CONTRIBUTI HERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON …

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CONTRIBUTI

THEORIES OF METAPHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIANHERMETICISM: MAKING SENSE OUT OF NON-SENSE

VIKTOR BERBERIUniversity of Minnesota

Morris, Minnesota

t was Francesco Flora who first insisted upon the association betweentwentieth-century Italian hermetic poetry and the category of metaphorreferred to as analogy, an identification so complete that he is led to use

the terms “hermeticism” and “analogism” virtually interchangeably. The useof analogy becomes perhaps the defining characteristic of the poets aroundwhom Flora’s theory of hermeticism turns (Ungaretti above all, but alsoValery and others from whom the hermetics supposedly inherited theunhealthy tendency to rely upon the use of analogy). The relationshipbetween Flora’s La poesia ermetica (1936) and later criticism is, to say theleast, an ambivalent one: on the one hand, the poets Flora singles out asexamples of this “new art” are generally no longer seen as “hermetic”, or atleast not seen as constituting the central moment of Italian hermeticism, butrather as its precursors (and, indeed, as poets whose significance andindividuality far exceed any such categorization). In fact, as Flora waswriting La poesia ermetica, the poets of the terza generazione – PieroBigongiari, Mario Luzi, Alfonso Gatto, Alessandro Parronchi, VittorioSereni, Leonardo Sinisgalli, among others – were just beginning to publishtheir earliest works and would hardly have come into his view. On the otherhand, the ideas elaborated in La poesia ermetica have continued to shapeeven the most recent critical discussions of Italian hermeticism: while it iscertainly the consensus that Flora’s aim was off, many of the critical notionshe established have simply been brought to bear on other, later poets; andwhere criticism has countered Flora’s denunciation of hermeticism, it has attimes done so without significantly changing the terms of the debate.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a survey of the discussion of metaphor in thecritics of hermeticism will to some extent read as a recapitulation of thehistory of metaphor theory, from early theories originating in classicalrhetoric, through a shift from a word-based to a predicative, tensionalapproach, to more recent theories emphasizing semantic innovation and theproduction of meaning, to, finally, the problem of reference and a recognitionof, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, “the metaphorical statement as the power to

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‘redescribe’ reality” (The Rule of Metaphor, 6). I will therefore refer often tosignificant moments in the history of the theory of metaphor as I consider theplace of metaphor in critical discourse surrounding hermetic poetry, endingwith the work of the poet Piero Bigongiari, who comes to occupy a centralposition as practitioner and theorist of Italian hermeticism.

Virtually all theories of metaphor find themselves on common ground atleast insofar as they accept Aristotle’s assertion that “a good metaphorimplies an intuitive perception of similarity in dissimilars” (Poetics, 1459a7). Indeed, perhaps the central problem around which one might organizethese various theories concerns the way in which they conceive of the natureof resemblance and its place in the metaphorical process. Moreover, wemight characterize analogy itself – at least to the extent to which the termplays a part in criticism addressing hermetic poetry1 – as that variety ofmetaphor emphasizing the difference or distance between the two terms: thus,on the one side of the debate, the threat to meaning posed by analogy in anentire line of critics ranging from Flora on, and on the other, LucianoAnceschi’s “poetica della distanza”, and Piero Bigongiari’s notion, borrowedfrom Paul Ricoeur, of metaphor that constructs its sense by rolling back thefrontiers of non-sense. At the risk of oversimplification, one either assumesthat metaphor allows the poet to unearth previous unseen resemblances, orthat it is the work of metaphor to lay the grounds for those very resemblances(that is, to produce the conditions for positing new resemblances): whatdistinguishes hermetic analogy from a range of other experiences, includingSymbolist analogy (and that of D’Annunzio, whose conception of analogyremains firmly rooted in late nineteenth-century sensibilities), as well assurrealist analogy, is the question of the grounds for posing a relationship ofsimilarity. Of particular interest are those instances when hermetic metaphorabandons traditional models associated with the representational modes. It isin these instances that hermetic metaphor comes into its own: to say thathermetic poetry abandons mimetic ideals is not to claim, of course, that it isentirely, or even primarily, non-representational, but merely that it has cometo distrust scenic or pictorial means as “heteronomous”2.

In La poesia ermetica, Francesco Flora provides a brief definition ofanalogy (suggesting at the same time the unfortunate appeal such a techniquehas for contemporary sensibilities): “l’analogismo, elementare rapporto dicomparazione, attuato sopprimendo il sintattico ‘come’, la parola-brivido-sonoro, solitaria ed aleatoria, son modi ligi alla sensibilità dei lettori d’oggi”(70). Flora’s definition of analogy is reiterated, virtually unchanged, in 1942by Salvatore Romano in his own La poetica dell’ermetismo: “L’analogiacome metafora è un paragone abbreviato per la soppressione del ‘come’.Soltanto, a differenza di quest’ultima, analogia è una similitudine di oggettilontani, d’impressioni e note di ordini sensibili più diversi” (99). Theserelatively uncomplicated descriptions of analogy rely upon two key notions:first, the absence of the syntactic “like”, and, second, the combination of two

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or more diverse orders of sensation3. Leaving aside the second4, the firstsuggests that analogy (or metaphor in general) and simile are onlystructurally distinct: in analogy, the connecting terms “like” or “as” (or theItalian “come” and other similar terms) are merely suppressed and can alwaysbe reinserted into the more elliptical expression. Such a theory of metaphorremains firmly within the classical tradition and reflects a fundamentalassumption that one can retrace the path from the figurative expression backto the thought behind it; in short, it assumes that the (meaning of) metaphor isparaphraseable and therefore assigns to it a purely ornamental function.

In fact, Flora and Romano have done little more than adopt a model ofmetaphor introduced by Quintilian in the first century A.D., who describesmetaphor as similitudo brevior, a formulation that continued to informstudies of metaphor long into the twentieth century. Before Quintilian,Aristotle had already considered the relationship between metaphor andsimile (explicitly in the Rhetoric, while this connection remains implicit inthe Poetics). However, where Quintilian describes metaphor as anabbreviated simile, Aristotle inverts the relationship, subordinating simile tometaphor. Paul Ricoeur, in The Rule of Metaphor, comments on this shift:“Rather, simile is a metaphor developed further; the simile says ‘this is likethat’, whereas the metaphor says ‘this is that’. Hence, to the extent that simileis a developed metaphor, all metaphor, not just proportional metaphor, isimplicit comparison or simile” (25).

The immediate implications of this inversion are clear: simile simply makesexplicit the grounds for all metaphor, which remains tied to the notion ofresemblance. The transfer of names at the heart of both metaphor and similein Aristotle’s word-based approach – according to which metaphor is defined“on the basis of a semantics that takes the word or the name as its basic unit”(Ricoeur, 3) – results in an apprehension of identity within difference; simile,however, in making the nature of the comparison explicit, runs the risk ofdissipating its pleasure and, more importantly, its power to instruct. Theformulations of the relationship between metaphor and simile by Aristotleand Quintilian (and, therefore, Flora and others who reiterate similar notions)may seem to amount to a distinction without a difference; nonetheless, wewitness in them a pull toward one of the two poles of identity and difference,the first instance of a tension that will mark all subsequent theories ofmetaphor. To state succinctly what we will see to be a complex issue, we cansay for the moment that Flora and Romano adopt a model that puts themsquarely on the side of identity, with the work of metaphor consisting in itspower to demonstrate vividly and concisely existing, if hidden, similarities.

