Liberating the Tomb: Difference and Death in Gerusalemme Liberata
[In the following essay, Ascoli examines the fundamental importance of entombment and liberation in Gerusalemme liberata.]
Like much Counter-Reformation writing, Tasso's epic of the Crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem represents and then represses several varieties of threatening difference—religious, sexual, racial, psychological, even textual. In his fundamental study of the Liberata, Sergio Zatti (1983) has shown that the struggle of the “uniforme cristiano” to overcome the “multiforme pagano,” that is, the heterodox multiplicity of the Islamic “other,” can be read as an overt allegory of internal difference and otherness. Zatti identifies several strata of internal “difference” and deviation—the tensions within the Christian camp itself (the “compagni erranti” of Goffredo di Buglione, whom one might be tempted to read as so many protestant schismatics [see Quint 1990 & 1993]); the tensions within individual characters such as Rinaldo and Tancredi, whose errant desires take them beyond the pale of the Christian soldier's duties; the tensions within the poet himself (who identifies himself as a “peregrino errante” in need of Duke Alfonso II d'Este's guidance) and within his poem, with its Armida-like recourse to dangerous “fregi,” “diletti,” “dolcezze” which compromise and divide the orthodox truth and goodness, not to mention the historical factuality, of the poem's subject matter.
In what follows I will develop Zatti's argument around the most obvious symbolic and narrative foci of the poem: the Holy Sepulchre, and the Crusaders' collective quest to liberate it.1 In both intra-textual and inter-textual terms, the quest for Christ's empty tomb constitutes the poem's culminating confrontation with the paradigmatic otherness and difference of death. Moreover, the apparently orthodox, devotional, turn to this symbol of a fulfilling life beyond death, a unity beyond multiplicity, conceals as well the yearning for liberation and release of another sort—an annihilation and dispersal capable of freeing Tasso from the vow (voto), the pledged word, the pledge of words, that binds him to his ungrateful patron, to the constraints of an orthodox theology, and to a counter-Reform poetics of epic unity.2
The key passage for my argument is the very last stanza of the poem, and particularly its final two lines:
Così vince Goffredo, ed a lui tanto
avanza ancor de la diurna luce
ch'a la città già liberata, al santo
ostel di Cristo i vincitor conduce.
Né pur deposto il sanguinoso manto
viene al tempio con gli altri il sommo duce;
e qui l'arme sospende, e qui devoto
il gran Sepolcro adora e scioglie il voto.
(XX.144)3
(“Thus Goffredo triumphs; and enough daylight remains for him to conduct the victors through the now liberated city to the holy resting place of Christ. Without even setting aside his bloody mantle, the highest leader comes to the temple with the others; here he hangs up his arms; here, devout, he adores the great Sepulchre and fulfills [or ‘is released from’] his vow.”)
The adoration of the liberated tomb is the last of a densely packed series of climaxes and plot resolutions carried out over the last three cantos, beginning with Rinaldo's return to the Christian camp, his submission to the authority of Goffredo, and his success in breaking the enchantment of the Wood of Sharon. The walls of the city are then breached by the anti-Babelic siege towers, constructed with the timber taken from the now demon-free forest.4 Then comes the death of Argante at the hand of Tancredi, and the taking of Jerusalem itself, all but the tower of David, by the Crusaders. Now the city must be defended by the Crusaders against the massed pagan armies under the general leadership of the renegade Emireno. While the battle goes on outside the city, its usurper-king, Aladino, is killed and the tower taken. The pagan champions Adrasto, Solimano, and Tisaferno are each defeated in turn. The last “champion,” Armida, is converted by her erstwhile lover, Rinaldo. Goffredo despatches his counterpart, Emireno. He then proceeds, still bloodied, to the Sepulchre to hang up the “arme pietose,” with which he was identified in the first line of the poem, and to fulfill the vow which he had already named in the twenty-third stanza of the first canto as the ultimate goal of the Crusade, in words that are precisely echoed in the final line (I.23.7-8, “né sia chi neghi al peregrin devoto / d'adorar la gran tomba e sciorre il voto”; “nor should anyone prevent the devout pilgrim from adoring the great tomb and fulfilling [being released from] his vow”; cf. I.1.2 and Chiappelli: 214n20).
There is reason to think that the liberation and adoration of the Sepulchre, at least as much as the “liberation of Jerusalem,” should be taken as the central action of the poem in Tasso's own neo-Aristotelian terms (cf. Giamatti: 183).5 It is the last event in the protracted sequence of closures; it is specifically identified as the fulfillment of Goffredo's, and the “others,” motives in carrying out the crusades (releasing them from the vows by which Pope Urban bound them to the enterprise—see canto XI.23-24); and, finally, as we have just seen, it echoes precisely language which set the poem and its events in motion. We know, in fact, that the title, Gerusalemme liberata, was not an authorial choice. The poet had earlier thought to call his poem the Goffredo and later he would retitle a revised, “authorized” version as Gerusalemme conquistata (Pittoru: 246-251). By contrast, in 1581, when the work was first printed, Torquato Tasso was in the third year of a forced eight year confinement (1579-1586) to the Hospital of Sant'Anna and had no direct part in its publication. As the editor, Angelo Ingegneri, who is responsible for affixing the title we know to the poem, noted accurately in a preface, the locution “Gerusalemme liberata” does have a strong textual basis (Pittoru: 248), deriving from two lines at either end of the poem: in the sixteenth stanza of the first canto, Goffredo describes the Crusader's mission as that of “liberar Gierusalem soggetta” (“liberating subject Jerusalem”); while in the poem's final stanza, as we have seen, Goffredo and company pass through “la città già liberata.” They do so, however, while on their way to the “santo / ostel di Cristo,” namely the “gran Sepolcro” itself. And the first two lines of the poem define Tasso's subject as follows: “Canto l'arme pietose e 'l capitano / che ‘l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo” (“I sing the pious arms and the captain who liberated the great sepulchre of Christ”; emphasis mine). In any case, as we are about to see, the city and the sepulchre converge in symbolic terms, the latter, as it were, unveiling and epitomizing the typological and potentially transcendent meaning of the former.6
Entombment, as has often been pointed out, has a fundamental importance in the dynamic of the Liberata's narrative, prominent examples being the miraculous tomb which arises to mark and honor the martyrdom of Sveno in canto VIII.38-40, and the tomb in which Tancredi places the remains of his beloved Clorinda (XII.79, 94-99; cf. XIII.41-43).7 As the young hero, Sveno, anticipates the more successful Rinaldo, so his tomb “prefigures in little the ‘gran sepolcro’” (Hampton: 114). And his martyr's death represents a heroism alternative and, in Tasso's Counter-Reform ideology, superior to that of the heroes of pagan Rome (Hampton: 118). The motif of the sepulchre is, in fact, one of the primary means by which Tasso sets his poem in dialectical relationship, of resemblance and of difference, to the classical, especially Virgilian, epic, whose principal subject is the destruction and foundation of cities (as we will see further along, it also position him in relation to his vernacular Italian precursors, especially Dante and Ariosto).
