SOURCE: Bellamy, Elizabeth. “Alcina's Revenge: Reassessing Irony and Allegory in the Orlando furioso.” Annali D'Italianistica 12 (1994): 61-74.

[In the following essay, Bellamy considers the ways in which Orlando furioso both conforms to European categories of allegory and epic and subverts its own allegorical and epic genres through ironic commentary.]

To place an epic within its European context is not always to discuss such matters as its influence on or borrowings from other European epics. With this in mind, I would like to begin my discussion of Ariosto's Orlando furioso with a brief consideration of what it might mean to talk about Virgil's Aeneid in a European context. In his The Allegorical Epic, Michael Murrin powerfully summarizes the Aeneid as having established “the great model for creative allegory in the West” (23). In other words, the Aeneid becomes fully “European” (or “Western”) at the site of allegory: only through allegory (as practiced by its medieval and Renaissance commentators) was the place of the Aeneid insured within Europe's literary history.

One way to talk about an epic within its European context, then, is to assess its relationship with allegory—specifically, epic's success in generating a sustained and coherent allegory of its plot. In an era that valued Aristotelian unity and decorum, Cinquecento commentary on the Orlando furioso continually felt the pressure to align Ariosto's sprawling work with the great classics of European antiquity like Virgil's Aeneid. One authoritative means of assuring the Furioso's enduring worth was to append allegorizations to it in a calculated continuation of the medieval tradition of allegorizing the pagan classics and thereby validating them as the foundation for what was beginning to take shape as a “European literary tradition.” Such was, for example, Landino's intention for Virgil when he allegorized the Aeneid in 1480 (continuing the tradition of such allegorizers as Servius and Bernard Silvestris). No one knew better than Ariosto's defenders that allegorical commentary was a mark of literary prestige, particularly for a vernacular work. Thus, in the 1540's Lodovico Dolce and other Italian commentators on the Furioso began the practice of introducing Ariosto's cantos with summary allegorie that made (and, in so many instances, forced) meticulous distinctions between vice and virtue in the narrative.¹

The effort to “proclaim” the Orlando furioso as not just a classic, but a properly “European” classic centered on allegory. But Ariosto's epic posed a problem because it did not readily yield to allegory's impulses to move to higher meanings. Its prefatory allegorie notwithstanding, virtually every reader of the Furioso knows that Ariosto's poem was judged to be full of obstacles hostile to any overarching project to render it “Virgilian.” As reported by one of Ariosto's more favorable commentators, Simone Fornari (whose two-volume Spositione sopra l'Orlando furioso, 1549, was the first extensive commentary on the poem), critics complained of such felicities as the poem's overabundance of meraviglie and fantastic episodes, the obtrusive presence of Ariosto as narrator and his persistence in presenting himself in the first person, the narrator's many annoying interruptions of his own narrative and their defiance of narrative decorum, etc.² Hence we encounter such oddities as Harington's “de-ironizing” of the authority of Bishop Turpin (i.e., his decision to take Turpin seriously), and even complaints concerning Ariosto's misleading title for his long poem—complaints that offered the title of Ruggiero as a more appropriate emphasis for the narrative's dynastic frame. In short, the real story of the Orlando furioso may be not so much the actual narrative itself as the many critical reactions against Ariosto's perceived excesses and the felt need of even his supporters to make the poem properly “allegorical” (i.e., properly “European”).

Let us turn for the moment to, in particular, the controversy generated by Ariosto's narrative interruptions. In a series of important and well-perceived articles that appeared in the eighties, Daniel Javitch has pointed out that the inimitable maniera ariostesca possesses what could be described as its own kind of libidinal economy, whereby Ariosto's persistently frivolous narrative interruptions leave the reader, in Javitch's words, “unrequited but without the prospect of gratification” (“‘Cantus Interruptus’” 71).³ For Javitch, the Furioso's own characteristic “pleasures of the text” are structured on thwarted expectations, or on quasi-sexual denials of (narrative) pleasure. In such a scheme, the neo-Aristotelianism of the Cinquecento and its emphasis on narrative unity may be viewed as a denial of the libidinal economy of the Furioso's interrupted narrative, judging Ariostan jouissance not as an invitation to textual pleasure, but merely as a series of structural defects.

What I wish to suggest here is that much of the Furioso's allegorical commentary exists as a kind of disavowal (a repression? a forgetting?) of Ariosto's inherent ingegno, his wit—or, to phrase it more rhetorically, his irony. In other words, to talk more fully about the Furioso within its “European context,” we may have to move beyond allegory to confront irony as the characteristic mode of Ariosto's tropological discourse. And such a confrontation necessarily entails an investigation of the rhetorical history of irony within its “European context.”

