiration. From my distant memories of
undergraduate days I wish to acknowledge the encouragement of Emanuela Tandello
and Kate Tunstall, who as demanding but heartening tutors enabled me to hone my
reading skills immeasurably, and have remained kind friends ever since.
Finally, I am grateful, too, to my sisters Cathy and Ruth, both voracious and
brilliant readers, to my parents for bringing me up in a house full of books, and to
my husband Matthew Salisbury, who read every draft of this book and who has
been a constant companion throughout. All remaining errors are, however, naturally
my own.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
Contents
Translations xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Bibliography 163
Index 195
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
Translations
Translations of the Vita nuova are by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from The Early
Italian Poets.
Translations of Proust: from Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, ed. by
Christopher Prendergast, 6 vols (London: Allen Lane, 2002), comprising The Way
by Swann’s, trans. by Lydia Davis; In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. by
James Grieve; The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne; Sodom and Gomorrah,
trans. by John Sturrock; The Prisoner and the Fugitive, trans. by Carol Clark and
Peter Collier; Finding Time Again, trans. by Ian Patterson. Printed with permission
from Penguin Random House UK.
Translations of the Bible: from the Vulgate with English translation follow-
ing the Douay-Rheims version: Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. by
B. Fisher, R. Weber, R. Gryson, and others, 4th rev. edn (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 1994); The Holy Bible translated from the Latin Vulgate, Douay-
Rheims version, revised by Richard Challoner (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and
Publishers, 1989). The Psalms are cited according to the Vulgate numbering.
All other translations—including from Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s
Canzoniere—are my own, unless otherwise stated.
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to
publication. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the
earliest opportunity.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/09/16, SPi
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Interpolating the Medieval and the Modern
Melancholie species infinitas ferunt: alii lapides iactant, alii libros scribunt; huic
scribere furoris initium est, huic exitus.
[One hears of innumerable types of melancholy. Some throw stones, others
write books. For one, writing is the beginning of madness; for another, it is
the end.]1
These lines, from Petrarch’s handbook on how to deal with the cruel blows of fortune,
provide a fitting preamble to this book, which explores a constellation of different
melancholic positions through close attention to a distinctive set of poetic, narra-
tive, and theoretical texts. This volume takes as its primary subject matter the work
of three writers: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca
(Petrarch), and a modern French novelist, Marcel Proust. What connects these
three writers is that each has reflected profoundly on the experience of grief. The
experience of loss occasioned by the death of the beloved is central to Dante’s
youthful prosimetrum, the Vita nuova,2 to Petrarch’s poetic collection, the Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta (or Canzoniere),3 and to Proust’s seven-volume novel, A la
1 From Petrarch, Les remèdes aux deux fortunes/De remediis utriusque fortune (1354–1366), ed. and
trans. by Christophe Carraud, 2 vols (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2002), i, p. 228 (book I,
chapter 44, ‘De scriptorum fama’). English translation from Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and
Foul: A Modern English Translation of ‘De remediis utriusque fortune’, with a Commentary, ed. and trans.
by Conrad H. Rawski, 5 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), i, p. 145 (book I, chap-
ter 44, ‘Fame as a Writer’). Peter Hainsworth draws attention to this passage in Petrarch the Poet: An
Introduction to the ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’ (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 83. More recently, this
same quotation is the epigraph to Sabrina Stroppa, Petrarca e la morte: tra ‘Familiari’ e Canzoniere
(Rome: Aracne, 2014), p. 5.
2 Dante’s Vita nuova is cited throughout from Domenico De Robertis’s edition in Dante Alighieri,
Opere minori, ed. by Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis, 2 vols (Milan and Naples: Riccardo
Ricciardi, 1979–88), i.1 (1984), pp. 3–247, hereafter VN, and in English translation, ‘The New Life’,
from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, ed. by Sally Purcell (London: Anvil Press, 1981),
pp. 151–211.
3 Petrarch gave his poetic collection the Latin title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Fragments of Things
in the Vernacular], although posterity has tended to call it simply the Canzoniere. I use the latter title
for convenience and shorthand, although poems from the Canzoniere are referred to by number
preceded by RVF. I cite from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata, 4th edn (Milan:
Arnoldo Mondadori, 2010), with all English translations my own.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time].4 Beyond these three works,
Dante’s Commedia (the subject of Chapter 1) and Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen,
Triumphi, and Secretum (introduced in Chapter 2) are equally vital texts for reflec-
tions on the inevitability of loss and on possible responses to this experience.5
In this Introduction, the key terms of this investigation are firstly defined, starting
with the twin titular concepts of discourse and mourning. Secondly, the shifting
critical stances towards mourning and melancholia embodied by Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva are elucidated, with a view to demon-
strating the productiveness of these three distinct viewpoints for literary analysis.
Thirdly, relevant comparative critical literature (in particular, on Dante and Proust)
is reviewed. Finally, interpolation is proposed as a new approach to comparative
literature.
A DEFINITION OF DISCOURSE
4 All quotations from Proust are from A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols
(Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9), hereafter ALR, with English translation from In Search of Lost Time, ed.
by Christopher Prendergast, 6 vols (London: Allen Lane, 2002), cited by individual volume title.
5 Quotations from the Commedia are taken from ‘La Commedia’ secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by
Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence:
Le Lettere, 1994), with translations my own. Citations of the Bucolicum carmen (BC) are from Petrarch’s
Bucolicum carmen, trans. by Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Petrarch’s
Triumphi are cited from Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. by Vinicio Pacca and
Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), with translation of the Triumphus Eternitatis (TE) from The
Essential Petrarch, ed. and trans. by Peter Hainsworth (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,
2010), pp. 154–8, and translations from the other five triumphs my own. Petrarch’s Secretum is cited
from Enrico Carrara’s edition in Petrarca, Prose (Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1955), pp. 22–215,
and in English from My Secret Book, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus Press, 2002). The full
title of the Secretum is De secreto conflictu curarum mearum (in the subtitle to Nichols’s translation, The
Private Conflict of My Thoughts).
