Chapter 1 Introduction

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, – straight forward; – for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, – he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end; – but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and pro- spects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various Accounts to reconcile: Anecdotes to pick up: Inscriptions to make out: Stories to weave in: Traditions to sift: Personages to call upon: Panegyrics to paste up at this door; Pasquinades at that: – All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. (TS 1.14 41)

For Laurence Sterne the job of writing was, ‘morally speaking’, bound to be digressive. Certainly his work, The Life and Opinions of Tris- tram Shandy, Gentleman (1760–7), reflects this imperative and can be considered a monument to digressiveness, not only because it abounds with digressions, but also because this device constitutes the very principle on which the novel is built. In Italy Tristram Shandy was discovered as a stimulating model of narration in the twentieth century (it was only in 1922 that the first Italian translation was published):1 modernist writers, such as Piran-

1 Laurence Sterne, La vita e le opinioni di Tristano Shandy, trans. by Ada Sal- vatori (Rome: Formìggini, 1922). Before 1922 Italian readers had to content themselves with the French translation of Tristram Shandy, apart from those ‘happy few’ who could read it in the original language. dello, saw in it a tool from the past to help them break the shackles of literary conventions and release themselves from the suffocating con- straints of the then dominant pattern of the realist novel, whereas subsequent postmodernist authors looked upon it as the progenitor of their own self-reflexive narratives. However, Sterne’s digressive tech- niques were already known and appreciated by Italian writers in the nineteenth century. In 1813 Ugo Foscolo published a successful translation of Sterne’s final work, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768); and Sterne was utilised by the Romantics, Alessan- dro Manzoni, Ippolito Nievo, and also Carlo Dossi and the ‘Scapiglia- ti’. According to Giancarlo Mazzacurati’s extensive study, Sterne’s influence on Italian literature was also a determining factor in the development of a humorous tradition in Italy.2 This book aims to define the history and functions of digression in Italian literature from the birth of the modern novel to postmodernist experimentation. Through the examination of the texts of five major Italian authors, I will reconstruct the fascination and the stimu- lus that a digressive pattern of writing has exercised in the Italian novel. At the same time it will become apparent that digression is not, as it has been commonly assumed, a narrative device restricted to a marginal tradition of antinovelistic experimentation (brilliantly epit- omised by Tristram Shandy), but constitutes instead a potential, vital resource for all narration.3 What is digression? The answer is less simple than it might seem. Firstly, very little critical work has been dedicated to digression

2 See Effetto Sterne: La narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello, ed. by Giancarlo Mazzacurati (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990). On the influence of Sterne in Italy, see also Giovanni Rabizzani, Sterne in Italia. Riflessioni no- strane dell’umorismo sentimentale (Rome: Formìggini, 1920), Paul F. Kirby, ‘Sterne in Italy’, in The Winged Skull, ed. by A.H. Cash and J.M. Stedmond (London: Methuen, 1971), pp.210–26, Lucio Felici, ‘Sterne in Italia’, in Laur- ence Sterne, La vita e le opinioni di Tristram Shandy, gentiluomo (Milan: Gar- zanti, 1983), pp.I–LIII, Olivia Santovetti, ‘The Adventurous Journey of Lorenzo Sterne in Italy’, Shandean, 8 (1996), 78–97, and Francesca Testa, Tris- tram Shandy in Italia. Critica, traduzioni, influenze (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999). 3 The antinovelistic tradition in Italy is discussed in Raffaele Morabito, Anti- romanzi dell’Ottocento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977).

14 as a specific narrative device, except for that dealing with Sterne’s in- novations (and those of other pioneers of the novel, including Swift and Diderot)4 or that devoted to the Renaissance debate that arose around the contrast between Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (which respected the unity of plot advocated in Aristotle’s Poetics) and Ari- osto’s Orlando Furioso (which on the contrary favoured a digressive and episodic structure).5 Treatments of digression as a technique by either narratologists or literary critics have been therefore sporadic or limited to isolated authors.6