In order to do so, we might begin not in antiquity but in the twentieth century with Paul de Man as perhaps the most prominent recent theorizer of irony and its place within the context of European literary history. Throughout the history of rhetoric, claims de Man, one can trace an “implicit and rather enigmatic link” between allegory and irony. For de Man (208-09), the trope of irony can readily be placed within a “European context,” pointing, in Germany alone, to the works of Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Solger, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, all of whom worried the connection between allegory and irony. In antiquity, it was the early rhetorician Quintilian who, in his Institutio, first forged a link between ironia and allegoria as both forms of “other-speaking,” wherein one thing is said, but something else is meant. Even so, irony proved to be a troublesome figure for Quintilian, who, despite his judgment that allegory was considered to be a more prestigious kind of “otherspeak” than irony, worried the problem of whether irony is a species of allegory or something very different. Thus in his Allegory and Violence, Gordon Teskey argues, “It was recognized fairly early in European literary history that any effort to stabilize a theory of allegory with irony inside it will be undermined by irony's corrosively oppositional power. …” In other words, claims Teskey, irony “devours its host from within.”⁴

But the practice of secular allegory for epic may never have come to discover the “truth” about irony that rhetorical theory discovered early on. De Man (210) identifies Quintilian as the first to describe irony as a trope that could dominate long narratives—and herein lies the significance of Quintilian's uncertainty about the relationship of allegory to irony for a study of the Orlando furioso. The long narrative of Ariosto's epic is a sustained illustration of Teskey's claim that irony always “devours its host from within,” negating the impulses of allegory to rise to higher abstractions. The move by Cinquecento commentators to allegorize the Furioso constituted a refusal to negotiate the peculiar processes by which Ariosto's ironic tone seeks to empty itself of all content—a sustained avoidance of the irony that is the narrative space of the poem. When Dolce, Minturno, Harington, et al., isolate what they judge to be most problematic about the Furioso (i.e., Ariosto's narrative interruptions, his breezy first-person intrusions into the narrative, his “red herring” title), what they are disavowing is, in essence, irony as the Furioso's dominant rhetorical trope. The sheer length of Ariosto's poem may be the most convincing symptom of Ariostan irony itself—irony as pervasive, limitless, and uncontainable within the bounds of allegory. Irony, to echo Teskey, always “devours its host from within.”

The urge of Renaissance allegorizers to curb the excesses of Ariostan irony—the urge to check irony's impulse to take on a referential life of its own—is, for that matter, mirrored in much contemporary commentary on the Furioso. In the mid-sixties, Robert Durling devoted an entire chapter to Ariosto's ironic poet-narrator, but even he has perhaps too neatly summarized Ariosto's disinvoltura as a “mixture of moral earnestness and an unwillingness to seem too preacherly” (132)—a summary that falls short of a full encounter with the rhetorical enigmas of irony. And as well perceived as Javitch's analysis of Ariosto's narrative impulse of cantus interruptus is, he too recapitulates the urge to “allegorize” the Furioso, interpreting the poet's narrative interruptions not so much as ironic “play,” but as “one of the poem's didactic aims, [i.e.] … to make us aware that in a world without constancy, … we must be elastic enough to bear the unpredictable frustration of our designs and aspirations” (“‘Cantus Interruptus’” 79). A textual “world without constancy” is the discursive space of irony—and from Fornari to Javitch, it is Ariostan irony, I would claim, where critics struggle the most. Throughout the reception history of the Furioso (and, I say this with full appreciation that no one has done a more productive analysis of this reception history than Javitch himself), we continually see evidence of a kind of anxiety of interpretation—an anxiety that induces the critic to foreclose on the Furioso's irony prematurely in order to find its didactic bedrock, or to sublimate the irony and abstract it into allegorical commentary. Either way, it would seem that it is now time to pose the simple question: how do we interpret Ariosto—or, phrased more broadly, how do we interpret irony itself? If, as Teskey has argued, “irony has an entirely negative relationship with interpretation,” then I would suggest it is time for a reassessment of Ariostan irony's elusive relationship with allegory—and, indeed, with the act of interpretation itself. Such an investigation will, I hope, provide a new framework for assessing the Orlando furioso's place within a European context

