The Italian Canon Abroad

Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 47-65 The Italian Canon Abroad Amilcare A. Iannucci University of Toronto Abstract Literary canons, or lists of authorial books, have come under heavy fire recently, but, in spite of this, they continue to exist and to thrive. One such canon is the Italian canon abroad, that is, that list of Italian authors who have emerged as authoritative figures in the literature, culture and education of non-Italian speaking peoples of the twentieth century. This paper focuses on this canon, its historical evolution and the gradual inclusion in it of its constituent members, namely, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Machiavelli, Vico and Pirandello. The dominance of these authors abroad is explored from their preeminence in educational curricula, translations, and serious engagement by non-Italian writers. The canon «controversy is one of the more important events in the history of twentieth-century criticism»,1as a recent special edition of Allegoria amply bear witness.2Derived from a Greek word, meaning «rod»or «rule», the word canon was originally applied to religious works such as the books of the Bible and signified a list of works which were considered orthodox, authentic, authoritative and so worthy of preservation. The word was extended to literary works in the eighteenth century.3Since that time the Western canon (and, by derivation, all national canons)4denotes a list of authorial, «quasi-sacred Great 1. John GUILLORY, «Canon», Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 233-249: 234. 2. The edition (n. 29-30, 1998) contains a wide range of material including formative articles on problems associated with the canon (Remo CESERANI, «Appunti sul problema dei canoni», p. 58-74), the role of the reader in canon formation (Hans Robert JAUSS, «Il lettore come istanza di una nuova storia della letteratura», p. 23-41) and the canon within and outside of Italy (Andrea BATTISTINI, «Il canone in Italia e fuori d’Italia», p. 42-57), These articles and others will be cited in subsequent footnotes. 3. Cfr. Harold BLOOM, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994, p. 20. 4. Canons can be represented in multiple different ways, from genre (poetry versus prose), through period (the Renaissance canon versus the Enlightenment canon) to geography. Books»,5which have been ranked as the very best, so to speak, and which have been selected for the purposes of literary emulation and pedagogic inculcation. Recently the literary canon has come under heavy fire. This attack has been mounted from several different quarters. First, literary critics of the school of post-structuralism, and its literary disciple, deconstructionism, who have been reared on Foucaltian, Derridean and Lacanian readings of a text and who stress the instability and indeterminancy of meaning, are opposed to anything fixed or static. They thus denounce any system that claims to have universal validity and regard the canonization of any text as encompassing universal truth to be spurious, at best, futile, at worst, another example of literary totalitarianism. It is precisely this very questioning, by the new literary critics, of universal truth, and its emphasis on the relativism of any text, that has afforded many others «the interpretive framework for challenging the canon».6Secondly, special interest groups, such as feminists, ethnicists and homosexuals, take issue with the canon’s formation and meaning. They see the process of its evolution as having been historically, and therefore essentially, determined by white, heterosexual, colonizing males. As Paul Lauter argues, the canon «is, in short, a means by which culture validates social power».7Thus, feminist lite48 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci Taking the latter, it is interesting to note that even within canons, arranged nationally, regional canons can and do abound. For a fascinating study of this phenomenon, especially as it relates to the dialect canons of Italy, see Hermann W. HALLER, The Other Italy. The Literary Canon in Dialect, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 5. Sandra M. GILBERT, «Shadows of Futurity: The Literary Imagination, the MLA, and the Twenty-First Century», PMLA, n. 112, 1997, p. 370-379: 375. The notion of the canon as authoritative, definitive and binding is contained in most of the standard literary dictionaries (see, for example, J. A. CUDDON, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991). Lurking behind any definition of canon are two distinct notions, one which view the canon from the perspective of the works themselves and their influence, the other which views the canon from the perspective of the reader and the general public (for observations on both notions, see Romano LUPERINI, «Due nozioni di canone», Allegoria, n. 29-30, p. 5-7). Similary distinctive are the two etymologies for canon, namely, a rule or a measuring standard and a catalogue or a list (see Remo CESERANI, op. cit., p. 58). Both notions and both etymologies hace to be borne closely in mind in any discussion of the canon. 6. James ATLAS, Battle of the Books. The Curriculum Debate in America, New York: W. W. Norton, 1993, p. 66. 