This relationship with the Aeneid is already in place in the first couplet of the poem (quoted above), where it is also clearly articulated in terms of the tomb. These lines, of course, closely echo the Virgilian “arma virumque cano,” but with the studied introduction of a Christianized “pietas” as qualifier on “arme,” and the subsumption of the heroic “vir” into the self-sacrificing office of “capitan.” The “gran Sepolcro” of line two also, if slightly less obviously, has its Virgilian equivalent. As is by now well known, the Latin verb “condere,” which designates the foundation of the Roman city in the opening lines of the Aeneid (“tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem” I.33, cf. I.5) also refers to burial (e.g., “animamque sepolcro / condimus” III.67-68, cf. VI.152 [Reckford: 255; Quint 1982: 32]). The word thus bears within itself the fundamental Virgilian paradox of the destruction of one city giving way to the birth of another, along with the recurring linkage between sacrifice and ritual burial of the dead, on the one hand, and on the other, the apotheosis of Rome and its rulers. The implication then is that for Tasso the real meaning of Jerusalem, the typological “visio pacis” and the figure of the City of God on earth, is epitomized by the empty tomb it contains, the promise of eternal life in another world made precisely by the sacrificial descent into the vacancy of death in this one.8 Whereas in Virgil burial is the necessary prelude to the founding of the city (illustrated, vividly, for example, in Aeneid, books 5 and 6)—for Tasso the Holy Sepulchre is the city of God—while the city of man, as Goffredo points out later in his speech defining the crusaders' mission—is nothing but a tomb (cf. Chiappelli: 172-173; Stephens 1989: 193):
Non edifica quei che vuol gl'imperi
su fondamenti fabricar mondani,
.....… ma ben move ruine, ond'egli oppresso
sol construtto un sepolcro abbia a se stesso.
(I.25.1-2, 7-8)
(“He who wants to fabricate empires on worldly foundations, does not build, but rather moves ruin—so that, oppressed, he has only built a sepulchre for himself.”)
Just so, the closing sequence of the Liberata both participates in the classical epic tradition, which invariably terminates in death, and in the Christian overgoing of that tradition. The Iliad, of course, culminates with the deaths of Patroklus and Hektor, and above all with the reconciling burial of both when the wrath of Achilles is set aside in pity for the sorrow of Priam. The Aeneid ends with the “sacrificial” death of Turnus, which clears the way for the union of the Trojans and Latins and hence for Rome to arise.9 Indeed, the entrance of the sword into Turnus's body is described with the word “condit,” recalling the poem's opening lines and forecasting a founding burial (XII.950). This ending had been recently closely imitated by Tasso's imposing precursor and bête noire, Ariosto, in the Orlando furioso,10 and, as we see shall further along, Tasso in turn echoes Ariosto's echoing of Virgil.
Tasso incorporates the classical versions of epic death and burial in his poem, but carefully links them to the otherness of the pagan enemy, rather than to the Christian crusaders. As Lauren Seem has recently argued, the death of Argante in canto XIX rehearses the Virgilian ending, but also transforms it, by removing it from the absolute terminus of the work and by redefining the significance of the enemy's death. In fact, through the death scenes of the greatest pagan champions, Solimano as well as Argante, Tasso emphasizes specifically classical concepts of dying. With Argante a Stoic ethos prevails (“vuol morendo anco parer non vinto” XIX.1; “he wishes even in dying to appear undefeated”; “moriva Argante, e tal moriva qual visse” 26; “Argante died, and he died just as he had lived”); while with Solimano one canto later we find instead a tragic fatalism and despair (XX.73, 104-108). In this case, then, the all-purpose alterity of the pagans becomes a figure for the traditional critique of the classical world-view from a Christian perspective.
This contrast between classical and Christian concepts of heroic dying is brought out with special clarity by Tancredi's insistence that his worthy foe Argante be given the ritual burial and the verbal honor, the terrestrial glory, that his creed demands:
… egli morì qual forte
onde a ragion gli è quell'onor devuto
che solo in terra avanzo è de la morte.
(XIX.117.2-4)
(“he died as a man of strength; whence with reason he is owed that honor which alone remains on earth after death.”)
In the very next stanza, however, Tancredi stresses the sharp limitations on the sheerly nominal fame accruing to his foe, contrasting it with the “extraterrestrial” life beyond death available to Christian believer: he says that he will now go to Jerusalem
ché 'l loco ove morì l'Uomo immortal
può forse al Cielo agevolar la strada,
e sarà pago un mio pensier devoto
d'aver peregrinato al fin del voto.
(118.5-8)
(“because the place where the immortal Man died, may perhaps ease the way to heaven; and my devout desire [or thought] to have completed a pilgrimage to the end of my vow will be appeased”).
The “devoto/voto” pun which closes the stanza just cited echoes Goffredo's words from the first canto (23.8) and specifically previews the rhymed couplet which ends the poem. At the same time, it stands in direct, contrastive relation with a rhyme that appears just after Tancredi has killed his pagan foe:
Ripone Tancredi il ferro, e poi devoto
ringrazia Dio del trionfal onore;
ma lasciato di forze ha quasi vòto,
la sanguigna vittoria il vincitore
(XIX.27)
(“Tancredi puts away his sword and thanks God devoutly for this triumphal honor; but the bloody victory has left the victor almost emptied of strength.”)
“Voto,” vow, has been replaced by the identically spelled, “vòto” (“vuoto” in modern Italian, meaning “empty”), indicating Tancredi's own nearness to a death as meaningless as his enemy's. By fulfilling his vow (voto), Tancredi will escape the void (vòto) that has engulfed Argante.
While the “voto/devoto” rhyme appears several times during the course of the poem (for example, at I.23; II.5; III.70; XI.23), usually recalling the Crusaders' devout vows and thus reminding the reader of the narrative's ultimate telos, the introduction of this punning counterpart is held back until the final two cantos, when it suddenly proliferates. As we have just seen it appears in the Tancredi/Argante subplot, which recommences in canto XIX when Argante pointedly reminds Tancredi that he had violated his promised faith (that is, his chivalric vow) to return to battle earlier and accuses him of letting “le promesse ir vòte” (2.6: “your promises were empty”). It crops up again conspicuously in final installment of the Armida/Rinaldo subplot in book XX, where Tasso introduces the first and only rhyming of “voto” with “vòto” (63.7-8: “lo stral volò, ma con lo strale un voto / subito uscì, che vada il colpo a vòto” “the arrow flew [toward Rinaldo], but with the arrow [Armida] let fly a vow that the blow should be in vain”).