The work in which Flora’s understanding of metaphor and related figures ofspeech is most fully elaborated, I miti della parola, is a curious text that inmany ways stands at odds with his treatment of similar problems in La poesiaermetica, where analogy is seen above all as symptom of the decadence ofcontemporary poetry. In the chapter “L’arte come metafora” in I miti dellaparola, Flora describes all art as being fundamentally metaphoric, in the


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broadest sense: “L’arte non è un paragone tra il modello e l’immagine: èl’alchimia dei due termini e perciò metafora” (48). While he claims to rejectany strict mimetic function of art – “Il mondo dell’arte non è mai realistico:l’arte è sempre metafora. [...] Bisogna saper vedere don Abbondio non comeun tipo il cui merito consisterebbe nell’essere fedelmente riprodotto dal veroe dal verosimile, ma come metafora linguistica della sua realtà terrestre: inquesto senso l’arte è simbolo” (55) – he nevertheless maintains the two keyterms “model” and “image”, emphasizing the essential, yet inevitablymysterious, relationship between the two. Flora is no more specific about thisrelationship than to say that it is always “musical”, a term he never managesto define, yet whose nature is unmistakable to the critic capable of reading“con l’animo di poesia” (I miti della poesia, 55). He finds this last quality tobe generally lacking in contemporary critics; the irony of the followingindictment of these critics will not be lost on the reader familiar with thedismay Flora displays, in La poesia ermetica, in the face of hermetic analogy:

Sono i nostri critici – anche i più sottili – son preparati, dico, a tutta larapida compenetrazione analogica della vita moderna, sì da intendere epadroneggiare davvero le immagini della poesia e della pretesa poesiacontemporanea? Credo che i più abbiano scarsa capacità e velocitàpsicologica, e nel nostro medesimo tempo siano antichi. Essi avrannoun’esperienza che è bastevole a far intendere un poeta di trecento anni fa:e non ne hanno alcuna per intendere quelli che vivono accanto ad essi,proprio perché c’è fra loro una differenza di età spirituale, in ciò che èsano e in ciò che è corrotto. (I miti della parola, 75)

In I miti della parola, however, Flora’s own ability to manage metaphorseems to take him no farther than Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, which servesas treasure trove of metaphors that, once bold, have since been renderedbanal over time. It is telling that all of Flora’s examples (“il ramo del lago”,“le catene dei monti”), even when newly minted, would hardly seem to havestruck one as terribly daring metaphors, resting as they do on a fairly clear,easily retrievable (usually visual) image5. Even as he rejects baroquemetaphor for its desire to impress and inspire wonder, his own approach tometaphor fails to go beyond a focus on its vividness and “internal harmony”.Curiously, he blames the failure of Baroque analogy on its inability to call upa coherent image: “Né il seicento peccò di troppe immagini, ma anzi peccòperché non seppe avere immagini” (83).

Other critics, while attempting to defend hermetic poetry against an idealistcritique that either rejected or minimized the experimentalism of hermeticmetaphor, continue to rely upon notions of a necessary visual clarity.Giuseppe De Robertis, for example, finds in Leopardi and Foscolo a “radicaldefense” of hermetic poetry6:

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Chi lo crederebbe? Ma la più bella, più aperta, più radicale difesa dellapoesia ermetica ce l’ha lasciata il Leopardi. Ma anche il Foscolo. Chedefinì la poesia “un complesso di sensazioni, d’idee e di allusioni”, e chelui, “non so se per virtù o per vizio, trasvolabat in medio posita, edafferrando le idee cardinali, lasciava a’ lettori la compiacenza o la noia didesumere le intermedie”. (“Parliamo dell’ermetismo”, 78)

The aspect of Foscolo’s treatment of metaphor that gets the most play in DeRobertis’s essay, however, offers no challenge to what we have seen in Flora:

La forza poi delle immagini, la potenza di suggestione che hanno le “ideeconcomitanti”, la necessità d’una lettura segreta, quasi che i poeti nonvolessero per lettori che “i loro pari”, erano tante condizioni per far poesiae per intenderla. E quel suo difendere infine “la fantasia pittrice”,“l’arcana armoniosa melodia pittrice”, e che un poeta deve “dipingere”non mai “descrivere”, tornava a riconfermare come sommo pregiodell’arte, dell’arte vera, e soltanto dell’arte moderna, certo potere allusivo,evocativo si direbbe oggi, e una eccitatrice velocità di trapassi. (79)

Moreover, De Robertis cites Leopardi on the importance of not taxing thereader with excessively obscure metaphors:

Sapeva anche, il Leopardi, che “le metafore troppo lontane stancano”,perché il lettore “non arriva ad abbracciare lo spazio che è tra l’una el’altra idea rappresentata dalla metafora, o non ci arriva in un punto, madopo un certo tempo”, sì che “la moltiplicità simultanea delle idee, nelche consiste il piacere, non ha piu luogo.” (80)

In the end, what is at stake in both Leopardi and Foscolo, in the view of DeRobertis, is the power of metaphor (that has its logic, again, in painterlyvividness and clarity, together with a musical harmony) to give pleasure tothe reader.

Mario Apollonio, on the other hand, takes a contrasting approach, refusingto condemn the exceedingly obscure analogy as well as to deny the challengeit presents, seeing it instead as an element in a ritual through which the readerparticipates in a kind of divine secret. He writes in Ermetismo (1945):

Il poeta nuovo, abolendo il commento e la graduale istituzione oratoriadel lettore, fissa fin da principio quel che deve essere il punto d’arrivo inogni opera d’arte, e cioè l’adeguarsi del lettore all’immagine,connaturandovisi (né una metafora si è connaturata alla parola finché ipassaggi intermediari non sono sottintesi)7. E se per ottenere questo scopogli chiede di incantarsi nella ripetizione di formule a prima vista astruse,la famigliarità è pur la premessa sociale di ogni connaturarsi: virtù elimite dell’abitudine. (70)


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In addition to the importance of the image as focus for the reader’sidentification, Apollonio points out the distance between metaphor anddiscursive language, only to dissolve this distance as the metaphor’s hiddenconnections are made explicit as a result of an incantatory repetitionbordering on the mystical.

In La poetica dell’ermetismo italiano, Mario Petrucciani’s critique ofFlora’s description of analogy in hermetic poetry is limited to pointing outFlora’s tendency to generalize regarding the negative results in the hermetics(apparent in the disconnect between the treatment of metaphor in I miti dellaparola and La poesia ermetica), rather than to look at specific works(something Petrucciani does briefly at the end of the chapter on analogy,without, however, tackling examples that at all test his own thesis). Writingin 1955, Petrucciani distances himself from Flora on analogy only in hiswillingness to allow for a greater number of successful analogies in hermeticpoetry. Moreover, the basis here for making such a judgment coincidesentirely with what we have seen in detractors and defender of hermeticismalike. Of the two terms of the metaphor, Petrucciani writes: “siano purlontanissimi, si giustificheranno sempre, ove abbiano una loro intimanecessità, e coerenza; ove la loro sintesi sia armonica” (163). Stopping shortof charging analogy in itself with being responsible for non poesia, he isscarcely better off than Flora in conveying a sense of the rationale behindsuccessful metaphors, other than that they are apprehended by the criticgifted with a sensibility toward music and harmony.

Where these approaches all seem to agree is in their assumption of anunderlying coherence and harmony justifying the metaphoric process andembodied in the image that results from the synthesis of the metaphor’s twoterms. As we have seen, such an understanding of the image in the work ofmetaphor has a precedent in Foscolo, who championed “la fantasia pittrice”and “l’armoniosa arcana melodia pittrice” (cited in De Robertis, 78-79). Ofcourse, the notion that metaphor should produce a vivid image in order to beeffective dates back to Aristotle, who writes: “It is also good to usemetaphorical words; but the metaphors must not be far-fetched, or they willbe difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or they will have no effect. The words, too,ought to set the scene before our eyes” (Rhetoric, 1410b 31-33). And as wehave seen, it finds its most insistent defender in the Flora of I miti dellapoesia.

