[1985]
The Structure of the Orlando Furioso
The Orlando Furioso is an epic which refuses to begin and which refuses to end. It refuses to begin because it presents itself as the continuation of another poem, the Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, which had been left unfinished at the authors death. And it refuses to end because Ariosto never stopped working on the poem. Having published it in a first edition as a poem of forty canti in 1516, he constantly sought to expand it, first by trying to write a sequel, which also remained incomplete (the so-called Cinque canti, published posthumously), then by inserting new episodes into the central canti, so that in the third and definitive edition published in 1532 the number of canti rose to forty-six. In between there was a second edition, in 1521, which also bore the signs of the poem’s unfinished nature in that it was simply a polished version of the first, consisting solely in a refinement of the language and metre to which Ariosto continued to devote great attention. An attention which lasted all his life, one could really say, since it had taken him twelve years’ labour to produce the first edition of 1516, and another sixteen years’ work before publishing the 1532 edition: one year later he was dead. This expansion from within, with episodes proliferating from other episodes, generating new symmetries and contrasts, seems to me to epitomise perfectly Ariosto’s creative method: for him this was the only real way of continuing this poem with its polycentric, synchronic structure, whose episodes spiral off in every direction, continually intersecting with and bifurcating from each other.
In order to follow the vicissitudes of so many both principal and secondary characters, the poem requires a cinematic editing technique which allows the author to abandon one character or action-scene in order to turn to another. Such shifts sometimes occur without losing the continuity of the narrative, for instance when two characters meet and the story-line, which initially had been following the first character, pans away from him to follow the second. On other occasions, there is a clean break and the action is interrupted right in the middle of a canto. Usually it is the last couplet of the octave which intimates the interruption or delay in the plot, a rhymed couplet like the following:
Segue Rinaldo, e d’ira si distrugge:
ma seguitiamo Angelica che fugge.
(Rinaldo is in pursuit, consumed with anger; but let us follow Angelica who is fleeing.)
or:
Lasciànlo andar, che farà buon camino,
e torniamo a Rinaldo paladino.
(Let us leave him now, for he will make good progress, and instead go back to the paladin Rinaldo.)
or again:
Ma tempo è ormai di ritrovar Ruggiero
che scorre il ciel su l’animal leggiero.
(But now is the time to go back and find Ruggiero, who is scurrying over the sky on the winged horse.)
While such shifts in the action take place in the middle of a canto, the close of every single canto promises that the story will continue in the following one. Here too the explanatory function is usually assigned to the final rhymed couplet which rounds off the last octave:
Come a Parigi appropinquosse, e quanto
Carlo aiutò, vi dirà l’altro canto.
(How he came to Paris and how much help he gave Charlemagne will be told in the next canto.)
Often in order to conclude the canto Ariosto pretends once more that he is a bard reciting his verses before a courtly audience:
Non piú, Signor, non piú di questo canto;
ch’io son già rauco, e vo’ posarmi alquanto.
(No more, my lord, no more of this canto, for I am now hoarse, and want to have some rest.)
Either that or — although this happens more rarely — he pretends that he is in the physical act of writing:
Poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il fogliofinire il canto, e riposar mi voglio.
(Since I have filled the sheet of paper all over, I want to end the canto and go and have some rest.)
So it is impossible to give a single definition of the structure of the Orlando Furioso, because the poem possesses no rigid geometry. We could resort to the image of an energy field which continually generates from within itself other force fields. However we define it, the movement is always centrifugal; right from the outset we are immediately in the middle of the action, but this is true both for the poem as a whole as well as for each canto and each episode.
The problem with every introduction to the Furioso is that if one starts by saying ‘This is a poem which is in fact a continuation of another poem, which in turn continues a cycle of countless other poems …’, the reader is immediately turned off: if before starting this poem, the reader has to know what happened in all the preceding poems, as well as in those that preceded the preceding poems, when will it ever be possible to start Ariosto’s poem? But in fact every introduction turns out to be superfluous: the Furioso is a book unique in its genre and can, or perhaps I should say must, be read without reference to any other text that either precedes or follows it. It is a self-contained universe, across whose length and breadth the reader can roam, entering, exiting, getting lost.
The fact that Ariosto makes us believe that the construction of this universe is nothing but a continuation of someone else’s work, an appendix, or as he himself terms it a ‘gionta’ or addition, can be interpreted as a sign of Ariosto’s extraordinary discretion, an instance of what the English call ‘understatement’, that is to say that particular form of self-irony which leads us to downplay things that are actually enormously important. But it can also be seen as a sign of a conception of time and space which rejects the closed paradigm of the Ptolemaic universe, and opens itself towards the infinity of both past and future, as well as towards an endless plurality of worlds.
From its opening words the Furioso presents itself as the poem of movement, or rather it presents a particular type of movement which will inform the poem’s entire length: a zig-zag. We could trace the general outline of the poem by following the constant intersections and divergences of these lines on a map of Europe and Africa, but the first canto alone is enough to give us its flavour: there three knights pursue Angelica through the wood, in a convoluted dance consisting of losing the way, chance encounters, mistaken paths, and changes of plan.
