If you can make your way past the living statues and knots of wannabe writers
supposing themselves to be Joyce and Hemingway deep in conversation outside
Les Deux Magots, you come, next door but one, to 4 place
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where enlightenment or something like it really did
strike twice. It was there on March 22, 1895, that the Lumière brothers
unveiled a prototype of their Cinématographe before a select audience of
technical experts and entrepreneurs. In Salle C of the same imposing
edifice, a biggish room with rows of tables at which the eager sat in groups
of five or so facing Professor Barthes, Julia Kristeva, concerned with “the
validity of scientific method in the domain of the ‘human’ sciences”,
disclosed in 1966 the term “intertextualité”.
Neither Kristeva nor the Lumières foresaw how their devices would catch on.
The brothers dismissed their invention as “without any future” and turned
their minds to dressings designed to heal burns. Less than a decade after
her presentation, Kristeva was complaining that intertextuality had been
“frequently understood in the banal sense of ‘source-criticism’ of a
particular text” (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974), which was not
what she had meant at all. She introduced the term while sketching out
Bakhtin’s account of the irreducibly dialogical nature of utterance, quoting
from his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: “if semantic and logical
relations are to become dialogical they have to be embodied . . . they must
enter another sphere of existence: they become discourse . . . and acquire
an author, that’s to say some one whose utterance they are”. She glossed
this “dialogical” quality as designating “language taken up in practice by
an individual”. Bakhtin thought any linguistics which concentrates on
language as a supra-individual system (Saussure’s langue) and on signs
considered as decontextualized items inevitably neglected this quality,
because dialogism arises, and contributes to how we make sense, only in a
concrete, historical world containing specific agents (the realm of
Saussure’s parole). For example, a Bakhtinian might say, nothing formulable
as langue in the two sentences “I got some anti-depressants from the doctor
this morning” and “Mary’s coming to stay for a fortnight”, nor in their
formal conjunction, would justify understanding an implicit “because”
between them. However, when uttered in rapid succession by an individual
whom the interlocutor knows to be disposed to gloom in Mary’s presence, the
“because” clearly transpires. To miss it might actually be to miss the
utterance’s drift.
Now that pragmatics is a familiar part of linguistics, students of language
might well be underwhelmed by such instances and what they imply, but
Kristeva was speaking at a time when, and in a place where, the role
inferences like this “because” play in our interpretations was not clearly
recognized. The langue/parole distinction, along with the disastrous
treatment of “language” as equivalent to “code”, still entranced attempts to
think about communication. The specific cognitive environments in which
utterances are exchanged were thought foreign to the systematicity of
langue, and systematicity had been laid down as a prerequisite for
semiological science. It was awkward for Kristeva to admit how emphatically
Bakhtin specified dialogism as something which happens between individuals.
He does so when commenting on real, spoken “rejoinders in dialogue” or on
the manner of a fictional text: “dialogic reaction personifies every
utterance to which it responds”; Dostoevsky’s writing has a “mouth”, casts
“verbal sideward glances”; in every phrase and, what’s more, between the
phrases, “a person is wholly present”.
Bakhtin’s understanding of every utterance, literary and non-literary,
“simultaneously as individual and as interlocutory” was an embarrassment to
Kristeva, not only in her pursuit of system but also in the prevailing
anti-individualism of her socio-intellectual milieu. “Intertextuality” came
to her rescue. She preferred her own fresh-minted “intertextualité” as a
replacement for the “subjectivité” and “communicativité” rampant in Bakhtin.
