CONTRIBUTI

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA

GIORGIO MELLONI State University of New York at New Paltz New Paltz, N. Y.

Abstract: This article on the short novel Passion (original title, Fosca ) by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti offers textual evidence, through the individuation of the sublime woman as central character, or myth, of the story, for the inclusion of Tarchetti in the aesthetic canon of the Post-Romantic Sublime (see Bloom 1982; De Man 1971; Foster 1997; Freeman 1997; Hertz 1985; Lyotard 1994). The essay investigates the differences between the Romantic notion of the Sublime and that of Tarchetti (a member of the Scapigliatura , “ The Disheveled Ones ”, a post-romantic Italian literary movement), which anticipates the poetical themes and aesthetic forms of later authors such as D’Annunzio, Tozzi, and Anile. Indeed, in many Post-Romantic writers, such as the well studied French poet Baudelaire (see Auerbach 1959), the paradoxical tranquility guaranteed by the Romantic Sublime to the individual – at least in its manifestation as an infinite destructive danger, however remote – seems to be converted into a sensation of annihilation or devastation in which the act of perception of the object reaches a peak. In the Post- Romantic Sublime the contemplation of the aesthetic object is not resolved in the survival of the subject, an act permitted by the Romantic sublime. Instead, it concludes in the frustrating defeat or death of the individual before the impenetrable veil which filters reality.

Key-words: Female Body, Sublime, Picturesque, Grotesque, Romantic, Scapigliatura, Stylistic Hermeneutics.

ny reader who explores that controversial manifesto of criticism and poetics set forth in the “Idee minime sul romanzo” ( Tutte le opere, AVol. II, pp. 522-35) of Tarchetti is presented, almost at the beginning of the essay, with a declaration on the historical destiny and the ethical purpose of Literature: 72

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S’egli è vero che l’umanità progredisca lentamente, ma in modo sicuro, e che nulla possa arrestare e far retrocedere il genio nel suo cammino, i nostri posteri, fra migliaia di anni, vivranno moralmente della nostra vita attuale: le lettere avranno raggiunto per essi quello scopo sublime e generale, che è di moltiplicare ed accrescere ed invigorire nello spirito quelle mille ed infinite sensazioni per le quali si manifesta il sentimento gigantesco della vita. (“Idee minime sul romanzo”)1. (pp. 523-24)

(If it is true that humanity progresses slowly but surely, and that nothing can hinder or turn back the genius in his course, then our present life will be the spiritual fodder for our descendents in a thousand years: for them, literature will have achieved the general and sublime end, that of multiplying, increasing, invigorating the many infinite sensations in the spirit through which the immense feel of life manifests itself.) (My translation)

This passage recalls unequivocally the terms and keywords of Romantic aesthetics, through which the reader must also decipher the belief – expressed by Tarchetti in a previous passage not far from the one just quoted – that the “fine comune delle lettere ” (“common goal of literature”) is “ l’istruire e educare allettando ’ (“to instruct and educate while entertaining”; “Idee minime’ p. 522). This eighteenth-century version of Horace’s principle of the utile dulci is filtered, however, through an eye that belongs neither to the Enlightenment nor to Neo-Classicism (Finzi, “Introduzione”, Fosca , p. 7) 2. Tarchetti was considering the advantages which a broader diffusion of the artistic form of the novel 3 would provide to human history. We must therefore reflect more closely on the contextual, semantic meaning of the specific terms used by the author. First of all, we are struck by the presence of one of the keywords of Romantic poetics: “genius”. Indeed, though the word is used here more in the collective sense of an intellectual and creative principle of the history of society, and of the development of humankind, than that of the original intuitive and “poetic” power of the artist, it is nevertheless a sign of a purposeful metaphorical choice. Tarchetti’s selection sinks its roots in the semantic patrimony of Romanticism, which is also related to the idea – idealistic and positivistic at the same time – of the progress of the human being. The adjective “ sublime ” followed by “ generale ’ in the structure of a dicholon , may at first appear to be employed in a very bland way indeed. Immediately after, however , the writer specifies the concept by means of the triple synonymic anaphora of verbs which indicate the intensification of perception. Its “phenomenology’ as Merleau-Ponty would term it, is articulated – surely not by coincidence – around a dynamic hierarchy of three spheres of the human mind-body, namely lo spirito, il sentimento and la sensazione, typical of what we call Romanticism. The simple use of these 73 GIORGIO MELLONI particular verbs ( moltiplicare , accrescere , invigorire ) immediately implies a corresponding adjective ( infinite ), which insists on the idea of infinity implied in the recurring nature of sensations (underlined by the connection between the explicit appearance of the adjective and the hyperbole of the syntagm “mille ed infinite ”), and on the extraordinary dimensions that the sense of life can attain. But it is precisely this notion of infinity and of the “gigantic” disproportion between the limits of man and the power of Nature that results in one of the key concepts of the Romantic reflection on the Sublime. In this way, Tarchetti wants to indicate an interpretive key or path to his own poetics, in addition to the delineation of an aesthetic synthesis of the cultural and artistic times in which he lived (particularly of the “current” of the Italian Scapigliatura , alias “the disheveled ones” 4). The Romantic idea of the Sublime is alive in many of Tarchetti’s works, but it finds its truest expression in his short novel Fosca 5, as this article will show. Indeed, Tarchetti’s Fosca is a great example of a nineteenth-century Italian novel of seduction, where an unsightly woman (a “sublime woman”) seduces the main male character, who also represents the focal point of the narration, and puts him in a revolutionary 6 situation of confusion regarding the traditional sense of masculinity. Thus, in order to identify the “sublime” modalities used by Tarchetti in Fosca , it seems proper to recall briefly some of the conceptual nuclei of Romantic speculations on the Sublime. Whoever considers the problem of the sublime in Romantic aesthetics and painting must always keep in mind that fundamental text entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , published in 1757 by the statesman Edmund Burke. Burke, on a theoretical path trod by Joseph Addison 7, Francis Hutcheson 8 and David Hume 9, opposes both the interpretations of Boileau and the hypotheses of Winckelmann. He clearly distinguishes the aesthetic concept of “Beauty” or “the Beautiful” from that of the “Sublime”. With the first are associated notions of order, composure, and harmony, understood as expressions of a form that reflects Nature’s sense of proportion and symmetry, in the perfection of its earthly finiteness. From this natural perfection, a peaceful feeling of “pleasure” is born in the mind of the spectator or the reader. To the Sublime, on the other hand, are connected ideas of disorder and disharmony, embodied in the infinite dimensions of the portrayed Object, emblematic of the negation and destruction of the traditional or classical artistic Form. The result is the feeling of “delight”, a strange enchantment that does not exclude what is dreadful and hideous, but indeed requires and welcomes it (De Paz, p. 212). Burke writes:

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is 74

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA

terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endured with greatness of dimension or not; for it is impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who, though far from being large, are yet capable of rising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror, as serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater. A level plain of a vast extent on land is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. […] To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly nights add to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. (pp. 57-59)

The beholder of the Sublime is petrified, invariably seduced by an irrepressible and irresistible strength which often assumes features of the monster . Nonetheless, the most surprising aspect of this process is the fact that the Subject, the spectator or the reader, rather than emerging in some sense “diminished” from the encounter with the Other, appears strengthened by this encounter. The witness or observer seems invigorated by the contemplation of his/her own possible ruin, by having tottered so long at the edge of a dizzying abyss. This struggle with the sublime manifestation of Nature may nevertheless lead to the defeat of the individual. The importance attributed here to the faculties of the single individual leads us again to consider the figure of the genius, a central “idea-symbol” of Romantic 10 culture, which we encountered in the Idee minime. The genius can be defined as the original intuitive and creative power of the artist. Questions regarding genius and the Sublime work in the same direction, becoming the two spiritual motives from which a new and richer conception of individuality evolves (De Paz, p. 214). The central position occupied by the Subject within the cognitive processes described by Romantic philosophy must also be understood in relation to the great importance that Burke attributed to anything – the Object – that provokes disturbance or perturbation in the Subject. The other point of reference that is fundamental to anyone who would 75 GIORGIO MELLONI reconstruct an essential paradigm of the Romantic theories of the Sublime is that represented by Immanuel Kant. Kant revisits and expands the philosophical reflections of Hume and Burke in two works: the first was published “pre-Critique” in 1764 under the title Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen ; the second is the famous Kritik der Urteilskraft of 1790. Samuel Holt Monk considers The Critique of Judgment as the one great document that collects and synthesizes all of the common eighteenth-century aesthetic concepts. Monk condenses the Kantian conception of the Sublime into three main arguments, which inform the theoretical and hermeneutical frame of my essay. Firstly, he reminds the reader, or the spectator, that Kant sees “Sublimity as an aesthetic concept” in terms entirely subjective, since “it is not considered as a quality residing in the Object, but a state of mind awakened by an Object”. Secondly, Monk asserts that it was Kant who clearly associated sublimity with “only the great and the energetic aspects of nature”. Finally, he maintains that the Kantian idea according to which pain as well as pleasure is found in the experience of the sublime, “played a considerable part in eighteenth-century and nineteenth- century art and literature” (p. 8). Furthermore, it is worthwhile to emphasize here once again the dualistic idea inherent in the theory of the Sublime: both positive and negative feelings are simultaneously aroused by the aesthetic Object, which is always cognitively subordinate to the “attitude of thought”11 of the Subject. Indeed, the Subject portrays the inner correlation between the actors of its perceptive process, Self (intellect, reason, imagination, ethical conscience) and Other- From-Self, as animated by a constant play of attraction and repulsion. This dramatic dimension of the aesthetic judgment is described by Kant through his definition of the “dynamic Sublime”:

Nature, considered in an aesthetical judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime. […] in the immensity of nature and in the insufficiency of our faculties to take in a standard proportionate to the aesthetical estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we find our own limitation, although at the same time in our rational faculty we find a different, nonsensuous standard, which has that infinity itself under it as a unity, in comparison with which everything in nature is small, and thus in our mind we find a superiority to nature even in its immensity. […] Thus humanity in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might have to submit to this dominion. (Critique of Judgment , pp. 99-101)

The antinomy delineated in this passage induced Harold Bloom, creator of the most original contemporary “new-romantic” (Bodei, p. 89) theory of the Sublime within a critical discourse on Revisionism, to propose an unusual connection between the Classical and the Romantic Sublime through his 76

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA critical “misprision” of the Freudian uncanny, the source of the hypothesis of a poetic “primal anxiety”:

Longinus had pointed the Sublime at “the eagerness of mutual rivalry and the emulous pursuit of the foremost place”. Kant also, rather more subtly, had posited an agonistic Sublime, the poet’s response to the Sublime in nature being a consciousness “sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature”. (Agon , p. 233)

Our analysis of Tarchetti’s novel, the story of the narration itself, requires that we recall also, along with Bloom’s critical hypothesis, some of the other contemporary interpretations and theories of the Romantic Sublime. A cultural and philosophical view of the physical nature of human bodies and its subjective aesthetic representation implies, through the lens of gender identification, the distinction between a masculine and feminine Sublime. Therefore the ideas of the feminine Sublime proposed by Burke and Kant must also be explored. As noted by Barbara Claire Freeman in her The Feminine Sublime. Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction , “in the Enquiry there is a hint of impending confusion, and it is no accident that the feminine body figures the breakdown of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful”. Indeed , Burke writes:

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and the breast; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (See Freeman, p. 50)

While Freeman very acutely comments that “here the feminine body, supposedly the symbol of the beautiful, instead produces the effects of the sublime”. Furthermore, she asserts that

[…] the absence of a fixed point of view or visual focus produces disorientation; unlike the male, the beautiful female body defeats our expectation of a center and instead becomes the occasion of a giddiness, or vertigo. Vertigo, of course, is a typically sublime feeling connected with the falling away of ground or center; it is what we feel when an abyss opens up before us. (Freeman, p. 50)

In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime , a “ pre- Critique ” Kant writes on the “Distinction of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 77 GIORGIO MELLONI the Interrelations of the Two Sexes”. Here are two passages which are pertinent to our discussion:

One expects that a person of either sex brings both [namely the beautiful and the sublime] together, in such a way that all the other merits of a woman should unite solely to enhance the character of the beautiful, which is the proper reference point; and on the other hand, among the masculine qualities the sublime clearly stands out as the criterion of his kind. All judgments of the two sexes must refer to these criteria […]. (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime , pp. 76-77)

A woman in whom the agreeableness beseeming her sex particularly makes manifest the moral expression of the sublime is called beautiful in the proper sense […]. ( Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime , p.86) According to Freeman, in her Feminine Sublime , Kant’s definition of the sublime is essentially misogynistic, as in the plots of eighteenth-century novels of seduction, where “feminine submission enhances and confirms masculine identity”. Freeman’s remark brings the discourse to the next logical step: my analysis of Fosca is the analysis of a male representation of an unattractive woman (according to traditional canons) who reveals what Kant calls – in the very ambiguous passage reported above – a “moral expression of the sublime”. A reading of Fosca , which explores the interpretative possibilities found in the key passage of the Idee minime del romanzo and also takes into account those concepts central to the Romantic aesthetics of the Sublime, must look at the text through a double lens. The first is stylistic in nature and follows the linguistic traces of a semantics of terribilità 12 (terribleness); the second identifies those passages in the novel that are more pertinent to a phenomenology of the Sublime and focuses instead on telltale appearances of images such as the double, the monster, and vertigo. We employ the term semantics of terribilità to describe that common class of expressions which insist, especially when functioning as adjectives, upon sensations of disgust, fright, and repugnance, inspiring ideas of paralyzing terror, “gruesome hopelessness” (Auerbach, p. 226) and horror without redemption. Let us turn now to a few concrete examples that will help to elucidate this notion. It should not be surprising to find the same stylistic features also in the passages that reflect the conceptual models of the Sublime, to which we will refer in the second phase of the analysis. The first specimen is found in chapter XIII:

Un giorno, durante il pranzo, fui colpito da urla acute e strazianti che provenivano dalle stanze della signora. [...] A me era stato impossibile frenare la mia emozione. Non solo quelle grida 78

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA

erano orribilmente acute, orribilmente strazianti e prolungate, ma io non aveva immaginato mai che vi potesse essere qualche cosa di simile nella voce umana; o essendovi, non mi pareva possibile che l’uomo da cui era uscito una volta un tal grido potesse vivere ancora. Ho sperimentato, prima e dopo quel giorno, fino a qual limite possa giungere il dolore della natura umana, e ne ho intese tutte le rivelazioni vocali possibili, ma non mi avvenne mai di sentirlo manifestare con un linguaggio così orrendamente spaventoso come quello. Oggi ancora, dopo cinque anni, io risento nei miei sogni l’eco di quelle grida terribili. (Fosca . Tutte le opere . Vol. II, pp. 273-74)

(One day, during dinner, I was struck by a series of shrill, heartrending screams that issued from the signora’s apartment [...]. I found it impossible to restrain my emotions. Not only were the screams horribly piercing, horribly tortured and prolonged, but I never imagined that the human voice could emit such sounds; or, since I witnessed them, I could not believe that a person who produced such a scream might yet be alive. I have tested, before and after that day, the limits that pain can reach in the human organism, and have heard every possible vocal manifestation of it, but never did I chance upon it revealed in a language so horrendously frightful as that one. Today, five years later, my dreams still echo with those terrifying screams.) (Passion , pp. 37-38)

Fosca’s initial “impact” upon Giorgio takes place during one of the dinners that Giorgio often attends at the request of the girl’s cousin, a full colonel in the Army. The redundancy of adjectives expressing horror is conspicuous, and seems to be informed by that hyperbolic style recognized by Portinari as one of the dominant tropes of both Fosca and Una nobile follia (VIII). The hyperboles intensify the linguistic blindness of the imagination and echo the exclusively auditory nature of this experience, and therefore of its description. Tarchetti portrays the terrifying encounter of Giorgio with Fosca through the uncanny vivid synecdoche of her excruciating and agonizing voice, and employs a rhetoric of obscurity, such as the one postulated by Burke:

To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. […] poetry with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the other arts. And I think there are reasons in nature why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.(Burke, pp. 58- 61) 79 GIORGIO MELLONI

According to Hugh Blair (1718-1800), who concurred with – and expanded on – the aesthetic reflections of the Irish statesman and philosopher, darkness and obscurity augment the impression of sublimity, helping to create the sublime image ( Lezioni di rettorica e belle lettere , Vol. I, pp. 60-63). Tarchetti’s quotation of “Ugo Blair, ministro del vangelo della Scozia” in his Idee minime sul romanzo (p. 525) is, without fail, a direct textual confirmation of the author’s exposure to the theories on the Sublime 13 . The terribilità permeates also the second private conversation between Giorgio and Fosca, in chapter XVI, when the female character reveals to the male auto-diegetic narrator her ideas concerning the terrors of death:

“Stamattina vi ho forse spaventato”, mi diss’ella con dolcezza, “ne fui afflitta per voi, molto afflitta; ma chi l’avrebbe preveduto? Fu una sorpresa così triste! Non ho molta paura di morire, ve lo giuro, benché sappia che non ho più gran tempo a vivere; ma ho paura di tutto ciò che accompagna e segue la morte: quel vedersi chiusi tra quattro tavole, quel sentirsi buttare la terra addosso, quel disfarsi [...] tutto ciò è troppo orribile! [...]”. (p. 284)

(“I may have frightened you this morning”, she sweetly said to me. “I felt very sorry for you, very sorry; but who could have foreseen it? It was such a sad surprise! I don’t much fear death, I swear to you, even if people think I won’t live very long. Yet I do fear all that accompanies and follows death: seeing yourself sealed within four planks, feeling the earth thrown onto you, decomposing […] all that is too gruesome! […]”). (p. 48)