Moreover, as a precedent for the critics under consideration here, we cannotoverlook an essential moment in the history of metaphor theory during whichthis emphasis on vision perhaps reached its apex: Emanuele Tesauro’stypology of metaphor in Il cannocciale aristotelico is perhaps the mostrepresentative work in this regard, contributing to the revival of theontological primacy of sight over the other senses characteristic of theseventeenth century8. Pierantonio Frare, in “Il Cannocchiale aristotelico: daretorica della letteratura a letteratura della retorica”, discusses this aspect of

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metaphor in Tesauro, referring to Aristotle’s claim that “it is from metaphorthat we can best get hold of something fresh” (Rhetoric, 1410b 13): “Laconoscenza di cui si parla è, prima ancora che intellettuale, visiva: spetta alRicoeur il merito di aver dimostrato come già il dettato aristotelico assegnialla metafora il potere di visualizzare le relazioni” (35)9. Along with thenotion of a visual component implicit in Aristotle, Tesauro underlines thecognitive, if not ontological, value of metaphor. Defining metaphor as“parola pelligrina, velocemente significante un’obietto per mezzo di unaltro”, he considers its essential qualities to be brevità, novità and chiarezza,the third of these resulting from the other two: “Da queste due Virtù nasce laterza, cioè la Chiarezza. Peroche un’obietto rattamente illuminato dall’altro,ti vibra come un lampo nell’intelletto” (301-03). In Tesauro’s typology, thefigure that currently goes by the name of metaphor corresponds to his“metafora di simiglianza”, which allows us to know a distant object (thisbeing the task of all eight of Tesauro’s figures). He writes: “Con la Simile, ioconosco un Uomo per mezzo della sua imagine: e questa è la Metafora disimiglianza” (303). Not surprisingly, it is here that we find the strongestidentification between image and clarity, as well as the notion that the imagethat results from an effective metaphor should be transparent so as to beimmediately apprehended.

What is overturned in hermetic metaphor are two assumptions runningthrough all the theories we have examined until now: one concerns theharmony that justifies the bringing together of the two terms, and the otherthe character of the image that results from the comparison, setting the stagefor the final clarity into which the metaphor is resolved. In reiterating the twoemphases, the approaches of the critics we have examined mitigate theprimacy of vision by relying on a sense of harmony, but fail to release theimage from the burden of a determining concept, a notion that will prove tobe central to the work of the terza generazione. This shift in the conceptionof the poetic image, fundamental to an understanding of the new relationshipto language embodied in hermetic poetry, will receive its first systematicelaboration in the work of Luciano Anceschi, who incorporates Kantianesthetics into his own work in order to provide the foundation for a notion ofimage freed from a dependency on concept.

It is Anceschi who identifies by way of reference to the technique ofanalogy an entire line of modern Italian poetry; far from being a phenomenonrestricted to hermetic poetry, analogy proves to be a defining aspect of a greatdeal of Italian poetry, as a glance at the titles of a number of his workssuggests: “Leopardi e la poetica dell’analogia”, “D’Annunzio e il sistemadell’analogia”, not to mention the important role analogy plays in Le poetichedel Novecento in Italia, as well in demonstrating the genesis of the categoryof pure poetry in Anceschi’s foundational work, Autonomia e eteronomiadell’arte10. Moreover, as Anceschi shapes his anthology Lirici nuoviaccording to a strong sense of continuity between poets such as Campana,Onofri, Ungaretti and Montale, and younger ones, including a number of


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poets of the terza generazione such as Gatto, Luzi, Sereni and Sinisgalli, hiscollection represents a significant moment of transition; the few years thathave passed since the earliest theories of hermeticism have allowed for thefocus to widen to include these younger poets. (The rationale behind theanthology, in fact, consists in giving space to those poets perhaps too recentto have been included in anthologies such as Pancrazi and Papini’s Poetid’oggi [the second edition of which extends to 1925] and Falqui andCapasso’s Fiore della Lirica Italiana [1933].) In this sense, it is with Liricinuovi that we can see critical attention begin to shift onto poets soon to bebrought together under the grouping “terza generazione”. More important tothe present discussion is the fact that this process takes place, to aconsiderable degree, according to a theoretical assumption that sees analogynot merely as a salient poetic technique, but rather as a guiding principle ofesthetic judgment. It is not surprising, in fact, that Anceschi’s estheticproject, grounded as it is in a phenomenological tradition inherited directlyfrom Antonio Banfi, interpreter of Husserl, might come to coincide in somesense with an understanding of the potentially ontological function ofanalogy itself.

In his 1942 Introduction to the Lirici nuovi, Anceschi attributes tocontemporary lyric poetry, among other qualities, “l’uso continuo ed energicodell’analogia, come modo rapido e quasi veemente di porre rapporti, di aprireorizzonti” and goes on to cite Ungaretti: “[la parola] si propone di mettere incontatto ciò che è più distante. Maggiore è la distanza, maggiore è la poesia.Quando tali contatti danno luce è toccata poesia. In breve, uso, e forse abuso,di forme elittiche” (4-5). Through reference to Ungaretti’s claims for theplace of “distance” in contemporary poetry, Anceschi allows analogy to takeon considerable significance in his discussion of the relatively wide range ofpoets represented in Lirici nuovi. As he formulates a notion of poesia comedistanza, he confirms more specifically the pairing of analogy andhermeticism; indeed, he is more uneasy about the term “hermeticism” itselfthan about the risk of reinforcing Flora’s equation of ermetici with analogisti,an equation Anceschi will reformulate in positive terms, emphasizing theproductive nature of hermeticism’s alleged obscurity11:

La poesia come distanza: è questo certo uno dei motivi fondamentali chepossono servire come principio attivo di una poetica odierna della lirica,di quella poetica che, con un nome in qualche modo incauto ed accettatocon troppa indulgenza, è stata classificata come ermetica. (5)

Under closer examination, the notion of “distance” in Anceschi’s workproves to be not merely one among many, but perhaps the single mostresilient and wide-reaching motive behind the poetics of hermeticism.

Citing specifically the work of Flora and Romano – though hinting that acritical commonplace initiated by these two would be taken up by others as

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well, as it certainly has been – Anceschi counters the tendency to understandcontemporary use of analogy as deriving primarily (if not entirely) fromFrench Symbolism and its immediate heirs, noting not only the foundationaldifferences between hermetic and symbolist analogy, but suggestingcharacteristically that the critic look at poets’ individual styles and not followpreconceived critical schemata:

Non pare, quindi, conveniente l’insistere, e lo si fa spesso (Flora,Romano…), sul metodo antico dell’analogia, come su una certa riprovadi una proposta origine solamente simbolistica della nuova lirica: delresto, l’analogia, per Mallarmé, era l’ideale principio di un puro ordineestetico di metafisiche ‘corrispondenze’, mentre, se per Ungaretti è solouna figura letteraria che, tra tante altre, giova alla sua volontà di stile peraccesi, fulminanti contatti tra evidenze lontanissime, per Quasimodo è ilmodo opportuno di togliere indugi alla sua intensa ricerca di modulareuna durata pura della pronuncia poetica. (6)

One senses in Anceschi the impulse to gather the work of a number ofdiverse poets under the single banner of analogy, variously inflected,distancing, at the same time, these Italian experiences from the Frenchtradition. Rather than seek models among the French Symbolists, Anceschiproposes, for example, another precedent, one closer to the experience of ayounger generation of Italian poets, in D’Annunzio’s “systematic”understanding and employment of analogy12:

È vero: i “lirici nuovi” si rifecero ad una lettura diretta, che risultòradicalmente diversa, di Baudelaire e di Mallarmé, ebbero una diversa ediversamente fondata idea di analogia; ma è anche vero che il primo aparlare in modo sistematico di analogia come istituzione della poesia nelnostro paese fu il D’Annunzio. In tal senso, con questi limiti, in queglianni, egli appare veramente come il prologo a certi aspetti e modi dellalirica e della prosa “nuova”. (“D’Annunzio, e il sistema della analogia”,40)

Anceschi traces analogy in D’Annunzio over a relatively brief span of time,from an early, unsystematic use in Primo Vere and Terra Vergine, throughCanto Novo, to a much more self-conscious use (and theorization) in thenovels of the 1880’s. D’Annunzio’s conception of analogy ranges from anemphasis, characteristic of the late nineteenth-century, on the perception ofobscure and profound symbols in nature, on the “comprensione simpaticadelle cose, e di penetrazione dell’anima umana nell’anima delle cose” (32),to the occasional meditation on the poet’s work in shaping the raw materialof language, a focus that will have greater resonance with the concerns oftwentieth-century poetry:


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La parola appare segno imperfetto; solo un artista espertissimo nei suoistrumenti può perfezionarla, essa deve essere continuamente intensamentelavorata perché rapidi accostamenti, identificazioni, estasi sensibili epiene di senso diano effetti esaltanti, raggiungendo la forza dellarivelazione. (33)

Even before he raises analogy to the level of “system”13, Anceschi’sD’Annunzio is the modern poet who demonstrates early on an intuition of therole of analogy in a much needed literary renewal.