Where “person” was, “text” would now be: “À la place de la notion
d’intersubjectivité s’installe celle d’intertextualité”. She gave no reasons
why this “installation” should be effected, but we can guess them, as we
guess the “because” from the person dreading Mary. She just put one word
where others used to be and the refit was complete. Signs of the strain
involved nonetheless remain. Bakhtin does not, as she made out, “regard
history and society as themselves texts”, but appeals with blowsy insistence
to the “concrete living totality” of language use; for him, there can be no
“dialogic relationships among texts when approached in a strictly linguistic
way”, or, it could be added, in a loosely linguistic way. Other contortions
in her paper bear witness to the violent contrariety of idiom and model
between them. The Socratic dialogue, which she quaintly treats as a “folk”
(populaire) form, is said to demonstrate “dialogism as the annihilation of
the person”. Though most such dialogues are known to us by the proper names
– Euthyphro, Gorgias, Phaedrus – of those who stooge for Socrates in them,
these figures are treated as “des non-personnes, des anonymats”
(non-persons, nameless ones), and yet their several utterances are somehow
each “organically bound to the man who produces them (Socrates and his
pupils)”. She doesn’t explain how we identify a “bond”, let alone an organic
bond, between an anonymous non-person and a particular utterance.
By 1974, “intertextuality” had become a name for the fact that “every
signifying practice is a field of transpositions of distinct signifying
systems”, where what had made the phenomenon of theoretical interest – its
straddling the gap stipulated between langue and parole, the recognition
that particular embodiments of “system” are themselves at work in language –
has vanished. The individual has become another system. Kristeva eventually
took the fact of intertextuality to show that “the subject of the utterance
. . . because of this intertextuality is not an individual in the
etymological sense of the term”. The etymological sense of “individual”
(from “individus”, “one in substance or essence, indivisible”, as in “the
high and individual Trinity”) is neither here nor there as far as concerns
the significance of individuated agency. Agents are individuals not by
resemblance to the Trinity but by their difference one from another.
“Dialogism”, “discourse” and “intertextuality” early in its career all
invoked such divisibility-from-others; Kristeva continued to rely on it when
she spoke of “divers systèmes signifiants” which I translated as “distinct
signifying systems”.
“Intertextuality”, then, ended up playing two roles: it recognized the
salience of situated agency for an understanding of language, and it
obscured that agency under a panoply of “text” and “system”. In current
academic usage, the word has become so double-jointed as to appear
spineless. When Michael Worton and Judith Still, in their primer,
Intertextuality: Theories and practices (1990), announce the axiom that
“texts function for their readers as intertextual and not intersubjective
networks”, they are true to Kristeva’s eventual handling of the word but
their stern divorce, “intertextual and not intersubjective”, is false to its
beginnings as a handy synonym for “intersubjectivity”. The term regularly
figures in literary studies these days as a pointer towards, say, “the many
vital ways” in which Primo Levi “practised what we might call
‘intertextuality’, drawing other books into his own” (The Cambridge
Companion to Primo Levi), though, for the mature Kristeva, to speak of an
individual practising intertextuality is like saying that I perform the
weather when I go for a walk in the rain. The term’s suppleness permits
Murray J. Levith in Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts to define “intertexts” as
“mostly conscious and adapted sources” and, on the same page, to note that
“the old notion of particular and distinct sources has given way to new
notions of boundless and heterogeneous textuality”. He does not face the
discrepancy between these models of interrelatedness among utterances but
just gives each a savvy nod one after the other.
In these instances, it’s taken for granted that intertextuality is a literary
phenomenon, whereas the conception of individuated language which the term
was invented to designate is not specifically literary at all. Kristeva
herself began to shrink her considerations down to the literary in the
second paragraph of her paper, when she pronounced that the “literary word”
is “not a geometric point (one fixed meaning) but an intersection of textual
surfaces”. There is nothing special about the “literary” word in this
respect, nor about words. Every sign is at a crossroads of varying purpose,
and situatedness is integral to our understanding of it. What an
establishment advertising “PAIN” has on offer depends (usually) on whether
it is in France or in England. The sign “PAIN” outside a shop constitutes an
invitation to acquire a commodity; on the wall of a derelict building, it is
more likely to be a prose poem or a cry for help. The precise location
matters.