As Quintilian might have predicted, the longer an ironic narrative extends, the more unreliable the ironic narrator becomes—hence the anxiety with which Cinquecento allegorizers viewed Ariosto's obtrusive narrator. De Man observes, “The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity” (214). We may say that the Furioso exists, then, only in the narrative space of Ariosto's awareness of the inauthenticity of his own ironic language. For anyone interested in the place of the Furioso within a “European context,” one of the more uncanny aspects of de Man's essay on irony might be the extent to which its descriptions of the tropic operations of irony seemingly describe much of the action of the Furioso itself. When, for example, de Man proclaims that irony “possesses an inherent tendency to gain momentum and not to stop until it has run its full course” (215), we are reminded of Orlando's seizure of Angelica's horse and the quasi-sexual fury with which he “rides” the horse for days until it drops from exhaustion (29.71). And when de Man argues that irony is “unrelieved vertige … a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself” (214, 215), are we not at the very threshold of Ariosto's presentation of the entropic destructiveness of Orlando's madness—a madness that, much more than Ruggiero's search for his dynastic spouse Bradamante, is the structuring metaphor of the poem itself? When Ariosto named his poem Orlando and not, say, Ruggiero, the choice of title became the poet's tacit acknowledgement that irony is a type of madness that envelops everything in its (non)referential grasp. And it is at this point that we can begin to appreciate the extent to which Orlando's senno, his lost “wits” that become allegorized on the moon as the site of psychic wholeness and the object of Astolfo's quest, cannot really be “allegorized” at all, but is the site of the madness that is irony itself. In Ariosto's ironic epistemology, when Orlando, in one of the more memorable statements of ego de-formation in the literary history of epic, declares: “Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso” (23.128),⁵ the paladin points to the very essence of irony as the trope of the divided self. He becomes the very epitome of the non-dialectical, ironic “self” that can proclaim itself only through the knowledge of its own inauthenticity. In short, allegory can only seek to conceal what an ironic consciousness already “knows”—and what irony “knows” is that it is uninterpretable because irony never is what it is, but rather is (in its restless disruptions of the narrative) always somewhere else.

Earlier I posed the (rhetorical) question of how we should interpret irony. At this point, I would like to narrow the focus of this question to the issue of irony's challenge for a feminist critique. In other words, what is the place of Ariostan irony in feminist interpretations of the Furioso? Certainly in recent years feminist scholars have found themselves increasingly drawn to the Furioso because so much of the poem is an extended discourse about women, representations of female desire, debates on women's social status, etc. The Furioso strikes the reader—the female reader, at least—as an often much more inviting text for feminist analysis than, say, its successor epic Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata not simply because there is a richer variety of female characters (Homeric, Virgilian, Ovidian, Boccaccian) but also because the poet seems committed to a sustained discourse about women, particularly in the form of the so-called querelle des femmes and their extended meditations on the nature of womanhood. In the case of the querelle des femmes, however, women are drawn to the Furioso at their own risk. As readers of the Furioso are well aware, from Rinaldo to Rodomonte any number of Ariosto's characters (not to mention Ariosto himself) are plunged into detailed debates about the moral worth of women, oscillating between, on the one hand, unbounded, almost grotesquely hyperbolic praise and, on the other, misogynistic rantings against female treachery and duplicity, rantings that, more often than not, result in a homoerotic bonding among many of Ariosto's male characters—not to mention a homoerotic bonding between the male characters and their sympathetic (if ironic) narrator, Ariosto himself.

In her excellent essay on the querelle des femmes, Deanna Shemek has skilfully traced Ariosto's contradictory deployment of this topos throughout the Furioso. What I would like to suggest further here is the extent to which Ariosto's unpredictable, contradictory oscillations between the topos of praise for women and the topos of women's inconstancy constitute the antithetical poles of irony itself. This is a simple enough observation, perhaps—but what I am suggesting is the crisis in interpretation that the querelle present. The obtrusive presence of the Ariostan narrator and his alternative praise and blame of women are a fitting enactment of the process by which irony always and inevitably takes on a life of its own. Let us focus on the representative moment when the narrator, rushing to the defense of women, accuses Rodomonte (who, following his loss of Doralice, is railing against “feminile ingegno”) of having lost his mind. As the poet claims, for every one or two treacherous women, there must be a hundred good ones: “e certo da ragion si dipartiva; / che per una o per due che trovi ree, / che cento buone sien creder si dee” (27.122). At this moment we can in no way view Ariosto's seeming “defense” of woman as an “interpretable” moment in the text—and this is the case even if we go to the opposite extreme and interpret his “defense” as an ironic “attack.” In other words, the reader (and, in particular, the feminist reader) is left with an anxiety of interpretation, for Ariosto is both affirming and negating the “truth” that virtuous women do exist. In short, the discourse of the querelle des femmes eludes interpretation because irony is (rhetorically) unlocatable. First here, now there—like the ghost of Hamlet's father—Ariostan irony also insures that so often “woman” herself is unlocatable in the Furioso, disappearing into the non-referential abyss that is irony. All of which is to say that irony (and, seemingly, Ariostan irony in particular) unravels the feminist project not because irony is, in some sense, inherently “misogynistic,” but because it is so frequently not misogynistic. Or, put another way, irony adduces the anxiety—without the verification—that praise of women may be the most misogynistic gesture of all.

