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 sub- sequent 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 trans- lation 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 de- velopment 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 postmodern- ist 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 6 limited to isolated authors. 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 im- portant 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 di- gression. 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 digres- sion 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 treat- ed 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 read- ing; – 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.