7. Paul LAUTER, «Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon», Feminist Studies, n. 9, 1983, p. 435-463: 435. The interpretation of canon formation as a reflection of an existing power structure has been much in vogue. It is evident, for example, in one of the first works to deal with this subject, The Politics of Literature, by Louis KAMPF and Paul LAUTER (New York: Pantheon, 1972), which arose out of the observation that «high culture propagates the values of those who rule and therefore helps to maintain current social arrangements» (p. 8). At times it is more radically stated, as when it is joined to a Marxist critique, according to wich, as Richard OHMANN, The Politics of Letters, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 3 ff., argues, teachers of English have become servants of monopoly capitalism. Thus, according to its critics, the canon is justified by the very values we bring to the enterprise of its formation, not only historical and political values, but literary and critical values as well, the latter point underscored by Frank HERMODE, «Institutional Control of rary critic Jane Tompkins, in arguing that there is a dynamic interplay between the changing currents of social and political life and the establishment of great literature, accounts for the canonical non-status of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World thusly: «because they were written by, about, and for women, they have been excluded from the literary canon».8These groups therefore eschew the canon as representative of vested interests and want to open it up. In its stead they accordingly propose literary alternatives which emphasize gender and sexual difference, a «defamilarization of masculinity, a poetics of the Other»,9and the history and literature of disfranchised minority groups such as Afro-Americans and representatives of the Third World.10 Thirdly, both academics and students alike have questioned the pedagogic centrality of the canon. For the canon has not only been used to shape the core curriculum of educational offerings at every institutional level, but has also permeated traditional pedagogic offerings, such as souce books, histories, collections, anthologies and various other texts dealing with thought and culture. Thus the canon with its choice of select authors has greatly determined the education program and it is this exclusivity of cerThe Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 49 Interpretation», Salmagundi, n. 43, 1979, p. 72-86. In this enterprise the position and importance of minority cultures and positions has assumed major significance. Henry Louis GATES JR. reviews many of these and their position of marginality in the canon in Loose Canons, Notes on the Culture Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 17 ff. In place of their ostracism from the canon, GATES argues for their inclusion. Thus, in dealing with the African American tradition, GATES, while not denying the «politics and ironies of canon formation» (p. 32) nevertheless attempts to elaborate a canon that is reflective of this tradition, that is, «“our” canon, one possible set of selections among several possible sets of selections» (p. 32), a task which he brings to fruition in his later The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. In a similar vein, but much more broad in scope, is the attempt of Linda HUTCHEON, Mario VALDÉS and others to rethink literary history comparatively from the position of the marginalized, and enterprise which «seeks not only to address specific instances of historical exclusions and inclusions, but to rethink the very categories of selection and ordering used in the writing of literary history» (Mario J. VALDÉS and Linda HUTCHEON, «Rethinking Literary History Comparatively», American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper, n. 27, 1994, p. 1-13: 11. 8. Jane P. TOMPKINS, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 192-193 and p. 120. 9. James ATLAS, op. cit., p. 63. Indicative of this approach is the collection of essays by Leslie A. FIEDLER and Houston A. BAKER, JR., English Literature, Opening Up the Canon, Baltimore: The Jhons Hopkins University Press, 1981, and the series of reflections by Lawrence W. LEVINE, The Opening of the American Mind, Canons, Culture, and History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 10. For African American studies, in addition to the works of GATES cited above, see Houston A. BAKER, JR., English in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature, Ithaca: N. Y., Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 1976. For an introduction to feminism and literary studies, see , Gayle GREENE and Coppélia KAHN, Making a Difference: Femminist Literary Criticism, London: Methuen, 1985. For the burgeoning field of post-colonial studies, especially its philosophical and intellectual context and major areas of concern, see Leela GHANDI, Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia, 1998. tain writers and their works that critics of the canon question. They view the canon in a hostile way as static and outmoded, an exclusivist or closed system which runs counter to the inclusive (that is, no longer Anglo-Saxon dominated) university environments of the present day and the freedoms of expression and educational choice which they have fought for and won since the turbulent days of academic protest and unrest of the 1960s. They therefore maintain that the canon’s major deficiency is one of limitation, limitation of historical growth, and limitation of inclusion. Thus, «those