Let us return to Shemek's interpretation of the querelle. She rightly interprets the contradictions of the querelle debates as Ariosto's complication of gender oppositions for the purposes of establishing “a reality more complex than reductive extremes,” such that, ultimately, the poet (who, as we know, himself claims to be frustrated in love) is “raising the issue of personal desire in all representation” (17). I would suggest that Shemek's argument that Ariosto is “raising the issue of personal desire in all representation” is both well perceived and a possible missing of the mark. Not unlike Javitch's interpretation of Ariosto's frequent interruptions of his narrative as “one of the poem's didactic aims,” Shemek's analysis of the querelle as Ariosto's calculated problematizing of “the issue of personal desire in all representation” may be itself a kind of allegorical gloss that forecloses on the thorny problem of irony's uninterpretability. And, once again, we can see the extent to which the Ariostan commentator is tempted by a polemical “will to allegorize” as a kind of disavowal of the need to negotiate irony itself. The move I wish to make here is much humbler and less ambitious than the “will to allegorize.” I simply wish to argue that the querelle des femmes is perhaps more productively viewed not as a rhetorical topos (i.e., that of “praise” and “blame”) requiring an interpretive gloss, but as the discursive space of an irony flaunting its own non-referentiality. The querelle des femmes is structured by an ironic self that, to echo de Man, exists only in the form of a language that proclaims its own inauthenticity. The querelle des femmes cannot be interpreted because irony, as a non-referential language, cannot be “harnessed” for hermeneutic purposes. And despite the Furioso's surface charm and appeal and open invitations to feminist readings, it may be one of the most treacherous texts of all for any feminist hermeneutic: the Furioso's irony is so thoroughly disintegrative that the concept of “womanhood” itself cannot survive its corrosive reach.

But neither, as I wish to consider now, can the Furioso's irony be readily appropriated for a masculine hermeneutic—and this is no more aptly illustrated than in the much-discussed and certainly the most over-interpreted episode in the entire Furioso, the episode of Alcina and Logistilla. This particular episode has undergone a four-hundred-year history of over-interpretation; and, as I will argue, these over-interpretations tend to follow the same pattern, i.e., the attempt to force an Alcinian irony into a process of allegorical signification. For the remainder of this essay, I will not attempt another interpretation of this episode, but rather I propose to consider the extent to which the Alcina episode, we may say, is constituted within the enigmatic intersection of allegory and irony and the collision of their respective “European contexts.”

As Albert Ascoli has argued at length, the Alcina-Logistilla episode is a virtual emblem of epic in a “European context”: “The episode freely mixes elements of Dante's Christian askesis, Hercules' ethical-humanist itinerary, and Ulysses' ‘neo-Platonic’ journey. … [The episode is] thoroughly steeped in the great traditions of literary education (Christian, humanist, neo-Platonic)” (Ariosto's Bitter Harmony 169; 181). But it is an episode not easily interpreted within the larger context of the Furioso itself. As Ascoli himself has so perceptively observed, “the island of Alcina seems to have simultaneously a radically exemplary and a highly alienated position” with respect to the rest of the Furioso (123). Certainly, the episode is sufficiently “exemplary” for Giamatti to have devoted an entire chapter to it (137-64), but its “highly alienated” quality may be due to its status as an allegory—the episode as “highly alienated” because there are so few manifestly allegorical moments in the otherwise ironic Furioso. And because Logistilla's instruction of Ruggiero is perhaps Ariosto's most conspicuous use of allegory, it is almost as if Ariosto is offering us an extended meditation on, to echo Teskey, irony's entirely negative relationship with interpretation. Given that theories of allegory so often chose to bracket the question of irony, it is significant that Ariosto deliberately constructs the Alcina-Logistilla episode as what we could refer to as the Furioso's primal encounter between irony and allegory, a sustained testing of Quintilian's claim that irony is little more than a species of allegory. If irony, as Teskey argues, does have “an entirely negative relationship with interpretation,” then I would argue that it is this same negative relationship that has had to be (and still is) repressed in order (to echo Javitch) to “proclaim” the Furioso a classic. Thus, such allegorizers as Fornari, Ruscelli, Toscanella, Valvassori, et al., focused a disproportionate, indeed a symptomatic attention on the “highly alienated” Alcina-Logistilla episode, so much so that Michael Murrin has argued that these allegorical commentaries on the Alcina-Logistilla episode alone contributed to the origin of secular allegory itself (54). But we must also consider the extent to which the “founding moment” of the origin of secular allegory is itself dependent on a peremptory suppression of the background “noise” of irony.