Intertextuality began from the acknowledgement that context is not something
“outside” the sign itself; as the case of the person depressed by Mary
shows, following the logic of an utterance involves acquaintance with
relevant, particular facts, sometimes including facts about who does the
uttering. There is no reliable way to forecast which particulars will come
into play and which turn out extraneous, and hence there is no “failsafe
algorithm by which the hearer can reconstruct the speaker’s exact meaning”,
as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson argue in Relevance (1986). There are,
though, useful tips, such as “stay alert” and “be patient”. But
intertextuality has grown expansive with the years, embracing everything and
grasping nothing, like an elder statesman’s bonhomie. John Sutherland, for
instance, explained to readers of the Guardian in 2006 that Kristeva’s term
expresses “the idea that all literature is constantly in conversation with
all other literature”. Holism such as this is heart-warming but bears the
same relation to the tasks of interpretation that liking to buy the world a
Coke bears to genuine political initiative. Sutherland’s slogan amplifies to
booming unintelligibility Kristeva’s much-quoted maxim, “every text fashions
itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text absorbs and transforms an other
text”. His “literature” is promiscuously chatty but has cold and cliquey
shoulders – you won’t catch it talking to something that isn’t literature –
though how it identifies the outsiders he does not say.
An inability to report accurately who said what to whom in which circumstances
afflicts many of the entries in the catalogue of the Wordsworth Trust’s
grand exhibition, Dante Rediscovered. The cataloguers note that Fuseli’s
depiction of Paolo and Francesca in their whirlwind is “unusual in isolating
the couple from the many others throughout history who are described by
Dante as having suffered the same fate”. What is particularly unusual about
Fuseli is that he noticed Dante describes no other such couples; Virgil
names Cleopatra but not Antony, Tristan but not Isolde, Helen and Paris but
separately from each other. What catches Dante’s eye is that Paolo and
Francesca alone are still a pair (“que’due”) and Fuseli registered this,
unlike other illustrators who festoon the storm with swathes of intertwining
lovelies. Ingres paints the lovers at the moment when the tale of Lancelot
is falling from her hand as Paolo first kisses her; stepping from behind an
arras, a villain in black, twisted with wretched envy, readies his sword to
strike them down. Ingres has inferred the scene from in between Francesca’s
words, inferred it quite reasonably but rather briskly, for she says nothing
to justify the belief that their first kiss was also their last. The
catalogue puts yet more words into her mouth: “Francesca tells Dante how,
although married to Giancotto Malatesta, she had fallen in love with his
brother . . . . Upon discovering them together, Giancotto had murdered them
both”. She tells Dante no such things. She never mentions she is married,
nor that Paolo (unnamed anywhere in the canto) is her brother-in-law, nor
does she identify the person she refers to only as “he who extinguished our
life”. If we feed back into her lines such information, supplied by later
commentators on the poem, we wrong the drama of her reticence and fail to
recognize that, when Dante swoons with pity at her speech, he sorrows not
only at what happened to her but also over how few of the truths relevant to
her own case she can bring herself to utter.
When distinct signifying systems, such as Dante’s poem and these pictures,
encounter each other, there will often be problems of cross-talk between the
way a poem says and the way a picture shows. You can sympathize with the
cataloguers’ difficulties while feeling they could have tried harder. As
Sperber and Wilson wrote, “the boundaries of cognitive environments cannot
be precisely determined”: we don’t, and maybe can’t, know for sure what
Dante knows that Francesca knows that he knows (and so on). Things are
difficult enough hereabouts without declining on mistaken principle to
mention what a cognitive environment environs – individuated agents. “Every
text fashions itself as a mosaic of quotations” occludes the workings of
agency; the lithe French reflexive “se construit” glides over the sticky
truth that mosaics do not pull themselves together. Unfortunately for this
gambit, the concept of a quotation is incoherent without reference to a
specifiable utterer. When Prue Shaw writes in Dante and his Precursors that
the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel’s speech in Purgatorio 26 is “a skilful
mosaic of poetic fragments from his own poems and those of others”, we might
wonder whether she is alluding to or citing Kristeva’s “mosaic” or whether
the word merely shows up in both the snippets I quote. Much about the agent
Shaw’s conduct suggests she wasn’t quoting Kristeva, especially her
description of the mosaic in Purgatorio as “skilful”, where thought of a
specifically endowed, assembling hand glints for a moment from the prose.