It is difficult not to notice in the above passage the influence of Edgar Allan Poe 14 (one thinks immediately of the short story The Premature Burial ) who provides, alongside Hoffmann, the ever-present model for Tarchetti’s prose as witnessed by, for example, his Racconti fantastici . Indeed, as noted by Dennis Foster, in The Premature Burial the “Subject of Reason is indistinguishable from the perverse Subject” (p. 46), a statement which provides an effective critical anamorphosis for the sublimity in Tarchetti. Like Poe, he “never forgets the human body of suffering and pleasure that denies the reduction to a unified whole, a singularity”, like Poe he dispels the illusion that the mother, her genitals, are “the source of sublime happiness”. As shown implicitly at the end of my essay, Tarchetti recognizes in Poe’s work the “infinite imperfect”, and enjoys the “perverse pleasure of what ultimately will not submit to the control of perfect ownership, of mastery, of death”. (p. 66) Further confirmation of the style of terribilità is to be found in the narrative technique that describes Fosca’s reaction to Giorgio’s pronouncement of his 80

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA intention to stay away from the colonel’s house for a few days, and in the resultant emotional backlash felt by the narrator-protagonist himself. It is in a scene of chapter XIX that Giorgio has come to understand the insufferably neurotic love of Fosca and has decided to escape to the company of Clara:

Quella sua coscienza, quel difetto di amor proprio che mi pareva scorgere nel suo carattere, quell’ostinazione a volermi imporre il suo affetto, fecero sì che io la vedessi sotto un aspetto ancora più triste di quanto non me la avesse già fatta vedere la sua bruttezza. Ne fui offeso e disgustato. [...] Era facile accorgersi che ella soffriva orribilmente e faceva violenza a se stessa per contenersi. [...] [...] mi coperse il volto dei suoi baci, il cui ribrezzo mi fece restare agghiacciato ed immobile. [...] “Mi disprezzerete! Ebbene, non importa; purché mi soffriate, purché mi permettiate di vedervi, di dirvi il mio amore, di raccontarvi i miei patimenti, di piangere con voi. Se non l’avessi confessato io che vi amava, voi non me l’avreste detto mai, nessuno me l’avrebbe detto perché hanno tutti orrore di me. Oh, abbiate compassione! amatemi, amatemi; si ama un cane, una bestia [...] e perché non amerete me che sono una creatura come voi? [...]” (Mi ricordo ancora di queste parole terribili: “si ama un cane, una bestia [...]”). (pp. 297-99)

(Her perseverance, that defect of amour propre which I seemed to discern in her character, the obstinacy of her wish to impose her affection upon me, cast her in a much sadder light than her ugliness. I was offended and disgusted by her. [...] It was obvious that she suffered horribly and was straining to control herself. [...] [...] she [...] covered my face with kisses, which provoked such disgust in me that I stood frozen, immobile. [...] “You despise me! Well, it does not matter – provided that you suffer me, permit me to see you, to tell you how much I love you, to relate my pains to you, to weep with you. If I had not confessed that I loved you, you would never have said it to me, no one says it to me because I horrify them. Oh, have compassion! Love me, love me; a dog, an animal is loved [...] why won’t you love me, who am a creature like you?” (I still remember these terrible words: “a dog, an animal is loved.”)) (pp. 60-62)

By way of a conclusion to this brief series of examples, let us consider a few passages from chapter XLVII, which precedes the chapter written by Farina, in which Giorgio and Fosca attain their most significant embrace, an event upon whose heels follows the definitive worsening of the girl’s state of health: 81 GIORGIO MELLONI

Io torno a rivolgermi adesso una domanda che la mia coscienza atterrita mi ripete assiduamente da cinque anni. Sono io responsabile di ciò che commisi in quella notte? Avevo io consapevolezza delle mie azioni? [...] È uno spaventoso problema che non giungerò mai a decifrare. La incertezza della mia responsabilità è il segreto delle mie torture; per essa io sarò infelice per tutta la vita. Che se pure io potessi allontanare da me questa responsabilità orrenda cesserei per questo di essere la causa di quelle sciagure? [...] Io ho perduto anche il conforto disperato che mi proveniva da quel dubbio; io sento la mia coscienza fremere e ripiegarsi sotto il peso di questo convincimento terribile. (p. 413)

(I turn to address a question that my terrified conscience has sedulously repeated to me for the past five years. Am I responsible for the deeds I committed that night? Was I aware of my actions? [...] It is a frightful problem that perhaps I shall never succeed in deciphering. The uncertainty of my responsibility is the secret of my torments; owing to it I shall be unhappy for the rest of my life. For if I could distance myself from the dreadful responsibility, would I cease to be the cause of those misfortunes? [...] I have lost even the desperate comfort that I drew from my doubt; I feel my conscience tremble and bend beneath the weight of my terrible conviction.) (pp. 181-82)

This motif of terribilità, then, is notably used in the conclusive focalization of the narrator-protagonist’s conscience which, shot through with the horrible suspicion of guilt, is cast in terms of a negative sublimity of psychological darkness that affords no route of escape. The sublime theme of the double 15 is readily recognizable in the novel’s opposition of the women loved by the protagonist. The first, known as Clara, is – at a quick reading at least 16 – the source of light (apparent not only in the etymology of her name), a mother-figure (Giorgio at one point notes a certain affinity with his mother), the symbol of the soul (in the first letter he sends to Clara, Giorgio refers to her as “ mia vita ”, “angelo” “nobile cuore ”, “anima pia e delicata ”, “spirito vergine e colto ”,) (pp. 37-40). The second, Fosca (morphologically equivalent, in Italian, to the feminine form of the adjective fosco , meaning dark, misty, gloomy), represents on the other hand an aberrant fascination with darkness, a repulsive, or perhaps intriguing, combination of the theriomorphic deformation of physical human nature, and of the most tender and acute sensitivities present in its moral and intellectual endowment. This unusual mixture suggests in her character a distorted image of unknowable, invisible, transcendence. The psychological interplay of two equal, though opposite, forces produces profound effects within the soul of the protagonist and sets the stage for the twofold, agonistic exposure of the volto femminile which becomes in the 82

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA ultimate analysis the symbolic expression of spiritual hypostasis. This dynamic is emphasized in the scene of chapter XLVI in which Giorgio, perturbed by the arrival of Clara’s letter in which she resolves to leave him, finds himself – as if in a “ tremenda allucinazione ” – before the epiphanic vision of his own double, his unknown and dissociated ego, in whose uncanny shadow the perceptive part of his consciousness responds in a sort of schizophrenic delirium, symbolized by the sadistic searing of an innocent spider:

Incominciai a camminare per la camera a passi accelerati. Senza accorgermene aveva preso in mano la candela; la mia ombra che si allungava sul pavimento e si piegava alla base della parete risalendola come vi aderisse, mi seguiva su e giù per la stanza. Mi arrestai a contemplarla, l’accorciai e la riallungai appressando e allontanando il lume: mi fermai ad un angolo, e guardai attorno alla camera quasi spaventato, vidi vicino a me un ragno nero che si arrampicava su pel muro, lo abbruciai colla fiamma della candela, e lo sentii friggere e scoppiettare con una specie di voluttà quasi crudele. Passando vicino ad uno specchio, vi scorsi riflessa la mia persona, e mi arrestai a contemplarmi. Avevo quasi paura di me, mi pareva che il mio volto non fosse quello, che avrei dovuto averne uno diverso. (p. 408)

(I began to pace through my room with quickened steps. Without realizing, I seized the candle. My shadow lengthened upon the floor, curved at the baseboard, climbed the wall as if stuck there, and followed me up and down the room. I paused to contemplate it contracting and elongating as I moved the light near and faraway. I stopped at one corner, and looked about the room, frightened. I saw a black spider creeping up the wall, close to me. I burnt it with the flame of the candle, and, with some sort of cruel delight, listened to it hiss and crackle. Passing before a mirror, I glimpsed the reflection of my person and paused to contemplate myself. I felt terrified: that seemed not to be my face, I should have looked different.) (p. 176)

Upon recognizing these images of the double and of terror, which also convey a sense of the displacement experienced by the individual who apprehends the schism of its personality, the reader clearly faces the forms of an aesthetic of the Sublime. Indeed, Ezio Raimondi asserts that it is not possible to define the poetics of duplicity and of the fictitious appearance, of the persona or of the lost identity, without establishing a relationship with the Sublime (Raimondi, “Il pathos critico del sublime”, p. 40). It is useful to note at this juncture, in order to provide an example of the appearance of the monstrous in the novel, an episode that takes place not long 83 GIORGIO MELLONI after the spider incident, once again in chapter XLVI. Here the figure of Clara is seen from a surprisingly different perspective when the narrator-protagonist utters the epithet, “ mostro ”, 17 and immediately regrets his words, as though unable to bear even the suggestion of her lack of internal coherence. The ambiguity which takes shape here lies not in the Object of the cognitive process but – as Kant would put it – in the perceptive Subject, the deep- seated source of the teratological vision of an aspect of reality. Tarchetti writes:

In quel momento scoccarono le sette al pendolo della camera; ogni vibrazione mi parve un colpo di coltello che trapassasse il cuore, e mi contorsi e mi raggomitolai gemendo come per difendermi da quei colpi. In quell’orribile confusione di idee che s’era formata dentro di me, una ve n’era ben certa, ben chiara, ben definita: io aveva amato un mostro. [...] Tal cosa non poteva essere immaginata che da un essere mostruosamente ingrato, mostruosamente crudele. Io aveva amato questo essere. Tutto l’edificio della mia fede era rovinato, tutto era caduto nel fango. Mi immersi e mi smarrii in questi pensieri, di cui non comprendeva allora tutta l’ingiustizia. (p. 409)

