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  • The End(lessnes)s of Infamy:Agamben, Enjambment, and Embodiment in a Cervantine Stanza
  • Paul Michael Johnson

[T]anta vergogna mi gravò la fronte.

Dante, Purgatorio

Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem begins and ends with two readings of Dante. The first, in the chapter entitled "Comedy," revisits the question of why the Italian poet considered his magnum opus as such, of why he would "abandon his own 'tragic' poetic project for a 'comic' poem" (1). Unsatisfied with prior scholarly explanations, Agamben interrogates the incipit of the Divine Comedy in order to finally validate, nearly seven hundred years on, the pertinence of its curious generic marker. His argument hinges on a consideration of tragic guilt and comic guilt, as well as the oft-related emotion of shame. Of particular interest to Agamben is the theory of shame that Dante develops toward the end of the Purgatory, when he is abandoned by Virgil in favor of Beatrice as his guide, a theory by which "'comic' humiliation" and "the purifying necessity of shame" lead to Dante's "expiation" (Agamben, End 15). In effect, when with harsh words his beloved first calls out to him near the end of Canto 30, he is immediately ashamed: "My lowered eyes caught sight of the clear stream,/but when I saw myself reflected there,/such shame weighed on my brow, my eyes drew back/and toward the grass" (268).1 It is the sight [End Page 494] of himself which forces Dante to avert his gaze in shame and to recoil in silence, leaving Beatrice's apostrophe unanswered.

The other Dantean reading that bookends The End of the Poem concerns a passage in De vulgari eloquentia: "The endings of the last verses are most beautiful if they fall into silence together with the rhymes" (qtd. in Agamben, End 113). Here Agamben identifies an unlikely solution to the paradox which gives his book its title; namely, how are poets to end any given work in a satisfactory way, to counteract the tendency toward the "cheap and often abject" that he locates at poem's end (113)? The urgency of the question turns on the incommensurability between syntax, semantics, and meter that inheres in all prosody. Following Valéry's conception, Agamben avers that "poetry lives only in the tension and difference… between sound and sense, between the semiotic sphere and the semantic sphere" (End 109). For Agamben, enjambment thus becomes the constitutive poetic figure par excellence, a distinguishing feature whose possibility determines our very capacity to discriminate between poetry and prose. "For what is enjambment," Agamben asks, "if not the opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause?" (End 109). To run from one line to the next without a syntactical or semantic break therefore becomes the singular means by which, alongside other forms of writing, we classify poetry as such. In this framework, however, the end of a poem presents an ontological challenge, particularly if it is to be considered "the ultimate formal structure perceptible in a poetic text" (Agamben, End 112). For how, Agamben ponders, can the last verse be poetic when it is deprived of the defining possibility of enjambment?

I would like to examine these problems through a critically neglected poem by Miguel de Cervantes that appears in the interpolated novella "El curioso impertinente" in Don Quijote. Representing the tearful repentance of the apostle Peter after his denial of Christ, the ottava rima work is an imitation of a stanza from the Italian poet Luigi Tansillo's Le lagrime di San Pietro, first published in 1560. Whereas Tansillo's extensive work depicts various stages of the grief experienced by Peter, the most conspicuous theme of Cervantes's version is shame, an emotion which has preoccupied not only Agamben, but Dante, Cervantes, and many other Renaissance thinkers.2 In this sense, my opening excursus of Dante's shame in the Purgatory will serve as an [End Page 495] instructive figure for understanding the relationship between the emotion, enjambment, and the reader of Cervantes's "Las lágrimas de San Pedro." In particular, I will argue that, through the author's innovative use of...

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