A further conjunction of the two homonyms comes in a passage which clearly anticipates Goffredo's laying aside of his “arme pietose,” when Tisaferno vows to dedicate his arms to “Macon” if he succeeds in killing Rinaldo for Armida, a vow destined to remain empty and unfulfilled:
“qui prego il Ciel che 'l mio ardimento aiuti,
e veggia Armida il desiato scempio:
Macon, s'io vinco, i' voto l'arme al tempio.”
Cosí pregava, e le preghiere ír vòte;
ché ‘l sordo suo Macon nulla n'udiva.
(113.6-8; 114.1-2)
(“‘Here I pray the Heavens that they aid my boldness and that Armida may witness the desired slaughter: Mohammed, if I win I vow my arms to the temple.’ Thus he prayed, but the prayers went unfulfilled, because his deaf Mohammed heard nothing of them.”)
The emptiness of pagan vows and the vacancy of a meaningless death that awaits the neoclassical champions is thus carefully poised by Tasso against the fulfilled vows and the emptiness of a tomb that promises eternal life beyond the grave for “fedeli” such as Tancredi and Goffredo. The “liberated” sepulchre is at once the sign of death and of liberation from death, as of the poem's participation in and alienation from an epic past. And this is true in another sense, as well, one which raises more directly a question of poetics and often places the epic poet himself before, or even within, a tomb like those he represents.
Again, we should begin with the Aeneid, which in book VI adopts the perspective of the Elysian underworld and of the dead to achieve a clarifying vision of Roman history. The Virgilian dead remain oriented toward historical life (Dido, Palinurus, Anchises all share this common trait—that they look back to their own former lives for meaning), while the cyclicality of metempsychosis gives mythic substance to the endless interweaving of death and life implied by the fundamental equivocation of a foundation which is also a burial.11 Nonetheless, only the gaze from beyond the tomb can fully uncover the meaning of Aeneas' epic mission. And in a famously “cryptic” image of the gate of false dreams through which Aeneas returns to the light and to life, Virgil tacitly identifies that gaze of death with an ivory and orphic poetics which are surely those of his own poem.12
Tasso's understanding of Virgil was heavily mediated, above all through the two most powerful post-classical epic poets of the Italian tradition at that time, Dante and Ariosto. Dante, of course, set a formidable, if particular, precedent for revising the Virgilian epic in Christian terms. He is a constant point of reference in Tasso's theoretical discussions of poetry,13 and, as we shall see, also provides the most obvious source for the Gerusalemme's language and thematics of “avowal.” The Commedia, it need hardly be said, openly embraces the perspective of the “oltretomba”—turning the excursus of Virgil's book VI into the substance of Dante's own vision. Death again is the interpreter of life, providing the necessary “alienation” to see and understand it. But now rather than death bending toward life, the meaning of historical life consists precisely and only in its destiny after death (at least at the explicitly doctrinal level). Dante and his poem assume the perspective of the “giudizio universale,” neither before nor inside the tomb, but beyond it.
By contrast, Tasso's immediate precursor, Ariosto, while imitating the end of the Aeneid in the conclusive death of Rodomonte, seems to renounce access to either the Virgilian or the Dantean perspective of the “oltretomba.” For Quint (1979) this ending means nothing more than the inevitability of human dying, redeemed neither by the social-political continuity envisioned by Virgil nor by the religious (and perhaps also political) transcendence of Dante. I, instead, would argue that Ariosto associates his poem's perspective with the “vocal tomba di Merlino” (“the speaking tomb of Merlin” [Ascoli 1987: 361-376]), as well as with the ambiguously parodic apocalypse of the “heaven of the moon” (264-304). In particular I claim that in canto III of the Furioso Merlin, neither alive nor dead, neither saved nor damned, figures the predicament of a poem which has survived its author's death but cannot transcend his limited, living, perspective to give final interpretation either to the meaning of history or to the possibility of a life beyond this one.
Tasso's sepulchre, one might then say, reflects a poetics that yearns for epic totality and Dantean transcendence but that feels its own greater proximity, historical and otherwise, to the errors of Ariostan romance and to the perspective of mortality.14 Like Dante's poem, Tasso's tomb is the sign that true meaning and true life dwell beyond history. Like Ariosto's poem, however, Tasso's remains essentially within the confines of temporality (Greene: 191-192; Murrin: 126). Although the author introduces both the divine and the demonic perspectives into the poem, his characters encounter it principally in dream, and rarely step beyond it literally.15 Tasso's theoretical discussions of epic, in fact, insist programmatically on the necessary “historicity” of its subject, while allowing for the introduction of incidental fictions.16 In Tasso's poem, the tomb is not just the beginning of a journey, as it is for Dante—it is the textual endpoint. You may be able to go beyond it, but Tasso's poetry cannot take you, or him, there.
So far I have made a relatively loose, associative connection between Dantean and Ariostan poetics of “oltretomba” and “tomba,” respectively, and Tasso's terminal image. But there are more specific textual connections that link the Crusaders' and especially Goffredo's quest for the tomb with, on the one hand, both of Tasso's Italian precursors, and, on the other, with the poet's own narrative quest to complete the Liberata. The crucial link, again, is the concept of the “vow,” or “voto.” The Crusaders' vow is clearly, as Aquinas defines it, “a promise made to God,” a paradoxical act of human will which is a “sacrifice of the will,” voluntarily enslaving the soul to God by a commitment to do (or not to do) something.17 It is analogous to and yet sharply distinguished from the ethos of Stoic-chivalric “fides,” or pledged word, which guides the “cavallieri” of romance, Ariostan and otherwise.18 It is also, as we shall see, potentially assimilable to the problem of linguistic and especially poetic referentiality and intentionality, both on the “metaphoric” axis of external reference (poet's word corresponds to historical reality or not) and on the “metonymic” axis of internal unity effected through narrative (poem's ending corresponds, or not, to what is promised at its beginning).19
The Tassian language of avowal, as I have described it so far, clearly derives from Dante's Heaven of the Moon, where dwell souls (Piccarda de' Donati; the Empress Constance) who were by force constrained to break religious vows and thus are placed in the lowest realm of the blessed. Note particularly the “voto”/“vòto” pun that will become so crucial for Tasso:
E questa sorte che par giù cotanto,
però n'è data, perché fuor negletti
li nostri voti, e vòti in alcun canto.
