Fragmentational Poetics: Staging the Crisis of Oratory in Petrarch's Political Canzoni

Abstract

Fragmentational Poetics:Staging the Crisis of Oratory in Petrarch's Political Canzoni Joel Salvatore Pastor Petrarch is many things to many people, but one thing on which we generally agree is that he is diffuse. This is especially clear compared with the usual account of Dante as an orthodox and rigorous—one might say, rigid—thinker; in contrast, Petrarch fits neatly into his assigned role as anti-Dante: modern as against medieval, lyric as against epic, relativist as against absolutist. Yet many of Petrarch's apparent self-contradictions can be shown to be purposeful gestures that illuminate the poet's philosophical instability less than his rhetorical sophistication. In what follows, I will apply this principle to the case of Petrarch's political canzoni, suggesting that these three poems compose a kind of narrative within the larger economy of the Rime, a narrative in which the chief point at issue is the ability of the poet-narrator to exercise his putative public function of moral suasion unto virtue. The manner in which he conducts this rhetorical narrative brings him into remarkably close alignment with Dante, and his conclusion, while still partial in the context of the Rime, gestures in a very Dantean direction, implying the exchange of human rhetoric for divine. Let us begin by rehearsing the case for Petrarch's incoherence. To call the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta "fragmentary" is to remark upon the defining feature of the text. It begins by suggesting a narrative in the confessional mode, then systematically refuses to submit to the narrative's demands. Whether in the misleading and obscure chronological relationships between individual poems,1 the instability of the lyric io that reduces potentially sanctifying progress to errancy, or the mere fact that one must stop reading and begin anew some 365 times in order to make it through,2 Petrarch's Rime seem to reject the very possibility of organizing his experience into a cohesive [End Page 59] whole.3 The whole inquiry into Petrarchan material culture bears this out, for what is Wilkins's chronicle of the Canzoniere manuscripts if not a monument to mutability,4 to an author whose greatest literary achievement seems at times the product of a distracted mind, whose every scratch upon the vellum is subject to infinite revision, rewriting, reelaboration? Moreover, the fragmented selfhood expressed in the Canzoniere takes on cosmic implications: as the Classical theorists used the state as a macrocosm for individual virtue, so the spiritual aspirations of which Petrarch's narrator falls short are echoed by a political agenda with a similarly disappointing outcome. Not only the poet, but Christendom itself is reft asunder. This systemic fragmentation marks a productive point of contrast with the inevitable reference for fourteenth-century compositions in the Italian volgare, Dante's Commedia. If Petrarch's "scattered rhymes" are a synecdoche for the irresolvable tensions in his portrayal of the world, Dante's chief concern is to stitch up rents in the political and spiritual fabric of Trecento Europe. To the shattered remnants of the old Imperial Order, he opposes "quella Roma onde Cristo è romano [that Rome of which Christ is a Roman]" (Purg. 32.102);5 to the archetypical divided city of Florence, swift and salutary judgment from on high. On the personal side, Dante sets the example of his own divided and imperfect will against a pageant of death and resurrection, figuring his divine vocation as that of an inspired prophet.6 It is no overstatement to say that Dante's narrative proposes itself as the final answer to the fragmentation of history. The coherence and perfection of the story of the world are inscribed upon his title page and reflected in the seamless undulation of his chosen meter: seen from eternity, even the tragedy of history becomes a felix culpa. And this turn from discord to harmony that so characterizes Dante's art seems in Petrarch's altogether lacking. Petrarch's tendency toward programmatic incoherence comes into clear focus when we consider the fraught soteriology of his Rime. Whereas Dante's composition takes the pilgrim's ultimate salvation as a narrative presupposition—having returned from his journey, the redeemed poet-pilgrim narrates it to us in the...