After Machiavelli: "Re-writing" and the "Hermeneutic Attitude"

Chapter One. Introduction

Chapter One Introduction Conceptually the central problem for the latecomer necessarily is repetition,for repetition dialectically raised to recreation is the ephebe's road ofexcess, leading away from the horror of finding himselfto be only a copy or a replica. -Harold Bloom Of the innumerable images adopted through the centuries as metaphors for the word text, I find the image of the palimpsest by far one of the happiest, for implied within the equation "text = palimpsest" lies a gamut of identities which, when taken together, give us a broader and more profound sense of that first word. Palimpsest means "evidence, trace" (Dizionario Treccani 8: 801), in reference perhaps to the hidden text (scriptura anterior ) that surfaces when a parchment is closely analyzed through the use of certain chemicals or ultraviolet rays. The palimpsest is witness to the existence of that text-now just a trace-which has since fallen (or rather, is falling) into oblivion. (It is "falling" and not "fallen" because it still exists.) This first definition is very much in contrast with a second sense of the term, whereby palimpsest also indicates the process of erasure of a text for the purposes of rewriting another in its place (Dizionario Treccani 8: 801), thus creating a situation in which the same word means both "evidence" and "erasure ": a self-contradiction, an oxymoron. For to say that the text is a palimpsest, a single piece of parchment upon which creative and destructive processes are constantly at work (Le., the alternating occurrences ofcomposing and writing, scraping and cleansing), whose "former identities" (vague traces of prior 1 Chapter One texts) are never completely eradicated, never completely forgotten, is to say, first and foremost, that the text is a "process " as well as a "product"; a dynamic force, traveling between past present future-traveling through us-as well as a static entity , "object" of our studies. The move from naAtJ.lVt1Jenot;' to palimpsestus to palinsesto to palimpsest, trans-Iating from Greek to Latin to Italian and then to English, is itself a palimpsest : not a mere repetition ofwhat was (the horrifying "replica" of which Bloom speaks), but rather an ongoing metamorphosis whereby each transformation bursts forth in newness while, at the same time, nurturing the essence of the former self. A process of change that is also an act of conservation.1 Going further, we find yet other noteworthy renderings of this term. One of the uses for the word palimpsest, now in disuse , was to indicate a notebook, or rather, a waxed tablet (Battaglia 12: 405). What is most interesting about thedefinition of the palimpsest as notebook is the new dimension that the term palimpsest acquires. It is not simply, as we thought, the dwelling place of the "substituted text," but it is instead also the site of the original text: the place where thoughts are first , jotted down, the source. An identity relationship is born be:tween all texts. They are all palimpsests to some degree, be that "degree" more or less metaphorical. The suggestion that palimpsest is synonymous with text is then reinforced by the figurative imagery of another definition, which states that in most cases, once the parchment had been scraped and cleaned, it was then newly lined and written upon in a direction perpendicular to the original (Battaglia 12: 404-05). The image evoked is that of new and old words crossing over one another: a "grid" of language interlocking and intertwining with itself; a practice truly illustrative of the word text as it derives from the verb tessere, "to weave." All of this brings us to a point in which the word palimpsest is not only a metaphor for text, an equation representing the identity relationship, but also a symbol of the text. It is a gathering place: the site where the text both rises and falls, where it is "invented" (from invenire, "to find") and then forgotten, preserved , and purged. The palimpsest is an oxymoron: something that is and is not at the same time, the site where re-writing-a kind of "repetition dialectically raised to recreation"-occurs. 2 Introduction There are, however, some reasonably strong doubts or objections concerning the appropriateness of the palimpsest image . For one thing, this image may suggest to some not the dynamic process ofexchange, discourse, and development that takes place between texts-the interweaving of various multicolored threads-but instead either the monotone ofeach new ''voice'' that...