4 On Sterne’s digressiveness particularly enlightening is the work of Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.71–82. See also William Bowman Piper, ‘Tristram’s Digres- sive Artistry’, in Laurence Sterne (New York: Twayne, 1965), pp.31–46. On Jonathan Swift, see Lamarr Stephens, ‘A Digression in Praise of Digressions as a Classical Oration: Rhetorical Satire in Section VII of Swift’s A Tale in a Tub’, Tulane Studies in English, 13 (1963), 41–9. On Diderot see J.J. Mayoux, ‘Di- derot and the Technique of Modern Literature’, Modern Language Review, 31 (1936), 518–31, and the volume Diderot: Digression and Dispersion. A Bicen- tennial Tribute, ed. by Jack Undank and Herbert Josephs (Lexington: French Forum, 1984). 5 A scholarly survey on the debate around the theorisation of unity and episodic elements in Renaissance narrative poems is Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago: Chicago Univer- sity Press, 1961). In particular see Vol. I, Chapter 10 ‘The Tradition of Aris- totle’s Poetics: II. The First Theoretical Applications’, pp.424–77, and Vol. II, Chapter 19, ‘The Quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso’, pp.954–90. On digression and Ariosto see Daniel Javitch, ‘Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso’, MLN, 95.1 (1980), 66–80, and Eugenio Donato, ‘“Per selve e boscherecci labi- rinti”: Desire and Narrative Structure in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. by Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp.33–62. 6 Among theoretical studies which discuss digression, see the work of Jean Ri- cardou, ‘Temps de la narration, temps de la fiction’, in Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp.161–70, Paul De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Tempor- ality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. by Charles S. Singleton (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp.173–209 (p.200), Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, ed. by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p.54, and Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp.205–6. An interesting article by Dascal and Katriel examined digression as a text linguistic phenomenon, Marcelo Das-

15 Rhetoric may provide the most extensive technical definition of digression:

Digressio (§§ 340–1) 340. An optional component of all parts of the speech […], especially of the narratio, is the digression, which can occur at the beginning […], in the middle, or at the end […] of the narratio. It is called […]. The digression is defined: Quint. Inst. 4.3.14 est, ut mea quidem fert opinio, alicuius rei, sed ad utilitatem causae pertinentis extra ordinem excurrens tractatio. […] 341. The length of the digression varies considerably: there are short (Quint. Inst. 9.2.56 brevior a re digressio) and long (Quint. Inst. 4.3.17 potest … lon- gius exire) digressions. Strictly speaking, within the narratio every expression of emotion, every amplificatio/minutio […], every quick-witted answer to an 7 objection from the audience is already a digression.

The key passage is evidently Quintilian’s definition: a digression, or is an exposition (tractatio) of a certain thing, relative to the main subject, which develops or spreads (excurrens) beyond or outside of the order or structure (extra ordinem). The definition is important but, in a sense, not particularly enlightening: indeed it does not say much more than what is already contained in the etymology of the word: dis-, apart + gradi, to step, walk, go: to go aside, to depart (OED). Moreover, if we continue to read the quotation we are struck by its vagueness: ‘strictly speaking’ everything in speech can be a digression. To clarify the functions and the effects of digression in texts we must look to other definitions, given, this time, not by scholars or grammarians, but by writers who themselves have employed digression in their narrative practice. Sterne provides us with one of the most insightful if somewhat imprecise definitions:

cal and Tamar Katriel, ‘Digressions: A Study in Conversational Coherence’, in Text vs Sentence: Basic Questions of Text Linguistics, ed. by Jànos S. Petöfi (Hamburg: Buske, 1979–82), pp.76–95. Digression in French literature is treated comprehensively in Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 7 Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: a Foundation for Literary Study (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p.158.

16 Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading; – take them out of this book for instance, – you might as well take the book along with them; – one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; re- store them to the writer; – and he steps forth like a bridegroom, – bids All hail; brings variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. (TS 1.22 81)

Digressions are the ‘sunshine of reading’ because they introduce variety into the text. The predilection for ‘variety’ has always been advocated by digressive authors as the reason for their shifts of narrative or interpolations of digressive essays in their texts. Ariosto believed that his ‘istoria, quanto / or qua or là più variata sia, / meno a chi l’udirà noiosa fia’,8 Cervantes thought that ‘to have his invention, his hand, and his pen, always tied down to write upon one subject only […] was an insupportable toil’,9 Fielding declared that the very ‘idea of all beauty’ is constituted by the ‘vein […] of contrast’,10 while Swift was convinced that ‘the fashion of jumbling fifty things together in a dish’ was precisely that which fuelled the creativity of writers (and indeed ‘the society of writers would quickly be reduced to a very inconsider- able number if men were put upon making books with the fatal con-