(At that moment the clock in my room struck seven. Every vibration felt like the thrust of a knife piercing my heart, and I groaned, writhing and flinching as if to shield myself from the blows. Amidst the horrible confusion of ideas that formed within me, one seemed quite certain, quite clear, quite precise: I had loved a monster. [...] Such a course of action could be imagined only by a being who was monstrously unkind, monstrously cruel. I had loved this being. The entire edifice of my faith was ruined, everything had been dashed into the mud. I was absorbed and dismayed by these thoughts, the injustice whereof I did not entirely comprehend at the time.) (p. 177)

The author, returning yet again to a system of imagery inspired by Poe (the implicit allusion to The Pit and the Pendulum is unmistakable), reveals here Giorgio’s most intimate double nature in an oscillation – accentuated by the agony that brings on the end of the love affair and the abandonment of his beloved – between the protagonist’s willpower and his capacity for sound judgment. The scene is charged with a relentless tension between desire and rejection that overturns the realistic, luminous portrayal of Clara for just an instant, only to reconfirm it moments later. From the potential monstrosity (which is also of an ethical nature insofar as it arises from the discord between exterior and interior dimensions) of the donna bella , the cognitive Subject is able at will to pass into as well as emerge from the consideration of a reciprocal image, that of the donna brutta 18 . Indeed, it is the novel itself 84

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA which suggests a position of the Subject that is prone to such transformations of perspective. It is worth considering this attitude toward the monstrous in Giorgio’s perception of Fosca on the occasion of their first meeting (chapter XV):

Dio! Come esprimere colle parole la bruttezza orrenda di quella donna! Come vi sono beltà di cui è impossibile il dare una idea, così vi sono bruttezze che sfuggono ad ogni manifestazione, e tale era la sua. Né tanto era brutta per difetti di natura, per disarmonia di fattezze – che anzi erano in parte regolari – quanto per una magrezza eccessiva, direi quasi inconcepibile a chi non la vide; per la rovina che il dolore fisico e le malattie avevano prodotto sulla sua persona ancora così giovine. Un lieve sforzo d’immaginazione poteva lasciarne travedere lo scheletro, gli zigomi e le ossa delle tempie avevano una sporgenza spaventosa, l’esiguità del suo collo formava un contrasto vivissimo colla grossezza della sua testa, di cui un ricco volume di capelli neri, folti, lunghissimi, quali non vidi mai in altra donna, aumentava ancora la sproporzione. Tutta la sua vita era nei suoi occhi che erano nerissimi, grandi, velati – occhi d’una beltà sorprendente. Non era possibile credere che ella avesse mai potuto essere stata bella, ma era evidente che la sua bruttezza era per la massima parte effetto della malattia, e che, giovinetta, aveva potuto forse esser piaciuta. La sua persona era alta e giusta; v’era ancora qualche cosa di quella pieghevolezza, di quella grazia, di quella flessibilità che hanno le donne di sentimento e di nascita distinta; i suoi modi erano così naturalmente dolci, così spontaneamente cortesi che parevano attinti dalla natura più che dall’educazione: vestiva colla massima eleganza, e veduta un poco da lontano, poteva trarre ancora in inganno. Tutta la sua orribilità era nel suo viso. (pp. 277-78)

(God! How to express in words that woman’s horrendous ugliness! Just as there exists beauty that surpasses all possible description, so there is ugliness that escapes every manifestation, and such was hers. Nor did her ugliness stem so much from some natural defect, a disharmony among her features (which in fact were somewhat symmetrical), as from an excessive thinness which I would almost call inconceivable to anyone who had not seen her – it was the ruin that physical pain and illness inflicted on her still youthful person. A slight effort of imagination would permit a glimpse of her skeleton. Her cheekbones and temples protruded fearfully, and her slender neck formed the most striking contrast with the bulk of her head, whose rich mass of hair, black, thick, longer than I had ever seen on a woman, further augmented the disproportion. All her life was concentrated in her eyes, which were jet black, large, veiled – eyes of a surprising beauty. One could not possibly believe that she had ever been 85 GIORGIO MELLONI

beautiful, but it was evident that her ugliness was for the most part the effect of the illness, and that, when a girl, she was perhaps pleasant. She was tall and stood erect. She also displayed some of the pliancy, grace, flexibility that distinguishes women of sentiment and gentle birth; her manners were so naturally sweet, so spontaneously courteous that they seemed to be drawn more from nature than from education. She dressed with a great deal of elegance, and seen from a distance, she might even deceive. All of her horror was in her face.) (pp. 41-42)

Reading this description, one is able to capture the essence of the very characteristics of Romantic beauty as they are interpreted in Praz’s noted work The Romantic Agony . The critic, taking as his point of departure a series of images of the Medusa 19 as set out in the poem “On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci ”20 of Percy Bysshe Shelley and a passage from Goethe’s Faust , reassembles the definition of the “beauty of the Medusa:” a “two-faced herm, filled with corruption and melancholy and fatal” (p. 31). Praz recognizes, through a careful analysis of various works, that “for the Romantics beauty was enhanced by exactly those qualities which seemed to deny it, by those Objects which produce horror; the sadder, the more painful it was, the more intensely they relished it” (p. 27). It is exactly this mythical essence of the monstrous that, as Praz insists, “was to be the Object of the dark loves of the Romantics and the Decadents throughout the whole of the century” (p. 20) 21 . This is, of course, the century to which Igino Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca belongs. In order to shed more light on the aesthetical and ethical intricacies of Fosca’s description indicated above, it is pertinent to give an account of the relationship between love, beauty and death in another work by Tarchetti, Lorenzo Alviati . The aesthetics of a “medusan sublime” (Bonesio, p. 20) is exemplified in the last letter sent by Lorenzo to his friend, the narrator:

D’altronde che cosa è la bellezza? Essa non può essere il risultato dell’armonia di alcune linee, perché queste stesse linee disposte diversamente possono dare diverse specie di bellezza – vi è non una legge in ciò; non vi è una bellezza assoluta. Possiamo analizzare il volto umano, descriverlo in tutte le sue parti, ammirare l’armonia dei loro rapporti – non basta – vi è ancora qualche cosa che è fuori di questa legge, che sfugge a questa analisi, che costituisce unicamente il bello che noi ammiriamo. Egli è che ciascun uomo, personificando le proprie idee, si è formato un tipo di bellezza, secondo il quale esamina e giudica delle forme e degli oggetti e delle creature che ci circondano. Ciò è quanto noi chiamiamo il gusto. Le leggi della bellezza fisica sono riposte in una legge della bellezza morale. L’identità della natura in ciascun uomo rende queste leggi pressoché simili in tutti, quindi pressoché uno il tipo della 86

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bellezza umana, ma se noi potessimo uscire un istante fuori di noi medesimi, distruggere e mutare questa legge vedremmo che il bello ci apparirebbe deforme, e il deforme bello, che la bellezza è tutta immaginaria, tutta convenzionale, tutta subordinata a questo principio. (Lorenzo Alviati. Amore nell’arte. Tutte le opere, Vol. I, pp. 590-91)

(Besides, what is beauty? It cannot be the result of a few harmonious lines, because these very lines, arranged differently, can suggest different kinds of beauty – there is no one law here, there is no absolute beauty. We can analyze the human countenance, describe it in all of its parts, admire the harmony of their relations – it does not suffice – there is still some thing that eludes this law, that escapes this analysis, that constitutes the very beautiful that we admire. It is that every man, personifying his own ideas, has formed for himself a type of beautiful, according to which he examines and judges the forms of objects and of creatures that surround us. This is what we call taste. The laws of physical beauty are placed in a law of moral beauty. The same nature in each man renders these laws almost alike in all men, therefore the same nature instills nearly one kind of human beauty, but if we could be, for an instant, outside of ourselves, if we could destroy and mutate this law we would see that the beautiful would appear deformed, and the deformed beautiful, and that all beauty is imaginary, conventional, subordinated to this principle.) (My translation)

Lorenzo is, like Giorgio in Fosca , an extraordinarily sensible and intelligent young man who, in his perpetual and morbid search for ideal feminine perfection, falls in love first with a dead young girl and then with a work of art (the Venere dei Medici in Florence). The story of Lorenzo reveals the logical climax of Tarchetti’s medusan sublime; the visually petrifying Object is transformed into stone by the emotionally petrified Subject (in the Kantian sense). In Il Sublime e lo Spazio , Luisa Bonesio maintains that there is a correlation between Winckelmann’s definition of sublime and the Kantian aesthetics of sublimity: a questionable parallel in my view, if one thinks of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His polemical aesthetic treatises, his engraved and etched views of Rome and his fantastic imaginary interiors, especially his oneiric Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons , plates issued in 1749-50) 22 provide a more clearly neoclassic consonance with the Kantian sublime. Nonetheless, Bonesio’s observations on the anthropomorphic dimension of the statue as quintessential of the classical canon are very relevant to our analysis. Following Dubois’ studies, she asserts that every statue expresses both a metamorphosis of superhuman limitlessness and a vestigial fossilized verticality. This very peculiar epiphany of the sublime is intertwined with the idea of death. Even though the sculpture is only the reduced and reassuring form of the colossus, it always retains an allusion to the excessus mentis of 87 GIORGIO MELLONI creation or to its catastrophic dissolution to the state of ruin (pp. 23-24). When Marguerite Yourcenar defines Piranesi’s Prisons as “dreams of stone”, she helps us to understand the psychology of creation which animated Tarchetti’s Lorenzo Alviati and, to some extent, Tarchetti’s Fosca . While Raimondi’s metonymic anamorphosis of Yourcenar’s definition already points towards the interpretation of the artistic body as a potential prison, the same sense of imprisonment is experienced by Fosca, whose feminine sublime will deflagrate in Giorgio’s mind as the ruinous “stones of a dream” (Raimondi, Le pietre del sogno , p. 15). As the last step in our discussion, it is appropriate to examine in Fosca the function of the sensation of vertigo, a component of the matrix of the sublime that must not pass unnoticed. This notion is explored at length by Weiskel 23 in his fundamental study entitled The Romantic Sublime , which touches on the connection between the aesthetics of the sublime and the vertiginous impression produced by “the abyss”. Raimondi brilliantly synthesizes this theme in his interpretation of Bloom’s theory of the Sublime:

[...] la grande figura del sublime, quasi la sua dominante iconologica, s’identifica nell’abisso, [...] la dimensione fondamentale dell’abisso è la verticalità. Che cosa rappresenta in fondo l’attirance du gouffre di Baudelaire se non esattamente questo tipo di prospettiva? La vertigine dell’iperbole sprofondata nelle viscere dell’interiorità suscita anche l’apparizione enigmatica dell’altro in cui si sdoppia l’immagine dell’uomo. (“Il pathos critico del sublime”, p. 42)

([…] the great figure of the sublime, almost its dominant iconology, identifies itself in the abyss, […] the fundamental dimension of the abyss is verticality. After all, what does Baudelaire’s attirance du gouffre represent, if not precisely this type of perspective? The vertigo of the hyperbole immersed in the viscera of the interior also provokes the enigmatic apparition of the other, in which the image of man is halved.) (My translation)

It appears that we have turned again to the concept of the double, to the idea of a phenomenological polarity based on the dynamics of attraction and repulsion, associated in this case with a sense of verticality to which correspond the images of rising and falling, weightlessness and heaviness, and the desire to let oneself descend into the abyss or to linger at its edge 24 . These are all complementary themes united in the perfect tension of corresponding oppositions. Harold Bloom’s poetic explanation of the double and of the metaphorical paradox of the tempting precipice in every “strong” act of writing, thus also of reading, implies the death of love as “a loss also to the self”. Here is his 88

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA description of the “agonistic self-questioning of the Sublime”, which is central to the present analysis:

When we suffer the effect of loss, and know too well the cause of that effect, we need to abandon the fiction of causation, in order to make a turning into some renewed sense of our own power. […] Erotic loss is self-loss, because it is a loss in solipsistic transport. The pain of loss is the pain of returning to otherness, an otherness in which the quest for lost selfhood turns into a sounding of the chasm of the Sublime. In sounding that chasm, we transgress necessarily, because the Sublime moment in poetry has its nearest psychic analogue in the defense Freud named repression, a defense frequently manifested as hysteria. (p.226)

This positively invites the interpreter to identify in Fosca the “patterns of forgetting” (Bloom, p. 236) and to retrace Tarchetti’s surrender to the Sublime. It is the “truth that strong poetry has to be agonistic, whether its writers consciously do or do not desire to enter the contest” (Bloom, p. 232), and it is “an un-naming accomplished by a purposeful forgetting, a forgetting of anterior texts”. (p. 226) In his Idee minime sul romanzo (pp. 527-29), Tarchetti’s conscious “revisionism” of Alessandro Manzoni is embodied by the antiphrastic nature of the light reflected in Fosca through the “monological” eye of Giorgio, its autodiegetic narrator. If, in a Sublime text, repression is “evidenced just as much in and by the words present as by the words absent” (Bloom, p. 226), then the absence of the intuitive maternal wisdom of Lucia (etymologically from the Latin lux , light) 25 is denounced, on a referential level, in Clara’s socially conventional adultery and, on an allegorical level, in Fosca’s hysteric 26 moral coherence. Redirecting the exploration of the phenomenology of dizziness to a closer explication du texte , we find the idea of vertigo associated with the image of flight. More specifically, at the beginning of chapter XX, the narrator- protagonist, traveling on a train toward Milan, recalls his memories of the first day of his leave of absence:

Ho passato sei ore in una specie di dolce rapimento, colla testa fuori dello sportello, coll’anima perduta nella natura. Un viaggio in ferrovia è una corsa attraverso la natura: si provano le stesse vertigini del volare. Dopo che la scienza ha creato questo mezzo di locomozione si può quasi dire che l’uomo ha delle ali. (p. 300)

(I spent six hours in a sort of sweet rapture, my head thrust out the train window, my soul lost in nature. A journey by rail is a race across the landscape: one experiences the sheer giddiness of flight. Since science 89 GIORGIO MELLONI

created this means of locomotion, one can almost say that man has grown wings.) (pp. 63-64)

In the passage in question, Tarchetti seems to push himself to the limits between positivism and rationalism, and we are tempted to wonder, with regard to his poetics, what features are assumed and what interpretation becomes necessary once the soul experiences a confusion within nature inasmuch as its bewilderment produces the same intense thrill so commonly associated with flight. Bachelard, in Air and Dreams (a study of dynamic imagination carried out by way of an analysis of the relationship between oneiric experiences and “aerial” imagery in literature), would cast this in terms of a “poetics of wings” (pp. 65-89). This is also, by no coincidence, the title of a chapter of Bachelard`s book dedicated to the elucidation of the new system of symbols which modern literature has taken from Nature in its attempt to give a new interpretation to reality and to create new forms of expression. And it is specifically in this chapter that the French critic analyses the various manifestations of the “ image littéraire pure ” (“pure literary image”, p. 99) of the skylark, whose vertical flight and song are considered “le signe d’une sublimation par excellence” (“the sign of a sublimation par excellence ”, p. 106). This rare and sublime atmosphere can be found also – with the attributes of an epiphany – at the beginning of Fosca, in chapter IV, where the author describes Giorgio’s trip on foot through the countryside from his home village to Milan:

Due allodole gorgheggiavano nel cielo che mi sembrava alto, sereno, sconfinato più di quanto non mi fosse mai parso dapprima. Esse si erano tanto innalzate che il mio occhio non arrivava a vederle, erano lontane l’una dall’altra, e a giudicarne dal canto, parevano immobili – si sarebbe detto che avessero trovato lassù dove posarsi. Il loro gorgheggio aveva qualche cosa di affettuosamente intimo, pareva una serie di domande e di risposte; ed era sì melodioso, sì calmo, sì limpido che mi ricordo d’averlo udito ancora ad una grande distanza dal luogo ove l’aveva sentito la prima volta. Certo perché calmo e limpido, non perché vigoroso. Vi era uno strano mistero di luce in quel canto. (pp. 249-50)

(Two larks trilled in the sky, which seemed to me very distant, serene, more boundless than I had ever seen it. The birds flew at such an elevation that my eye could not reach them, they were very far away from each other, and to judge from their song, they seemed motionless – you could describe them as having perched up there. Their trilling had something tenderly intimate about it, like a series of question and answers; and the sound was so melodious, so calm, so limpid that I recall still hearing it at a great distance from where I first stood. This was of course because of its 90

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calmness and limpidity, not because of any power. The song was imbued with the strange mystery of light.) (p. 14)

It is in this “mystery of light” (nearly a metaphoric oxymoron) that the profound and estranged intuition of transcendence, which is the nucleus of the sublime, seems to be encompassed. In Tarchetti, however, as later in D’Annunzio’s Contemplazione della morte (wherein the flight of the birds is called a “ vertigine d’ombra ”) and La città morta , as well as in Federigo Tozzi’s Bestie and in Antonino Anile’s (1869-1943) La morte dell’allodola 27 , the contemplation of the skylark’s song and flight is neither resolved in the survival of the Subject nor in the overstepping of the threshold of the Infinite, an act permitted on occasion by the sublime (in the case, for example, of Christian sublimity). Instead, it concludes in the frustrating defeat of the Self before the impenetrable veil which filters reality, it ends in diminution or death, or even in the complete quashing of the sublime as described in Binswanger’s “fall” 28 . For Tarchetti, the paradoxical tranquility guaranteed by the Romantic Sublime to the individual – at least in its manifestation as a remote danger of destruction – seems to be converted into a sensation of annihilation or devastation in which the act of perception of transcendence reaches a climax, however that transcendence may be manifested, whether in the guise of an aesthetic form or as amorous passion. Fosca then, as the sublime woman, could come to represent this selfsame ambiguous transcendent experience that Giorgio is incapable of resisting, for his health would have been irreparably tainted in an ever more serious fashion, indeed to the very point of death, had her disappearance – symbolic of the necessarily evanescent nature of the manifestation of the Sublime – not prevented it. Tarchetti’s vertigo, which becomes in this sense an extraordinary precursor of decadent “modernity” (particularly in Lyotard’s sense 29 ), cannot withstand a separation of the desire/fear of flying from the certainty of fall and ultimate ruin. The experience, if fleeting, of the mystery of the Other comes to a conclusion at the apex of its intensity through the defeat or even the death of the Subject. Clara’s unusual act – almost a pre-figuration at once of the end of her relationship with the young protagonist and of the risk to which he exposes himself through his intimacy with Fosca – now seems far more understandable. It is the collapse of the Subject that is poignantly represented in Clara’s inclusion of a dead butterfly in a letter to Giorgio (chapter XXX):