6 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), in Œuvres complètes (OC), ed. by Éric
Marty, new edition, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002), v, pp. 24–296 (p. 29); A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments,
trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 3. The OED notes similarly, con-
cerning the etymology of the verb ‘to discourse’, that it comes from the Latin discurrere meaning ‘to
run to and fro’.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
for the early-modern obsession with melancholy, and renders roving between a
variety of texts paradigmatic of the study of this widespread emotional state. At the
outset, Burton warns that he proceeds in fits and starts, digressively, and with a
compendiousness that risks causing confusion:
This roving humour […] I have ever had, & like a ranging Spaniell, that barkes at
every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I shoud,
& may justly complaine, & truly […], that I have read many Bookes, but to little
purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers Authors in
our Libraries, with small profit, for want of Art, Order, Memory, Judgement.7
Beneath the disarming captatio benevolentiae, this passage reveals a fundamental
concern shared by the present book, that of the utility and validity of ‘tumbl[ing]
over divers authors’, and of the motivation behind particular choices and ordering
of texts. While this concern is addressed in this Introduction, the ‘roving humour’ of
the ‘ranging Spaniell’ moving from quarry to quarry remains a useful and dynamic
image for the enthusiastic, discursive, multi-directional literary approach adopted
throughout this book.
This discursive, roving movement between texts is ordered in two different ways.
Firstly, the structure of this book is loosely pyramidal, and moves, cumulatively, to
a more and more overtly comparative approach, with a focus on Dante in Chapter 1,
Petrarch and Dante in Chapter 2, and Proust, Petrarch, and Dante in Chapter 3
and the Epilogue. Secondly, the relationship between Dante, Petrarch, and Proust
is established through a process of ‘triangulation’, borrowing a term used by George
Steiner to advocate reading three texts at once in order better to understand what
is at stake in each.8 The following diagram represents this relationship between
texts in terms of two superimposed triangles, in a mobile, flexible framework that
allows for different theoretical lenses to inform each author’s œuvre in turn. The
base triangle consists of the primary ménage à trois, Dante, Petrarch, and Proust,
while the upper triangle demarcates the main theorists involved, namely Freud,
Kristeva, and Derrida. In the centre I place Roland Barthes as both theorist (of
discourse, and of mourning in Dante and Proust) and aspiring author (of his own
Dantean and Proustian Vita Nova).
7 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and
Rhonda L. Blair, with commentary by J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), i, p. 4. Burton also speaks of his work as a ‘Discourse’, i, p. 110.
Burton’s ‘melancholy spaniel’ is discussed by Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder
in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Reinhard H.
Friederich, ‘Training His Melancholy Spaniel: Persona and Structure in Robert Burton’s “Democritus
Junior to the Reader”’, Philological Quarterly, 55:2 (Spring 1976), 195–210. See also, on the impor-
tance of this work, and on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century melancholy in general, Lawrence Babb,
The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1951) and Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of
Melancholy’ (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959).
8 In My Unwritten Books (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), George Steiner even suggests,
encouragingly for two-thirds at least of the present project, that ‘Both the Recherche and SCC can be
“triangulated” in relation to Dante’s Commedia’ (p. 18). The abbreviation SCC refers to Science and
Civilisation in China, ed. by Joseph Needham and others, 30 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997–2004).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
Freud Kristeva
Barthes
Proust Petrarch
Derrida
Figure 1. Diagram of the two-layered textual triangulation around which this book is
structured.
Figure 1 illustrates the pairing of primary and theoretical works that structures
Chapters 1–3: Dante and Freud in Chapter 1; Petrarch and Kristeva in Chapter 2;
Proust and Derrida in Chapter 3. Yet the star layout is significant, since each the
orist also acts in part as a bridge or stopping point between two of the three pri-
mary authors. Thus the discussion of melancholia in Chapter 1 is inspired as much
by Kristeva as by Freud, and Chapter 3 brings together Proust and Petrarch through
a Derridean interpretation of the proper name.9 Finally, Barthes is at the intermittent
heart of this project conceptually (in terms of discourse) and practically (as demon-
strated later in the Introduction), as an instigator of comparisons between Dante
and Proust precisely in terms of mourning.
A DEFINITION OF MOURNING
The term ‘mourning’ used in isolation acts as a synonym for grief and the anguish
of bereavement; it is, in this sense, a generic term for an experience that encom-
passes both the work of mourning and melancholia. The latter term, ‘melancholia’,
is variously inflected by each theorist by whom it is evoked, and itself has a long
and illustrious history stretching back to Aristotelian times, as traced in brief at the
start of Julia Kristeva’s Soleil noir [Black Sun] and at greater length in an ever-growing
number of critical studies.10 This book is not a history of melancholia, but rather
9 A Derridean reading of Dante is not undertaken in the present study, although such readings
have been successfully pursued by other critics: John Leavey, ‘Derrida and Dante: Differance and the
Eagle in the Sphere of Jupiter’, Modern Language Notes, 91:1 (January 1976), 60–8; Jeremy Tambling,
Dante and Difference: Writing in the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
Francis J. Ambrosio, Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2007). See also, for a reading of Paradiso in the light of modern French theory, William Franke, Dante
and the Sense of Transgression: ‘The Trespass of the Sign’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
10 SN, pp. 16–18; BS, pp. 6–8. See also The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. by
Jennifer Radden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jean Starobinski, Histoire du traitement
de la mélancolie des origines à 1900 (Basel: Acta psychosomatica, 1960) and L’Encre de la mélancolie
(Paris: Seuil, 2012), this last with the 1960 thesis reprinted, pp. 13–158; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin
Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion
and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic to
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Jennifer Radden, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,
in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression,
ed. by David Michael Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987), pp. 231–50, and
Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995); Matthew Bell, Melancholia: The Western Malady (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
11 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), in The Standard Edition to the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [SE], ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953–74), xiv (1957), pp. 243–58. All other quotations from Freud refer to volumes in this edition.