It is this zig-zag traced by the galloping horses and by the oscillations of the human heart that introduces us into the spirit of the poem. The pleasure deriving from the rapidity of the action instantly blends with a sense of breadth in the amount of time and space available. This aimless wandering is inherent not just in the knights but also in Ariosto himself: it is almost as if the poet when beginning the narration does not yet know at the start of the narration the direction the plot will take, though subsequently it will guide him as though perfectly planned. Yet he has one thing totally clear in his mind: his own mixture of narrative élan and informality, what we might define, to use an adjective loaded with meaning, as the ‘errant’ movement of Ariosto’s poem.
These characteristics of Ariosto’s ‘space’ in the poem can be perceived either on the scale of the whole poem, or in individual canti, or on an even more minute scale in each stanza or even each line. The ottava is the unit in which it is easiest to recognise what is distinctive about his poetry: Ariosto is relaxed in the ottava, he feels at home in it, and the miracle of his poetry resides above all in this nonchalance.
This is so for two reasons above all. One is intrinsic to the ottava itself, in that it is a stanza which can handle even lengthy speeches as well as an alternation of sublime, lyric tones with more prosaic, humorous notes. The other reason is inherent in Ariosto’s method of writing poetry, which is not bounded by limits of any kind: unlike Dante, he has not set himself a rigid division of subject-matter, nor any rules of symmetry which would force him to write a set number of canti or set number of stanzas in each canto. In the Furioso the shortest canto contains 72 stanzas, the longest 199. The poet can take things easy if he wants, using several
stanzas to say something which others could say in a single line, or he can concentrate into a single verse something that could be the subject of a lengthy discourse.
The secret of Ariosto’s ottava resides in his following the varied rhythm of the spoken language, in the profusion of what De Sanctis called the ‘inessential accessories of language’, as well as in the swiftness of his ironic asides. But the colloquial is only one of the many registers he deploys, which extend from the lyric to the tragic and sententious and which can all coexist in the same stanza. Ariosto can be of memorable concision, and many of his verses have become proverbial: ‘Ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra!’ (This is how human judgment errs so often!) or ‘Oh gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui!’ (Oh the wonderful goodness of the ancient knights!). But it is not only with such asides that he executes his changes of speed. It has to be said that the very structure of the ottava is based on a discontinuity of rhythm: the first six lines linked by just two alternating rhymes are then followed by a rhyming couplet, which produces an effect which today we would term anticlimax, a brusque shift not only in rhythm but also in the psychological and intellectual atmosphere, from the sophisticated to the popular, from the evocative to the comic.
Of course Ariosto plays with these contours of the ottava as the expert he is, but the play could become monotonous without the agility of the poet in giving movement to the stanza, introducing pauses and full stops in varying positions, adapting different syntactic structures to the metre, alternating long and short sentences, splitting the stanza in two or in some cases tagging another stanza on to the first, constantly changing the narrative tenses, switching from the remote past tense to the imperfect, the present, then the future, in short creating a whole array of narrative planes and perspectives.
This freedom and ease of movement which we have noted in his versification dominates even more at the level of narrative structure and composition of plot. There are, as we all remember, two main themes: the first tells how Orlando from being merely the hapless lover of Angelica went furiously mad, how the Christian armies without the presence of their hero risked losing France to the Saracens, and how the madman’s wits were recovered by Astolfo on the Moon, and then forced back into the body of their rightful owner, thus allowing him to take his place again in the army ranks. Parallel to this runs the second plot, that of the predestined but constantly deferred love of Ruggiero, champion of the Saracen camp, for the Christian female warrior Bradamante, and of all the obstacles that come between them and their destined marriage, until Ruggiero manages to change sides, be baptised and win the hand of his warrior lover. The Ruggiero-Bradamante plot is no less important than the Orlando-Angelica one, because it is from them that Ariosto (like Boiardo before him) claims that the Este family descends, thus not only justifying the poem in the eyes of his patrons, but above all linking the mythical period of chivalry with the contemporary history of Ferrara and Italy. The two main plots and their countless ramifications thus proceed intertwined, but they also develop in turn around the more strictly epic trunk of the poem, namely the course of the war between the Emperor Charlemagne and Agramante, king of Africa. This epic contest is concentrated particularly in a block of canti which deal with the siege of Paris by the Moors, the Christian counter-offensive, and the discord in Agramante’s camp. The siege of Paris is in a sense the poem’s centre of gravity, just as the city of Paris presents itself as its geographical ‘navel’:
Siede Parigi in una gran pianura
ne l’ombelico a Francia, anzi nel cuore;
gli passa la riviera entro le mura
e corre et esce in altra parte fuore:
ma fa un’isola prima, e v’asseoira
de la città una parte, e la migliore;
l’altre due (ch’in tre parti è la gran terra)
di fuor la fossa, e dentro il fume serra.