Vedi questa farfalluccia? Ho voluto mandartela; ronzava già da un’ora attorno al mio lume allorché io sono andata sul balcone. Ne l’aveva cacciata mille volte colla mano. Ora tornando l’ho trovata qui agonizzante. Ha urtato nella fiammella ed è caduta sulla carta con un’ala 91 GIORGIO MELLONI

bruciata. Sarei pur curiosa di sapere il segreto di questa attrazione che la luce esercita sugl’insetti alati. Amano la luce e muoiono di quest’amore. Che cosa sublime! Ma veramente [...] quando si hanno le ali, come non amare la luce e l’azzurro? Hai mai osservato? Le farfalle sono molto migliori di noi. Quando si abbracciano, muoiono. (p. 352)

(Do you see this little moth? I wanted to send it to you; it was humming around my lamp for over an hour when I went onto the balcony. I chased it away a thousand times with my hand. Returning now I found it lying here in the throes of death. It flew into the flame and fell upon the paper with a burnt wing. I would be curious to know the secret attraction that light exerts on winged insects. They love the light and they die for this love. What a sublime thing! But truly [...] when one possesses wings, how can one avoid loving the light and the sky? Have you ever observed it? Moths are much better off than we. When they embrace, they die.) (p. 119)

Bachelard writes:

The butterfly appears in entertaining reveries or in poems that look to nature for picturesque examples. In the real world of dreams, where flight is unified and unvarying motion, the butterfly is a ridiculous accident – it does not fly, it flutters. Its too beautiful and too large wings prevent its flying”. (p. 66)

In aesthetic philosophy, the Picturesque 30 holds a station between the Beautiful and the Sublime and, even though clearly distinct from both, it is often merged with one of the two. In Bachelard’s metaphoric semantics, the Picturesque is the revelation of a deformed sublimity (opposed, in this respect, to the Grotesque, which may be considered as an instance of sublime deformity). In Tarchetti, the fixated and deformed sublimity symbolized by the moth (a picturesque miniature of Baudelaire’s albatross) agonizes and wins over the sublime light flight of a skylark. This seems to be the personal and original solution, proposed by the Tarchettian interpretation of the Scapigliatura, to that poetics of Dualismo so lucidly expressed in the famous verses of Arrigo Boito ( Dualismo , pp. 6-7):

Son luce ed ombra; angelica farfalla o verme immondo, sono un caduto cherubo dannato a errar sul mondo, o un demone che sale, affaticando l’ale, 92

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verso un lontano ciel. [...] (cited in Bettella, “The Debate on Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire”, p. 74).

(I am light and shadow; angelic butterfly or filthy worm, I am a fallen cherub damned to err in the world, or a demon who ascends, with fatigued wings, towards a distant heaven.) […]

Patrizia Bettella explains how Boito’s Dualismo encompasses the core of the Scapigliatura:

Dualismo articulates Boito’s problematic views on beauty and ugliness. […] The dichotomy between beauty and ugliness is expressed in the opposition between the Ideal and the Real […] the desire for beauty and ideal is still present in the scapigliato artist, but it cannot be fulfilled. This loss of faith in the ideal urges the artist to represent a reality which encompasses also horrendous and ugly aspects. (p. 74).

For Scapigliati such as Boito, ugliness replaces an unattainable beauty. As Bettella seems to suggest, Tarchetti strays from this interpretation of dualism and leans more towards Baudelaire’s art, the unreachable archetype of all the Scapigliati. From our perspective, indeed, Tarchetti resembles what Erich Auerbach defines as Alfred de Vigny’s romantic “tone of sublime horror”. This tone permeates and pervades the words that Fosca says to Giorgio in chapter XXIX:

Tu non sai cosa voglia dire per una donna non esser bella. Per noi la bellezza è tutto. Non vivendo che per essere amate, e non potendolo essere che alla condizione di essere avvenenti, l’esistenza di una donna brutta diventa la più terribile, la più angosciosa di tutte le torture. Nella vita dell’uomo non vi è miseria paragonabile a questa. L’uomo, ancorché deforme, ancorché non amato, ha mille divagazioni, ha mille compensi; la società gli è indulgente; non potendo mirare all’amore, egli mira all’ambizione; ha uno scopo; ma la donna non può mai uscire dalla via che le hanno tracciato il suo cuore e la sua vanità, non può tendere ad altro fine che a quello di piacere e di essere amata. Non vi è che la maternità che possa compensarla qualche volta della privazione dell’amore, ma questa ne è il frutto, ed è spesso negata alla bruttezza. (pp. 332-33) 93 GIORGIO MELLONI

(You cannot know what not being beautiful means to a woman. For us, beauty is all. Since we live only to be loved, and are apt to be loved only on the condition that we are lovely, an ugly woman’s existence becomes the most horrible, the most anguished of all torments. A man’s life contains no misery comparable to this one. A man, even if deformed, even if unloved, commands a thousand distractions, a thousand compensations; society indulges him; blocked from aspiring to love, he aims at ambition; he formulates a goal. But a woman cannot ever depart from the path that her heart and her vanity have marked for her; she cannot aim for any goal but pleasure and love. Only motherhood can sometimes compensate for the privation of love, but this is in fact the fruit of love, and is often denied to ugliness.) (p. 97)

Fosca’s words can be analyzed and interpreted against the backdrop of Joseph Rykvert’s heuristic postulate. While comparing Piranesi’s and Burke’s aesthetics in his On Adam’s House in Paradise (published in 1972), Rykwert suggests that art originates from two kinds of passions: those stemming from social relationships, where Beauty is a fundamental factor; and those derived from instincts for self-preservation, in which terror and pain prevail (Raimondi, Le pietre del sogno , p. 8). In the midst of these two poles of emotional tension, Tarchetti dramatizes the relationship between a sublime woman, the socially repulsive Fosca, and Giorgio, spectator and actor in front of a ruinous apocalypse of transcendence. Even though Tarchetti does not achieve stylistically and rhetorically Baudelaire’s post-romantic “somber sublimity, which is perfectly consonant with the deep despair”, nevertheless, he unflinchingly portrays an image of erotic “hopeless horror” (Auerbach, pp. 202-04) through his representation of the feminine sublime 31 as both a terrible socio-cultural oxymoron and an evanescent epiphany of transcendence 32 .

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NOTES

A first version of this essay was presented in Italian at the AAIS Convention in Tempe, AZ, on 21 April 1995; I would like to thank Erica Cerza, Michael Papio, Guy Puzey and Anthony Terrizzi for their invaluable help with its translation into English. 1 This article originally appeared in Rivista minima on 31 October 1865. Angela Scordo-Polidori as well quotes this text, and a small segment of the same passage, in order to define the Scapigliati ’s criticism of Manzoni, but without mentioning the recurrence of the adjective “ sublime ”. Her article on 94