12 SE xiv, p. 244. 13 SE xiv, p. 245. 14 SE xiv, p. 244.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
15 Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939, ed. by Ernst L. Freud, trans. by Tania Stern and James
Stern (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 386. As a consequence of such statements, several critics
have warned against reducing Freud to ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. See Richard Goodkin, Around
Proust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 127–45; L. Scott Lerner, ‘Mourning and
Subjectivity from Bersani to Proust, Klein, and Freud’, Diacritics, 37:1 (Spring 2007), 41–53; and
Anna Magdalena Elsner, ‘Mourning and Creativity in A la recherche du temps perdu’ (unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010), pp. 8–15. See also, for the revised, published version
of the last, Elsner, Mourning and Creativity in Proust: Psychoanalysis and the Ethics of Creation
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2016). Elsner instead adopts a predominantly
Kleinian perspective in ‘Tracing the Presence of an Absence: Mourning and Creation from “Les
Intermittences du cœur” to Le Temps retrouvé’, in Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After/80 ans après:
Critical Essays/Essais critiques, ed. by Adam Watt (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 279–92.
16 Also distinct to Kristeva’s writing as opposed to Freud’s is an interest in a gendered understand-
ing of mourning. See, in this regard, Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism,
Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992), as well as Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of
Elegy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), this last with particular attention to modern
reworkings of the myth of Orpheus.
17 SN, p. 55; BS, p. 44.
18 SN, p. 54; BS, p. 43. Marie-Claude Lambotte reaches similar conclusions to Kristeva as to the
characteristic features of melancholic language in Le Discours mélancolique: de la phénoménologie à la
métaphysique (Paris: Anthropos, 1993), although I remain instead with Kristeva’s argument because of
its appropriateness to literary analysis, in contrast to Lambotte’s solely clinical focus.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
enchaînements étranges, des idiolectes, des poétiques’ [The excess of affect has thus no
other means of coming to the fore than to produce new languages—strange concat
enations, idiolects, poetics].19 The melancholic loss of contact with reality and with
ordinary, phatic speech can inspire new, highly personal contortions of language.
Unlike Kristeva, Derrida has a more complex, ambivalent relationship with
Freudian psychoanalysis. Derrida describes himself as an ‘“ami de la psychanalyse”’
[‘friend of psychoanalysis’], where the term ‘ami’ [friend] is both amiable but also
an act of self-distancing: Derrida stresses that he is not a psychoanalyst, nor has he
ever been in analysis.20 Assessing his writings on Freud as a whole, Derrida aptly
detects a:
Double geste, donc, toujours : marquer ou remarquer chez Freud une ressource qui
n’avait pas encore été lue, me semble-t-il, comme je croyais devoir le faire, mais du même
coup soumettre le ‘texte’ de Freud (théorie et institution) à une lecture déconstructice.
[Always, therefore, a double gesture: to mark or remark in Freud a resource that had
not yet been read, it seems to me, as I thought it should be, but at the same time to
submit Freud the ‘text’ (theory and institution) to a deconstructive reading.]21
Derrida tends to prioritize subversive, non-linear elements which are already
present in the Freudian text—‘déjà à l’œuvre dans l’œuvre’ [already at work in
the work]22—but which may not be immediately apparent.
As regards mourning and melancholia in particular, Derrida’s thoughts, though
scattered throughout his extensive corpus, can be found in their most concentrated
form in the collection Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde.23 Derrida’s writings on
grief are a curious, complex mix of the autobiographical and the theoretical; many
of these texts originated as obituaries or funeral eulogies, and are inspired by the
death of friends who were often also important twentieth-century French thinkers
in their own right. In all these texts, Derrida consistently criticizes Freud’s model of
grief in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as unethical in its proposal of the normality
24 See Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980),
pp. 275–437 (p. 356); The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 257–409 (p. 335 for ‘mid-mourning’); and ‘Dialangues’, in
Points de suspension: entretiens, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), pp. 141–65 (p. 161);
‘“Dialanguages”’, in Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. by Elisabeth Weber and trans. by Peggy
Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 132–55 (p. 152 for ‘semi-mourning’).
25 Kathleen Woodward also calls for ‘something in between mourning and melancholia’ in ‘Freud
and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief’, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media
and Culture, 13:1 (Fall–Winter 1990–1), 93–110 (p. 96).
26 On Dante’s use of liturgical language, see most recently Ronald L. Martinez, ‘Dante and the Poem
of the Liturgy’, in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. by Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne, 2 vols
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), ii, pp. 89–155, and Matthew Treherne, ‘La Commedia di Dante e l’immagi-
nario liturgico’, in Preghiera e liturgia nella ‘Commedia’: atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi: Ravenna,
12 novembre 2011, ed. by Giuseppe Ledda (Ravenna: Centro dantesco dei frati minori conventuali,
2013), pp. 11–30. A good summary is also John C. Barnes, ‘Vestiges of the Liturgy in Dante’s Verse’, in
Dante and the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Essays, ed. by John C. Barnes and Cormac ó Cuilleanáin
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), pp. 231–69. See also, more generally, Evelyn Birge Vitz, ‘The
Liturgy and Vernacular Literature’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan
and E. Ann Matter, 2nd edn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), pp. 503–63.
27 For a reading of Proustian mourning as cold-hearted, unfaithful forgetfulness, see Alessia
Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003). For ethical considerations of mourning, see, besides Derrida, R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of
Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004). Despite this focus on Proust and Derrida, the many works on Proust and Freud deserve
acknowledgement: most recently, Jean-Yves Tadié, Le Lac inconnu: entre Proust et Freud (Paris:
Gallimard, 2012); but also Jacques Rivière, Quelques progrès dans l’étude du cœur humain: Freud et
Proust (Paris: Librairie de France, 1926); Jean-Louis Baudry, Proust, Freud et l’autre (Paris: Minuit,
1984); and Pierre Bayard, ‘Lire Freud avec Proust’, in Marcel Proust visiteur des psychanalystes, Revue
française de psychanalyse, 63 (May–June 1999), 393–406.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
The Epilogue returns to Freud, with a reading of Dante’s Vita nuova as ending in a
melancholic impasse.28
Having outlined the divergent theories of mourning and melancholia to be
found in Freud, Kristeva, and Derrida, it is important to acknowledge that,
although there is no critical precedent for triangulating Dante, Petrarch, and
Proust, these authors have to various extents been considered in pairs. For a start,
the relationship between Dante and Petrarch is, unsurprisingly, of enduring critical
interest.29 Petrarch’s attitude towards his poetic forebear is typically interpreted as
one of ambivalence, which combines an explicit rejection of any interest in or
knowledge of Dante and his poetry with discernible meticulous intertextual rec-
ollections of his predecessor’s work. This relationship is discussed further in
Chapter 2. Petrarch and Proust have only very rarely been connected in critical
discussions, most often in terms of speculation about a Petrarchan form of invol-
untary memory.30 In contrast, the surprisingly fertile field of comparative readings
of Dante and Proust requires greater attention here, before turning to a proposal of
comparative literature as interpolation.