On Alcina's isle (where everything seems to be something else—where whales are islands and plants are men), the irony manifests itself immediately with Ruggiero's encounter with the imprisoned Astolfo in the myrtle and Ariosto's extended parody of the bleeding branch, one of the previously more venerable topoi throughout the literary history of epic. With its echoes of similar episodes in Virgil, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Dante, the episode begins, then, within a self-consciously “European context”; but, scarcely possessing the psychic resonance of Virgil's tragic Polydorus or of Dante's eloquently mournful Pier delle Vigne, Ariosto's absurdly talkative myrtle may be the reader's surest indication that Ariosto intended Alcina's isle as the parodic locus classicus for the Furioso's irony.⁶ As we have seen, irony always affirms and negates the truth of its own discourse—and, predictably, the more Astolfo narrates his tale of the snares of the fata Alcina, the more Ruggiero becomes seduced by the very warning that is intended to repel him. And again, we have a foreshadowing of the prospect that irony always threatens what an allegorical discourse seeks to confirm.

As readers of the poem have frequently noted, throughout the episode the tone of Ariosto's narrator alternates unpredictably between naiveté and worldly wisdom, creating treacherous going for any interpretation that seeks to “ground” itself in easy alternatives between vice and virtue. The poet's tonal ambiguities notwithstanding, Cinquecento allegorizers of the Furioso forged rigorous distinctions between an Alcinian vice and a Logistillan virtue as the central moral opposition that structures the episode. In no uncertain terms, Fornari declared the Alcina-Logistilla episode to be the most important allegory in the Furioso, and Dolce interpreted Alcina allegorically as posing two moral states, i.e., Alcina as the assaults of the appetites (gli assalti dell'appetito) and Logistilla as the virtuous life (vita virtuosa).⁷ Fornari and Dolce thus established a long tradition within the reception history of the Furioso of interpreting the episode as an extended “rite of passage” for Ruggiero that is designed to instruct him in restraint and the avoidance of idle sensuality.

Ascoli acknowledges the extent to which interpretations of this episode have split into two poles, the so-called “Alcinian” critics and the “Logistillan” critics. Whereas the “Logistillan” critics focus on Logistilla as an agent of education and moral reform, “Alcinian” critics choose to celebrate the romantic sensuality of Alcina's isle (Ascoli 127).⁸ Ascoli argues that Ariosto is actually playing the two readings off against each other, offering a kind of “collision” of the conflicting impulses of sensual poetry versus didactic allegory. But it is also worth nothing here that in the curious narrative rhythms of this surprisingly anti-climactic episode, the reader is never presented with any kind of clearly defined, decisive encounter between Alcinian vice and Logistillan virtue—which may be the most ironic outcome of the entire Furioso. If we view the episode simply as an agon between Circean sensuality and Logistillan restraint, then we run the risk of “repressing” the disintegrative power of irony. The real drama of the episode may not be the choice between an Alcinian vice and a Logistillan virtue, but rather the reader's repression of the primal encounter between allegory and irony.

The rather conspicuous absence of any kind of decisive defeat of Alcina in Ariosto's narrative marks the presence of this primal encounter; and it invites a careful consideration of just exactly what is the fata Alcina's vice that Logistilla must be the correction of. Through the aid of the magic ring that Melissa gives to Ruggiero, the Circean Alcina is revealed as physically loathsome:

Pallido, crespo e macilente avea
Alcina il viso, il crin raro e canuto:
sua statura a sei palmi non giungea:
ogni dente di bocca era caduto.

(7.73)

Thus, like irony itself, Alcina proves not to be what she is, but rather is something else. But what is the precise nature of her vice?