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Giorgio Tarchetti’s psychological and aesthetical dynamics of masochism and rebellion, which applies (among other critical notions) Deleuze’s theories to Fosca , does not consider the artistic dimension that connects masochism to the Sublime. As Suzanne Stewart brilliantly argues: “The notion of the sublime plays a crucial role within the masochistic scenario, both because it undermines all representation and because it marks the point toward which aesthetic and religious practices strive, while it nevertheless undoes them” (p. 55). In fact “the masochist himself created Cruel Woman as aesthetic Object and in that move attempted to reassert control, both over the means of cultural production and over the woman’s body. Since the Cruel Woman was always this aesthetically created Object, a close link was established between masochism and the Freudian concept of sublimation. Indeed, Freud himself drew on discursive practices that had already created such a connection through the notion of the sublime” (Stewart, p. 13). Moreover, Suzanne Stewart challenges the value of a psychoanalytical reading in the case of masochism in literary texts: “How does woman come to occupy the position of the Cruel Lady? How does she come to speak from the position of the dead father, now interiorized as superego? The theoretical concept that articulates this position and this voice is that of sublimation ; it is through the process of sublimation that it becomes possible to think of the peculiar structural position assigned to woman as the cruel agent of the Law and at the same time as the sublimation object of man’s desire. […] The concept of sublimation questions the relationship between psychoanalytic interpretation and the interpretation or critique of cultural products. For if sublimation produces a non-repressed object – that is, a cultural object that cannot be traced back to unconsciously structured desire – then it follows that sublimation can only with difficulty be theorized as a psychoanalytic concept and that furthermore the product of sublimation cannot be submitted to the methods of a psychoanalytic or symptomatic reading” (pp. 40-41). Even though I do not interpret Giorgio’s love as masochistic, I agree with the idea of subtracting any analysis of the literary sublime from a strictly psychoanalytical approach, in favor of a hermeneutical interplay of critical methods. Ultimately, Susanne Stewart demonstrates, in a very persuasive manner, that male masochism is not at all a rebellion against the patriarchal status quo : “Male masochism […] is one way by which fin-de-siècle culture reflected and sought to come to terms with a serious crisis of liberalism and of the bourgeois Subject. […] masochism subverted the contract […] as well as the hitherto more easily maintained distinctions between male and female, public and private, consent and compulsion. And yet, such subversions remained politically ambiguous at best, for they predicated on the silencing of women whose position of victims of a sexual hierarchy had been triumphantly usurped by a male claim to the margin that, once so claimed, became the new centre. Male masochism’s staged renunciation of power to the Cruel Woman 95 GIORGIO MELLONI created what Tania Modleski recently has described as a feminism without women” (pp. 14-15). 2 In the interest of clarifying some of the methodological grounds of the present study, and particularly the idea of Romanticism upon which it is based, let us recall briefly the essential points of controversy in the concept of “romantic” between the ideas of Wellek in Concepts of Criticism (1963) and those of Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being (1936) and Essays in the History of Ideas (1948). Lovejoy maintains that the label “Romanticism” encompasses several different phenomena, or rather that it is the reflection of a historic moment and cultural movement identified by plurality, heterogeneity and continuous change: all phenomena that imply essentially antithetic ideas among them. For his part, René Wellek shows “that there is no basis for this extreme nominalism (embodied by Lovejoy’s suppositions), that, on the contrary, the major romantic movements form a unity of theories, philosophies, and style, and that these, in turn, form a coherent group of ideas each of which implicates the other” (“The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History”, p. 129). Here I assume an intermediary position between these two concepts. I consider the premises of Lovejoy’s thesis indispensable, since they aid in one’s understanding of the motives of the co-presence of heterogeneous elements in the late Romantic and pre-Decadent experience of the Scapigliatura (and thus also in the case of Tarchetti). I wish, however, to avoid the risk of nominalism (against which Wellek warns us) that would deprive Illuminism and Romanticism of their historical-cultural and heuristic function. Toward the end of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Burke and Kant had developed an aesthetic theory of the Sublime, which is different from the theories produced in other periods and cultural contexts. The new conception of the Sublime – its ideas, feelings and styles – gives birth to the Romantic Sublime, a contribution of unprecedented modernity, and it is this with which our discussion is concerned. Pagnini’s stance, in his anthological essay on English Romanticism, seems analogous to the present interpretative proposal. On a similar approach see also Raimondi’s Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo (pp. 1-57). 3 See, for example, the assertion: “le vecchie novelle Milesie apersero sotto il cielo della Grecia la via del romanzo ” [“the old novellas opened the way of the novel under the Greek sky”] (Tarchetti, Idee minime , p. 524). The Fabulae milesiae , attributed to Aristide of Mileto (who lived between the III and II centuries B.C.), are recognized as the origin or birth of the modern Romantic genre, whether from the historically-oriented studies on the argument, or the theoretical approaches to the subject, for instance in Kellog and Scholes. 4 A very accurate etymological and historical semantic reconstruction of this term is offered by David Del Principe, “The Origins of Scapigliatura”, in

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Rebellion, Death and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura , pp. 23-42. 5 The novel is composed of autobiographical experiences from 1864-65, first in Milan and then at Parma, where the author meets Carolina C., a young epileptic who serves as the template for Fosca’s character. It was compiled in Milan, where Tarchetti lived with his friend Salvatore Farina (from 1866 until his death), who was the author’s advisor and in fact wrote the 48 th chapter. The book was published as a series, from 21 February to 6 April 1869, in the Milanese magazine Il Pungolo . Later that year, it was also published in book form. 6 While recognizing Elena Coda’s accurate historical reconstruction of the eighteenth-century medical science and the positivistic philosophy that permeated Tarchetti’s culture, my aesthetical approach does not agree with her critical conclusions. Coda believes that Giorgio represents the male protagonist and narrator who holds the reins of his rationality and has the ability to create an organic and unified text, notwithstanding the subversive function of Fosca’s character. In my opinion, the ambivalent and rebellious attitude of Tarchetti toward the positivistic male-centered medical discipline of his time is embodied by the character of the military physician, a symbol of the male inability to decipher and accept the diversity of the female psyche. Moreover, Tarchetti’s text does not present the features of a cohesive unity of composition. 7 “In the Spectator essays on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ Addison popularizes newly fashionable ideas of taste, genius and the sublime” (Prince, p. 405). In one of these essays, one reads: “There may indeed, be something so terrible or offensive, that Horror or Loathsomeness of an Object may over- bear the Pleasure which results from its Greatness , Novelty or Beauty ; but still there will be such a Mixture of Delight in the very Disgust it gives us […]. It feels the Soul with an agreeable Surprise […] serves us for a kind of Refreshment, and takes off form that Satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary Entertainments. It is this that bestows Charms on a Monster, and makes even the Imperfections of Nature please us” (Prince, p. 406). Prince’s comment on this passage is very relevant to my theoretical framework: “Even at this early stage in the history of modern aesthetics, the sublime of deformity enters as a supplement to the dominant category of the beauty. With this shift we are well on the way to Burke’s re-gendering of the beautiful as effeminate and the sublime as masculine” (p. 406). 8 See Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726) (Prince, p. 406). 9 See Hume’s dissertation Of Tragedy (1741) (Paz, p. 212). 10 According also to M. H. Abrams, “what distinguishes” Romantic writers “derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes and values which had 97 GIORGIO MELLONI been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject ad object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature” (Abrams, p. 13). 11 “The sublime […] is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought. Thus the beautiful seems to be regarded as the presentation of an indefinite concept of understanding, the sublime as that of a like concept of reason. Therefore the satisfaction in the one case is bound up with the representation of quality , in the other with that of quantity . […] We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful of nature, but seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought, which introduces sublimity into the representation of nature” (Kant, Critique of Judgement , pp. 82-84). 12 See The Oxford English Dictionary , p. 816: “In an artist or work of art: awesomeness of conception and execution, originally as a quality attributed to Michelangelo by his contemporaries (e.g. by S. del Piombo in a letter of November 9, 1520: see G. Milanesi Les Correspondants de Michel-Ange (1890) , p. 24) […]; 1961, Daily Telegraph , 5 December 13/4. In these [ sc. Piranesi’s engravings of prisons] he conveys a degree of terribilità no one else has conferred upon architecture” […]. 13 In his annotated edition, Ghidetti mistakenly corrects Tarchetti’s quotation and confuses Hugh Blair with Robert Blair (1699-1746), the author of the sepulchral short poem entitled “The Grave” (1743) (Tutte le opere , p. 525). In fact Hugh Blair published a treatise on rhetoric and aesthetic s (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres , London: 1783), which Girolamo Prandi translated and integrated in his Dissertazione intorno al sublime – one of the few Italian texts on the subject, along with Ignazio Martignoni’s Del bello e del sublime (1810) (cf. E. Raimondi, Le pietre del sogno , pp. 14-15) – published at Bodoni in Parma, 1793 (see E. Mattioli, “Il sublime in Italia fra Sette e Ottocento”, Studi di estetica , p. 135). Perella reminds us that, during the first half of the XVIII century, in Italy and elsewhere “Blair’s reputation” was “immense”. Indeed, “the earlier edition of Soave’s translation, Venice: 1803 (3 vols. in one)” was in the library of Giacomo Leopardi. Furthermore, “in the Leopardi household library, there was an Italian version (Macerata, 1804) of Burke’s famous essay” (Perella, pp. 85-86). 14 For a discussion of Poe’s influence, as well as that of Cletto Arrighi, Charles Baudelaire, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on Tarchetti with regard to the motif of disheveled hair, cf. Del Principe (pp. 53-60, et al .). 15 O’Healy notes a significant literary trend in the 19 th century: “The deployment of the double was a prominent trope in the tradition of Gothic fiction, and especially in the work of Edgar Allan Poe […] at the time that Fosca was written” (p. 334). 98