8 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. by Cesare Segre, 2 vols (Milan: Mon- dadori, 1990), I, XIII.80–1 (p.188): ‘Come raccende il gusto il mutar esca, / così mi par che la mia istoria, quanto / or qua or là più variata sia, / meno a chi l’udirà noiosa fia. / Di molte fila esser bisogno parme / a condur la gran tela ch’io lavoro.’ 9 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. by Charles Jarvis, ed. by E.C. Riley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), II.44 (p.829). 10 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. by John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 1996), V.1 (p.183): ‘We shall here waive the privilege above contended for, and proceed to lay before the reader the reasons which have induced us to intersperse these several digressive essays in the course of this work. And here we shall of necessity be led to open a new vein of knowledge, which, if it hath been discovered, hath not, to our remembrance, been wrought on by any ancient or modern writer. This vein is no other than that of contrast, which runs through all the works of the creation, and may probably have a large share in constituting in us the idea of all beauty, as well natural and artificial: for what demonstrates the beauty and excellence of anything, but its reverse?’

17 finement of delivering nothing beyond what is the purpose’).11 Swift went on to say that this variety can often be mistaken for disorder by ‘morose, detracting, ill-bred people’, who feel that ‘digressions in a book are like foreign troops in a state, which argue the nation to want a heart and hands of its own’.12 Hence, digressions bring not only variety but disorder into a text. They disarrange and cut into pieces the narrative machine, and induce each component to revolt against the principle of order, the plot. To return to Swift’s metaphor, digressions, as foreign troops, incite the people to rebel against their ruler and provoke a civil war. Digression is a disruptive, centrifugal force. Thus, Sterne states clearly, ‘all the dexterity is in the good management and cookery of them’. This is not an easy task:

– This is a vile work. – For which reason, from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such inter- sections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine has been kept a- going; and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. (TS 1.22 81–2)

The ability of an author is all in keeping the balance between the two movements which keep the narrative machine going: the ‘progressive’ and the ‘digressive’, the plot and digressions. The interdependence between the two movements is represented pictorially, where the lines describe the pattern of Tristram Shandy’s first five volumes (see Fig- ure, p.19). It becomes evident that to understand digression it is also neces- sary to elucidate its counterpart, the plot. Indeed, the interplay between plot and digressions is the axis on which the investigation of digression will be articulated in this book. It is by analysing the dynamic between the two ‘movements’ that it is possible to assess and to explore the variety (and the disorder) that digressions bring to a text,

11 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Digression in Praise of Digressions’, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. by Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1986), p.69. 12 Swift, ‘A Digression’, p.69.

and consequently to circumscribe and clearly define the

Figure. Sterne’s illustration of the nonlinearity of the first five volumes of Tristram Shandy.

19 and consequently to circumscribe and clearly define the functions of this ancient technique. Narrative plot has been given almost countless definitions, beginning with the first and most famous, that of Aristotle in his Poetics. The Aristotelian theory pivots around the concept of imitation (‘tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, com- plete and possesses magnitude’)13 and considers the plot to be the most important component of the tragedy because it constitutes the ‘organisation of the events’ on which the imitation is based.14 This organisation or structure possesses specific qualities (com- pleteness, magnitude, unity and universality) and pursues a triple process of complication, crisis and solution. The Aristotelian definition of plot as the structure which provides the ‘organisation of the events’ has been the main theoretical framework for novelists up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Consequently, when the five authors are treated in this book, there will be frequent references to the Aristotel- ian plot. Manzoni, Dossi, and Pirandello strongly objected to the Aris- totelian plot and employed digressions as a means to escape its rigid conventions. Gadda and Calvino had a different perception, since their conception of plot was broad so that attacking plot as a suffocating convention held no interest. Instead they chose to explore what they perceived as the unlimited possibilities of plot. More recent elabor- ations of the notion of ‘plot’ have been by E.M. Forster and the Rus- sian Formalists. The Formalists make a distinction between two features of the ‘organisation of events’: the fable or story (‘fabula’), that is, the series of events represented as they would occur in life, and the subject or plot (‘szujet’), the special arrangement given to these events by the author.15 The temporal sequence that characterises the story is in the plot accompanied by a causal order, which reveals the presence and the style of the author.16 Digression breaks the temporal

13 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), p.10. 14 Aristotle, Poetics, p.11. 15 See in particular Boris V. Tomasevskij, Théorie de la littérature (Paris: Seuil, 1965), p.268. 16 For Forster the element of causality is what distinguishes the ‘plot’ from the ‘story’: ‘Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the em-