who endorse a core curriculum, a canon of great works, are old-fashioned. To claim that such a canon exists is to discriminate against the literature of minorities. To teach the canon is to ignore the ethnic diversity of college students in the 1990s».11 A number of canon defenders have marshaled themselves against these broadsides. Allan Bloom for example, in his runaway best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, surveyed contemporary American education and culture and lambasted its deplorable absence of literary values. Taking aim at what he perceived to be its underlying cause, namely, deconstructionist critics and their attacks on established literary works, Bloom writes as follows: The school is Deconstructionism, and it is the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy. The interpreter’s creative activity is more important than the text; there is no text, only interpretation. Thus the one thing most necessary for us, the knowledge of what these texts have to tell us, is turned over to the subjective, creative selves of these interpreters, who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer. A cheapened interpretation of Nietzsche liberates us from the objective imperatives of the texts that might have liberated us from our increasingly low and narrow horizon. Everything has tended to soften the demands made on us by the tradition; this simply desolves it.12 In similar vein, Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, has castigated the assault on the established canon and excoriated those special interest groups who propose «opening up» the canon and establishing alternatives by its side. Bloom lumps all of these groups together and disrespectfully refers to them, with their anti-canon stance, as lemmings plummeting over a cliff, a flock he dismisses with the label «The School of Resentment».13 Elsewhere Bloom has gone even further and, in a particularly invective piece, has denounced these groups as «a rabblement of false feminists, inchoate would-be-Parisians, and gender-and-power rhapsodes calling themselves New Historicists».14 As overstated as Bloom is in his dismissivness, he has produced in The Western Canon 50 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci 11. J. ATLAS, op. cit., p. 81. 12. Allan David BLOOM, The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, p. 379. 13. Harold BLOOM, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994, p. 15, 18 and 4. 14. ID., «Why Not Burn Sade?», Bostonia, n. 70, 1996, p. 67-68: 68. a well-reasoned and passionate plea for the canon’s preservation, emphasizing throughout its literary criteria of value selection, memory preservation and high (read «elitist») aesthetic judgment: The Western Canon, despite the limitless idealism of those who would open it up, exists precisely in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measurement that is anything but political or moral. I am aware that there is now a kind of covert alliance between popular culture and what calls itself «cultural criticism,» and in the name of that alliance cognition itself may doubtless yet acquire the stigma of the incorrect. Cognition cannot proceed without memory, and the Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking. Most simply, the Canon is Plato and Shakespeare; it is the image of the individual thinking, whether it be Socrates thinking through his own dying, or Hamlet contemplating that undiscovered country. Mortality joins memory in the consciousness of reality-testing that the Canon induces. By its very nature, the Western Canon will never close, but it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders. Strength alone can open it up, the strength of a Freud or a Kafka, persistent in their cognitive negations.15 Finally, E. D. Hirsch, in the phenomenally successful Cultural Literacy, while not specifically addressing the issue of the canon, nevertheless underlines its traditional wisdom in pedagogic circles. Arguing that the education system is in a crisis with long-range social consequences, Hirsch therefore proposes a pragmatic list,16 a veritable canon in itself, of what every literate American needs to know in order «to negotiate effectively in the world».17 In spite of these spirited defenses, however, the attacks on the canon have had their desired effect. Deconstructionism with its canon bashing has become the norm, alternative canons proliferate and abound and university curricula are replete with «new» courses the likes of which would have been unrecognizable to a student of twenty years ago. But, although diminished, the canon still survives. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the canon in Italy both within and outside of its borders.18 Outside, the Italian canon abroad refers to that list of Italian authors The Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 51 15. ID., The Western Canon, op. cit., p. 35. 16. E. D. HIRSCH, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 1ff. (esp. 27 ff) and p. 152-215. Others have employed a less pragmatic, but still eloquent plea for the preservation of a core curriculum and have joined it to a spirited defense of the canon. Harry LEVIN («Core, Canon, Curriculum», College English, n. 43, 1981, p. 352-62), for example, points to a «shared base of knowledge» and a «community od ideas» as the basis of the common intellectual property of educated persons. Without these, he argues, «we will lose our most valued patrimony, our collective memory, and we have seen what wrong turns history can take when it is made by persons and peoples ill versed in it» (p. 362). 