O N D A N T E A N D P RO U S T
Formative for this comparative project from the outset has been Kristeva’s description
of Proust’s Albertine in Le Temps sensible [Time and Sense] as a ‘moderne Béatrice’
[modern Beatrice], since both characters die in the middle of their respective nar-
ratives (the Recherche and the Vita nuova), thereby unleashing a complex grieving
process coupled with sustained reflections on the language appropriate to this
28 For earlier Freudian readings of Dante, see, in particular, Thomas Parisi, ‘Freud as Virgil: The
Anthropologies of Psychoanalysis and the Commedia’, in The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to
Individuals, ed. by Richard Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 257–74. Parisi discusses the role of
autobiography and pride or narcissism in Dante and Freud, and suggests a comparison between Freud
and Virgil. See also the essays collected in Psicoanalisi e strutturalismo di fronte a Dante: dalla lettura
profetica medievale agli odierni strumenti critici: atti dei mesi danteschi 1969–1971, 3 vols (Florence:
Leo S. Olschki, 1972). Guglielmo Gorni laments the ‘incontro mancato’ [missed or failed encounter]
between Freud and Dante in ‘Beatrice agli inferi’, in Omaggio a Beatrice 1290–1990, ed. by Rudy
Abardo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1997), pp. 143–58 (p. 151) and also in ‘La Beatrice di Dante, dal tempo
all’eterno’, in Dante, Vita nova, ed. by Luca Carlo Rossi (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1999), pp. v–xl
(p. xx). On Freud’s passion for Italy and Italian literature, despite his lack of engagement with Dante,
see Freud and Italian Culture, ed. by Pierluigi Barrotta and Laura Lepschy with Emma Bond (Bern and
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), as well as more generally Graham Frankland, Freud’s Literary Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
29 See Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and
Theodore J. Cachey Jr (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Other important
contributions are cited in due course in Chapter 2.
30 See Stefano Agosti, Gli occhi le chiome: per una lettura psicoanalitica del ‘Canzoniere’ di Petrarca
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993), pp. 47 and 14 (for a Proustian analysis of RVF 175 and 196); Gianfranco
Contini, Varianti e altra linguistica: una raccolta di saggi 1938–1968 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), p. 22 (for
discussion of RVF 194); and, in relation to RVF 126, Rosanna Bettarini, Lacrime e inchiostro nel
‘Canzoniere’ di Petrarca (Bologna: CLUEB, 1998), pp. 20 and 137, as well as Emilio Pasquini, ‘Medieval
Polarities: Dantism and Petrarchism’, in Dante in Oxford: The Paget Toynbee Lectures, ed. by Tristan Kay,
Martin McLaughlin, and Michelangelo Zaccarello (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 167–79 (p. 177).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
experience of grief.31 The first article dedicated wholly to Dante and Proust dates
back to 1958, and identified a number of similarities between the two authors,
from shared thematic interests (in particular, the timeless literary theme of love)
to specific structural analogies, including the suggestion that Un amour de Swann
[A Love of Swann’s] (the third-person narrative of Swann’s love for Odette from the
second half of the first volume of the Recherche) is to the rest of the Recherche as the
Vita nuova is to the Commedia.32 Samuel Borton’s article explicitly forms the basis
of the Dantean pages of Richard Bales’s Proust and the Middle Ages, an essential
critical work to which later discussion returns.33 Other early contributions to a
reading of Dante and Proust include Gianfranco Contini’s passing but tantalizing
suggestion that ‘Marcel Proust […] serve di metafora per un discorso non del tutto
elementare su Dante’ [Marcel Proust acts as a metaphor for a not entirely elemen-
tary discourse on Dante].34
More recently, precise critical reviews of explicit mentions of Dante in Proust
have been carried out by Gemma Pappot, Anne Teulade, and Claude Perrus.35
Given the comprehensiveness of such surveys, it is not necessary to list here all such
references, although it is worth highlighting that Proust’s identification of himself
or his protagonist with Dante suggests a surprising degree of emotional involvement
with the Florentine poet. This identification is most striking, firstly, in Proust’s
decision to sign off a book review with the pseudonym Marc el Dante (which Marie
Miguet-Ollagnier has glossed as Proust ‘se glissant avec humour dans l’écrivain du
Trecento’ [insinuating himself humorously into the fourteenth-century writer]).36
31 Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 148;
Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), p. 81.
32 See Samuel Borton, ‘A Tentative Essay on Dante and Proust’, Delaware Notes, 31 (1958), 33–42.
A development of this comparison between Dantean and Proustian love can be found in Jennifer
Rushworth, ‘Proust et les tourments de l’amour courtois’, in Cent ans de jalousie proustienne, ed. by
Erika Fülöp and Philippe Chardin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), pp. 173–83.
33 The Epilogue, in particular, explores Bales’s own suggestion that Proust and Dante shared a
‘rather exalted conception of the book as such’, Proust and the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 138.
Two important edited volumes continuing in the footsteps of Bales’s research on Proustian medieval-
ism have been published in recent years: Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts: Essays
in Memory of Richard Bales, ed. by Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011),
within which see especially Catherine O’Beirne, ‘Proust and the Carlylean Mediation of Dante’,
pp. 17–37; Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann,
2015). On Proust’s relationship to medieval French literature, see also J. H. Watkins, ‘Proust and
Medieval Literature’, in Studies in Modern French Literature Presented to P. Mansell Jones (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 326–32.