Before attempting to answer this, I would like to pose another question: Can allegory have a sexual politics? Or, more specifically, what is the precise relationship between a Logistillan allegory and Alcina's physical loathsomeness that Ruggiero, with the aid of the magic ring, eventually unveils? The move from “vice” to “virtue” is structured on Ruggiero's abandonment of Alcina and his journey to Logistilla; but the process of education (of a conspicuously “European” education) when he finally arrives there is itself brief, peremptory, fairly unrigorous (in actuality, involving little more than learning to control the hippogriff)—prompting a series of questions that get us to the heart of allegory's arbitrariness and ineffectualness when it must confront irony. Despite the virtues of “right reason” or unity with the “Logos” or whatever else is presumably embodied in Logistilla's name, how logical (as a deliberate pun on “Logistillan”) is the allegorical progression away from the ironic Alcina? Allegory as a form of “other-speaking” is traditionally based on a process of predication: the literal figure of allegory (in this case, the figure of Logistilla) does not just stand by itself—but rather is, always, intended to be something else. But even as, earlier, we asked the question of what is the nature of Alcina's vice, so also are we at this point justified in asking: What precisely is Logistilla an allegory of? Or, to phrase the question another way, although Logistilla is a woman, to what extent has the allegory coded her “male” as a defense against Alcina's (ironic) body?

Ruggiero's progression to Logistilla (i.e., the progression to allegory itself) begins, not insignificantly, at the moment Alcina's body is unveiled. In other words, because Alcina affirms and negates the truth of her own discourse, her body and, in particular, her lower body parts from her tresses to her feet are transformed into the discursive space of irony itself: the irony resides below her waist in a fleshly and, to Ruggiero, revolting materiality. It is in this fleshly materiality that allegory seeks to intervene and “mold” for higher purposes—and it is this intervention that becomes the primal scene of allegory's not fully successful confrontation with irony.

To repeat the question I posed earlier: Does allegory have a sexual politics? Let us consider the precise nature of the signifiying process by which the reader is intended to move from Alcina's newly unveiled state of physical decay to a Logistillan allegory. Allegory, we may say, has its own libidinal economy—and that libidinal economy is distinctly male. In an Aristotelian scheme (feminine) matter always desires (masculine) form. In his De generatione animalium, Aristotle writes of the process of generation: “the male provides the form and the principle of the movement, the female provides the body, in other words, the material.”⁹ In a Lacanian scheme, for that matter, there exists a virtual ideology of paternity that, by means of the veiled phallus, insists on a denial of flesh. For both Aristotle and Lacan, then, the flesh cannot signify. The veiled phallus of paternity (perhaps as a severance from the womb and a denial of the procreative mother) must intervene in order to produce a process of signification beyond the Real of fleshly materiality: over and against the materiality of the female body, paternity establishes itself as the signifier of vital perpetuation. But there is an attendant anxiety that underwrites both the ideology of paternity and the ideology of allegory. Teskey has argued, “It is the project of allegory to descend into the realm of matter, to capture it, and to lift it up onto the level of concepts. … Allegory must capture the heterogeneity of the material and convert it to form.” Herein lies the central quandary for allegory: allegory needs a material substratum (hyle), matter, to survive—but if matter (the decaying flesh of Alcina) is not inherently symbolic or signifying (not even in potentia), how can allegory insure that it is read “properly”—how can allegory insure that it is read allegorically? How can Logistillan allegory logically emerge from the Real of Alcina's decaying flesh and arbitrarily endow it with a transcendent meaning? This anxiety over the nature of allegorical signification is what I take to be at the heart of Teskey's identification of the inherent violence that occurs when allegory tries to move to a higher level of abstraction; ideal abstraction in allegory is achieved only by the suppression of allegory's own materiality, a suppression of the material substratum—a material “stuff,” if you will—that can never fully be incorporated as allegory moves to increasingly complex structures of meaning.

We may say, then, that allegory attempts to “gender” itself male, and in the realm of the Alcina-Logistilla episode the most serious literary challenge to that “gendering” impulse may be Alcina's physical decay (as her own version of an Aristotelian hyle). The unveiling of her loathsomeness establishes her as a figure of irony par excellence—which is why the move to interpret her allegorically (by Logistilla, by Fornari, by Doice, etc.) seems so peremptory and so anti-climactic. Allegory needs something to be an allegory of—and thus Logistillan allegory seeks to “pin” a vice on Alcina. But does Alcina's unveiling reveal foulness—or is it simply the body of woman which the post-coital male needs to revile following (as Shakespeare would phrase it) “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame”? Since irony always empties itself of its own content, then we could ask: how wrinkled and foul is Alcina—or to what extent does the move to allegory require a soma (a debased female carnality) in order to constitute itself as allegory? The very name “Logistilla” suggests an anxious attempt to impose a logic onto Ruggiero's education—an anxious attempt to show that irony can have something other than an entirely negative relationship with interpretation. The real underlying anxiety for Logistillan allegory is not so much that Alcina is a monstrous woman corrupting the fantasy of male purity—but rather that her “corrupt” matter (the locus of the episode's irony) may not adduce a sufficiently transcendent meaning.