17. J. ATLAS, op. cit., p. 91. 18. Romano LUPERINI, one of the scholars most concerned with the Italian canon, has tied the canon closely to literary history («La questione del canone e la storia letteraria come ricostruzione», Allegoria, n. 26, 1997, p. 5-13) and has implicity argued for its preservation, who have emerged as authoritative figures in the literature, culture and education of non-Italian speaking peoples of the twentieth century. Since, as we shall see, this canon is intimately related to the origins and historical formation of the Italian literary canon, this paper addresses the latter first. In so doing, it will also, hopefully, shed some light on the process of canon formation, that is, on the criteria at work in canon inclusion. Dante both begins and looms large over the list of all other members of the Italian literary canon. It is therefore appropriate, as befits his primacy of place, that he, from his privileged position of humble pride, should have given considerable thought to what place he would occupy in the literary canon which would follow him. Any great writer is beset by what Harold Bloom calls the «anxiety of influence»19 and Dante, as a poet, is no exception. In the extraordinary encounter with the poets of antiquity in Inferno 4, the latter, so the narrative goes, welcome him into their illustrious company «sì ch’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno» (Inf. 4. 102). With this simple gesture, Dante elevates himself to the rank of an auctor, or as we would say today, to the rank of a classic. The gesture is not entirely self-serving. In claiming citizenship in the «bella scola» of «timeless authority»,20 Dante also claims legitimacy for the Italian vernacular as a literary language, proclaiming it the equal of Latin, «the grammatical language». In fine, the encounter is an act of cultural self-definition and a bold statement of authorial intention.21 Dante will write (such is his boast) the great Christian epic of conversion (as yet unwritten), and he will do so in Italian, that is, in a language which he is quite literally forging on the spot. Between aspiration and achievement yawns an abyss. Fortunately Dante’s talent matched his ambition. His poema sacro was an instant best seller. The literate read it, copied it, and passed it on to friends — the manuscript tradition assures us of this. Those who couldn’t read gathered eagerly in public squares to hear the latest news from the other world. The poem was immediately and widely known, and soon became both an object of study and a source of creative inspiration. The transition from best seller to classic was almost immediate. By the end of the fourteenth century, Dante’s poem had generated more commentaries 52 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci drawing up a list of twentieth century Italian authors whom LUPERINI designates as «classici», «maggiori» or «grandi» («Il canone, la scuola e l’insegnamento del Novecento», Allegoria, n. 32, 1999, p. 61-70). In the absence of a clearly defined twentieth century canon by the Italian educational ministry, LUPERINI, in the same aforementioned article, points to the importance of anthologies as preserving the best of Italian «canonical» authors (p. 67 ff.) Similary, Andrea BATTISTINI (op. cit. p. 42 ff.) highlights the importance of an Italian canon, especially in pedagogy, both within Italy and abroad. 19. H. BLOOM, The Western Canon, op. cit., p. 7-12. 20. Ernst R. CURTIUS, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963, p. 18. 21. Cfr. Amilcare A. IANNUCCI, «Dante e la «bella scola» della poesia (Inf. 4. 64-105)», Dante e la «bella scola» della poesia, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci, Ravenna: Longo, 1993, p. 19-39. than Virgil’s Aeneidhad throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. It had also engaged the most prominent Italian creative writers of the century, especially Boccaccio and Petrarch. The Comedy’s impact on the literary scene in fourteenth century Italy was nothing short of phenomenal. Suddenly it was possible to write a great work in the vernacular without having to reach deep into antiquity for models. There was now a contemporary or near contemporary Italian epic in the class of Virgil, Lucan, and Statius (and Homer too) to look up to. Dante was thus emerging as a (vernacular Italian!) canonical poet and an ambitious Italian writer of the time had to come to terms with him and his poem. However, before canonical status can be conferred on any given work, time and acceptance by posterity must intervene.22 Dr. Johnson remarked, in reference to Shakespeare’s plays, that a century is «the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit». It is during this period that critical discussion is often most intense with respect to a work’s canonical merits and during this period that the same work finds either acceptance or rejection by subsequent and substantial individuals of letters and critics. We see this process at work most acutely in the case of Dante. The century after Dante’s death was marked not only by the rise of a commentary tradition on the poemasacrobut also by the appearance of two other Italian writers who would also attain canonical