In Le istituzioni della poesia, published in 1968, Anceschi returns toanalogy as one of two organizing principles influencing the works of thelirici nuovi, but extending beyond those individual works to establish nothingshort of a literary “society” (“si pensa che il sociologo possa avere qualchecosa da dire a questo proposito”):

Tutti i poeti che diciamo “lirici nuovi” nel nostro paese hanno avuto in unmodo o nell’altro a che fare con le istituzioni della analogia o del simbolooggettivo; ciò ha delle conseguenze sul modo con cui essi organizzaronoil loro universo verbale; e ha un significato che vive all’internodell’opera, ma va anche oltre l’opera. (38).

Later, however, when Anceschi tackles the poetics of hermeticism for theEnciclopedia del Novecento (1975), even Montale, the most significant figureassociated with the use of the simbolo oggettivo, fails to escape the influenceof analogy (which becomes the istituzione per eccellenza):

Venuto dopo Ungaretti, Montale ha una formazione tutta diversa; e,intanto, è da notare che se Ungaretti pone l’analogia al centro del suosistema, Montale si serve della analogia come di una componente per unsistema che diciamo della “poetica degli oggetti”, che potremmo anchedire di “correlazioni oggettive”, tale infine da giungere fino a toccare ilterritorio difficile degli emblemi e dell’allegoria. (“Poetichedell’ermetismo”, 26)

For Anceschi, who locates the earliest manifestations of hermeticism in theyears 1916-1919, Ungaretti’s analogia will carry more weight than Montale’ssimbolo oggettivo with regard to the experience of the terza generazione –culminating in Luzi, of whom Anceschi remarks, “porta fino al deliriol’isituto dell’analogia” (37) – even if we consider the use of analogy inMontale’s very early “Elegia” and “Musica silenziosa”.

Each of Anceschi’s istituzioni della poesia presupposes a response to atleast one of three functions: they may represent a technical notion aiding inthe production of poetry, or a didactic norm transmitting specific aspects ofpoetic invention, or a traditional norm associating with a depository of

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codified literary knowledge. As istituzione in Anceschian esthetics, analogyseems to fulfill all three functions, in addition to acting as a principle ofjudgment extendable even to earlier poets for whom such a technique mightat first seem foreign:

Si aggiunga, poi, che se l’istituzione sarà l’analogia, comunque vengaintrepretata secondo le diverse disponibilità di pronuncia che, daAutonomia alle Poetiche del Novecento, abbiamo constatato nei diversimovimenti e nei singoli poeti, ecco proprio l’analogia, oltre che proporsicome modello della poesia, come procedimento interno del fare, e comestruttura generale che tende a caricarsi di significati metafisici, vorràanche presentarsi come un sistema dei giudizi. E non solo servirà agiudicare i poeti viventi che accettano il principio, ma anche per guardarecon occhio diverso quelli che T. S. Eliot chiamava i poeti morti. (49)

Before Le istituzioni della poesia, the sense in which analogy might serveas a system of judgment had already been a central concern in Autonomia edeteronomia dell’arte. When Anceschi addresses the problem of judgment – inAutonomia in particular, but also in his later writings – one is reminded of therole the work of Kant plays in shaping Anceschian esthetics14. Indeed, inaddition to the fundamental notions of autonomy and heteronomy, Kantsupplies Anceschi with the means for positing the importance of analogywithin the broader discussion of a systematic understanding of estheticjudgment. He does this through his description of the free play of imaginationin esthetic judgment.

Kant premises aesthetic judgment on the disinterested contemplation of theobject, so that the interests of the individual have no bearing on judgment.More pertinent to the present discussion, however, is his description of anecessary relationship between judgment and imagination. Although Kantargued, in the Critique of Pure Reason, for the central role of imagination inthe synthesis of concept and intuition (one function of imagination beingprecisely that of assigning concepts to our experience in order to give shapeto our perceptions of the world), he also believed in the possibility of freeingimagination from a reliance on the concept in esthetic judgment, whetherthrough the absence of any determinate concept or its non-application.Anceschi refers early on in Autonomia to Kant’s affirmation, in the Critiqueof Judgment, that “è bello ciò che piace universalmente senza concetto”15,upon which is founded the notion locating esthetic judgment in the free playof faculties of the senses, that is, of the imagination16 (26-27). Theintersection of Kant’s thoughts on imagination with Leopardi’s notion of ideeconcomitanti will take us beyond a word-based approach to metaphor thatfails to break with classical rhetorical in the direction of a predicativeapproach capable of accounting for the complex nature of the “pictorialdimension” of modernist metaphor. Moreover, such a focus will help usappreciate the significance of Piero Bigongiari’s discussion of what he calls


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the “freedom of the image” in his own work and in that of hiscontemporaries.

In the Introduction to Lirici nuovi, Anceschi relates analogy to “certedimenticate osservazioni leopardiane circa il diletto aperto e infinito delleidee concomitanti” (4). Two years earlier, in 1940, De Robertis had, in hisown discussion of analogy, referred to Foscolo’s – not Leopardi’s – ideeconcomitanti. However, De Robertis’ appeal to Foscolo as authoritativeprecedent for hermetic analogy is limited to acknowledging the role ofambiguity: Foscolo, after Locke, uses the term to designate the plurality ofideas in the poet’s mind that result in a given composition; the task of thecritic and translator is then to rediscover and make explicit these ideas(Fubini, 17-18). By citing Leopardi’s idee concomitanti, Anceschiemphasizes instead the infinite variety of meanings associated with a literarywork (also involving sound and other qualities of language) whose range is aswide as that of all of the possible contexts (readers, circumstances of timeand place) in which that work might exist17. Within a discussion of the theoryof metaphor, such an emphasis constitutes a shift away from the possibility ofan exhaustive paraphrase of metaphor and in the direction of the productiveforce of metaphor as an unresolvable tension.

It was Paul Henle, an important theorist of metaphor in the English-language tradition, who emphasized the iconic character of metaphor, thetrait he claims singles it out among the various tropes18. This iconic characteris not associated with an image in a strong sense, but instead with the processof seeing one situation in terms of another: as Ricoeur notes, it “has to dowith a parallel between two thoughts, such that one situation is presented ordescribed in terms of another that is similar to it. […] The essential role ofthe icon is to contain an internal duality that at the same time is overcome”(The Rule of Metaphor, 189). The analogical character of the icon, then,accounts for its ability to suggest resemblances. Moreover, the idea of theiconic moment of metaphor “calls to mind the ‘productive’ imagination thatKant distinguishes from the ‘reproductive’ in order to identify it with theschema, which is a method for constructing images” (189). Similarly,because the iconic element in metaphor is not itself an image – in which casethe power of metaphor would be exhausted in its immediate expression – butrather a formula for calling up icons capable of pointing toward “originalresemblances, whether of quality, structure or locality, of situation or, finally,of feeling […], the iconic representation harbours the power to elaborate, toextend the parallel structure” (189).

