“A LANGUAGE IN ITSELF MUSIC”: SALVATORE VIGANÒ’S BALLET EN ACTION IN SHELLEY’S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

LILLA MARIA CRISAFULLI

This essay explores the encounter of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley with an experimental and seemingly minor art, that of choral drama, or pantomime dance, or ballet en action of the famous Italian Romantic dancer and choreographer, Salvatore Viganò.1 However, in order to deal with the influence that the Italian choreographer exercised on the English poet, it is necessary first of all to set out from Shelley’s almost obsessive concern with language, which he saw both as a powerful medium of communication and as the primary means of conveying thought. Throughout his life Shelley maintained a particularly wary attitude towards language, caught, as he was, between an idealist theory of poetic empowerment and an empiricist outlook. If such an outlook implied scepticism and failure – since no thought can be entirely or faithfully rendered by means of words, whereby language always disfigures truth – it also maintained that human language was eternally progressive rather than regressive as in the adamic theory of the sign. To Shelley, then, language was at once true and false, imperative and problematic: true when discussed as a pure and abstract sign, dealing with the universal and the spiritual; false, when it is designed as a vehicle for the individual mind, or when it speaks for single classes of

1 This article originated within the context of research I have been working on for some time. See my essays “Il viaggio olistico di Shelley in Italia: Milano, la Scala e l'incontro con l’arte di Salvatore Viganò”, in Traduzioni, echi, consonanze. Dal Rinascimento al Romanticismo – Translations, Echoes and Consonances. From Renaissance to the Romantic Era, eds Roberta Mullini and Romana Zacchi, Bologna: Clueb, 2002, 165-83; “Poesia e danza nel Prometeo Liberato di P. B. Shelley: pensando al coreodramma di Salvatore Viganò”, in Poesia romantica in musica, ed. Alberto Caprioli, Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2005, 35-47, and “Shelley’s Perception of Italian Art”, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, VI (2001), 139-52. 136 Lilla Maria Crisafulli thought, in which case it is inevitably exposed to equivocation and doubt. However, since one characteristic does not exist without the other – that is to say that the shared universe of thought cannot avoid resorting to the linguistic contribution of the individual which, therefore, undermines any universal value from within – we see Shelley struggling to solve this contradiction: “how vain is talk”, “words are quick and vain”, says Prometheus in Shelley’s poem. 2 But while empiricism was responsible for the dichotomy between universality (the universal sign) and linguistic subjectivism, at the same time it turned to imagination as a means to bridge the gap between the two, and, overall, as a way to apprehend an ever-elusive and ever-dissolving reality. Tropes and figures, similes and metaphors, as we learn from poems such as Shelley’s “To a Skylark” or “The Cloud”, help to approach, if not to define, the sensible world that otherwise would remain inexpressible and literally inconceivable. Mary Shelley, in her “notes” on Shelley’s essay “On Life” (1815), ascribes this polarity in Shelley’s thought to the opposing influences of Berkeley and Hume respectively: the former (Berkeley) is responsible for the doctrine of immaterialism, where “thought and the object of thought were the same and similarly immaterial”, because, as Mary states, all the mind possesses is an image of the various sensible objects, then “there must be a mind to perceive them”;3 Hume, on the contrary, sceptical of the capacity of the mind to understand the sensible world, and even more so of the ability of language to express it, turns to imagination as the creative faculty that can redeem this failure. Shelley himself, in the essay, proclaims:

How vain is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much.

He concludes with: “We are on that verge where words abandon us.”4

2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I. 431 and 303, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G.M. Matthews, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 217, 214. 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Essay on Life”, in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark, Preface by Harold Bloom, London: Fourth Estate, 1966, 171. 4 See ibid., n.2.