The simultaneously drab and lurid metaphor of “mosaic” usually recurs in
intertextual studies uninvigorated by such attention to how and why mosaics
are various, how distinct a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the apse of Santa
Maria Assunta on Torcello is from a mosaic of a smiley dolphin on the floor
of my rich friend’s swimming pool. The metaphor is inherently flawed,
because we can in principle count the number of bits in a mosaic, whereas
the question “how many quotations (in a Kristevan sense) are there in
Purgatorio 26?” is as inane as the question “how many sounds are there in
this article?”. For the mosaic-metaphor to have a point, it needs to be
taken both less seriously than is usual among literary academics (it tells
us little about the organization even of centos and dictionaries of
quotations) and more seriously. Taking it more seriously requires admitting
that mosaics are normally representations of something other than their
tesserae. This is one big difference between mosaics and the patterns in
kaleidoscopes, though Kristeva overlooks it when her taste for snappy,
unconsidered metaphor leads her, as she says, “to understand creative
subjectivity as a kaleidoscope”. You can’t see anything apart from a faint
light and a few, chance symmetries in a kaleidoscope, and nothing through
it.
Mosaics, however, like all communicative processes, are asymmetrical. Those
who look at a mosaic attentively spot its “andamento”, the expressive,
technical term for how it moves, its “gait”, traditionally categorized as
“vermiculatum”, “musivum” and so on. Those categories generalize recurrences
discerned in the body-language of many mosaics, but any such category needs
to be returned with interest to the particular settings whence it arose, if
it is not to take on a delusive life of its own which blinds us, like an
overworn, unexamined metaphor, to the realities it is supposed to marshal.
At one point during Dante’s impersonation of Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio
26, there occurs a word, “escalina”, which, Prue Shaw points out, “exists
neither in Provençal nor Italian”. Amid the gloss of the mosaic, her
knowledgeable eye singles out, as it were, one square of matted chewing gum.
Maybe the agent Dante mistakenly believed there was such a word; maybe he
thought it ought to exist and made it up (neologism is a permanent
possibility in any language, reluctantly though langue admits this); maybe a
corrupt scribe had a hand in the text, and Arnaut was not describing Dante
as “al som de l’escalina” – “on the highest pavement of the stair”, as T. S.
Eliot, whom the phrase haunted, once translated it – but as “ses dol e ses
calina” (“without pain and without heat”). No system can spare us these
“maybe”s. You may call this “literary word” an “intersection of textual
surfaces”, but that will not help you cope with the fact that what we come
across at this intersection is a crux.
A metaphor implies a model, and a model suggests a method, methods in turn
give rise to priorities, and prioritization results in some things being
heeded and others scanted. For the reasons I’ve outlined, there were always
at least two directions in which “intertextuality” pointed. We could call
them “individuating” and “systematic” for short. It seems to me our
attention is given a bum steer when a contributor to Worton and Still’s
anthology tells us, in accents characteristic of his school, that “what is
relevant to textual interpretation is not . . . the identification of a
particular intertextual source but the more general discursive structure
(genre, discursive formation, ideology) to which it belongs . . . detailed
scholarly information is less important than the ability to reconstruct . .
. cultural codes”. It is always comforting to be told there is not much you
need to learn, but whether a generic label securely applies can’t be
determined by someone, however extensive his supply of labels, who knows in
advance that it’s superfluous to look in detail into a package.
Take “epic”, for example. In his lucid and thoughtful From Many Gods to One:
Divine action in Renaissance epic, Tobias Gregory writes well about Milton
not just because he unpacks the label “epic” itself, indicating its wrinkles
(where “a European culture that was officially, if by no means purely,
monotheistic” and the convention’s “pagan origins” tug it about), but also
because he individuates the agent Milton, whose conduct in the epic
environment of Paradise Lost he subtly describes as “arguing” about
predestination not only with tough-minded contemporaries but “arguing as
well, perhaps above all, with his own younger self”. Milton’s great poem is
not, as Bakhtin was inclined to label all epics, “monological” but in
dialogue over time with himself, both intersubjective and intra-subjective.