20 and causal linearities or orders: it arrives without a cause (apparently), and out of the chronology of the story. By interrupting the linear sequence of the plot, digression intro- duces some ‘extra’ material, which is responsible for the variety and disorder characteristic of digressive texts. Now the questions arise, what is this ‘extra’ material, what are the functions it fulfils in the plot? These are some of the issues that will be addressed by this book. At this point it is sufficient to give a first response: this extra material is, primarily, extra time. We can thus describe a digression as a strategy to multiply time within the text, a strategy to postpone the end, a perpetual – and fictional – escape from time. Digression is therefore intimately connected with time. In this regard, obligatory resources for this book have been the following three critical studies: Gerarde Gen- ette’s Narrative Discourse (1980), Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot (1984), and Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1984). Genette does not speak about digression, but we can place this technique under the first of the four movements that, by his definition, regulate time in the novel, ‘pause’, the movement that expresses the absolute slowness of temporality, in which a ‘section of narrative discourse corresponds to non-existent diegetic duration’.17 A digression may thus be defined as a section of discourse that corresponds to no duration in the plot, such as a descriptive pause (unless, Genette underlines, it corresponds to a contemplative pause by the protagonist and therefore does not evade the temporality of the story), a commen- torial excursus, the author’s intrusion or intervention, or embedded story. Brooks analyses the plot in relation to the principle of deferral, which is intimately connected with that of digression. In order to emphasise the dynamic aspect of narrative he suggests using the term ‘plotting’ instead of plot. Plotting is the ‘structuring operation elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only

phasis falling on causality’, E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Ar- nold, 1927), p.116. 17 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Jane E. Lewis (Oxford: Black- well, 1980), p.94.

21 through textual and temporal succession’.18 In Brooks’ Freudian analysis the accent is on the reader and, particularly, on the desire that makes the reader follow the plot. A desire to read is a ‘desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative’.19 According to Brooks the plot in itself is a system of deferrals which keep apart the beginning and the end, maintaining the desire of the reader and, literally, allowing the story to exist (in this sense, the ‘straight line’, which was parodied by Sterne, is not a good model for any narration). Since I have defined digression as a strategy to postpone the end of narration, a new question arises: in what way does a digression dif- fer from any other episode of the plot, both being detours, deviations, from the end of the story? Returning to Genette’s definition of the narrative ‘pause’, the distinction is clear: a digression never belongs to the same temporal level of the plot; it always implies an interruption in the temporal sequence and the interpolation of an extra temporal level. It will become clear through the analysis of the texts of Man- zoni, Dossi, Pirandello, Gadda, and Calvino that this level is the level of the narrating. Is digression perhaps a sort of temporal short circuit through which the author makes the time of his narrating interact with the time of the narrated events? That it is so is demonstrated by the fact that a digression, unlike any other episode of the plot, has two important consequences: the stronger presence of both the narrator and the reader, the two main figures of the narrative process, and a greater awareness of the problematic relationship between the fictional text and reality. Ricoeur does not speak about digressions either, but devotes his three-volume work to defining the function and the meaning of plot. Narrative plots constitute the centre of his philosophical investigations because the modern novel ‘has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of com-

18 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p.37. 19 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p.104.

22 position and the expression of time’.20 The novel’s principle of order or basic structure, the plot, appears to him to be the ‘privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at times mute temporal experiences’. Thus, ‘in the capacity of poetic composition to re-figure this temporal experience, which is prey to the aporias of philosophical speculation, resides the referential function of the plot’.21 Following his new and deeper interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of the plot – according to which the notions of beginning, middle and end, that is the internal connection of the Aristotelian plot, are to be intended in terms of logic rather than a restricting chronology – he postulates a more extensive concept of plot which combines two temporal dimensions, one chronological and the other not; the first constitutes the ‘episodic dimension of narrative’, while the second is ‘the configurational dimension […] thanks to which the plot transforms the events into a story’.22 If the ‘episodic dimension of the plot draws narrative time in the direction of a linear representation of time’, the other, the configurational ‘presents temporal features directly opposed to those of the episodic dimension’.23 According to Ricoeur’s theory, should not we consider digression, which is a deliberate and abrupt interruption in the representation of time in the novel, to be a strategy expected or even created by the plot itself? Let us make this point clear: for Ricoeur ‘the remarkable property narrative possesses is that of being split into utterance [énonciation] and statement [énoncé]’ – what I have called above the narrating and the narrated events – which is what immediately activates an act of reflection upon the narrative process itself:

By means of such a shift in attention from the narrative statement to its utterance, the specifically fictive features of narrative time take on a distinctive out- line. They are in a sense set free by the interplay between the various temporal levels stemming from the reflexivity of the configurating act itself.24

20 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8), II, p.8. 21 Ricoeur, Time, I, p.XI. 22 Ricoeur, Time, I, p.66. 23 Ricoeur, Time, I, p.67. 24 Both quotations are from Ricoeur, Time, II, p.61.

