Allegory at the Limits of Classicism: EUGENIO MONTALE'S LA BUFERA E ALTRO

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the “Conclusioni provvisorie,” the last section of Eugenio Montale's La bufera e altro. It takes its lead from notion of Classicism outlined by T.S. Eliot in his 1923 review of Ulysses and argues that the recourse Montale makes to Dante in particular, and to Christian symbolism in general, is structurally akin to the parallel James Joyce draws between Homer's Odyssey and the world of the early 1920s. In Eliot's view, it is by invoking the coherence of ancient myth that a writer can lend shape and significance to the chaos of the modernity. In Montale's case, however, rather than work to organize the chaotic present according to the idealized image of form and order Classicism promises, the structural use the poet makes of Christianity serves a demythologizing function. On the one hand, it exposes how Classicism is unable to marshal the chaos of the present beyond transforming it into a work of art; on the other, it shows that ideas of order are in fact allegories of the kind elaborated by Walter Benjamin, that is to say, provisional, makeshift, and ultimately empty.