In Ricoeur’s work, Henle’s iconic function, like Kant’s productiveimagination, cautions against assigning to the image the character of a stable,visual representation. Ricoeur locates this notion within the history ofmetaphor theory by returning to Aristotle’s formulation, this timeemphasizing an inherent tension:

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“To metaphorize well”, said Aristotle, “implies an intuitive perception ofthe similarity in dissimilar”. Thus, resemblance itself must be understoodas a tension between identity and difference in the predicative operationset in motion by semantic innovation. This analysis of the work ofresemblance suggests in turn that the notions of ‘productive imagination’and ‘iconic function’ must be reinterpreted. Indeed, imagination mustcease being seen as a function of the image, in the quasi-sensorial senseof the word; it consists rather in ‘seeing as […]’ according to aWittgensteinian expression – a power that is an aspect of the properlysemantic operation consisting in seeing the similar in the dissimilar. (TheRule of Metaphor, 6)

The intersection between Kant’s idea of productive imagination and acharacteristically modernist suspicion of image as embodiment of thought –an intersection that informs both Anceschi’s description of the language ofthe lirici nuovi as well as Ricoeur’s discussion of the place of resemblance ina predicative theory of metaphor – is treated in depth in an often overlookedarticle by Piero Bigongiari. In “Libertà drammatica della poesia”, whichappeared in the journal Prospettive early in 1943 (just a few months after thepublication of the first edition of Lirici nuovi), Bigongiari identifies in theRomantics the beginning of a tendency to separate judgment and fantasy(imagination), with which he associates the contemporary habit of assigninga priori to thought the character of an image and expecting “life” tocorrespond thus to a static, embodied concept:

Tra giudizio e fantasia il romanticismo creò una scissione inesistente,sinchè per una cattiva abitudine dell’intelligenza oggi si dà alla riflessioneil carattere di un’immagine ognora presunta e sempre ipotetica, quasi cheessa sostituisca nella sua autonomia quel che la vita ha di fluido e difantastico. La ragione dei moderni opera per schemi successivi quel cheinvece dovrebbe investire di una logica naturale. (253)

As the title suggests, “Libertà drammatica della poesia” centers on the twoterms in the phrase libertà drammatica, a quality of poetry that refers as wellto the nature of the individual’s relationship to the world. What Bigongiaricondemns, in fact, is a strong sense of the subject-object dichotomy, whichshould instead be a fluid dialectic. This dichotomy involves the subject’sstripping itself of “imaginary qualities”; as the object gains consistency, thesubject increasingly assumes the sense of a finite, constructed, “unreflective”image. The movement inherent in the dialectic Bigongiari would substitutefor a dichotomy that tends toward reification – and results in a “closed”poetry – acts as guarantor of the freedom to which he appeals19:

È giudizio la nostra libertà quotidiana, il cadere del nostro soggettivismo,il senso del moto inerente alla dialettica soggetto-oggetto, il giudizio è


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l’atto stesso dell’esistenza dopo che ci ha deposto come immaginianticipate, falsamente conclusive. [...] La facoltà del giudizio parte, devepartire, dal silenzio, e non dall’occulto clamore degli uomini negati allastoria; ha la moralità di un atto puro nella ragione continua dell’esistenza,è il silenzio dischiuso al corpo, è una immagine non analogica; per cuigiudizio e fantasia vengono in questo senso a identificarsi. E una rondineche righi il cielo della nostra finestra è il proprio perpetuo e liberogiudizio. (256)

Given the context of our discussion of analogy, it is important to clarify thesense in which Bigongiari uses the term “analogical” here. We might opposethis idea of analogy in Bigongiari to what we encountered in Anceschi’sreading of D’Annunzio, where the analogical relation between the individualand his surroundings, the “penetrazione dell’anima umana nell’anima dellecose” (“D’Annunzio, e il sistema della analogia”, 32), implied an almostviolent imposition of the poet’s mind or sensibilities on the objects of theworld20. More significantly, it also stands in contrast to a “transcendent”analogy that merely indexes some invisible, eternal absolute, as well as to thenotion of the power of the symbol to encapsulate the passions of a Romantic“I”. According to Bigongiari, although his contemporaries may haveabandoned a predetermined morality, they nonetheless contaminate thefreedom of the image with the “morality” of the image, rendering itdemonstrative, closed, transcendent. In order for poetry to render thisfreedom, it must resist the temptation of the idyll and remain open to a fluidsense (“mobile senso”) in which judgment and imagination both play a part.Thus, in place of the image grounded in an idyllic morality, in a “closed”,analogical relation, Bigongiari proposes the anti-idyllic, dramatic, openimage.

We can clarify what is at stake in Bigongiari’s project by returning toAristotle’s description of metaphor in the Rhetoric, and specifically to theattention he gives to the visual aspect of metaphor (“making one’s hearers seethings”): “We have still to explain what we mean by their ‘seeing things,’ andwhat must be done to effect this. By ‘making them see things’ I mean usingexpressions that represent things in a state of activity” (Rhetoric, 1411b 24-25). As Ricoeur points out, this shift in emphasis results in a privileging ofAristotelian over Platonic metaphysics, the emphasis being on “renderingthings dramatic” rather than on making the invisible appear through thevisible (The Rule of Metaphor, 34). In keeping with the underlyingassumptions of many of the critics who have played a part in this parallelhistory – that of metaphor theory as determining factor in critical approachesto Italian hermetic poetry – we have until now favored the “Platonic” readingof the visual component of metaphor; in order to situate Bigongiari’s notionof the dramatic liberty of the poetic image within a theory of metaphor that

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takes its cue from the Kant’s theory of esthetic judgment, it will be necessaryto emphasize instead the dramatic nature of imagination.

Ricoeur suggests a way of putting Aristotle’s recognition of the power offigurative language to show things “in action” into a context of thought,contemporary with the terza generazione, that moves beyond the referentialfunction of poetic language:

To present men ‘as acting’ and all things ‘as in act’ – such could well bethe ontological function of metaphorical discourse, in which everydormant potentiality of existence appears as blossoming forth, everylatent capacity for action as actualized. Lively expression is that whichexpresses existence as alive. (43)

Or to say it with Bigongiari: “Una rondine, ripeto, è solamente una rondine,e non può dirci nulla per chiusura strofica, per analogia. Drammatico è ilgiudizio per cui quella vive nella poesia: cioè l’apertura dell’esistenza; eritorno all’identificazione che pongo tra giudizio e fantasia” (“Libertàdrammatica della poesia” 257).

Bigongiari’s rejection of a closed, demonstrative, consolatory poetic imagein favor of the “dramatic freedom” of poetry, though little discussed incriticism addressing Italian hermeticism, constitutes an indispensablestatement of the poetics of the terza generazione. Moreover, it is striking thatfifty-three years later, in an interview given to Daniele Piccini, Bigongiariwould reaffirm the significance of this “dramatic” character of languagewhen offering a description of the nucleus of values identifiable in thespecific experience of the hermeticism of the terza generazione:

È una poetica in cui il discorso è in uno stato di tensione: il punto discelta, la parola che in quel momento viene cercata e definita è una parolache sente questa tensione fra gli estremi; è una parola che io definerei‘drammatica’, nel senso che appunto avverte in sé questo stato dinamico,potenziale. (“Nel labirinto della lingua”, Poesia, Giugno 2003, 12)

Perhaps the most pertinent demonstration of such a theory of poeticlanguage will be given by Bigongiari, in an essay entitled “Montale fra sensoe non senso verso il ‘correlativo soggettivo’”, where he takes up Montale’spoem “Potessi almeno costringere”.