34 Contini, Varianti e altra linguistica, p. 335.
35 Gemma Pappot, ‘L’Inferno de Proust à la lumière de Dante: remarques sur les renvois à la Divina
Commedia de Dante dans A la recherche du temps perdu’, Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, 1 (2003), 91–118;
Anne Teulade, ‘Proust et l’épopée de Dante’, in Proust, l’étranger, ed. by Karen Haddad-Wotling and
Vincent Ferré (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 15–36; Claude Perrus, ‘Dante du côté de chez Proust’,
in Non dimenticarsi di Proust: declinazioni di un mito nella cultura moderna, ed. by Anna Dolfi
(Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014), pp. 413–25. See also the article ‘Dante (Alighieri, Dante
dit) [1265–1321]’ by A. Beretta Anguissola, in Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, ed. by Annick Bouillaguet
and Brian G. Rogers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 283–4.
36 Marie Miguet-Ollagnier, ‘Les Cités maudites: fondements mythiques et versions romanesques’,
Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 32 (2001), 91–105 (p. 95). The review in question was of Lucien
Daudet’s Le Chemin mort, and was originally published in L’Intransigeant, 8 September 1908, and is
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
reprinted in Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed.
by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 550–2. Unfortunately, the journal
seemingly failed to pick up on the Dantean allusion, transforming Proust’s chosen nom de plume into
the less elegant and less meaningful Marc Éodonte.
37 ALR i, 167; The Way by Swann’s, p. 170. This passage is discussed particularly by Carolyn Clark
Breen, ‘Proust, Dante, and Vergil: An Incident of Intertextuality along the Vivonne’, Classical and
Modern Literature: A Quarterly, 9:1 (Autumn 1988), 73–8; J. Theodore Johnson, Jr, ‘Proust’s
“Impressionism” Reconsidered in the Light of the Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century’, in Twentieth
Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée, ed. by George Stambolian (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1975), pp. 27–56; and Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Proust’s Ruskinian Reveries on
Dante and Florence’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35:4 (September 2013), 419–34. The topic of
Proust, Dante, and art is also explored by Walter A. Strauss, ‘Proust–Giotto–Dante’, Dante Studies,
96 (1978), 163–85.
38 Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (London: Fontana Press, 1998), p. 105; Jean-Yves Tadié,
‘Note sur Proust et Dante’, Adam International Review, 394–6 (1976), 61–2 (p. 62).
39 Karlheinz Stierle, Zeit und Werk: Prousts ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ und Dantes ‘Commedia’
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008). See also Hans-Robert Jauss, ‘Erleuchtete und entzogene
Zeit: Eine Lectura Dantis: VI. Die Divina Commedia im Lichte von A la recherche du temps perdu’,
in Das Fest, ed. by Walter Haug and Rainer Warning (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1989), pp. 64–91
(pp. 85–91).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/09/16, SPi
intervention and the help of Beatrice, so Proust’s protagonist at the end of the
Recherche becomes the narrator of the book we have just read, thanks to the appar-
ition of Mlle de Saint-Loup in Le Temps retrouvé.40 On the other hand, Joshua
Landy has rejected any such perceived consonance and rightly challenged the
pivotal role Balsamo attributes to the marginal character of Mlle de Saint-Loup.41
Though sympathetic to Balsamo’s urge to compare Dante and Proust, my own
position is closer to that of Landy, in the sense that the Epilogue discerns insur-
mountable structural differences between the literary projects of Dante and Proust
as regards the Commedia and the Recherche (in contrast to the Epilogue’s compara-
tive reading of the Vita nuova and the Recherche via the Derridean promise). Most
recently, Adam Watt has sought to ‘open up the field of enquiry’ in an article on
Dante and Proust which suggests that wider fruitful comparisons remain to be
made between the two.42 Watt offers the examples of image formation or the para
disal language of music and stars as persuasive points of resonance between the
Commedia and the Recherche, and also stresses that parallel readings of Dante and
Proust need not limit themselves to discussion of infernal suffering, but might
equally address the joy and pleasures of art and Paradise.43
Amongst this critical compte rendu, three further individuals deserve special
mention: George Steiner, Wallace Fowlie, and Roland Barthes. The first, in add-
ition to suggesting the usefulness of textual triangulation, is more generally a
valuable ally for comparative studies, since he argues that ‘Criticism delights
in affinity and the far leap of example’ and ‘that literature should be taught and
interpreted in a comparative way’.44 As regards Dante and Proust specifically,
Steiner has also made perceptive comments on the pair, not only remarking that
‘Dante and Proust, like no others, give us the gossip of eternity’, but also asking,
‘Could there be any more acute understanding than Dante’s or Proust’s—so akin
in this respect—of the manifold ways in which the worlds of the dead reach into
those of the living?’.45 This question is at the heart of my consideration of post-
humous epiphanies in the Epilogue, in which a parallel reading is proposed of
the reappearance of Beatrice at the end of the Vita nuova and the Proustian
episode of the ‘Intermittences du cœur’ [Intermittences of the Heart], that is, the
reappearance via involuntary memory of the grandmother in Sodome et Gomorrhe
[Sodom and Gomorrah].
40 Gian Balsamo, ‘The Fiction of Marcel Proust’s Autobiography’, Poetics Today, 28:4 (Winter
2007), 573–606.
41 Joshua Landy, ‘A Beatrice for Proust?’, Poetics Today, 28:4 (Winter 2007), 607–18.
42 Adam Watt, ‘“L’air de la chanson”: Dante and Proust’, La Parola del Testo, 17:1–2 (2013), 101–10
(p. 101). The article appears in the journal as part of a special issue on Dante in France, ed. by Russell
Goulbourne, Claire Honess, and Matthew Treherne.