This is why it often sounds like a play by Shakespeare. Sometimes the
resemblances are probably happenstances. When, at the outset, he promises
his readers “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”, we had better not
hear “unattempted yet” as an echo of the same words from King John, Act Two,
scene one (line 601), where the Bastard torrentially reflects that the only
reason he is railing against bribery is that nobody has so far troubled to
try greasing his palm. We discount this as “static”, interference from a
shared, but insignificantly shared, atmosphere, unless we impute to Milton a
desire to hint with inordinate faintness that we should think of him as a
bastard, too. But when Satan leads Eve to the forbidden tree, and she
explains that it is off-limits to her, “To whom the tempter guilefully
replied. / Indeed?”, a family resemblance between two tempters may strike
us. We can hear here an echo of that “Indeed?” with which in Act Three,
Scene Three, Iago initiates Othello’s downfall. Textually, and a fortiori
intertextually, there is more in common between Milton and the Bastard than
between Satan and Iago – two words rather than one – but if we personify
“Indeed?”, embody it with camp surprise and mock solicitude, with the
paraded reasonableness that comes pat to both these insinuators, we find
they are a match for each other. When intertextuality distends into a
General Theory of Relatedness, it loses the capacity to produce such yields.
It becomes a mere derivative of the exchange principle, “every contact
leaves a trace”, which Edmond Locard introduced into forensic science. This
principle guides the work of those who investigate the scenes of crimes, but
it serves them well only because they select for traces which will lead them
to a person.
An unargued preference for “more general discursive structure” over attention
to a “particular intertextual source” or two has the further drawback that
it conduces to fetishism of the categories brought to bear on utterances.
“Structure”, “system”, “genre” and “discursive formation” remain drastically
under-described pseudo-entities; like nation states, their existence and
frontiers acquire a bogus solidity. As in nationalist historiography, sham
demarcations are established; a weird protectionism envelops the resultant
intellectual domains, so that when a writer like Primo Levi alludes in one
of his poems to the “Shema Yisrael” this is called “appropriation” (who was
expropriated by it ?). Contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi
think it odd that Levi, a “secular humanist”, according to them,
“nonetheless uses the language of the Hebrew Bible in his poetry”. Yet Levi
“uses” terms, cadences and their implied commitments from Diodati’s 1603
Italian version of the Scriptures (he does not quote Hebrew) throughout his
prose as well as his poetry. When he speaks of the “shame which il giusto
experiences facing a crime committed by someone else”, the Italian word is
the equivalent of the King James’s “the righteous”. When he is drawn, as he
so often is, to people who are “mite”, like his best friend, Alberto, “la
rara figura dell’uomo forte e mite, contro cui si spuntano le armi della
notte” (“the rare example of a man at once strong and meek, against whom the
weapons of the night fall away blunted”), the magnificence of his phrase
stems from Wisdom 2:19 and Matthew 21:5 and the many other places where that
notable intersection, Judaeo-Christianity, transvalued meekness. You don’t
learn about these detailed realities of Levi’s writing from the Cambridge
Companion; the contributors’ attachment to their own labels is such that
they even describe “compassion and forgiveness” as “Christian virtues”, a
slur on the Hebrew Bible if ever I heard one. For them, an iron curtain has
fallen between the “cultural” and the “religious”, so they imagine Levi must
be a double agent, engaged in “ironic rewriting of divine utterances in
secular terms” (they do not mention what the point of his irony is),
whereas, in fact, the Scriptures are already written in “secular terms”,
there being no other terms available even to God, supposing he wishes to
speak with his creatures. The Word itself, as Bakhtin said, has to be
“embodied”, “enter another sphere of existence” and “become discourse”.
A pivotal episode in Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo, tells how, within
sight of Auschwitz’s greedy chimneys, he tries to remember and convey to a
companion, as they are fetching the day’s ration of cabbage and turnip soup,
what Dante means to him. This companion is from Alsace-Lorraine, a land
which has strayed across frontiers as Levi’s Piedmont did when it was the
Duchy of Savoy and stretched north to Geneva and west beyond Nice. He starts
out with some approximate points of orientation that trip from his tongue
(“Virgil equals Reason, Beatrice equals Theology”); he’d picked these up
during literature lessons which bored him at the Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio in
Turin. Then the smooth patter of what “everybody knows” about the Commedia
abandons him; he strains to recite and translate the specific words of one
passage, probably set for memorization as homework, beginning to quote
Inferno 26 from line 85. He manages six lines which describe the initial
stirrings of response to Virgil’s question about “dove” (“where”) the lost
Ulysses went to die, down to the first word of Ulysses’ oblique reply
“Quando . . .” (“when”). At that point, the text escapes Levi; he falls
through it into “the void. A hole in memory”, such a sad hole as Dante
imagined hell itself, that “triste buco”, to be. Levi dredges up only a
further seventeen of the remaining fifty lines, but Dante courses through
his writing more thoroughly than such a B+ rate of retrieval would suggest.