(Paradiso III.55-57)
(“And this lot, which appears so lowly, is given to us because our vows were neglected and void in some particular”)20
That Dantean episode, not coincidentally, had earlier become a principal source for Ariosto's parodically transcendent representation of the inconstancy of human minds and words in his famous lunar episode (Orlando furioso XXXIV.67-XXXV.31), where, prominent among the other items in the junk heap of vanities, are “infiniti prieghi e voti … / che da noi peccatori a Dio si fanno (XXXIV.74.7-8: “infinite prayers and vows … which we sinners make to God”; see also 82.6).21
It is important to note here how Tasso's treatment of vows borrows elements from both predecessors but also alters them.22 In Paradiso III-V, Dante represents salvation achieved in spite of contingent historical disruptions in the “sacrifice of the will” to God which is effected by a religious “voto.” Moreover, he also warns stringently, in what may well have appeared to a reader from Tasso's time a signally pre-Lutheran moment, against making vows that cannot and should not be fulfilled (Paradiso V.64-73).23 By contrast, the Christian cavaliers of the Liberata, at least when they are not “erranti,” prove their faith and ensure their salvation by fulfilling their vows, while only the pledges of pagan infidels remain “vuoti.” By insisting on the successful fulfillment of vows, Tasso clearly rejects the Ariostan satire that threatens to generalize Dante's limited acceptance of human weakness and inconstancy in Paradiso III-V to such an extent that it infects and undermines all religious commitments and the belief on which they are founded. But the very vehemence and rigor of his representations of Goffredo's constancy suggests that he was in some ways persuaded by Ariosto's serious, if comically articulated, critique of Dante's treatment of vows: he simply cannot allow for the possibility of a salvation achieved despite the incompleteness of a vow or the outright failure to fulfill it.24 Tasso, haunted by the specter of heterodoxy, yearning for a transcendence of which, however, he can permit himself only the most fugitive glimpses (e.g. I.7-17; XIV.2-19; XX.20-21), finds it crucial to make word match deed in God's (or the Inquisition's or the Duke's) eyes. Refusing alike the accommodating mysteries of Dante and the comfortable demystifications of Ariosto, which perhaps bear a troubling resemblance to the protestant, and especially Lutheran, attacks on religious vows as needless vanities, he represents the making and keeping of vows as not only possible and desirable, but indeed as necessary. For Tasso, it seems, vows provide an essential structure and order for defining and grounding human selves otherwise divided by doubts and corrupted by sensual delights and violent passions.25
Furthermore, in both Dante's heaven of the moon and Ariosto's calque on it, a thematics of vows and human inconstancy gives rise to reflections on the nature of poetic referentiality which, at least implicitly, create a problematic analogy between the word of promise and the poet's fictions. The case of the souls who have left unfulfilled the letter of a vow but whose “absolute will” (IV.109) still cleaves inwardly to God, frames and parallels the account of the metaphorical quality of Scriptural reference, where a failure of referential adequation still points toward the invisible Truth of God:
Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno,
però che solo da sensato apprende
ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno.
Per questo la Scrittura condescende
a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano
attribuisce a Dio e altro intende. …
(IV.40-45)
(“It is needful to speak thus to your faculty, since only through sense perception does it apprehend that which it afterwards makes fit for the intellect. For this reason Scripture condescends to your capacity, and attributes hands and feet to God, having other meaning. …”)
And, as Freccero points out, this account of Scriptural figures is applied explicitly and a fortiore to Dante's own representations of the blessed, and thus “the whole of Paradiso … has no existence, even fictional, beyond the metaphoric” (211; cf. 222). Much like Piccarda and Constance, Dante cannot make his “words of promise,” his “poema sacro,” coincide completely with reality.
As I have argued elsewhere, Ariosto's “allegory of poets and theologians” in the lunar episode turns precisely this acknowledgement of the non-correspondence of human language and intellect to divine referent against the authoritative texts in which faith should be grounded and which claim to offer a referential bridge between human history and God's eternity—first of all the Commedia itself, everywhere echoed and nowhere taken seriously—but also, more devastatingly, the New Testament, whose most authoritative scribe, St. John of the Gospel and of Revelations, is on hand to reduce himself and his texts to the status of lying flattery (Ascoli: 285-291).
Tasso too moves analogically from the domain of his narrative and thematic representations into a consideration of the status of the poetics that subtends those representations, and in a way that suggests he has both Dante and Ariosto's critique of Dante in mind as he does so. Just as at the thematic level, so at that of “metapoetics” Tasso moves anxiously between his two predecessors. While he is, like Dante, trying to write a poem that is unequivocally Christian, and thus cannot include Ariosto's playful near-sacrilege, he has also taken to heart the Furioso's exposé of the dangers inherent in claiming access through human words to ultimate Truth, and especially the mad pride of putting poetry at or near the level of sacred Scripture, or of adopting a transcendent, eschatological perspective that begins to resemble God's own. The consequence of such considerations is that noted above: the abandonment of the perspective of the “oltretomba” in favor of a quest for a “gran tomba” which, however, gestures beyond itself to a higher reality of eternal life.
It is not surprising, especially in light of the Dantean and Ariostan “pretexts” just discussed, that Tasso's metapoetic concerns appear most explicitly in the incomplete and uneasy parallel between the Crusader's vow to take Jerusalem and his commitment to write the poem in which the story of their vow and its consequences is narrated (Chiappelli: 178-181; Langer: 43-44; Zatti 1983: 93 & 1991: 207-208). In the fourth stanza of the first canto, Tasso makes one of his rare first person appearances in the poem, in order to define his own and his text's relationship to their patron, Duke Alfonso II d'Este:
Tu, magnanimo Alfonso, il qual ritogli,
al furor di fortuna e guidi in porto
me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli
e fra l'onde agitato e quasi absorto,
queste mie carte in lieta fronte accogli,
che quasi in voto a te sacrate i' porto
[emphasis mine].
(“You, magnanimous Alfonso, who remove me from the fury of Fortune and guide me, a wandering pilgrim, to port, who had been tossed and almost consumed among the waves and cliffs, gather up with a glad countenance these my pages which I bring consecrated to you almost as a vow.”)
Tasso's wandering or errant pilgrimage is thus a shakier version of that of the “peregrin devoto” who Goffredo soon after imagines seeking out the Sepulchre in safety (I.23)—his offering “quasi in voto” to Alfonso a less stable variant on that generic pilgrim's, and Goffredo's own, vow. The substance of the “voto” is first of all a commitment to writing a poem, this poem. But the “carte … sacrate”—consecrated if not truly sacred—figure not only as the fruit of a vow, but as the verbal record of that vow, both the promised words and the words of promise themselves. Otherwise put, Tasso dramatizes his poem as a vow to be fulfilled, a word to be kept. Thus, when Goffredo “scioglie il voto” with the simultaneous liberation of Jerusalem and the Sepulchre, Tasso analogically fulfills, and is thus symbolically released from, his vow as well, as he completes his representation of Goffredo's vow and its fulfillment (Martinelli: 13 & 17).
To understand more fully the significance of this convergence between the narrative that Tasso writes and the “metanarrative” of Tasso's writing, we need to consider further why it is that the poem focuses so intensely on the “voto” or vow and especially why it is so consistently paired with the action of “scioglimento”26—literally the release or dissipation which signifies the fulfillment of a vow but also denotes its annihilation. As I began to suggest above, a vow is a formal promise that binds and constrains the one who makes it to transform a word or metaphorically verbal intention into an internal and external reality.27 In Tasso's world, then, the chivalric pledge or promise of faith (“fede”) which dominates the world of Ariosto (where it is, however, almost always violated or contaminated)28 is conflated with and/or superseded by the Christian believer's “voto”—just as the cavalier's aimless errancy is replaced by the Crusader's directed pilgrimage. The human word of promise thus looks to ground itself in the Logos, the Word of God.