While “Potessi almeno costringere” (from Ossi di seppia; it remainsunchanged from the 1925 edition) precedes the experience of the terzagenerazione by a number of years, it nevertheless hints at modes morefamiliar from Montale’s later poems (particularly certain poems from Leoccasioni). Like other poems from Ossi di seppia21, “Potessi almenocostringere” is an indictment of the poet’s language as incapable of equalingits object, here the voice of the sea, through an operation rather more


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analogical (the strong relation one hears in “costringere”, “accordare”, and“rapirti” recalls D’Annunzian analogy) than mimetic in a direct sense:

Potessi almeno costringerein questo mio ritmo stentoqualche poco del tuo vaneggiamento;dato mi fosse accordarealle tue voci il mio balbo parlare: –io che sognava rapirtile salmastre parolein cui natura ed arte si confondono

What distinguishes “Potessi almeno costringere” from other of Montale’searly poems, and what makes it of relevance to a discussion of the “dramatic”character of poetic language, are precisely the final lines, cited by Bigongiariat the beginning of the essay, where Montale moves away from the discursiveregister with which until this point in the poem he laments the bankruptcy ofreceived language. These final lines read:

Ed il tuo rombo cresce, e si dilataazzurra l’ombra nuova.M’abbandonano a prova i miei pensieri.Sensi non ho; né senso. Non ho limite. (Tutte le poesie, 60)

The lines “Ed il tuo rombo cresce, e si dilata / azzurra l’ombra nuova”,while determined by the imediate context (as well as by that of theMediterraneo as a sequence), look forward, in fact, not only to the languageof the Mottetti – where we find phrases such as “un ronzìo lungo vienedall’aperto”, “allunga [...] l’ombra nera”, “un cigolìo si sfera, ci discosta, /l’azzurro pervicace non ricompare” – but also to central works of the terzagenerazione, such as Luzi’s Quaderno gotico and Bigongiari’s La figlia diBabilonia. As Montale abandons an aspiration to capture (rapire) nature orforce it (costringere) into the bounds of a concordant language, his poembecomes suggestive of the dramatization of abstract qualities so prevalent inthe terza generazione.

In the present context, what is of interest is that “Se potessi almenocostringere” also looks forward to a Montale in which “non-sense” will beunderstood as a necessary moment in preparation for the “other”, unforeseensense, that which results from the tension between two extremes22:

In Montale il “limite” che non ha, è il limite interiore, il limite dellaqualificazione dell’esistenza in termini implosive, dentro il soggettosentito come soggettività senza fondo, dietro quel “rumore senza fondo”che l’interior hominis avverte se si ausculta con l’orecchio dell’anima,

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dimessa ogni volontà di potenza, cioè ogni volontà mitica, nelladerealizzazione esistenziale di ogni mito di fronte alla realtà oggettiva.Ma è proprio questo non aver senso, oltre al non aver sensi, a far sì che ilpoeta nella sua prima fase senta anche in termini improgressivi la sua“immobilità come un tormento.” (473)

The torment constituted by the absence of sense prepares the way for thesecond phase of the poet’s career, where it is transformed into a kind of“interior dialectic”, between an internal and an external – or centrifugal andcentripetal – impulse, as in the later “La casa dei doganieri”. Indeed, it is thisquality that distinguishes Montale’s “correlativo oggettivo” from that of T. S.Eliot, which remains fundamentally allegorical (and, therefore,fundamentally static):

[Il “correlativo oggettivo” montaliano è] a fondo strettamente esistenziale,senza cioè alcun diritto di prelazione sulla conoscibilità anche emotivadell’oggetto rispetto a cui il soggetto correla la sua procedura. È proprio“l’occasione” a togliere alla correlazione qualsiasi premessa gnoseologicain favore della casualità geometrica dell’intersezione tra soggetto eoggetto. (474).

Rejecting the premise of a resulting self-knowledge or knowledge of theobject, Bigongiari draws attention, instead, to the random nature of theintersection – or, rather, impact – between the two impulses.

What I have traced until now are a number of theories that provideproductive ways of reconsidering the work of metaphor in hermetic poetry. Ido not mean to suggest, however, that any one approach will be universallyeffective, even that of Ricoeur, whose approach resonates so well with theaspiration to a dramatic image in the terza generazione. One finds numeroususes of metaphor in the terza generazione, and, indeed, often enough theseuses are quite conventional and present little difficulty for the reader (and, infact, seem not to exceed approaches relying upon notions of similarity withina semiotic or word-based theory of metaphor). At other times, one’s attentionis drawn to the suspension of sense as a precondition for semantic innovationand the recognition of some unanticipated sense. Nevertheless, occasionallyone encounters a disposition of language that remains in some sense“impenetrable”, a phenomenon that has, as Marcello Pagnini has pointed out,its own cultural “necessity”, as well as a rhetoric of its own (“cioè, unrepertorio di modalità che generano indecidibilità e oscurità”)23.

The theories of metaphor implicit in the work of several of the critics I haveconsidered thus far (Flora, Romano, Petrucciani) limit the relation betweenthe two terms of the metaphor to one of similarity (the “harmony” at the heartof effective metaphors)24. Such emphasis on “intimate coherence” and“harmonic synthesis” in these critics strikes one as fairly anachronistic, giventhe preference among modernist writers for what Karsten Harries has called


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“metaphors of collision” (“Metaphor and Transcendence”, 72). Yet, othercritics, such as Anceschi and Bigongiari, while allowing for the notion ofmetaphor as generator, rather than the mere conveyor, of meaning,nevertheless leave aside the question of metaphor that fails to achieve adegree of harmony or coherence. Even Ricoeur’s discussion of the iconicmoment rests upon the work of resemblance in the production of meaning:

Metaphorical meaning does not merely consist of a semantic clash but ofthe new predicative meaning which emerges from the collapse of theliteral meaning, that is, from the collapse of the meaning which obtains ifwe rely only on the common or usual lexical values of our words. Themetaphor is not the enigma but the solution of the enigma.

It is here, in the mutation characteristic of the semantic innovation, thatsimilarity and accordingly imagination play a role. (“The MetaphoricalProcess”, 144)25.

Ricoeur’s formulation of the semantic innovation and the significance ofimagination in the metaphorical process offers considerable advantage overprevious theories of metaphor in dealing with the difficulty presented bymany uses of metaphor in the terza generazione. However, it is difficult todeny that there are moments when hermetic metaphor seems to remain at themoment of semantic impertinence, a problem Harries addresses informulating his notion of “metaphors of collision”. Though he generallyagrees with Ricoeur, Harries argues that not all metaphors result in a newsemantic pertinence:

There are metaphors that direct us away from reality toward the aestheticobject; in such instances semantic collision weakens or breaks thereferential function of language and, supported by phonetic collusion, letsus become absorbed into the poem. (“The Many Uses of Metaphor”, 171)

In acknowledging the possibility that certain instances of hermeticmetaphor may fail to result in a gain in meaning, we seem to have come fullcircle, left, as it were, with something troublingly close to the parola-brivido-sonoro that was for Francesco Flora the symptom of a kind of modernsickness:

The impossibility of translation points out that the collision of images isbalanced by the collusion of the pattern in which these images findexpression. This collusion, which has its ground not so much in a realsimilarity of the referents as in the flow and texture of the wordsthemselves, gives the poem a presence that lets us accept the poet’sbroken metaphors. (“Metaphor and Transcendence”, 79)

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Harries’ theory, which takes us away from a reliance on similarity into therealm of unbridgeable difference, also has its place in a comprehensiveapproach to the place of metaphor in the hermetics’ modernist project.