The whole episode is calqued on Dante’s canto: Levi starts with a precarious
descent into a “cisterna interrata” (“an underground tank”), just as Dante
and Virgil totter down to meet Ulysses in Inferno 26 (all hell is a
“cisterna” at Inferno 33.133). Levi’s companion is a “Pikolo”, a go-between,
a minor functionary; one shred of Ulysses that has stayed with Levi is the
phrase “quella compagna Picciola” (“that little band”). The Pikolo/Picciola
carry-over aligns Levi’s audience with the select few veterans to whom
Ulysses delivers his team talk, and more generally recalls the canto’s
fondness, unequalled in the Commedia, for the word “little”. In the
intensely signifying environment of this chapter, even the capital “P” of
these two words works communicative overtime, for “Picciola” has a majuscule
not only to point up the fellowship between two situations but because it
marks the beginning of a new line in Dante’s text. Levi had been made to
learn the words, and did so with dutiful reluctance; as he told Germaine
Greer, he scorned lessons “about the theory of poetry, the structure of the
novel, stuff like that”. But the drudgery to which he then submitted also
made him the person who is now struggling to survive annihilation in the
camp; what was learned by rote is remembered by heart.
Even the rhythms of his prose come to him through Dante. The words which
introduce his first quotation are themselves a hendecasyllable such as would
not be out of place or tune in the Commedia: “ed io comincio, lento e
accurato” (“and I begin, slowly and correctly”). “Correctly” in the
important way of fidelity to Dante’s line-units, but there are several
variants in what Levi quotes from the more-or-less standardized version
accepted in his schooldays in Italy (nor does Levi’s Inferno 26 correspond
exactly to any of the five editions published in Turin between 1920 and 1935
which I’ve been able to see). But Levi's Dante is “personified”, in the
sense that all his variants conform to the rhythmic frame of the Commedia;
each is something “Dante might have said” in the pulse of his
hendecasyllables, though brought fractionally closer to the inflections of
Levi’s own voice. These specific, textual details tell a more than scholarly
story about what Levi is doing in his writing. For it seems he did not check
against a book his memory of what he had quoted in the camp when, having
survived and got back home, he wrote the story of his quoting. All the
variants remain unchanged from the first edition of Se questo to the second.
The Levi who wrote the chapter wrote from memory, performed again the act of
remembering Dante, remembering himself remembering then what earlier still
he had memorized. So his text, “of” himself as “of” Dante, is the imprint of
a surviving agent, not “individus”, evidently, because so torn and
fractured, so carted off as a “non-person”, so ground down, but nonetheless
a recognizable individual persistent through time and atrocity.