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16 We shall see how Clara’s character is also shaped by the dualism that characterizes the perceptive system of Subject/protagonist. Indeed, Giorgio potentially sees every woman as an epiphany of the Sublime, through the ambiguous lens of a sentimental polarity of attraction/repulsion. This aesthesic (in accordance with the semiological terminology introduced by Greimas and Fabbri) and aesthetic dimension seems to agree with Del Principe’s interpretation of Clara and Fosca as the symbols of “the psychological division of the personality of the male protagonist” (Del Principe, p. 44). 17 Angelo Mangini’s book ( La voluttà crudele ), which deploys Starobinski’s definition of a fundamental feature of Baudelaire’s poetics, offers a keen and original analysis of Fosca , as “romance of the melancholic immortality.” Moreover, applying to the text various interpretative tools, from cultural anthropology to psychoanalytical rhetoric, from theory of genres to historical approaches, Mangini underlines the structure of the novel’s circularity. Indeed, in Giorgio/Tarchetti’s melancholic mind, every event goes back to its beginnings (see also Blanchot’s interpretation of Freud) and every person’s encounter refracts its double personification. For example, Clara’s initial role as that of the nurturing mother-figure and “giver of light” is progressively fading out, while her empty presence (tragic reminiscence of the absence of the mother) is crossing Fosca’s fade-in. Finally, this dual woman reveals her “terrible character” – indeed, that of a monster – and becomes the strongest perpetrator of death (“ Fosca : il romance dell’immortalità melanconica”, pp. 144-92). The ontology of the melancholic polarity between an unending death and a reviving life could be seen as reflected in the aesthetic phenomenology of the Sublime. 18 Indeed, as Bettella states, “Fosca is a woman who evades any cliché and any model. […] Fosca is not only ugliness-disease, she is a myth. Fosca’s myth coincides with her seductive unattractiveness […]. Fosca represents the mortal temptation which attracts and repels at the same time, she is the antithesis of the woman who seduces with her beauty”. According to my aesthetic interpretation of Fosca as a sublime woman, Bettella’s words are defining her sublime myth. Furthermore, Bettella’s essay lays the foundation of, and invites for, a non-traditional reading of Tarchetti’s Fosca : “To understand fully the innovative impact of Tarchetti’s novel on the nineteenth century literary scene, it is necessary to abandon a traditional interpretative approach, which concentrates on the male character, and recognize the pivotal role of Fosca in the narrative” (“Fosca: the Myth of the Ugly Woman”, p. 140). 19 Del Principe, in a very interesting staunchly psychoanalytic investigation of Fosca (“ Fosca and the Rebellion of Scapigliatura”, pp. 43-74), explains the terror experienced by Giorgio, in his initial meeting with Fosca, through the Freudian theory of Medusa’s head. According to Freud, the decapitated head 99 GIORGIO MELLONI of Medusa resembles the female genitalia, which in turn are likened to and perceived as a castrated male penis; sighting of the head consequently provokes the fear of male castration. Del Principe compares Fosca’s appearance and the horror she instills in Giorgio to that of Medusa’s head, particularly in respect of her hair which, he asserts, is an extremely significant motif in the works of Tarchetti. Del Principe writes: “The colloquial use of ‘hairy’, to mean troubling, was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century in a context that suggests that it may have been inspired by the Latin horridus (from which derives the English horrid )” (p. 52). He also discusses the long- standing association of unbound hair ( capelli scapigliati ) with rebellion and deviousness: Indeed, the mutinous character of the Scapigliatura movement is inherent in its name. My hermeneutical aesthetic interpretation diverges from Del Principe’s psychoanalytical explanation of Fosca as Medusa. The Freudian approach accentuates the subconscious fears evoked by Fosca in Giorgio’s psyche, and therefore in Tarchetti’s mind, while the aesthetic interpretation emphasizes the conscious representation of the sublime and its epiphanies as products of the author’s imagination. 20 This painting of Medusa’s head is now attributed to an unknown Flemish artist, circa 1620-1630 (Praz, p. 438). 21 In his “Foreword to First edition”, Praz reminds us that “the cult of ‘Medusean’ beauty burst forth into a fashion in the nineteenth century, but isolated signs were not lacking even earlier” (p. XIV). Among the precursors is Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), whose “peculiar sense of painful pleasure” closely relates to that of the Romantics (p. 36). As proposed by Raimondi’s inter-textual analysis (Le pietre del sogno , pp. 7-16), Tasso’s poetry (namely the Jerusalem Delivered ’s heroic paradigm) can be said to have played for Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his pre-romantic poetic of the Sublime a role analogous to that of John Milton (1608-1674) for Burke’s Enquiry . Cf. specifically Piranesi’s Ragionamento apologetico (Apologetic Argument) , preface to Diverse maniere di adornare i cammini e ogni altra parte degli edifici (Various Methods of Decorating Fireplaces and Every Other Part of Buildings , published in 1769). 22 Piranesi strongly argued the supremacy of Roman over Greek architecture. 23 Weiskel’s study on the “psychology of transcendence” has been a model and an incentive for the Freudian meta-psychological approach to the sublime that Neil Hertz adopts in his original literary study of Kant’s mathematical sublime entitled The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime (pp. 40-60). 24 The poems of the Scapigliati are rich with vertical imagery; here one thinks especially of Boito and, as Bettella states, Baudelaire’s archetype. Bettella discusses the familiar plight of the Scapigliato: the urgent desire to rise toward the Ideal confronted by the grim awareness of the real: “The irredeemable contrast between the ideal and reality leads the Scapigliato to 100

THE SUBLIME WOMAN: A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA the representation of a fractured world, constantly hovering between the ideal-beautiful and the ugly-real” (“The Debate on Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire”, p. 76). 25 The onomastic reference to Lucia in Tarchetti’s female names does not imply a reductional interpretation of her character: id est Lucia’s intuitive maternal wisdom is neither the only attribute of her persona in the complex narrative construction of Manzoni’s novel (with a variety of diverse female characters) nor the only feature that Tarchetti recognizes in The Betrothed ’s heroine. For instance, in chapter XXI of The Betrothed , after meeting the Unnamed, Lucia becomes prey of a negative sublimity, which is intertwined with the feeling and the belief of the positive Christian sublimity. In the room where she has been imprisoned, Lucia experiences the dreadful, ambiguous and paralyzing effects of the negative Sublime. Her vow of chastity to Mary, the mother of Christ, can be seen as inspired by a confused and misleading sense of the Transcendence, of the will of God. This is the deep, carnal, reason why she will be declared free of her vow by Father Cristoforo, in The Betrothed chapter XXXVI. Thus, I disagree with Bettella when she affirms that “a dominant cliché of the Romantic narrative”, that is “the ideal of feminine angelical beauty”, persists in Lucia of The Betrothed (Bettella, “Fosca: The Myth of the Ugly Woman”, p. 133). As Verina R. Jones very convincingly demonstrates, Manzoni’s The Betrothed represents an “infringement of the canon”. In fact, “there are no blond women in Manzoni’s novel. Both the heroine, good, sweet, shy, homely Lucia, and the counter- heroine, glamorous, imperious, treacherous Gertrude, are dark” (“Manzoni’s Dark Ladies”, p. 37). 26 It is important here to mention the hysterical qualities exhibited by Fosca’s character. Aine O’Healy examines the phenomenon of hysteria from a historical and literary perspective in her article, “‘Hysteria Made Woman’: Alterity and Contamination in Tarchetti and Scola”. After tracing the evolution of the social status of the disorder from that of a medical disease affecting the uterus to a psychological condition of “deceit” (quoting British physician Robert Carter that hysterical women possessed a “mendacity that verges on the sublime”) and finally to the mid-nineteenth century concept that hysterical women were victims of sexual repression, O’Healy argues that Fosca’s condition is a combination of physical illness, sexual desire, and cunning trickery. She describes Fosca as a “canny, manipulative personality, who imposes her will through the compelling spectacle of her distress. However, the authenticity of her suffering is simultaneously established, since her unstable mental state is accompanied by a host of mysterious illnesses […]” (p. 331). O’Healy also suggests that the magnitude of Fosca’s sexual desire for Giorgio can be seen as hysterical behavior in the form of Eros. 27 See Antonino Anile’s La morte dell’allodola (The Death of the Skylark), pp. 13-15: “Riapre il volo stanco; e dalle prime/ rame, che l’ombra grande 101 GIORGIO MELLONI ormai disfiora,/ tende a quella che tremola sublime.” (“She again unfolds her weary wings, and from the first/ Branches that by now broad shade despoils,/ She makes for one that trembles at the summit.”) (Anile 146-147). Vivante’s literal translation does not capture the ambivalence of the adjective “sublime” in the original poem. 28 For a critical symbolic reading of the phenomenon of dizziness in literature, which applies to the texts the anthropological-analytical approach, cf. P. De Man. “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self”, pp. 36-50. 29 “Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality” together with the invention of other realities. What does this ‘lack of reality’ signify if one tries to free it from a narrowly historicized interpretation? The phrase is of course akin to what Nietzsche calls nihilism. But I see a much earlier modulation of Nietzschean perspectivism in the Kantian theme of the sublime. […] it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms” (Lyotard, p. 128). 30 On the complex and still open to new interpretations (from a post-modern point of view) concept of “picturesque,” cf. Praz, pp. 18-21. 31 In this sense, Tarchetti’s art, particularly in his last novel, after taking his cues from Blair’s lessons, evolves closer to Schlegel’s idea of the sublime (according to Vestraete’s interpretation): “Contrary to what Schlegel’s contemporaries (Kant, Wordsworth) experienced as the ineffable grandeur of nature paradoxically signaling the superiority of the artist’s ego, Schlegel’s sublime reminds us that this superiority is an illusion insofar as it hinges on the encounter between two oppositional voices, both of which represents mutually exclusive interests: while the author’s sole aim is to give a definite shape to his fantasies, the reader confronts him with the exigencies of daily life. […]”. Having authorized Fosca to speak and to be, Tarchettis’ sublime (like Schlegel’s) “is to be in turn subverted to contribute to a discourse that far surpasses that of the male Subject. What emerges at the end of the line is not an egotistical, masculine “I” but an inter-subjective, androgynous “we” (Verstraete 53). 32 It is not by chance that both Ettore Scola’s filmic adaptation, Passione d’amore (1981), and Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics for the musical Passion (1994) offer a contemporary interpretation of the book Fosca which evokes and portrays, among other features of Tarchetti’s novel, the traumatic emotional wound of women, whose identity is devastated by the societal aporias of conventional beauty. These multi-media artistic works convey to the spectator the profound intuition of the romantically sublime nature of female body and soul.

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