23 I shall demonstrate that digressions are part of this interplay, of these ‘games with time’, and that they allow and enhance a potentiality of every fictional narrative, which is the capacity of reflecting upon itself. Because of their disruptive and playful effects (the most evident of which are the fragmentation of the plot and the self-conscious reflection) digressions are usually considered a characteristic feature of the antinovel tradition. This kind of fiction tends to be experimental and breaks with the traditional storytelling methods and form of the novel; usually these are texts that systematically flaunt their condition of artifice and call into question and parody the narrative process itself. Having said this, it must be underlined that ‘antinovel’ is a mis- leading term, because it might seem to imply the actual existence of a parallel and antithetical model of narration to the novel itself.25 The research presented here is based on the assumption that the novel as a genre incorporates its critical reflection, that is, its antinovel. In this regard, obligatory reference points, in addition to the work of Ricoeur, are Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (1925) and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1975). Defining art as the laying bare of devices in the early 1920s, Shklovsky turned upside down the critical work on on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which, because of its extreme digressiveness, its attack on plot and its constant self-reflexivity, was not considered a novel in the traditional sense. He provoca- tively declared that ‘Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature’.26 Observing that throughout the entire history of the

25 Ceserani and Pellini argue that ‘it is a peculiar, almost paradoxical, feature of Italian literature that the antinovel […] was born and developed parallel to the novel’. For example, the antinovel and novel are identifiable in Foscolo and Manzoni. Remo Ceserani and Pierluigi Pellini, ‘The belated development of a theory of the novel in Italian literary culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, ed. by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.1–19 (p.9). 26 Victor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p.170.

24 novel, defined as the ‘only developing genre’,27 ‘there is a consistent parodying or travestying of dominant or fashionable novels that at- tempt to become models for the genre’, Bakhtin identifies in this ‘ability of the novel to criticise itself’ its most remarkable feature.28 Digression therefore is not only a feature of a supposed antinovel fiction, but a potential resource for the novel, and storytelling in general, in as much as it promotes this fundamental reflexivity. It is sig- nificant that Cervantes’ Don Quixote is at the same time undisputedly the first modern novel, and the most brilliant example of a digressive and self-conscious narrative. The same observation could be applied to Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the Latin novel that can be considered as the progenitor of the modern novel as a whole and particularly as one which exemplifies the digressive narration-within-the-narration structure. The doubt arises that postmodernism has placed too much emphasis on the historical presence of the antinovel, as if to reclaim, in its affiliation with this alternative and transgressive tradition, an in- ventiveness and experimentalism that has always existed in the novel.

The main body of this book is divided into five chapters, each devoted to the analysis of a text by an Italian author and each developing a separate vision of a digressive work. The chapters are then divided into sections: these are the places where the poetical reasons that brought each writer to adopt the digressive pattern are discussed and where the examination of the specific digressive quality of the text is carried out in detail. Every text presents different insights, expresses different poetics and carries its own repertoire of images and meta- phors. The texts are: I promessi sposi (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, Vita di Alberto Pisani (1870) by Carlo Dossi, Uno, nessuno e cento- mila (1925–6) by Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pastic- ciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) by Italo Calvino. The date of publication orders the chapters in this book. The choice of the texts, which range from ex-

27 Michail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 10th edn, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p.7. 28 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.6.