status, Boccaccio and Petrarch. Already by 1400 there were roughly twelve commentaries on the Commedia.23 These earliest commentators were driven by one principal practicality, «their wish to make the poem authoritative».24 However, as the commentary tradition continued, its main focus changed. A second generation of commentators, beginning with Benevenuto, accepted the authoritative nature of the poem and sought instead, to apply it to particular social questions, to make it, in short, more appealing to particular audiences.25 With the rise of humanism, however, and the advent of the Renaissance, there is a marked shift in the commentary tradition away from an acceptance of the poem as authoritative to a questioning of the poem’s authority based on linguistic grounds. «Dante’s poem becomes a lightning rod for a host of humanist debates over the poet’s impoverished knowledge of classical culture, his historical errors, his linguistic improprieties, and his adherence to a discredited scholasticism and an imperial ideology».26 Above all else, however, was the issue of Dante’s use of a mixed or heterogeneous style for the composition of his poem. The humanists, of course, were committed to the recovery of the classical past. Their aestethics were The Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 53 22. On the problematic of «acceptance» for the canon and the fundamental critical importance of the reader, see Hans Robert JAUSS, op. cit., p. 23-41. 23. Deborah PARKER, «Interpreting the Commentary Tradition to the Comedy», Dante. Contemporary Perspectives, Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997 p. 240-258 (esp. 241). 24. ID., Commentary and Ideology. Dante in the Renaissance, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 31. 25. Ibid., p. 34-35. 26. Ibid., p. 48. driven by the classical ideal of the separation and purity of genres. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Comedy’s contamination of styles would offend their classical oriented sensibility. Petrarch was one of the first humanists to fault the poem for this deficiency (Familiares 21.15) and he was followed by others such as the great humanist Niccolò Niccoli, who was especially persistent in his criticism of Dante, calling him «poeta da calzolai» because of his lowly and popular style.27 But as opposed as the humanists were to the poem’s hybrid of a style, they were still won over by the poem’s lofty subject matter and certainly did not dismiss the work as being unworthy of critical consideration. The commentary tradition was not alone in being engaged by Dante. Rather, his direct literary heirs, Boccaccio and Petrarch reflected deeply on him and were divided in their estimation of him. Boccaccio, Dante’s biographer, commentator and great admirer, accepted Dante without hesitation and was totally open to his influence, an influence which we see both in his so-called minor works, the Amorosa Visione especially, and in his major vernacular work. Indeed, in the Decameron, Boccaccio uses Dante to structure and define his very different literary enterprise — the work’s subtitle is, you will recall, «Prince Galahalt». On the other hand, Petrarch refused to read his great predecessor, or so he claims in a celebrated letter to Boccaccio (Familiares 21.15), who had chastised his friend and mentor for his lukewarm attitude towards Dante. This preoccupation with Dante by the critical and literary tradition shows that Dante was entering the canonical mainstream. The very same observation can be made of Boccaccio and Petrarch. At the same time, however, the varying assessments of Dante by Boccaccio and Petrarch highlight not only the different literary agendas that almost contemporaneous canonical authors pursue but also the hidden influence that canonical authors have, by virtue of their lofty position, on their literary descendants. In the case of Petrarch, for example, we see how deeply indebted he was to Dante and how he, in spite of his critical observations to the contrary, responded to the «anxiety of influence» by attempting to emulate his literary forebear. Petrarch’s cultural agenda was, of course, much grander than Boccaccio’s, consisting of no less than the recovery of classical antiquity, which he felt has been lost, and in the process bringing about a profound renewal of culture, to be based no longer on abstract philosophical schemes but on the studia humanitatis. His own fame as a poet and humanist was to be made in Latin, philologically repristined. Thus in his (unfinished) epic, the Africa, he, like Dante, invoked Virgil, Statius, and Lucan (there is also the mandatory nod to Homer), but, in contrast to his famous precursor, he engages them on their own linguistic turf. In this ambitious enterprise to revive contemporary culture, in 54 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci 27. For a summary of humanistic appraisals of Dante, see David THOMPSON, and Alan F. NAGEL, eds. and trans., The Three Crowns of Florence. Humanist Assesment of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio, New York: Harper and Row, 1972. which he manages to involve Boccaccio, Petrarch was enormously successful. Indeed, his reputation and influence during his lifetime and the first threequarters of a century or so after his death were based almost entirely on his Latin, humanistic compositions. During this period, Boccaccio too was known less for his vernacular