Alla città che molte miglia gira
da molte parti si può dar battaglia;
ma perché sol da un canto assalir mira,
né volentier l’esercito sbarraglia,
oltre il fiume Agramante si ritira
verso ponente, acciò che quindi assaglia;
però che né cittade né campagna
ha dietro (se non sua) fino alla Spagna. (14.104-105)
(Paris stands in a huge plain, in the navel, or rather in the heart of France. The river passes between its walls, flows and comes out the other side; but before that it forms an island, and there makes safe one part, the best part, of the city. As for the other two parts (for the great town is divided into three), they are locked in by the moat on the outside and the river within.
The city, which extends for many miles, can be attacked on many sides; but since Agramante wants to concentrate his assault on one side, and does not wish to expose his army to any danger, he retreats beyond the river towards the West in order to attack from there, for he has now neither city nor country behind him (except those on his side) all the way to Spain.)
From what I have said it might be thought that the journeys of all the main protagonists end up converging on Paris. But this does not happen: the majority of the most famous champions are absent from this collective epic episode. Only the giant mass of Rodomonte towers above the mêlée here. Where on earth are all the others?
It has to be said that the poem’s space also contains another centre of gravity, a negative centre though, a trap, a kind of vortex which swallows up the principal characters one by one: the wizard Atlante’s magic castle. Atlante’s magic delights in architectural illusions: already in canto 4 it raises a castle entirely made out of steel in the hilltops of the Pyrenees, only to have it dissolve again into nothing; between canti 12 and 22 we see arise, not far from the Channel coast, a castle which is an empty vortex, in which all the images of the poem are refracted.
Orlando himself, while pursuing Angelica, happens to fall victim to its spell, a pattern which is repeated in almost identical terms for each of these gallant knights: he sees his beloved being carried off, pursues her captor, enters a mysterious palace, and wanders aimlessly through halls and deserted corridors. In other words, the palace is devoid of what they seek, and is populated only by those in pursuit.
Those wandering through loggias and passageways, rummaging beneath tapestries and canopies are the most famous of Christian and Moorish knights: they have all been lured into the castle by the vision of a beloved woman, or an enemy who is just out of reach, or a stolen horse, or a lost object. And now they can no longer leave those walls: if one of them tries to leave, he hears someone calling him back, turns round and the apparition he has sought in vain is there, the damsel in distress he has to save has appeared at a window, imploring his help. Atlante has created this kingdom of illusion; if life is always varied, unpredictable, and changing, illusion is monotonous, hammering away at the same obsession. Desire is a race towards the void, Atlanta’s spell concentrates all unsatisfied desires within the enclosure of a labyrinth, but does not alter the rules that govern men’s movements in the open spaces of the poem and the world.
Astolfo also ends up in the palace pursuing — or thinking he is pursuing — a young peasant who has stolen his horse Rabicano. But there is no spell that will work on Astolfo. He possesses a magic book which explains everything about that kind of castle. He goes straight to the marble stone on the threshold: all he has to do is to lift it and the castle will go up in smoke. But just at that moment he is joined by a crowd of knights: nearly all of them are his friends, but instead of welcoming him, they stand in front of him as though wanting to run him through with their swords. What has happened? The wizard Atlante, defending himself in dire straits, has resorted to a last magic spell: he has made Astolfo appear to the various prisoners of the castle as the last person they had been pursuing when each of them entered the palace. But all Astolfo has to do is to sound his horn to dispel both the magician and his magic along with the victims of his spells. The castle, a cobweb of dreams, desires and
jealousies, dissolves: that is to say, it ceases to be a space outside ourselves, with gates, stairways and walls, and recedes inside our minds, into the labyrinth of our thoughts. Atlante then restores to the characters that he had kidnapped free rein through the ways of the poem. Atlante or Ariosto? In fact the castle turns out to be a crafty structural device for the narrator, who because of the physical impossibility of developing simultaneously a large number of parallel plots, feels the need to remove characters from the action for the duration of a number of canti, setting aside a number of cards in order to continue his game and to bring them out at the appropriate moment. The magician who wants to delay the fulfilment of destiny and the poet-tactician who alternately multiplies and reduces the threads of the characters he deploys on the field, now grouping them together, now dispersing them, blend into one another until they are inseparable.
The forty-sixth and last canto opens with the list of a crowd of people who constitute the public for whom Ariosto thought he was writing his poem. This is the real dedication of the Furioso, much more so than the obligatory nod in the direction of his patron Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, the ‘generosa erculea prole’ (noble descendant of Hercules) to whom the poem is addressed, at the opening of the first canto. The boat of the poem is now coming into harbour, and waiting for him there on the pier are the most beautiful and noble women of the Italian cities along with their knights, poets and intellectuals. What Ariosto gives us here is nothing short of a roll-call of names and brief profiles of his friends and contemporaries: it is a definition of his ideal literary public, as well as an image of a model society. Through a kind of structural reversal, the poem steps out of itself and examines itself through the eyes of its readers, defining itself through this roll-call of those to whom it is addressed. And in turn it is the poem which acts as a definition or emblem for the society of present and future readers, for the entirety of people who will participate in its game and who will recognise themselves in it.
Why Read the Classics? Page 8