43 See Watt, ‘“L’air de la chanson”’, p. 110. Connections between art and literary vocation are
explored by Julia Caterina Hartley, ‘Literary Vocation in Dante and Proust’, doctoral thesis in process
at the University of Oxford. See also Hartley’s ‘Reading in Dante and Proust’, Modern Language Notes,
130 (2015), 1130–49.
44 Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 27.
45 Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 172; Steiner,
Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 232.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
tratto si levò ritta in piedi, e disse a mezza voce, così che a pena egli
la intese:
— Su via, dunque, mi dia un saggio della sua abilità d’alpinista. Mi
raggiunga... Andiamo!
Le semplici parole, che parevan dette per giuoco, ebbero
dall’intonazione e dal gesto un significato profondo. Egli non potè
resistere all’invito; s’abbandonò a quel tenue incanto; si lasciò
trascinare da quella voce di donna che lo chiamava discretamente a
sè. Un desiderio oscuro l’assalì: di mostrare la sua vigoria fisica, di
rivelare in uno slancio leonino la sua giovinezza agile e forte. Si
sarebbe detto che l’essere originario, primordiale, selvatico, avesse
avuto in lui un brusco risveglio, fosse uscito libero e fresco dalla
spoglia artificiale che l’opprimeva. Egli ascese in corsa il pendìo
ripido del prato, giunse in un attimo a fianco della fanciulla, si fermò
sicuro d’avanti a lei, rattenendo il respiro per non tradire la
commozione del cuore, per ostentarne la regolarità dei palpiti anche
dopo uno sforzo supremo.
— Bene! Bravo! — ella approvò seriamente, senza sorridere, con
sincerità; poi, soggiunse cambiando tono ed espressione: — Ed ora
che si fa? Dove andiamo?
— Dove andiamo? Dove vuole, signorina.
— Nell’orto?
— Nell’orto.
— Forse non c’è mai stato?
— In fatti, mai.
— Io le farò da guida, — concluse la fanciulla; e s’incamminò
spigliata d’avanti a lui.
Portava un abito grigio, sobrio e attillato, che avvinceva strettamente
il suo torso e scendeva diritto lungo i fianchi, ritraendo a ogni
movimento le forme eleganti della persona. Nessuna guarnizione su
quell’abito; un sol nastro serico d’un color di lilla pallido le girava
intorno alla cintola assai sottile, e ricadeva dalle reni in due lunghe
bande volanti fin quasi a terra. In capo aveva un cappellaccio di
paglia dalle tese larghe e convesse, su cui risaltavan due tulipani
scarlatti in un ciuffo di foglie e di spighe; e in mano, a guisa di
mazza, un ombrellino di raso iridescente, orlato d’una trina bianca.
Aurelio la seguiva da presso, guardandola con curiosità intenta, ma
immemore e spensierato come un fanciullo. Entrarono così nell’orto,
uno dietro l’altra, senza parlare, tenuti entrambi da una specie di
stupefazione dolce, da una specie di torpore, sotto la sferza del sole.
Un gran viale, cosparso di ghiaia fina e quasi candida, tagliava a
mezzo il pianoro dove il vecchio frutteto prosperava. Da ambe le
parti, equidistanti e regolari, altri viali più angusti vi affluivano in una
perfetta simmetria di linee parallele. Nei rettangoli intermedii gli
alberi crescevan poderosamente sopra un suolo grasso e ubertoso,
piantati in ordine sparso, bene esposti alla luce, diritti e sani, come
assistiti nel loro sviluppo da una mano sollecita. Alcuni, troppo
carichi, avevan sostegni obliqui sotto i rami più oppressi dal peso;
alcuni, ancora esili e malfermi, si vedevan protetti da una custodia di
piuoli confitti nel terreno, trattenuti da cerchii di ferro. E v’erano
albicocchi, peri, pruni, mandorli, superbi d’una innumerevole prole di
globuli gialli o verdi; alcuni noci giganteschi dal fogliame smorto, dal
fusto smorto, dai malli smorti, come scolorati dalla soverchia
illuminazione; fichi enormi e serpentini, che parevano celare a fatica
il loro scheletro mostruoso nel manto delle vaste foglie triforcute; e
una moltitudine di peschi fragili, seminudi, maturanti al sole i grossi
frutti penduli e vellutati.
Si spandeva all’aria da quella possente coltura di piante fruttifere un
odor caldo e salubre, molto simile a un alito vivo. Qua e là qualche
vaso di limone o d’arancio, disposto su i margini dei viali, mesceva
alla fragranza diffusa dei grandi alberi il profumo penetrante de’ suoi
fiori, come un artificio d’eleganza e di seduzione in una bocca di
donna. E dovunque era silenzio, silenzio profondo; nella pineta, nel
prato, nell’orto, sul poggio, nel cielo.
— Com’è ben tenuto questo frutteto! — esclamò Aurelio, guardando
in torno pieno di maraviglia.
— È l’unica parte del giardino che non fu trascurata dopo la morte
del vecchio marchese. Il guardiano Giuseppe vive in su questa
comodamente con la sua numerosa famiglia. Perciò prodiga qui tutte
le sue attenzioni, impiega tutto il suo tempo; io credo che l’ami più di
sua moglie, più de’ suoi stessi figliuoli.... E ne è geloso, geloso fino
alla manìa, — ella soggiunse, ridendo forte. — Se il pover uomo
sapesse che ora noi gli abbiamo invaso il territorio, chi sa in che
pena starebbe!...
— Non sospetterà certo che noi gli si voglia rubare....
— Sospetta di tutto e di tutti....
— Ritorniamo dunque indietro, — propose Aurelio, seriamente.
— E perchè?.... Se a me piace di venir qui, soltanto perché so che
Giuseppe non lo desidera....
— È una cattiveria questa, signorina!
— No, un capriccio.
— Ma se ci scopre?...
— Peggio per lui!... Non sarebbe poi la prima volta ch’egli mi trova
nel suo orto, sola o accompagnata....
Aggiunse anche, facendosi grave, guardando fissa il giovine:
— D’altra parte noi pure abbiamo un certo diritto su queste frutta,
perché il luogo non è suo e noi lo teniamo in affitto senza alcuna
riserva della padrona.