writing than for his classical scholarship, to which, under the sway of Petrarch, he dedicated the latter part of his life. His encyclopedic Genealogia deorum gentilium, for instance, became a standard reference text throughout Renaissance Europe. Petrarch, however, was much too sensitive to literary history to ignore the vernacular completely, despite his apparent scorn for it. We know the care that went into the making of the Canzoniere which he refers to simply as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. And although he stakes his ultimate fame on the Africa, he is not about to hedge his bets. He informs us in another celebrated letter to Boccaccio (Seniles 5.2) that from an early age he had planned to write a «great work» (magnum opus) in the vernacular, a probable reference to the Triumphs. Written in terza rima in obvious competition with Dante, this little work became the source (about the middle of the fifteenth century) of a second wave of Petrarchan influence in Europe. The first, as I have already noted, was driven by his Latin works; the third and last in chronological order would be fuelled by the Canzoniere.28 These waves of Petrarchan influence testify to another important aspect of canonical inclusion. As Alastair Fowler29 points out, «changes in literary taste can often be referred to reevaluation of genres that the canonical works represent». Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Petrarch, less so of Boccaccio and Dante. After the initial success of Petrarch’s Latin works the Triumphs then achieved wide-spread acceptance and exerted incredible influence. In the latter half of the Quattrocento, the Triumphs surpassed even Dante’s Commedia in popularity, and remained a powerful literary force well into the seventeenth century. Hundreds of surviving manuscripts scattered throughout Europe attest its remarkable diffusion, and after the first Venetian edition of 1470, it was reprinted regularly. Moreover, during this time it was repeatedly illuminated, glossed, translated, and generally revered. The source of a rich and extensive iconographical tradition which soon took on a life of its own, it also left its imprint on Renaissance pageantry and spectacle. Even more enduring, however, was the later success of the Canzoniere. Originating in Italy near the end of the fifteenth century, it spread quickly throughout Europe, to France, Spain and England. The channels of diffusion were many and diverse, but the end result was that Petrarch (directly or indirectly) defined the vocabulary of a lover’s discourse, no matter what language he spoke. His work was so thoroughly assimilated into the various European national literatures that he has become The Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 55 28. Hatch Ernest WILKINS, Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1955, p. 280-281. 29. Alastair FOWLER, Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 214. in King Arthur (1691) are imbued with Tassessque atmosphere, and Byron, who used the story of Tasso’s supposed love for the princess Leonora (immortalized in Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso [1790]) as the basis of his Lament of Tasso (1817). But perhaps, the influence of both Ariosto and Tasso is best seen in the Spanish literary tradition, first on native soil and then in those countries colonized by Spain. Both made a deep impression on the writers of Spain’s Golden Age, especially in the areas of epic and lyric poetry and drama. Central of course, to Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615) is a character whose madness is pitted against the external world. Both this aspect of the central character as well as the pomp and imagery associated with him are derived from Ariosto. Moreover, the erudite epic La hermosura de Angélica (1602) by Lope de Vega, which was composed while he was aboard a galley of the ill-fated Armada, was a continuation of the Orlando Furioso. The same female character from Ariosto inspired another epic by De Soto, Las lagrimas de Angélica (1586). Moreover, Ariosto influenced a host of lyric poets such as Góngora, Fray Luis de León, Garcilaso (a favorite strophe of the latter two was the lira which came from Ariosto) and Juan Boscán who naturalized to Spain the octaves of the Italian poet. Finally, playwrights such as Lope de Vega turned frequently to Ariosto and Tasso for dramatic subjects as the plays Celos de Rodomonte (1588), Angélica en el Catay (1600) and Jerusalen conquistada (1609) amply bear witness. In addition to these exclusive products of the Spanish mainland, both Ariosto and Tasso also influenced works from Spain’s colonial world. The sixteenth century Spanish poet, Ercilla, for example, who had participated in the conquest of Chile, used both Ariosto and Tasso for the shaping of his epic Araucana (1569-89) and in the same century one of the first Peruvian poets, Diego de Hojeda, composed his vast poem on Christ, Christada(1611), under the sway of both Ariosto and Tasso. In the following century, in what is considered to be Cuba’s first poem, Espejo de paciencia (1608), Silvestre de Balboa has reminiscences of both Ariosto and Tasso mediated through Italianate Spanish poets such as De Soto. Ariosto and Tasso have continued to influence the Spanish-American tradition in the modern period. They have, for example, contributed to the poetic imagery of Octavio Paz with its