We could say that “Logistilla” is less an allegorical character in the narrative than Ariosto's “ironic joke” at the expense of allegory itself. If (in the case of the Alcina episode) irony can co-exist quite happily with fleshly decay—if, in other words, irony is not in the least anxious in the face of its own uninterpretability—then, once again, we may state that irony “knows” what allegory does not. After Melissa frees Alcina's captive plant-men, we see Ruggiero standing on a hot, sandy shore: “sol la cicala col noioso metro / fra i densi rami del fronzuto stelo / le valli e i monti assorda, e il mare e il cielo” (8.20). Not insignificantly, all that can be heard is the monotonous droning of the cicadas, intended, no doubt, as a symbol of the “real” sterility that underwrote Alcina's isle. But we are well reminded here of Socrates' dialogue, the Phaedrus. When Phaedrus, walking barefoot with Socrates along the bank of the river Ilissus, is counseled to remain silent during the divine chirping of the cicadas, it is a sure sign that the prime matter of the woods is teeming with the deities of an Orphic inspiration. In such a Phaedran scheme, Ariosto's chirping cicadas come to symbolize the material “noise” of irony that Logistillan allegory seeks to suppress.

I would like now to return to the project of placing the Orlando furioso within a European context. Alcina's “ironic” isle has no real geographical location—unlike so much of the rest of the Furioso which takes place in Europe. In such a scheme, then, we could argue that Alcinian irony is converted into allegory so that Ruggiero can (Aeneas-like) return to the completion of his epic destiny, and (in effect) so that the Furioso can take its place within a “European” tradition of the literary history of epic. But perhaps the episode's greatest irony has nothing to do with the “allegorizing” of Alcina, but rather with her more all-encompassing role not as Ruggiero's seducer, but as (ironically) his savior. On Alcina's isle, Ruggiero squanders his days in post-coital bliss, but, as we also learn, his prolonged dalliance with Alcina is fully in accordance with the sorcerer Atlante's plan to protect his ward from his future brutal murder by the Pontieri of the Maganza clan.¹⁰ As William J. Kennedy has cogently noted, “In view of this issue Alcina represents neither carnal delectation simply nor unrestrained sensuality totally, but rather an alternative, and a wholly attractive one, to Ruggiero's destiny” (61). For Kennedy, in other words, the Logistillan allegory obscures the most “pungent ironic effect” of the episode (65): that it is not Alcina, but Logistilla who, by teaching Ruggiero to tame the hippogriff, ends Atlante's control over Ruggiero and thereby pushes him towards his eventual doom. And once again, we are presented with compelling evidence that irony “knows” what allegory does not. What irony “knows” is that we can “interpret” Alcina indefinitely, but if we ignore the irony of her underlying (if inadvertent) role as Ruggiero's protector, then our interpretation of the episode will never be complete. Although Ariosto at one point accuses Alcina of being a seductive Dido, in Atlante's scheme, she is actually a new kind of redeemed Dido: the more she lures Ruggiero from Bradamante and the fulfillment of his epic destiny, the more she succeeds in saving his life. It is Ruggiero's dalliance with the ironic Alcina, then, not his instruction by the allegorical Logistilla, that, quite literally, saves his life. This is what irony “knows” and allegory does not. Viewed in this context, then, we should not be surprised when the long-forgotten Alcina makes her sudden and unexpected reappearance in the beginning of the Cinque canti, Ariosto's fragmented continuation of the Furioso that focuses on the origins of the Roland saga. In the final analysis, Ariosto's most ironic act of all may be the resurfacing of Alcina, angry at her abandonment by Ruggiero, as the principal agent of Ruggiero's destruction in the Cinque canti.

Levarsi Alcina non potea dal core
che le fosse Ruggier così fuggito:
né so se da più sdegno o da più amore
le fosse il cor la notte e ‘l dì assalito;
e tanto era più grave il suo dolore,
quanto men lo potea dir espedito,
perché del danno che patito avea
era la fata Logistilla rea.

(1.19)¹¹

In this cynical work, where Ariosto has almost totally suppressed his playful irony in favor of allegory, Carlomagno's empire disintegrates, and Ruggiero (not to mention Bradamante, Orlando, and other heroes from the Furioso) is deposited several steps closer to death's doorstep.

