Beyond the story of storytelling: The narrator as lover in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso

Abstract

The article builds on the well-established tradition of studies devoted to metanarration and metafiction in Ariosto's Orlando furioso to focus on the Narrator as a key self-reflexive device, while questioning the common identification of the Narrator as a straightforward double of Ariosto. The author analyses the construction of the Narrator as Lover, arguing that the epic story of Orlando and the knights is in fact embedded in the lyric story of the Narrator-Lover. By means of a close reading of two stanzas from canto 35, the fragments of the Narrator-Lover's fabula are drawn together to show how the content of his autodiegetic narrative exceeds the scope of the self-conscious action of storytelling and includes episodes which must be placed, in a fictional chronology, beyond the limits of his act of narration. His experience revolves essentially around the conditions of being in love and writing narrative poetry, which interweave in the lyric story of an epic narration threatened by love's destructive effects. In the Narrator-Lover's story, references to the beloved present him as a timeless lover, whereas hints at the patron anchor him to individualizing historical circumstances. Significantly, the only direct apostrophe to ‘madonna’ is placed at the beginning of the most explicitly metaliterary canto of Orlando furioso (35), so that the climax of the poem's epic self-reflection is preceded by the most lyric and anti-epic moment for the Narrator-Lover.