In lieu of a broader investigation into the specific instances of metaphor inthe work of the terza generazione, a brief look into an exemplary poem byBigongiari will have to suffice. In “Trama”, the final poem of La figlia diBabilonia (1942), the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is reduced,metonymically, to the “passo” of the absent other, just as the last lines of thepoem call up a number of the issues I have addressed here. The entire poemreads:

Su un ambio di cavalli tu cammini,lungo rocce bianchissime, o sognante,divalli, il cuore perso in altri minîche l’orizzonte insanguina alle valli.Ed è questo il divino? come cadonotepide piogge sui muri al suburbioe rose rose in cieche fogge invadonola tua finestra brancolanti a un Ade.Strade senz’ombra, luci senza altare,cuore che ingombra un vano delirare,e le serre fiorite, in altre serepiù cariche, di croci di nepente.Io lungamente attesi il mio morireda uno sguardo più lungo, ma se nientesopravanzava fuor che il tuo transiresempre là dove inalterata i sognitradisci per non essere men vera,nelle lacrime dove mi specchiai,nella spera impazzita, nel segretodella mia vita incalcolato, andraiper sempre, o sognante, col tuo passoo sia esso un po’ di sole che ti giustifica.(Tutte le poesie: 1933-1963, 120-21)

Certainly, the poem is replete with metaphors – “il cuore perso in altriminî”, the “cieche fogge” of the roses, the “luci senza altare” – that areunresolvable into a clear sense, but whose logic resides in the interaction ofabstract properties that drives much of the poem. The central moment,however, coincides with the resistance of the other – “là dove inalterata isogni / tradisci per non essere men vera” – to any sort of transfiguration(whether in memory or metaphor). Here Bigongiari looks forward to the finalpoem of Luzi’s Quaderno gotico (1947), “Dove non eri quanta pace: ilcielo”, the second stanza of which begins “Né memoria, né immagine, nésogni”, a phrase one is tempted to read as a declaration of an ideal (negative)


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poetics. Ultimately, what the refusal to stage such a transfiguration allows topersist is the unbounded and unforeseen (and unforeseeable) secret of life:“nel segreto / della mia vita incalcolato.”__________

NOTE1 Clearly, the subject of analogy does not entirely coincide with that ofmetaphor. I will leave aside the larger problem, beyond the scope of thisstudy, of the many uses of analogy, including its role in philosophy, as wellas the distinction Aristotle himself makes between other types of metaphorand metaphor by analogy. (Aristotle describes four types of metaphor,according to whether the transference – using the name of one thing for thatof another – occurs from genus to species, from species to genus, fromspecies to species, or by analogy. The last of these is what we generallyunderstand as metaphor, without, of course, having to call up the four termsof the analogy.)2 Moreover, the hermetics were certainly not the first to come to such arecognition, nor was theirs the most violent rejection. Indeed, what CharlesAltieri says of nineteenth-century artists has a striking resonance with thehermetics, particularly given the political climate in which they came intobeing: “Representational ideals once profoundly caught up in the project ofEnlightenment now seemed capable of sustaining only public values thatreinforced a self-congratulatory bourgeois dispensation, which became moreappalling as it achieved increasing power” (Painterly Abstraction inModernist American Poetry, 389).3 Flora’s discussion immediately moves from one of art as metaphor to whatwe might call, more specifically, “art as synesthesia”: “E se ci si riferisce allacomoda divisione del tatto, della vista, dell’odorato, dell’udito, l’arte puòessere la traduzione di un’immagine da un senso all’altro, la mutazione diuno stato musicale in un colore, di un sapore o di un odore in un suono o inun gesto” (48).4 For more on the place of synesthesia in Italian hermeticism, see my“Synaesthetic Metaphor in the Poetry of the terza generazione” (forthcomingin The Italianist).5 That Manzoni’s metaphors would tend to rely on a clear, associated imageis hardly surprising, given the debt owed in I promessi sposi to anEnlightenment tradition emphasizing the coupling sguardo-pensiero, anaspect of the novel discussed in depth by Ezio Raimondi in Il romanzosenza idillio (Torino: Einaudi, 1985): “Il fatto è che lo sguardo con cui ilnarratore misura ed esplora lo spazio del suo universo romanzesco non sirapporta soltanto all’occhio della ‘fronte,’ ma anche a quello della ‘mente’che interpreta, che scruta i segni di una realtà faticosa e non immobile. Anchela visualizzazione della scrittura manzoniana, in fondo, procede nel senso di

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una logica scientifica, di una conoscenza appassionata del fenomeno umano”(56)6 For the significance of Leopardi for the terza generazione, see Anna Dolfi’s“Leopardismo e terza generazione”, in La cultura italiana negli anni ’30-’45 (Omaggio ad Alfonso Gatto). Atti del Convegno – Salerno, 21-24aprile 1980, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1984, pp. 349-90.7 When Marco Fioravanti anthologizes this section of Apollonio’s“Ermetismo”, in La critica e gli ermetici (Bologna: Cappelli, 1978), thisparenthetical statement is oddly omitted without explanation (nor is theellipsis noted). Given the context of our discussion, what would otherwise bean inconsequential editorial error takes on certain significance forApollonio’s take on the paraphrasability of the metaphor statement.8 For this shift in the hierarchy of the senses, see Ezio Raimondi’s chapter“Verso il realismo”, in Il romanzo senza idillio, Torino: Einaudi, 1985.9 Ricoeur writes: “To this same characteristic [the ability to astonish andinstruct rapidly] Aristotle attributes another feature of metaphor that has notappeared before, and that seems somewhat disconcerting at first glance.Metaphor, he says, ‘sets the scene before our eyes’ (Rhetoric, 1410b 33). Inother words, it gives that concrete colouration – imagistic style, figurativestyle it is called now – to our grasp of genus, of underlying similarity. It istrue that Aristotle does not use the word eikôn at all in the sense in which,since Charles Sanders Pierce, we speak of the iconic aspect of metaphor. Butthe idea that metaphor depicts the abstract in concrete terms is alreadypresent” (The Rule of MetaphorG, 34).10 Analogy will take its place alongside other – though, one suspects, notequally significant – “institutions” of nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryItalian poetry, most notably that of the correlazione oggettiva. However, theamount of work that the concept of analogy is made to do in Anceschi’scritical enterprise risks an accusation similar to the one he himself levelsagainst Baudelaire with regard to his view of other nineteenth-century Frenchpoets: “Se pure Baudelaire si pone di fronte agli artisti in una posizione chefinisce col vedere in essi solo determinati fatti, comprenderemo che egli sipone di fronte agli artisti con un’esperienza personale troppo vissuta –esperienza personale vissuta, in cui la sua personalità essenzialmente siresolve – per permettergli di assumere un atteggiamento di veracomprensione verso i motivi determinanti di personalità diverse dalle sue:tutti i poeti gli appaiono, dunque, o poeti delle analogie o non poeti. Poesia onon poesia. La differenza starà nel tipo delle analogie” (Autonomia edeteronomia dell’arte, 132).11 Anceschi writes: “Ormai, è chiaro, ‘l’oscurità’ di questi poeti consistesoprattutto nell’ostacolo che offre naturalmente ogni inconsueta disposizionedel linguaggio – e in questa necessaria ‘riforma’ è già il segno che garantiscela validità estetica, l’urgenza morale delle ricerche – in forme per cui i modipoetici si fanno agili a suggerire moti violenti e nuovi del sentimento, sì chespesso si richiede una collaborazione attiva e aperta del lettore, quasi che


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ogni composizione sia fatta insieme dal poeta e da chi lo interpreta secondoinfinite libere direzioni” (“Introduction” to Lirici nuovi, 11).12 As we might expect, D’Annunzio will speak of analogy as an individual’sheightened state of sensitivity to his surroundings, in which previouslyunimagined relationships of similarity among things suddenly becomeapparent. Anceschi cites D’Annunzio’s Taccuino: “Sento nel mio visopallido il colore dei miei occhi simile a quello delle acque che guardo. Il miospirito – per questa sensazione singolare – entra nello stato di ‘grazia’ ossiadi ‘sogno’” (Taccuino, XXIII 209; the italics are D’Annunzio’s).13 Anceschi points out that, while one certainly comes across examples ofanalogy in poets like Carducci, the Scapigliati, and Pascoli, it would bedifficult to locate in them what would amount to a “poetics of analogy”.14 The larger problem of the influence of Kant on the terza generazione andtheir immediate predecessors has received little attention. In addition to keeninterest on the part of theorists like Anceschi and poets like Bigongiari, it isworth noting Laterza’s reissuing in 1938, during period of intense activity forItalian hermeticism, of Gargiulo’s translation of the Critique of Judgment,originally published 1907.15 Of the autonomy of the imagination, Kant writes: “If […] imagination mustin the judgment of taste be regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with, it isnot taken as reproductive, as in its subjection to the laws of association, butas productive and exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitraryforms of possible intuitions” (Critique of Judgment, 86). Though I will beunable to do so here, one might trace the influence Kant’s discussion of theconcept in the work of esthetic judgment has on the aspiration to anathematic poetry cultivated by the terza generazione.16 In referring to “le facoltà conoscitive” in Kant, Anceschi glosses thephrase, significantly, as immaginazione – “Kant fonda il giudizio di gustosopra il libero gioco delle facoltà conoscitive (immaginazione)” (Autonomiaed eteronomia dell’arte, 27). Kant himself has it (in Meredith’s translation)as imagination and understanding: “For the ground of this pleasure is foundin the universal, though subjective, condition of reflective judgments, namelyof the final harmony of an object (be it a product of nature or of art) with themutual relation of the faculties of cognition (imagination and understanding),which are requisite for every empirical cognition” (Critique of Judgment,32). The fact that Anceschi emphasizes the role of imagination is emblematicof his desire to place analogy at the center of the theory of the modern lyric,elaborated first in Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte and continued in Lepoetiche del Novecento in Italia and Le istituzioni della poesia.17 See Leopardi’s Zibaldone 3952.18 See Paul Henle, “Metaphor”, in Language, Thought and Culture, ed.Paul Henle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1958.19 Bigongiari echoes here one of the central concerns – the principle ofsubject-object correlation, as opposed to the tendency to render absolute both