Significantly, in this work it is Alcina who (ironically) serves as the powerful agent of a destructive allegory, enlisting and manipulating the allegorical figure of Invidia to incite the Maganzan Gano into a jealous frenzy at Ruggiero's expense. If, as we have seen, the Furioso's many appended allegories proved to be an uncertain and even at times anxious vehicle for placing Ariosto's epic securely within a European literary tradition, the formerly “ironic” Alcina wields her explicit allegory (through the figures of Invidia, Sospetto, etc.) not in the Furioso's dreamy selva oscura of romance but rather in a real, geographically explicit Europe (the Europe of Bavaria, Saxony, Silesia, Hungary, Rumania, and Serbia—not to mention Carlomagno's Paris). By shedding her ironic status and so thoroughly transforming herself into the agent of a destructive allegory (an allegory so thoroughly situated within a “European context”), it is as if Alcina seeks her revenge against Quintilian, Logistilla—anyone within literary history or the history of rhetoric who would seek to subordinate irony merely as a species of allegory. By becoming more “allegorical” than Logistilla, Alcina sees to it that allegory places epic more squarely within a “European” literary tradition than Logistilla could ever have imagined.

It is as if Alcina's resurfacing in the Cinque canti serves as a reminder to Ariosto's readers that irony always serves as allegory's “return of the repressed.” Having been “forced” into allegory by Logistilla, Alcina will now (ironically) deploy allegory with a vengeance. The final irony of Alcina is that irony can be more “allegorical” than allegory itself—and this may be Ariosto's most ironic gesture of all.

Notes

1. For an extensive treatment of early criticism of the Furioso, see Weinberg; more recently, see Javitch's excellent study, Proclaiming a Classic.

2. In his Arte poetica (1563), for example, Minturno levels the Cinquecento literary critics' most characteristic charge against Ariosto's long epic, complaining that the Furioso is “una gran massa di persone, e di cose” (qtd. Weinberg 2: 972).

3. See also his essays, “The Orlando furioso and Ovid's Revision of the Aeneid” and “Narrative Discontinuity in the Orlando furioso and its Sixteenth Century Critics.”

4. Teskey's forthcoming book constitutes an impressively learned genealogy of allegory from paganism to neo-classicism, and the scope of my paper is greatly indebted to his chapter, “Irony, Allegory, and Metaphysical Decay,” in particular. The chapter is due to appear in the May issue of PMLA. I regret that it appeared too late for me to make page references to it.

5. All citations of the Orlando furioso are taken from Caretti's edition.

6. For an excellent treatment of Ariosto's ironic humor in this passage, see Kennedy. His essay is an extended appreciation of what Ascoli refers to as the “highly alienated” quality of the Alcina-Logistilla episode and an attempt to reconcile irony and allegory in the Furioso by arguing that Ariosto has achieved a kind of hybrid “ironic allegory.”

7. For more on Fornari and Dolce as allegorizers of the Alcina-Logistilla episode, see Javitch 29, 33.

8. An example of a “Logistillan” critic would be De Blasi. The paradigmatic romantic “Alcinian” critic would be Momigliano.

9. De generatione animalium 729 a10. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between allegory and Aristotle's metaphysics, see Teskey, to whom I am indebted for my own turn to Aristotle in the context of the Alcina-Logistilla episode.

10. For more on the role of Atlante as Ruggiero's ward, see Quint, “The Figure of Atlante.”

11. Quotations from Caretti's edition.

Works Cited

Ariosto, Ludovico. Cinque canti. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Torino: Einaudi, 1977.

———. Orlando furioso. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1954.

Ascoli, Albert. Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

De Blasi, Giorgio. “Ariosto e le passioni.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana. Pt. 1: 129 (1952): 318-62; pt. 2: 130 (1953): 178-203.

De generatione animalium. 729 a 1b. The Basuc Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: 1941.

De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.

Durling, Robert. The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.

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Javitch, Daniel. “‘Cantus Interruptus’ in the Orlando furioso.” Modern Language Notes 95:1 (1980): 66-80.

———. “Narrative Discontinuity in the Orlando furioso and its Sixteenth Century Critics.” Modern Language Notes 103 (1988): 50-74.

———. “The Orlando furioso and Ovid's Revision of the Aeneid.” Modern Language Notes 99:5 (1984): 1023-35.

———. Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando furioso. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Kennedy, William J. “Ariosto's Ironic Allegory.” Modern Language Notes 88 (1973): 44-67.

Momigliano, Attilio. Saggio su l' Orlando furioso. Bari: Laterza, 1928.

Murrin, Michael. The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Quint, David. “The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo's Poem.” Modern Language Notes 94:1 (1979): 77-91.

Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. Ed. H. E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, 1921.

Shemek, Deanna. “Of Women, Knights, Arms, and Love: The Querelle des Femmes in Ariosto's Poem.” Modern Language Notes 104:1 (1989): 68-97.

Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell UP (forthcoming Fall 1994).

Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.