In either case, chivalric or Christian, the paradigmatic narrative structure of the “voto” should be clear (cf. Hampton: 98-100). Between the pilgrim-crusader's pledged word and its fulfillment lies the story told in Tasso's poem, between Tasso's poetic “voto” and its conclusion—and its hoped for coincidence with historical and/or transcendent reality—lie the words of the Liberata themselves. In this connection it is crucial that Tasso consistently uses the verb “sciogliere” and derivatives in his theoretical discussions of the “unfolding” and “tying together” of narrative form, and that this word marks the parallel between religious and poetic quests just as strongly as the echoes of “voto” do.29 At the same time, “scioglimento” is itself a name for the liberation that both the Crusaders and the poet seek—by achieving the freedom of city and tomb from the oppression of the “Other,” Goffredo and the Crusaders achieve their own freedom from the constraint, their freely assumed bondage, to fulfill a word of promise; by “tying together” the various loose ends resolved in cantos XVIII-XX, Tasso paradoxically unties the knot (“scioglie il nodo”) of narrative complication into the simplicity of unity and the silence of ending.
It is no accident then that the terminus of both vows, the scene of their liberating “scioglimento” is the Holy Sepulchre: “adorar 'l gran sepolcro e scioglie il voto.”30 The freedom of release from a binding vow is closely identified in the text with the corporeal disintegration of a physical death, albeit one whose ultimate significance is eternal life. The application to the story of “'l capitan” is clear enough. The death of the historical Goffredo took place in the year following the conquest of Jerusalem (1099). And within Tasso's text the character's physical demise is already predicted during the appearance of Ugone in canto XIV, where it is directly contrasted with the possibility of earthly rule over the conquered Jerusalem, which devolves upon his otherwise undistinguished brother.31 For Goffredo, presumably, the adoration of the Tomb and his release into death signify the departure from the pain of this world into the beatitude of the next, and perhaps as well the transcendence of the constraints of impersonally allegorical “role-playing.” As “capitan,” we know, he plays head to Rinaldo's hand throughout the poem, and in the final lines he is still the “sommo duce” who leads (“conduce”) the others (“altri”) into the blessed anonymity of individual redemption.32
For Tasso, by contrast, the meaning of this conclusive release out of narrative and of language itself is not so obvious. His “carte” after all, were only offered “quasi in voto” (I.4.6), and, at least as he presents them at the beginning of the poem, they are only a pledge in earnest, the avowal of a future vow, of something else to be written—the story of Alfonso's successful “emulation” of Goffredo's Crusade (cf. Langer: 44). Moreover, as a “peregrino errante” (who not once but twice in a single stanza uses the word “quasi” of himself [cf. I.4.4: “quasi absorto”]), he dwells uncertainly between the “cavallieri erranti” who populate Ariosto's seemingly endless romance (and who are apparently never able to make faithfully pledged word and historical reality coincide) and the “peregrino devoto” who is the hero of the Liberata.33
My final gloss on the last line of the Liberata will require yet another detour out of Tasso's poem and back into Orlando furioso. Attention has recently been called to the Ariostan reminiscence in Liberata canto 1, stanza 4—showing that Tasso's initial hope to be brought into safe haven after voyaging on dangerous seas clearly echoes Ariosto's image of a return to friendly shores after a long, “errant,” voyage on the open ocean of poetry at the beginning of the forty-sixth and final canto of the Furioso (Langer: 43-44; Zatti 1991: 206-208). Tasso's “voto” to his patron thus corresponds and responds to Ariosto's hope “nel lido i voti scioglier” (“to fulfill my vows [by arriving] on the shore”), which in turn refers us back to the reference to a promise made to his patron, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, in the second stanza of the Furioso's first canto. In this way, Tasso expresses the terrors of romance error—the straying of poetic multiplicity, heterodoxy, and difference that he consistently associates in his theoretical writings with Ariosto—only in order to avoid them, apotropaically.34 But if Tasso begins where Ariosto ends, he ends there as well, since the closing lines of the Liberata echo the Furioso just as directly as the opening stanzas do, the Ariostan “nel lido i voti scioglier spero” recurring in the Tassian “scioglie il voto.”35
At one level, these repetitions means that Tasso's obsession with the error which he attempts to project onto the poetic “Other,” Ariosto, has not been overcome by poem's close, and remains a haunting presence internal to the Liberata. But it means something else as well. Despite the celebratory scene that Ariosto projects for the arrival of his “carte” on the poetic shoreline where its courtly readers await it, the “scioglimento” of vows has a darker side for him too. In fact, the “lido” of courtly readers is haunted by an accompanying reference to the banks of the river Styx (Furioso XLVI.9.5-6)—that is, to the possibility that the real terminus of Ariosto's poetic journey is precisely death (Ascoli 1987: 364-365; cf. Quint 1979). And indeed the metaphor of “scioglimento” returns again in the very last stanza of the poem, where the embittered soul of the dying Rodomonte is described as “sciolta dal corpo più freddo che ghiaccio” (140.6: “released from the body, colder than ice”; emphasis mine) as he plummets down to that other river of the dead, Acheron. Ariosto's solution to this threat, I have argued, is first to defer the moment of deathly “scioglimento” as long as possible, but also to figure the poem itself as “vocal tomba,” the loquacious sepulchre which goes on speaking long after its author's life has ended.
Like Ariosto before him, Tasso obliquely confronts the abyss between language and death precisely at the point when his poem is drawing to its close. A number of passages are suggestive in this regard,36 but an unusually dense constellation of references occurs in a six stanza stretch near the end of canto XX. Gildippe and Odoardo, “amanti e sposi,” dying by the hand of Solimano “vorrian formar, né pon formar parole” (100.3: “would like to form words, but are unable to do so”). Failure to speak is here, as often, the clear index of impending death. Their deaths, however, unleash the words of others: “Allor scioglie la Fama i vanni al volo; le lingue al grido” (101.1-2: “then Fame releases her wings to flight, and tongues to shouting”; emphasis mine). The locution “scioglie … il volo” obviously anticipates “scioglie il voto,”37 while creating a defining contrast with it. Fama, the notoriously unreliable personification of the public circulation of language which purports to bear witness to the significant events of history, but in fact indiscriminately mixes truth with falsehood (see Aeneid IV.173-197, esp. 190 “pariter facta atque infecta canebat”), is the demonized opposite of voto, the private performance of a given linguistic promise—which, when successful, precisely converts word into deed, establishing iron bonds of reference. The juxtaposition of the two moments may well recall the opening ambivalence of the Tassian narrator who seeks pardon for adding “fregi al ver” (I.2.7), contaminating truth with fiction, moral teaching with illicit pleasure38—an ambivalence from which the poet hopes to be released precisely by the fulfillment of his narratological vow.