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subject and object – of many for whom Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte,by applying Antonio Banfi’s “critical rationalism” to a view of the task thecontemporary lyric has set for itself, served as a theoretical premise for thenew poetry. On the project of Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte,Anceschi writes: “Si cercava, dunque, un punto da cui muovere; e, pertanto,per sfuggire alle secche sia dell’idealismo che dal realismo, come alletentazioni (anche molto seducenti) della parzialità che si fa dogma, tale puntofu trovato nel rilievo della continua correlazione soggetto-oggetto nella lororeciproca azione, proponendo un movimento infinito della riflessione umananell’apertura e come instabilità continua del problema” (XVIII).20 In Il fuoco, D’Annunzio posits “segni e forme” that impose analogiesbetween the mind of the poet and the universe; in Il secondo amante diLucrezia Buti, he describes such a process as “cogliere qualche accordoinsolito tra la forma mentale e la forma universale” (cited in Anceschi,“D’Annunzio e il sistema della analogia”, 35).21 One might mention in this regard poems like “Non chiederci la parola” and“So l’ora in cui la faccia più impassibile”, among others.22 Bigongiari finds a similar suggestion in Montale’s reference to the tertiumnon datur: “Credo vero il miracolo che tra la vita e la morte / esista un terzostatus che ci trovò tra i suoi” (Tutte le poesie, 721). Published in Altri versi(1978), the poem “Credo” is dated 1944, though, as Bigongiari points out,there is some doubt in this regard. See Gianfranco Contini’s essay in“Dedicato a Montale”, Antologia Vieusseux, n. 64, October-December 1981(cited in Bigongiari, “Montale fra il senso e non senso verso il ‘correlativosoggettivo’”, p. 484).23 Marcello Pagnini, “Difficoltà e oscurità nel modernismo letterario”, 317-18.24 Again, these are word-based approaches that fail to break with classicalrhetoric: if were to speak of deviant predication instead of deviantdenomination we might then refer to the “interaction between a logicalsubject and a predicate” (Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process”, 143).25 As Mary Gerhart notes, Ricoeur seems to believe not so much that certainmetaphorical combinations are incompatible as that ‘some poets are not ableto throw a bridge between them’ (“The Live Metaphor”, 219)

WORKS CITED

Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry,University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Anceschi, Luciano. Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte, Milano: Garzanti,1976.

_____. “D’Annunzio e il sistema dell’analogia”, in Saggi di poetica e dipoesia, Bologna: Boni, 1972.

_____. “Introduzione” to 1942 edition of Lirici nuovi, Milano: Mursia, 1964.


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_____. Le istituzioni della poesia, Milano: Portico, 1968._____. “Leopardi e la poetica dell’analogia”, in Saggi di poetica e di poesia,

Bologna: Boni, 1972._____. “Poetiche dell’ermetismo”, il Verri, 11, 1978, pp. 10-43; originally

published as the entry “Ermetismo”, in Enciclopedia del Novecento,Istituto per l’Enciclopedia italiana, 1975, pp. 741-51.

_____. Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia, Torino: Paravia, 1972._____. Saggi di poetica e di poesia, Bologna: Boni, 1972.Apollonio, Mario. Ermetismo, Padova: Cedam, 1945.Aristotle. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys

Roberts and Ingram Bywater, New York: The Modern Library, 1984.Bigongiari, Piero. “Libertà drammatica della poesia”, Prospettive VII, 38-39

(February-March 1943), pp. 17-18. Now in Piero Bigongiari, Studi._____. Studi, Ed. Maria Carla Papini, Trento: La Finestra, 2003._____. “Montale fra senso e non senso verso il ‘correlativo soggettivo’”, in

La poesia di Eugenio Montale: Atti del convegno internazionale tenutoa Genova dal 25 al 28 novembre 1982, Eds. Sergio Campailla and CesareFederico Goffis, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1984.

_____. “Nel labirinto della lingua: Conversazione con Piero Bigongiari”, Ed.Daniele Piccini, Poesia: Mensile internazionale di cultura poetica, XVI,173 (June 2003), pp. 11-14.

_____. Tutte le poesie (1933-1963), Ed. Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, Firenze: LeLettere, 1994.

De Robertis, Giuseppe. “Parliamo dell’ermetismo”, in Primato I, 8 (June 15,1940); now in Marco Fioravanti, La critica e gli ermetici, Bologna:Cappelli, 1978.

Dolfi, Anna. “Leopardismo e terza generazione”, in La cultura italiananegli anni ’30-’45 (Omaggio ad Alfonso Gatto). Atti del Convegno –Salerno, 21-24 aprile 1980, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1984,pp. 349-90.

Fioravanti, Marco. La critica e gli ermetici, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978.Flora, Francesco. I miti della parola, Milano: Mondadori, 1958._____. La poesia ermetica, Bari: Laterza, 1936 (1947).Frare, Pierantonio. “Il Cannocchiale aristotelico: da retorica della letteratura

a letteratura della retorica”, Studi secenteschi, XXXII, 1991, pp. 33-63.Fubini, Mario. “Foscolo”, in La critica letteraria: Foscolo, Leopardi,

Manzoni, Ed. Emilio Piccolo. Napoli: Dedalus, 2000, pp. 7-21.Gerhart, Mary. “The Live Metaphor”, in Lewis Edwin Hahn, The

Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.Harries, Karsten. “Metaphor and Transcendence”, in Sheldon Sacks, On

Metaphor._____. “The Many Uses of Metaphor”, in Sheldon Sacks, On Metaphor.Henle, Paul, ed. Language, Thought and Culture, Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1958.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith,Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.

_____. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. John Miller Dow Meiklejohn.Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.

Leopardi, Giacomo. Zibaldone, Ed. Rolando Damiani, Milano: Mondadori,1997.

Montale, Eugenio. Mottetti, Ed. Dante Isella. Milano: Adelphi, 1988._____. Tutte le poesie, Ed. Giorgio Zampa. Milano: Mondadori, 1990.Pagnini, Marcello, “Difficoltà e oscurità nel modernismo leterario”, in

Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate XLIV (ottobre-dicembre1991), pp. 311-33.

Petrucciani, Mario. La poetica dell’ermetismo italiano, Torino: Loescher,1955.

Raimondi, Ezio. Il romanzo senza idillio. Saggio sui Promessi sposi,Torino: Einaudi, 1985.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny, Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1977.

_____. “The Metaphoric Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling”, inSheldon Sacks.

Romano, Salvatore Francesco. La poetica dell’ermetismo, Florence:Parenti, 1942.

Sacks, Sheldon, ed. On Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1979.

Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico, Ed. August Buck. Berlin:Bad Homburg v. d. H., 1968.

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