25 perimental through to mainstream, gives some confirmation that digression is not an antinovel strategy and that there is not a parallel tradition running alongside the novel. The five Italian authors, with the exception of Gadda, are in fact noted primarily for characteristics other than digressiveness, and yet all have, for one reason or another at a certain point in their career, made use of digression in order to achieve their aims. Manzoni’s work, well placed in the mainstream of the historical novel, has for over a century embodied the founding text in the modern Italian tradition of the novel. Dossi’s work was generally affected by the decadent poetics of the fragment (which, as I will explain in due course, implies the end of both plot and digression). The novel constitutes only one of the fields in which Pirandello’s art- istic activity was articulated and to which he owes his literary fame; in the novel, moreover, digression makes its entrance only when Piran- dello is able to detach himself from the ‘verista’ model. Calvino has always claimed and demonstrated in his writings not to be a ‘cultore della divagazione’ (S 669). The only truly and unmistakably digressive author is Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose entire oeuvre is affected by digression and constitutes the most visible demonstration of the Stern- ean principle for which writing is, ‘morally speaking’, bound to be digressive. While disclosing the web of links and intertextual references, some more evident than others, which tie these different works of Ital- ian literature into an unexpected tangle, I will show how digression played a key role in shaping both the poetics and the world-views of these writers. Digression will be revealed to be not just a narrative strategy, but also a cognitive and philosophical disposition. As already noted, the main body of the book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 2, which deals with I promessi sposi, is the occasion for a first identification of four main functions of digressions. They are used by Manzoni to draw attention to the narrative process and open a dialogue with the reader, reproduce in the text the variety and disorder of life, emphasise minutiae, and postpone the end of the narration. The same functions reappear, with different emphasis, in the subsequent chapters. In Dossi (Chapter 3) digression serves predomin- antly to flaunt and explore the act of narration and to provoke the active collaboration of the reader. In Pirandello (Chapter 4) digression is the device that best embodies the principle of humour as the art of

26 ‘scomposizione’; Pirandello applies this technique to dismiss the con- clusiveness of the traditional plot – through which the character was supposed to achieve a coherent image of itself – and to open the text to the multifarious and contradictory aspects of reality. The notorious- ly unfinished and deformed plots of Gadda (Chapter 5) reflect a world conceived in terms of ‘muddle’ (‘groviglio’); digressions therefore re- spond to a cognitive impulse and strong desire to know the world, and are coherently employed as the narrative means of embracing reality in all its ramifications, to explore simultaneously all its divergent parts. Finally, in Calvino’s postmodernist novel (Chapter 6), digression appears as a carefully planned and balanced device, which in spite of, or rather, because of its centrifugal force, explicitly shows itself as a potential and intrinsic movement of every narration. Cal- vino’s use of interruption and digression ends up emphasising the adaptability and vitality of the plot, and, in so doing, its irreplace- ability. The reader is the key participant in digressive texts. For typo- graphical simplicity in this book I generally refer to the reader using the masculine pronoun. It is however important to stress that the com- plexity of this figure was acknowledged openly by most of the authors examined. Male and female readers are addressed specifically (‘letto- ri’, ‘lettrici’) and according to their supposed specific different ap- proaches to reading. Dossi warned female readers when moral issues with the possibility of upsetting (or exciting) an audience educated according to the ‘virtù del pudore’ were to arise. As it was not opportune for an author to speak baldly, ‘senza camicia’, in front of the ‘weaker sex’, he promised to pass his language through a sieve, ‘passare per tutti e sette i crivelli’ (O 137). A young Gadda felt the need to justify his digressive practice particularly in front of his ‘graziosissime o stu- pende lettrici’ (SVP 457) as if female readers, engrossed as they were in reading for the plot, were less likely to appreciate the disruptions and intellectual challenges of digressions.29 One could not fail to hear behind the superlative and exaggerated adjective a compliance with an

29 For a similar superficial attitude to reading Sterne reproached his female public: ‘How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter?’ (TS 1.20 64).

27 old chivalric and patronising attitude common to many nineteenth- century novelists, another of whom was evidently Dossi. Calvino ex- ploited the differences between a female and a male audience in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, where a ‘Lettore’ and a ‘Lettrice’ are not only the protagonists of the story, but embody two different modes of reading. In Calvino’s book, however, the stereotypes are not so straightforward. It could be, as the feminist critic Teresa de Laure- tis has argued,30 that a male cliché is reproduced in the narrator of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, but it is also undeniable that in this text digressivity, which is clearly charged with a positive value, is associated with the female. The expression of desire for the female reader is at one with a desire for a nonlinear narration. A gender analysis goes beyond the scope of this book, but it is not precluded. In finis, ‘Lectore intende: laetaberis’. Adopting the conclusion of Apuleius’ introduction to The Golden Ass, let me invite the reader to ‘pay attention’ because ‘you will find delight’ in this journey into the Italian novel. The ability and originality of the selected authors in the ‘cookery and management’ of digressions within their novels is remarkable. This ancient device produces such a sense of vitality and flexibility in the novel that we might all join Jonathan Swift in his praise of digression as ‘refinement of knowledge’.

30 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fic- tion (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp.70–83.