A queste parole egli ebbe entro di sè un moto ostile contro la
fanciulla, una specie di disgusto istintivo, come fosse stato colpito da
un suono discorde o sgradevole. Ma Flavia non gli lasciò il tempo di
ricercare le intime cause, di rendersi ragione d’un tal sentimento.
Ritornata ilare e leggera, gli susurrò sotto voce all’orecchio, con
un’espressione infantile di malizia e di gioja:
— Ormai le ciliege son mature!..
— Ebbene? — chiese il giovine, senza comprendere.
— Ebbene: se son mature, si possono mangiare.
— Naturalmente, — egli confermò, non potendo trattenere un
sorriso.
— E perché non le mangiamo?...
Aurelio indietreggiò d’un passo.
— Come? Come?! Vorrebbe....
— Rubare, certo: rubare!
— Ah, questo poi no! Io mi ribello, o meglio mi ritiro. Non voglio
esser complice d’un furto, e nè pure spettatore....
— Ella sarebbe dunque capace di farmi un affronto simile?...
Vorrebbe lasciarmi qui sola in lotta con gli elementi? Abbandonare
una donna in un momento difficile?... Non sarebbe soltanto
scortesia, signor conte; sarebbe viltà....
Parlava forte e solenne, interrotta a ogni frase da un urto d’ilarità
incontenibile. E in quell’atteggiamento emanava da tutta la persona
una grazia così semplice e schietta che sedusse e maravigliò il
giovine, quasi una rivelazione inaspettata.
— Vede come sono alte?... e come sono belle!
Ella gli mostrava un ciliegio venerabile dal tronco alto e robusto, su
cui i grappoli vermigli rampollavano con sovrana abondanza e
levava la mano verso i frutti desiderati, ridendo, comunicandogli a
poco a poco la sua giocondità fanciullesca.
— Ci deve essere una scala di mia conoscenza nel frutteto, — ella
disse, girando in torno lo sguardo per iscoprirla. Poi, d’un tratto,
gridò trionfante: — Eccola! Eccola!
E si diresse in corsa verso un pilastrello poco discosto, a cui una
lunga scala era appoggiata.
— Io spero che vorrà almeno ajutarmi a portarla fin sotto l’albero. È
troppo pesante per le mie povere braccia!
— Si pretende dunque la mia complicità attiva...?
— No, s’invoca semplicemente un soccorso! Venga!
Ferma ed eretta nel sole, sul candor niveo della ghiaja, tra le masse
degli alberi che s’inarcavano verso di lei carichi di frutti, ella parve al
giovine supremamente bella.
Omai Aurelio seguiva, domato e attonito, ogni suo atto, ogni suo
movimento, ogni sua parola, come se tutto il resto si fosse occultato
a’ suoi sensi. Un potere misterioso e irresistibile lo teneva soggetto
all’agile creatura che gli splendeva d’innanzi, lo piegava
inconsapevole a qualunque stranezza, a qualunque follìa ch’ella gli
avesse potuta comunicare. L’impeto birbesco e tumultuoso della sua
compagna sembrava avere invaso, travolto, rituffato il suo spirito in
un fiume d’oblio e di spensieratezza; ed egli, già ebro della magica
luce in cui si scioglievan le sane fragranze terrestri, s’abbandonava
alla seduzion di quel giuoco, cedeva insensibilmente al fascino di
quella malizia puerile, quasi a traverso una seconda adolescenza.
Flavia ripetè il richiamo, limpida e forte, come volesse meglio
affermare la sua possanza:
— Venga dunque! M’ajuti!
— Ella mi vuol proprio trarre in perdizione! — mormorò Aurelio,
sorridendo, mentre s’avvicinava a lei.
E prese la lunga scala, la sollevò ritta con le mani per mostrare il
vigor de’ suoi muscoli, la portò così senz’inclinarla fin sotto l’albero,
mediante uno sforzo che a pena riuscì a dissimulare. Ella, tenendogli
dietro seria e attenta, lo fissava con uno sguardo ambiguo tra
d’ammirazione e d’ironia.
— Ed ora, bisogna salire! — disse, poi che il giovine ebbe deposta e
bene assicurata la scala tra due rami del ciliegio.
— Anche salire?!
— Mi sembra. Vuol forse che salga io, per rimanersene qua giù
tranquillo a contemplarmi da un nuovo punto di vista? Io non dò di
questi spettacoli, signor mio, e a così buon prezzo!...
Proferì queste parole celiando, ma senza la minima reticenza, senza
un’ombra nella voce o negli occhi, con una sicurezza da donna
spregiudicata. Aurelio, che la guardava, abbassò sùbito gli occhi,
arrossì anche un poco, offeso dal senso volgarmente procace dello
scherzo; poi, per non tradire il suo disgusto, le volse con un moto
subitaneo le spalle, e si mise rapidamente su per la scala.
— Le lasci pure cadere abbasso ché le raccolgo nel mio grembiule,
— gli gridò dietro Flavia, raggiante, trasfigurata dalla gioja.
Il giovine, ritto su l’ultimo piuolo, col capo nascosto nel fogliame
profondo, si vedeva allungar le braccia, pencolare, atteggiarsi in
pòse larghe e snodate tra i viluppi dei rami, alla ricerca dei grappoli
maturi. A quando a quando una fitta gragnuola di chicchi vermigli,
annunziata da un richiamo, accolta da un saluto festoso, partiva
dall’alto, si sparpagliava un poco nell’aria, cadeva solo in parte nel
grembiule spiegato a riceverla. La giovinetta per giuoco fingeva
d’irritarsi perché non poteva contendere alla terra tutti quei chicchi;
protestava ridendo contro di lui; gli raccomandava d’esser più attento
e preciso nel gittarli; a volte si chinava a raccattarne qualcuno più
appariscente, e, con aria di dispetto, se lo mangiava.