The episode in fact begins with an apostrophe to the defunct Gildippe and Odoardo, in which the narrator makes one of his rare appearances:
Gildippe ed Odoardo, i casi vostri
duri ed acerbi e i fatti onesti e degni
(se tanto lice a i miei toscani inchiostri)
consacrerò fra' peregrini ingegni,
sí ch'ogn'età quasi ben nati mostri
di virtute e d'amor v'additi e segni,
e co 'l suo pianto alcun servo d'Amore
la morte vostra e le mie rime onore.
(94; emphasis mine)
(“Gildippe and Odoardo, if so much is permitted to my Tuscan pen, I will consecrate your harsh and bitter fates and your noble and worthy deeds among those of rare wit, so that every age will point you out and signal you as excellent examples of virtue and of love, and [so that] some servant of Love may, with his tears, honor your death and my rhymes.”)
These lines position the narrator's poetic language at a mid-point between the consecrating efficacy of avowal (“consacrerò fra' peregrini ingegni,” with a double echo of I.4) and the divulgative function of Fama. Moreover, they set up a suggestive parallel between the represented death and the representing rhymes (“la morte vostra e le mie rime onore”).
Immediately after the slaughter of the married heroes, their murderer, Solimano, witnesses Adrasto's mortal failure to “solver[e] della vendetta i voti” against Rinaldo (102.5: “to be released [by fulfillment] from the vows of vengeance”), and soon finds himself doomed too, unable to speak out for fear: “scioglier talor la lingua e parlar vole, / ma non seguon la voce o la parola” (105.7-8: “he yearns to loose his tongue and speak, but words and voice do not follow”; emphasis mine). The power of Tasso's “arte musaica” binds together, in the space of five stanzas, four key terms that all begin with “vo” (volo, voti, vole, voce) making absolutely clear the link between failure of voice and end of life, and along with them the disappearance of the willing (vole) self that, we have already seen, both affirms and negates itself in the making of a vow. The negative, even tragic, implications of vows unfulfilled and words unpronounced are articulated largely in relation to the pagan champion Solimano (as the “voto/vuoto” pun was earlier to Argante and Tisaferno) and they certainly contrast with the fulfillment of Goffredo's Christian vow, even as they prepare us to appreciate its full implications. What is, again, not so clear is their relation to the near-vow of the Tassian narrator to which the repeated emphasis on voice links them even more closely than to Goffredo's.
For the narrator-poet as “peregrino errante,” to “scioglier il voto” at poem's end may be as much as to “scioglier la lingua,” that is, to transcend death, Ariosto-like, by proving that one can still speak through one's surviving books.39 But this is not the point where the narrator begins to speak, but rather that where he ceases to do so. We have already seen that to fulfill a vow is also to be released from the bondage of words—to be precisely free to remain silent at last, to exchange the “voto” for what Tasso has carefully identified as its sonorous opposite and double, the “vuoto” or void—and thus to lose oneself in the nullity of the tomb.40 Like Goffredo in his earlier vision of the “cittadini de la città celeste,” the Heavenly Jerusalem of which this one is merely a prefiguring type, Tasso yearns to be free not only from a vow but also from terrestrial life itself: “il mortal laccio / sciolgasi omai” (XIV.7.7-8: “let the mortal knot be loosed at last”; emphasis mine). In other words, to recognize the echo of an Ariostan “pre-text” in the final line of the Liberata is to understand that Goffredo and Tasso have each pursued quests to fulfill and to be released from vows which have the empty tomb, metonym both of death and of its possible transcendence, as their telos.41 But it is also to notice that what this relentless drive to be released from vow, narrative, and life means for the narrator is finally far less certain and reassuring than it is for the “Captain.”
For Ariosto no vows, including his own, can be fulfilled, since word never truly coincides with deed, poem never fully intersects with history, much less what may lie beyond it. By accepting the contradiction at the heart of language that makes truth and falsehood, goodness and corruption, unity and multiplicity, sameness and alterity inseparable companions, Ariosto can luxuriate in the protracted deviations of romance. His “lucido intervallo” of writing (Furioso XXIV.3.4) is then actually a genial madness which by accepting its own alterity is able to forestall, for a time, the terminal difference of death, and then to reconcile it with the disembodied voice that lingers on in verse.
Tasso knows just as well as Ariosto the irrepressible differences within his own language—the contamination of truth and goodness with fictional “fregi” and seductive “diletti.” But for him the threat of difference, whether textual, or psychological (in the form of impending madness), or religious (in the form of the heterodoxy he seeks to purge to the point of submitting himself voluntarily to the Inquisition), or political (in the form of his tormented relationship with Duke Alfonso II), or all of the above, leads him in another direction entirely, one quite in keeping with the age of academic culture, despotic courts, and Counter-Reform in which he lived. From beginning to end of the Liberata, he pursues the liberating and enslaving closure of a narrative vow, which will bring together word and reality,42 abolishing all threatening otherness, sheltering him, as Alfonso could not, from the destiny of the “peregrino errante.”43 From beginning to end of the Liberata, however, he seems aware that his literary pilgrimage will go inevitably astray, that his vow can never be fulfilled and that hence he can never be released from it, this side of the tomb. Where for Ariosto madness is the best defense against death, for Tasso, death, and above all the silence that comes with it, seems the only alternative to an endlessly loquacious madness.44 Only there can one be freed from the ineluctable servitude of the unkeepable vow; only there, in the shadow of difference itself, can one escape from the horror of the many differences of which world and self alike are composed.
Notes
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The centrality of this image and this quest have only recently identified as such: see Chiappelli: esp. 171-75, 178-83, 214n20, 227n46; Hampton: 99-100, cf. 113-15.
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Exegesis of the theme of the voto in the Liberata is also a fairly recent development. In addition to the just cited passages from Chiappelli (plus 222n104 and 227-28nn146-51) and Hampton, see Raimondi: 201-02 and Langer: 43.
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Italian quotations are from the Caretti edition. Translations are my own throughout.
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For a development of this idea, see Quint 1993: 403n72. In a classic and extremely powerful example of Tassian ambivalence, the historical city of Jerusalem stands at once as the typological prefiguration of the city of God and as its own symbolic antithesis, Babel-Babylon, particularly in the final seige when it is defended against the Christians by the “popol misto” of pagandom.
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On Tasso's theoretical commitment to Aristotle's dictum of unity of action, see Discorsi dell' Arte Poetica, book II, translated in Rhu 1993: esp. 114-20.
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See Derla: 475, “La struttura spaziale della Liberata è ordinata infatti intorno a un centro cosmico (Gerusalemme e il Sepolcro di Cristo: il Centro del Centro).” Stephens 1989: 193 makes the compelling suggestion that the number, 144, of the final stanza has apocalyptic resonance. And see note 8 below.