concentration on beauty and individual communication with the external world and they have colored the weaving of realism and fantasy that is the hallmark of the works of Gabriel García Márquez. Most importantly, they have played a decisive role in the shaping of the literary vision of Jorge Luis Borges. References to both authors abound in his works46 and Borges shaped many of his pieces in response to their influence. A prime example is Borges’ long poem «Ariosto y los árabes». Having come to Ariosto almost by chance, Borges was fascinated that this poet, once revered as among the greatest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had fallen into almost total neglect in more recent time. The key to this neglect for Borges lay in Ariosto’s, 62 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci 46. A useful index of all references of Borges is provided by Daniel BALDSERSTON, The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges. An Index to Reference and Allusion to Persons, Titles, and Places in His Writnigs, New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. and thus, the poet’s, vision, which is fleeting and subject to the whims of time. Accordingly, Borges uses this (both Ariosto’s and his) vision to fuel his poem which extols and exalts Ariosto’s fantasy. Machiavelli’s influence can be seen in the Elizabethans, such as Marlowe, Kydd and perhaps Shakespeare himself,47 some of whose characters, such as King Claudius in Hamlet suggest Machiavellian underpinnings, the German Romantics, and the American pastoralists. Perhaps, however, his greatest influence has been on contemporary literature. Pound, for example was deeply indebted to him. He heads the memoir of his dead sculptor friend, Gaudier–Brzeska (1916) with a quotation from Machiavelli and his defense of Italian politics, together with its apparently shocking juxtaposition of Jefferson and Mussolini in the Cantos, is due to Pound’s reading of Machiavelli’s conception of power and the place in it of virtù.48 Moreover, Muriel Spark has imbued all of her novels with a Machiavellian feel. This is especially true of The Comforters (1957), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), about an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher who manipulates, but is greatly admired by her pupils. This preoccupation continues in Loitering with Intent (1981), a discussion of good, evil, and the writer’s mind. Perhaps, however, the Machiavellian influence is most apparent in the Abbess of Crewe (1974) in which the artful and cunning religious superior gleefully mingles for her charges passages from Machiavelli within a wide range of poetic references. The case of Vico, as pointed out above, is an exception and the diffusion of Vico’s Scienza Nuova was, until this century sparse. This is strange and Vico, whose ideas were remarkably similar to the German pre-Romantic and Romantic writers, «should have been one of their acknowledged and admired forerunners», as Auerbach notes,49 but was not. Even Goethe failed to recognize his importance. Auerbach sees this failed reception as «one of the most astonishing facts in the history of ideas». But even in Italy, «nobody really understood his ideas».50 For almost two hundred years the Scienza Nuova was very much a text in search of a comprehending reader. It finally found two, Croce and Joyce. However, it was primarily through the latter that it found an international audience. McLuhan was a great admirer of Joyce, especially the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake. It was there that McLuhan discovered Vico, whom he was able to read because of the Fisch-Bergin translation. McLuhan pays his debt to the Neapolitan writer in his last book, published posthumously by his son, the Laws of the Media. It is subtitled The New Science. These then are the authors who have a predominant place in the spreading of Italian literature abroad. By contrast, other Italian authors do not have the The Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 63 47. Edward Stockton MEYER, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama, Weimar: E. Felber, 1897. 48. Reed Way DASENBROCK, Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 158 ff. 49. Erich AUERBACH, «Vico and the Aesthetic Historism», Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, New York: Meridian Books, 1959, p. 183-198: 189. 50. Ibid., p. 187-189. same importance, not even the canonical ones of the nineteenth and twentieth century, who are listed in Bloom’s Vician inspired Chaotic Age.51 The sole exception is Pirandello who is widely taught (he is the only one who also has a society, the Pirandello Society and a journal, Pirandellian Studies in America), is commonly translated,52 and is at the center of a formative and massive literary influence that stretches from Brecht to Sartre and beyond.53 Thus, in the future Pirandello may have to be added to the other authors of the Italian canon abroad. In a similar vein it is the test of time that will determine the inclusion or not of Italo Calvino whose late works (Il castello dei destini incrociati, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, Palomar) have received high literary praise and which appeal to a more refined, intellectual audience, and Umberto Eco who has enjoyed both critical and popular success. The latter author, in fact, is an excellent example of the pragmatic business of the