Se questo is full of Dante and grew fuller of him between the first and second
editions; Levi continued to return to the poet throughout his career – his
last book published during his lifetime, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned
and the Saved), takes its title in part from Inferno 20.3. His adherence
will seem to some yet more bizarrerie from a “secular humanist” or be
written off as all-purpose, postmodern “irony”. It is rather an act of
resistance to what Levi called the “war on memory” which the Fascists
conducted. To hear why Levi in the camp heard Ulysses’s injunction
“Considerate la vostra semenza” (“ask yourselves what seed you spring from”)
as “come uno squillo di tromba, come la voce di Dio” (“like the sound of the
trumpet, like the voice of God”: Deuteronomy 4:33, Jeremiah 4:19), you need
to bear in ear the continuity of promise carried through the word “seed”
from Genesis to the offertory of the Roman Catholic Requiem where it begs
God to be freed from death “which of old you promised to Abraham and his
seed”. You need to recognize this “seed” as enshrining a concept of human
solidarity across times and frontiers, a concept at the heart of Levi’s
resistance to the violence unleashed upon the “human” by pseudoscientific
expertise about “race”, for example, by Mussolini’s hireling academics who
in 1938 issued a manifesto proclaiming that “we must regard as dangerous
theories which . . . include Semitic groupings within the scope of a common
Mediterranean race . . . . The Jews do not belong to the Italian race”. When
Levi describes in the words of Diodati’s version of Scripture his response
to Dante, an unbelieving Jewish Piedmontese writer (exiled in Poland),
nourished on the words of a bible translation made by a devout Tuscan
Protestant (exiled in Switzerland), comes to life at the sound from his own
mouth of the account given by a Florentine Catholic poet (exiled somewhere
in what was not yet known as “Italy”) of the response given to a Roman pagan
by a Greek pagan (self-exiled till drowned in the antipodes). I don’t think
“intersection” is a good enough word for what happens here; “intermarriage”
would be better. Intermarriage such as had been practised by 43 per cent of
Italian Jews in the 1930s, a fact which goes some way to explain both why 20
per cent of Italian Jews were members of Mussolini’s party and, more
hearteningly, why the name “Dante” was popular among them, borne by the
prominent Zionist journalist, Dante Lattes, and by the man who became in
1939 the head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Dante Almansi.
Ulysses’ “Considerate” also figures in the line from Levi’s poem which gave
his imperishable book its name: “Considerate se questo è un uomo” (“Ask
yourselves whether this is a man”). Only persons can ask themselves such
questions about the words of their texts. This is why Levi hears in his
searching encounter with Dante not only “the voice of God” but also,
uniquely in the book, his own name, for the words “Primo” and “Levi” both
appear in these pages as in no other chapter, just as Dante is named by
Beatrice once and once only in the Commedia (Purgatorio 30.55).
Of course, this passionate intricacy of writing is beneath consideration from
those who specialize in “general discursive structure” and is, indeed,
merely an individual instance, though an instance of individuality. What
happens between individual “Italians” like Primo Levi and Dante Alighieri
may have the force of parable. In this case, a parable about, among other
things, the phenomenon of linguistic reflexivity, the fact that language
makes us capable of talking about our selves and itself, and does one only
by doing the other. To hear your name is, as Roy Harris writes in The
Language Connection, to become acquainted with linguistic reflexivity, and
"it is also to grasp the communicational concept of self. It involves
recognizing that you, your name and various others words like I and me are
integrated into a communicational programme that is different from anyone
else’s. It is on this basis – and no other – that we enter into membership
of a linguistic community."
It is not far from the building where Levi was born and died to the school
where he was entered into a linguistic community, partly through required
memorization of Dante. You turn left out of his front door, left onto via
Vico, and left again up via Massena, which in about ten minutes leads you to
the Massimo d’Azeglio, where Levi’s memory is now honoured (see the
exhibition the school mounted last year). At one intersection of the
street he walked daily on his way to class, someone has sprayed on a wall
“Europa agli Europei, Africa agli Africani” (“Europe for Europeans, Africa
for Africans”). Some people never learn.
David Bindman, Stephen Hebron and Michael O’Neill
DANTE REDISCOVERED
256pp. Wordsworth Trust. Paperback, £19.95.
978 1 905256 23 5
John C. Barnes and Jennifer Petrie, editors
DANTE AND HIS LITERARY PRECURSORS
Twelve essays
320pp. Four Courts Press. £55 (US $65).
978 1 85182 652 0
Murray J. Levith
SHAKESPEARE’S CUES AND PROMPTS
107pp. Continuum. £45.
978 0 82649 597 6
Tobias Gregory
FROM MANY GODS TO ONE
Divine action in Renaissance epic
240pp. University of Chicago Press. $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£15.50.
978 0 226 30755 8
Robert S. C. Gordon, editor
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO PRIMO LEVI
232pp. Cambridge University Press. £17.99 (US $29.99).
978 0 521 60461 1
Eric Griffiths is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the
author of The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 1989.