Quando Aurelio discese dall’albero erano entrambi come ubbriachi
d’ilarità. Balbettavan frasi insulse con la voce alterata; ammiccavano
con gli occhi piccoli, abbacinati dal soverchio chiarore; si sfioravan
con le mani, esprimendo una specie di piacere a ogni lieve contatto;
e ridevano insieme con la facilità di due fanciulli. La spartizione del
bottino provocò poi tra loro una questione romorosa e vivace, che
finì in una corsa sfrenata a traverso il frutteto. Ella, agile e astuta, si
sottraeva a lui, approfittando della sua conoscenza dei luoghi,
calpestando senza scrupoli le zone coltivate, sgusciando sotto gli
intrichi dei frutici con una perizia singolare. Egli, più veloce e più
cauto, cercava invece di raggiungerla senza batterne le orme,
prevenendola allo sbocco d’un viale, aspettandola a un varco in
agguato, accelerando vertiginosamente il passo quando ella
percorreva una strada dritta. Finalmente Flavia, mentre usciva
d’improvviso fuor da un cespuglio, cadde, come una preda, in suo
potere. Accesi, esausti, anelanti, s’avvinghiarono uno all’altra con un
moto istintivo e selvaggio. Ella, stanca, s’abbandonò, arrovesciò
indietro il capo, prorompendo in una risata nervosa, che squillò
acutamente nel silenzio; Aurelio, stringendola forte a sè e smarrendo
ogni senso nella contemplazione di quel viso illuminato da una
strana fiamma, la sorresse, la tenne così per qualche attimo come
sospesa tra le sue braccia.
— Mi dò per vinta! — ella mormorò d’un tratto.
E si sciolse con un moto languido da lui, invasa da una sùbita
angoscia, intimorita dal suo sguardo vorace.
Non parlarono più. Susseguiva a quel tripudio folle di vita il
turbamento oscuro e quasi pauroso degli eccessi. Provavano ora un
malessere profondo, indefinibile. Si guardavano in faccia attoniti,
arrossendo; si sentivan soli, estranei, divisi da un ostacolo immane;
si sentivano oppressi da un peso morale, rimorsi da un’occulta voce.
L’incanto breve era sfumato; ed essi si trovavano, come al risveglio
d’un sogno voluttuoso, sfiniti, delusi, umiliati.
S’incamminarono così, in silenzio, verso il poggio, sospinti da
un’idea comune: quella d’allontanarsi dal palazzo, forse per
acquetarsi, per riprendere le loro espressioni abituali, sformate dalle
agitazioni e dai turbamenti molteplici. Aurelio era come trasognato e
stupefatto. Si movevano nel fondo della sua anima alcuni pensieri
molesti, sorgevano i ben noti fantasmi a rappresentargli dentro
l’eterna Comedia, il Dramma immortale, in cui egli si vedeva
continuamente trascinato dalla fatalità delle cose. — Che cos’era
avvenuto? Da quale possente soffio di passione o di frenesia s’era
lasciato dominare per dimenticarsi a tal segno? Come aveva potuto
cedere senza una resistenza a quei trasporti insensati? — Ecco: la
Donna, il mostro magnifico, era là accanto a lui, e lo seguiva. Egli ne
udiva il passo cricchiare su la ghiaja con una regolarità da pendolo
che misura il tempo; egli, senza guardarla, la vedeva distintamente
procedergli a fianco, alta e serena, terribile e inconscia come un
feticcio. La loro via era comune, ed eran pari le forze: salivano una
dolce erta, tra gli alberi onusti di frutti caduchi o acerbi, verso
un’altura limitata, perduta tra altre innumerevoli alture. La montagna
superba dalle incorrotte solitudini, dalle larghe visioni, s’ergeva
lontana, molto lontana, di là da tutti quei colli, reale ma pure impervia
per entrambi e irraggiungibile. Essi salivano insieme, quasi tenuti da
una stessa catena, la dolce erta su cui erano impresse le orme di
mille passanti; e, giunti al sommo, sarebber dovuti sostare,
sconosciuti pellegrini, stretti in torno dall’umile giogaja, avendo
sempre in vista — come un Ideale beffardo — la vetta alpestre
baciata dal cielo....
— Oh! Guardi! — proruppe Flavia, volgendosi maravigliata verso il
lago.
E parve ch’ella, divinando il pensiero di lui, volesse distogliere il suo
sguardo dalla scena simbolica.
Anch’egli si volse.
Dal poggio si rivedevano alfine la superficie azzurra delle acque e la
riviera opposta, dove già qualche obliqua ombra cadeva. Alcune
vele, gonfie e quadrate, apparivano qua e là dirette verso
settentrione, così tarde da sembrare immobili. Un piroscafo presso
Intra lanciava nell’aria un’enorme colonna di fumo nero, che si
torceva in grosse spire senza dissolversi. Le nevi del Sempione, in
fondo alla valle nebulosa, erano pallidamente celesti e parevan
fondersi nell’orizzonte.
Ella mormorò fissando il lago con gli occhi incantati:
— Che pace!
Egli aggiunse, gravemente:
— Che silenzio! Non s’ode frusciare una fronda!
Infatti il più piccolo romore non rompeva il sonno dell’universo: non
un soffio di vento, non un murmure d’acque, non una voce, non un
latrato, non un’eco di lavoro lontano. La calma del paesaggio pesava
sopra di loro come un malefizio, infondeva nelle loro anime una
malinconia suprema. Ambedue sentivano ora il tempo scorrere,
disperdersi le cose nella vanità dello spazio, le illusioni e i desiderii
morire. Ambedue sentivano che la vita era triste, e che oltre la vita
eran tristi anche le speranze.
— Discendiamo? — propose Flavia, accasciata dal silenzio,
provando uno sgomento fosco d’avanti a quella solitudine, sotto quel
cielo deserto e impassibile.
— Discendiamo!
Ritornarono su i loro passi; si salutarono freddamente al limite della
pineta, non avendo scambiato durante il cammino che poche frasi
brevi e inconcludenti. Flavia riparò di nuovo al suo luogo di lavoro,
nell’ombra degli ultimi abeti; Aurelio, solo, s’inoltrò nel bosco per
discendere verso il palazzo.
V.
Echi del passato.