process of canon formation, and, as such, deserves a brief excursus. The reasons for the phenomenal success of the Name of the Rose (its marketing and its exploitation of Eco as a cultural figure) have been thoroughly documented.54 In addition, the internal — textual — reasons for its success have not been neglected. When the novel first appeared, the general consensus, in fact, was that Eco had succeeded in writing the kind of work hypothesized in Apocalittici e integrati,55 that is, an open and closed text, capable of reaching a large audience from simple readers to more sophisticated ones who were eager to participate in the novel’s complex allegorical discourse. Thus, it is important to note that Il nome della rosa was being reviewed and talked about in critical parameters set by Eco himself. In addition, Eco, realizing that canonical status is only conferred on a work which is an object of academic and critical study, took steps to ensure that his work would become a classic. Accordingly, he published Postille a «Il nome della rosa» in the June 1983 issue of Alfabeta, situating the work securely within the debate on the postmodern, and in 1985 his publisher, Bompiani, published a collection of 35 essays, Saggi su «Il nome della rosa», written by scholars from all over the world and edited and 64 Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 Amilcare A. Iannucci 51. Cfr. H. BLOOM, The Western Canon, op. cit., Appendix A. Bloom’s canon of Italian authors, divided across Vico’s four ages (theocratic, aristocratic, democratic and chaotic) is simply a list (albeit with a separate chapter on Dante) of definitive Italian writers. For a much more exhaustive list of Italy’s national canon throughout the ages, accompanied by critical discussion, see Peter BRAND and Lino PERTILE, The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 52. A. IANNUCCI, «The Presence of Italian Literature Abroad (Old and New) Abroad in the Twentieth Century», Italian Studies in North America, ed. Massimo Ciavolella and A. Iannucci, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1994, p. 17-54: 34-36. 53. Ibid., p. 36-38. 54. See Gian Carlo FERRETTI, Il best-seller all’italiana: fortuna e formule del romanzo di «qualità», Bari: Laterza, 1983; ID., La fortuna letteraria, Urbania: Transeuropa, 1988; several essays in Renato GIOVANOLLI (ed.), Saggi su «Il nome della rosa», Milano: Bompiani, 1985; most recently Margherita GANERI, Il nome della rosa. Una strategia di successo, Cosenza: Grisolia Editore, 1990 and ID., Il «caso» Eco, Palermo: Palumbo, 1991. 55. Umberto ECO, Apocalittici e integrati, Milano: Bompiani, 1964. introduced by Renato Giovannoli. Moreover, not only critical glosses were afforded Il nome della rosa. No fewer than 31 artists took up the challenge of illustrating the novel56 and prominent French director, Jean-Jacques Arnaud turned the novel into a heavily financed film starring Sean Connery, a film which, unfortunately did not have the success of the novel and which opened to mixed reviews.57 Thus, like Dante’s Commedia Eco’s Rose was almost immediately deemed worthy of the deepest critical respect, both literary and artistic, and Eco emerged as one, who, like Dante before him, by his bold act of self-inclusion in the «fair school» of poetry in Limbo, was offering himself for canonization. The negotiations for canonical status are complex. The canonization of the authors of the Italian canon abroad (with the exception of Vico and perhaps Machiavelli) began during their own lifetimes. And their response to the challenge was critical to their ultimate elevation. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso — in addition to writing literature, they all wrote about literature, and managed to place themselves at the center (as Eco has done) of the literary debates of their times. In the end, however, the designation «canonical» has stuck to their works because of their textual properties: their energy, adaptability and translatability. These qualities have assured them large audiences throughout history, both within and, especially, outside Italy. Whether or not, The Name of the Rose, has the textual characteristics to guarantee it the staying power required for canonical status, only time and ongoing literary appeal will tell. The authors of the Italian canon abroad are not dead authors, but are forever alive and vibrant, both within and, especially, outside of Italy. They continue to form the minds of thousands of students, continue to bring pleasure and profit to the reading public and continue to influence the literary currents of the day. In an age which is so concerned with the preservation or not of the literary canon, they, even apart from that canon, are both witness and testimony to the far-reaching diaspora of Italian literature abroad. In so doing, they are, in the end and ultimately, a powerful reminder that, in spite of all of the polemic debates centered on the canon, great literature and the literary criticism it engenders will not die, but will continue to bring pleasure to all those outside of Italy’s borders who come into contact with the very best that the Italian language has to offer. The Italian Canon Abroad Quaderns d’Italià 4/5, 1999/2000 65 56. La rosa dipinta. Trentuno illustratori per «Il nome della rosa» di Umberto Eco, Milano: Azzurra editrice, 1985. 57. A. IANNUCCI, «The Presence of Italian Literature», op. cit., p. 41.