The Creative Subject and the Law of Reality (Self-censorship in the Work)

Abstract

If an unbreakable law exists for the Subject, it is the limits that Reality sets for his expansion and for his creativity, unless he alienates himself from reality to enter the realm of folly. Literary creation realizes itself in the space between the direct experience of the world, the event in its pure happening, and the unity of sense as an object of desire. The subject with his understanding abilities, therefore, must react to the stimulus given by the event willingly or unwillingly experienced and he must venture out to the eventful journey of interpretation led by the intentionality of his desire. As Petrarch’s canzone 360 demonstrates, the trial-pattern can be used as a literary form and a cognitive model in order to show the inner reasoning and moral debate, to define the rules of the specific literary genre, to explicate a truth that finally depends on the literary genre. On this journey the desire of sense can suffer limits and frustrations imposed by the law of Reality: obstacles, obligations, censorship and self-censorship (as introjected censorship principles). This law both makes hard and leads the journey, obstructs it but also makes it shareable: facing a Reality similar for all the human beings (even if differently perceived), shareable reactions and interpretations are developed. My article intends to explore these issues in some revealing and foundational texts of modern lyric poetry (mostly from Petrarch’s Canzoniere), having in mind the idea that poetry, as a personal voice of a subject, utters this journey of research more than it reveals some acquired general truths. In European lyric tradition, woman and nature can be considered as functional objects that activate and set a limit to the subject; they embody the law to obey, to which to conform or to rebel. In order to exercise himself in the text-space, to construct himself as a subject, the lyric-I has to create the limits within which to act and the laws of this space.