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See Ferguson's reading of the Clorinda episode (126-30) as well as her treatment of the thematics of the sepulchre in lines 27-32 and 55-60 of the “Canzone al Metauro” (74-77). For related explorations of the thematics of death in the poem, see Fichter: 143-53; Martinelli: 155-58.
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On Jerusalem as “visio pacis,” see, for example, Guibert of Nogent: col.25D-26A; Isidore of Seville: VIII.i.6. For the figurative convergence between the enclosed spaces of the tomb and the hortus conclusus, see Chiappelli: 182-84, 229n166. On the typological significance of Tasso's Jerusalem see Giamatti: 183 et passim; Raimondi: 126-28; Fichter: 127, 153; Martinelli: 155; Stephens 1989: 193. For a dissenting view, see Murrin: 126. Tasso, in the Apologia in difesa de la Gerusalemme liberata, puts it thus: “perché alcuni di loro [i savi] dicono che Gerusalemme, secondo vari sensi, ora è nome di città, ora figura dell'anima fedele, ora della chiesa militante, ora della trionfante, non sarà stimata vana l'allegoria ch'io ne feci, a la quale posso aggiungere il senso che leva in alto: perché nella visione di Goffredo ed in altri luoghi della celeste Gerusalemme significo la Chiesa trionfante” (485). See also the Allegoria del poema, translated in Rhu 1993: esp. 156-57, 160-61.
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In the Apologia (434) Tasso observes that in the poems of Homer and Virgil, the deaths of Hector and Tumus are “principalissime.”
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For the imitation of Virgil and a survey of the range of interpretive possibilities in the close of the Furioso see Sitterson. Ariosto criticism has been divided between those who stress the poem's plural, “romance” or Ovidian, form (e.g., Javitch 1976 & 1984) and those who insist on the importance of the addition of epic, neo-Virgilian elements of structure to the earlier chivalric poems of Boiardo and others (Quint 1979; Fichter; Ascoli). See Kallendorf on the question of how Virgil was read and rewritten in the Quattrocento and before.
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On the classical models of the otherworld which most influenced Virgil, see Homer, Odyssey, book XI, and Plato's Myth of Er in Republic, book X, which is also the locus classicus for metempsychosis.
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This image has been a perennial crux. My suggestion is that the gate of ivory is anticipated associatively by a series of images in Book VI: at lines 645-47 Vergil refers periphrastically to Orpheus, priest of Apollo and archetypal poet, mentioning specifically his “ivory quill” (“pectine … eburno”), which clearly anticipates the “porta … eburna” of VI.898. Orpheus is also mentioned earlier (VI.119-20), there with suggestive reference to his attempt to bring his dead wife back to the land of the living, out of Hades. For parallels between Aeneas' descent to Hell and Orpheus', see Putnam, 41-48, who does not note this particular connection. Orpheus' descent is recounted at length in Georgics IV, where he is clearly linked qua poet-figure to Virgil himself. Reinforcing the general theme of vatic song and artistic creation are the description of Daedalus' carvings (14-33), as well as the encounter with Musaeus, “optime vates,” and other prophetic singers (661-76) in Elysium. The ivory gate is anticipated by the vision of the tree of false dreams at lines 281-94.
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See, for example, Discorsi dell'arte poetica, translated in Rhu 1993: esp. 119, 139, 142-45. See Looney.
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For Tasso's complex attitude toward Ariosto's romance (which he insisted on seeing as failed epic), see Ferguson 1983: esp. 54, 62-70; Quint 1983: 102-06, 116-17; Langer: 43-44; Zatti 1991: 203-16. On his attitude toward the epic/romance question, see Discorsi dell'arte poetica, translated in Rhu 1993: esp. 120-34; and, in addition to the previously cited critics, Fichter: 153 and Looney
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Even the magical aids of the “Mago d'Ascalona” remain technically within the realm of the natural, using sublunary Fortune as a primary agent (on the Mago, see Quint 1983: esp. 94-97).
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On Tasso's complex sense of the relation between historical fact and the matter of poetry, see especially his Discorsi dell'arte poetica, book 1, translated in Rhu 1993. See also Durling: 192-195 and note 38 below.
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Aquinas II.II q. 88, esp. art. 1. For Aquinas, vows are a subspecies of sacrifice (II.II. q.85), as they are for Dante as well (Paradiso V.43-44). Thus it is not surprising that Tasso's “voto” figures as both “promise and offering” (pace Langer: 43).
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On Tasso's general relation to the sixteenth century instantiation of the chivalric code of honor, see Erspamer 1982. On his attitudes toward chivalric romance, see note 14 above.
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I adapt Jakobson's distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic poles of language.
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Text and translation of the Commedia are taken from Singleton. I am indebted to Walter Stephens and to John Freccero for insisting on the importance of Paradiso III-V for understanding the “voto/vòto” connection in Tasso. I have found Freccero's suggestions concerning the poetics articulated in the early cantos of Paradiso particularly helpful in developing my argument. Ferguson points to Tasso's allusion to Dante's Piccarda in the dialogue Del piacere onesto, again in connection with his father's “involuntary” breaking of obligations (91).
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Citations are taken from the Bigi edition of Orlando furioso. On this aspect of the episode see Ascoli: 264-304, esp. 285-286 and nn.
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For a subtle discussion of Tasso's interweaving of Dantean and Ariostan pretexts in another connection, see Looney. See also Ferguson: 57, 106-107 et passim.
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Admittedly, even Aquinas (II.II.q.88) puts some qualifications on what vows are appropriate and to whom.
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It is, however, true, as Hampton points out (107-08), that Goffredo must give up a “personal” vow to fight as a common soldier in order to fulfill the greater demands of the collective vow to liberate the Holy Sepulchre. On “Goffredo's error” in canto XI, and the place of this individual vow in that larger context, see Bruscagli, esp. 221-22.
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It is in this sense that we should interpret Tasso's hyperbolic outburst in the Apologia: “rompendosi il giuramento si guasterebbe il mondo” (423). Conversely, it illuminates his reluctance to make a commitment concerning a possible change of patrons in a letter to Scipione Gonzaga of 24 March 1576: “non volendo prometter io cosa che non volessi osservare con la mia ruina, non mi risolvo di venire ad una risoluta promessa …” and “non mi legarò con nuovo nodo così forte, ch'io non mi possa con buona occasione disciorre” (#57 in Guasti ed.; emphasis mine). Note the metaphorics of binding and loosing that accompany the voto of the Liberata as well; cf. notes 26, 29 & 35 below.
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On the recurrence of the verb “sciogliere” and derivatives in the poem, see Chiappelli: 153-54.
