The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (review)

REVIEWS demonstrates the relativity ofassumed cultural givens. The book as a whole thus proves the opposite of its thesis. Comparativism if properly done, i.e., as crosscultural observation and reflection, can and should still be done, for it leads to a critical look at the Western self in all its cultural contingency, which is exactly where comparatists today should want to go. Such a comparatist hermeneutic thus approaches what Yokota-Murakami recommends as a substitute for old-fashioned, identity-based comparison: "an infinite act ofrelativization" (189). Irmgard WagnerGeorge Mason University GIORGIO AGAMBEN. TheEndofthe Poem: Studies in Poetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. vii + 148 pp. 7Ae End ofthe Poem collects essays written over two decades, each treating exemplary cases in the history ofliterature in order to investigate poetics. In the introduction , Agamben underlines four steps in his argument (xii). From Dante to Giovanni Pascoli andthe HypnerotomachiaPolifili, and from the contemporary Italian writer Antonio Delfini to the twentieth-century poet Giorgio Caproni, we are offered an array ofvery innovative readings. Though each essay could stand on its own, I will outline some ofthe principal arguments that best represent the spirit ofthe whole. The first essay, "Comedy," discusses Dante's radical innovations in our traditional understanding ofthe opposition tragedy/comedy. This opposition "may have [its] remote origin in medieval culture" (7), as may be seen from the very title of Dante's poem: Comedy. The comic there must be understood beyond a purely stylistic opposition and beyond the possible felicitous or infelicitous endings. It has to do with man's guilt or innocence. The letter to Cangrande is where Dante "joined the categories ofthe tragic and the comic to the theme ofthe innocence and guilt of the human creature, such that tragedy appears as the guilt ofthejust and the comedy as thejustification ofthe guilty" (8). This statement would be consonant with Aristotle's Poetics, which was known both through the translation ofAverroes 's Middle Commentary, and in its entirety by 1278. The issues ofthe guilt and innocence ofhumankind before divine justice are amplified in the reversal ofthe categories of"nature" and "person" operated by Christ's passion (12) by turning a situation of "natural guilt" into one of "personal expiation": "Christ's death thus liberates man from tragedy and makes comedy possible" (13). As a corollary, the essay ends with a discussion ofthe duality of"person" and its theatrical evolution in order to understand both Dante's "comic" and the antitragic legacy that Dante bequeathed to Italian culture. In similar fashion, Agamben resorts to etymology when he analyzes the term "com" in Provençal to show that what seems limited to female anatomy leads instead to an understanding ofthe body of the poem (30). The same critical apparatus is adopted in inquiring into the "Dream ofLanguage," the third essay in which Agamben, recalling Poliziano, states that "the more a work seems to concentrate on philological and linguistic problems, the denser its truth content may be." He then goes on: "It is perhaps precisely here that the critic must not fear the risk ofthought, and that the commentator, in turn, must not shy away from appearing to be a 'bad philosopher'" (44). Reflection on language in the fifteenth-centuryHypnerotomachia Polifili leads to a discussion ofthe isolation of words in Mallarmé's poetry. Then it delves into bilingualism in the case ofa "dead" language (Latin) and a "living language" (Vernacular). This discussion continues Vol. 24 (2000): 178 ??? COHPAnATIST in the next essay, on Pascoli's theorizing ofthe dead language as the only language ofpoetry, for which "to speak" means to "experience the letter as the experience of the death of one's own language and one's own voice" (74). In "The Dictation ofPoetry," a further reflection involves the relationship between life and poetry. In particular, it tackles the bond ofspeech and life according to the Christian tradition and shows such a bond dominating the concept ofbiography and the way several poets dealt with it. This issue carries on in the first ofthe appendices, where we read of Antonio Delfini's enigma of the Basque woman whose "spirit isjoined with the voice without the mediation ofmeaning" (120). With the poetry ofGiorgio Caproni, attention focuses on...