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In the Apologia Tasso defines “giuramento” (which though not identical with “voto” is related to it) as “un parlare confermato co 'l nome di dio, o vero un parlare con venerazione divina che non riceve altra pruova: e colui pare che pecchi in estremo grado, il quale fa giuramento falso” (423). Compare Cicero's definition of “fides, id est dictorum conventorumque constantia et veritas” and especially the Stoic etymology which he gives for the word, “quia fiat, quod dictum est, appellatam fidem” (De officiis I.vii.23: “faith, that is, constancy and truth in what is spoken and what is agreed,” “Because it calls into being what is spoken, it is called faith”; my translation). Faith in this active, moral sense is the virtuous agency which makes it possible to fulfill a promise or vow, religious, political, or otherwise.
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For “fede” as the paradigmatic value of the Furioso see Saccone 1974 and 1983. For a critique of that account, see Bonifazi, Ascoli 1987, esp. 285-86, 329-31 and nn, Zatti 1990: 95-106 and nn. Ferguson (62-70) is especially valuable on this score in her discussion of Tasso's attack on the confused faith of Ruggiero in his Apologia (esp. 422-25), which she sees as connected to his own father's catastrophically divided loyalties.
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Zatti 1983: 123 & n. Relevant examples are in the Apologia, “Aristotile parla di quella necessità senza la quale non si potrebbe legare o sciogliere la favola” (453), and in several of the Lettere, notably that of 16 September 1575 to Luca Scalabrini (#45 in Guasti ed.), with its discussion of the “soluzione per macchina.” In the latter text Tasso makes the metaphor of narrative promise explicit: “Il poeta fornisce come comincia, e osserva quel che prometta” (107).
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In light of Zatti's compelling findings (1992) concerning the representational, poetic associations of the word “manto” and the systematic echoes which invest both landscape and characters with those associations (cf. IV.25.8: “[Armida] fa manto del ver alla menzogna”), perhaps we should add the phrase describing Goffredo's still-bloody garb (“né pur deposto il sanguinoso manto” XX.144.5) to the list of terms that create a doubling between Goffredo's story and Tasso's story-telling.
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In XX.20, Goffredo concluding his hortatory speech to the troops has his head surrounded by a lampant halo of light which some take to be a sign of future rule (“segno / alcun pensollo di futuro regno”), which, however, the reader will take figuratively, already alerted to the imminence of Goffredo's death.
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On the vexed question of the deployment of political and moral allegory in the poem, see Derla, Murrin, Rhu 1988, and Stephens 1991, contra.
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See Klopp; Chiappelli: 180-81 & 224n154; Zatti 1983: 96-97, 112. Langer puts it succinctly: “Tasso recasts the poet figure as ‘peregrino,’ but cannot avoid adding the ambiguous ‘errante,’ which is not only a depiction of Christian life as a peregrination between birth and death, but also recalls Ariosto's ‘errare sempre’ (XLVI.1.6)” (44). As Ferguson notes, in the Apologia Tasso applies the word “peregrino” to express his own sense of alienation, corporeal and familial: “invoco la memoria, come fanno i poeti, e colui [Bernardo Tasso] che me la diede insieme con l'intelletto, quando il mando ad abitare in questo corpo quasi peregrino” (426). See also the autobiographical “Canzone al Metauro,” line 4, where Tasso describes himself as “fugace peregrino.”
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See note 14 above.
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As we have already begun to see, the final canto of Tasso's poem is in fact thick not only with “voti” but also with the imagery of “scioglimento,” and the synonymous “solvere,” in a variety of contexts, e.g., stanzas 71, 91, 101, 102, 105, 135-36, 144.
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For example: 33.7-8, “poi fèr la gola e tronca al crudo Alarco / de la voce e del cibo il doppio varco”; 39.5-8, “Trafitto è … insin là dove il riso / ha suo principio, e 'l cor dilata e spande, / talché (strano spettacolo ed orrendo!) / ridea sforzato e si moria ridendo”; See also 51.5-8; 56.7-8; 77.3-5; 89.7-8.
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See XX.63.7-8, cited above in the text, for an explicit juxtaposition of “voto” and “volo” earlier in the same canto.
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On the ambivalent poetics defined in I.2, see Zatti 1983: esp. 34-37; on the Tassian obsession with a language of “dissimulation” where truth and falschood intertwine indistinguishably, see Erspamer 1989 and Zatti 1992. See Greene: 180.
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For an explicit and wildly overdetermined Tassian variant on this humanistic topos see the Apologia, “mio padre, il quale è morto nel sepolcro, si può dire ch'è vivo nel poema, chi cerca d'offendere la sua poesia, procura dargli morte un altra volta” (415), as well as the gloss of Ferguson 59-60.
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Compare the brief, suggestive remarks of Raimondi: “il motivo del ‘voto’ percorre tutto il poema e ne fissa ora limpidamente l'ultima nota … di là dal quale ricominicia forse il conflitto delle ambivalenze e delle contraddizioni che il racconto ha tentato di sciogliere prima di approdare al silenzio, dove il fine è veramente origine” (201).
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My reading here is influenced, if not fully determined, by Walter Benjamin's understanding of how, in the Baroque period, the allegory of transcendent Presence gave place to the allegory of death and absence. Schematically, Tasso might be said to be “pre-Baroque” in the sense of hovering at a threshold between representing Otherness as divine presence, on the one hand, and, on the other, as the staring vacancy of the tomb. I would wish, in any case, to be more prudent than Benjamin, by taking at face value the traditional symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre, but also to insist that the incompleteness of the analogy between Goffredo's vow and quest and Tasso's (“quasi in voto,” etc.) opens the way to a freer interpretation of the latter's relationship to the poem's terminal image.
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Stephens 1991 has argued that against the “alieniloquium” of allegory, Tasso sought to develop a sacramental “system of poetic signification that, in its own terms, was designed to unify Gerusalemme liberata by bridging the gap between signifier and signified” (247). I have suggested that this is precisely the problematic which develops around the vow, which also shares the sacrificial character of sacrament. Applying my conclusions to Stephens' argument, one would conclude that Tasso certainly aspires to such a unitary mode of signification, but that he betrays over and over again the anxiety that it is unattainable.
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As note 33 above began to suggest, the word “peregrino,” as both adjective and substantive, has deservedly received much attention in the criticism. As Klopp shows admirably, Tasso's most common use of the adjective is in reference to language, especially to the Aristotelian question of the employment of strange or foreign words in poetry, a fact which reinforces the connection between the psychic drama of the poet-pilgrim and the “viaggio testuale” of his language. For my purposes it is crucial that in Tasso's Italian “peregrino” means not only “pilgrim,” but also “new,” “strange,” and, especially, “different” (see also Chiappelli: 180).
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This drama can be described in a more “objective” way as well, in terms of the poem's protracted compositional history. The Liberata is a text with a decisive ending, but it is also a text which its author never finished writing. The endless, anxious revisionary process partly documented in the “poetic letters” of 1575-76 gives eloquent testimony to Tasso's sense of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of bringing the writing of the poem to a definitive close.
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