The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso (review)

Sergio Zatti's collection of essays, written between 1983 and 1999 and translated elegantly by Dennis Looney and Sally Hill, focuses on the synthesis, development and elaboration of epic and romance genres in the Orlando furioso and the Gerusalemme liberata, thus forecasting the advent of the novel. In the Furioso narrative devices like the narrator's ironic and reflective relationship with the sources would be used later by Cervantes in Don Quixote (141-42), while the author's probing analysis of the characters' psychological inner life in the Liberata "creates a breach between the exterior and the interior" (213).

Zatti's rigorous analysis shows how the structure, themes, and ideology of the two texts resonate historically and politically in sixteenth-century Italy. He argues that the quest in the Furioso becomes a means for Ariosto to explore experimentally "the cognitive crisis of his time" (57) and that irony becomes a critical tool for contemplating, on the one hand, "the meaning of the romance action . . . the modes of the narration . . . its techniques and representational strategies" (20) and, on the other, the relation between fiction and truth (92). Zatti establishes his reading of the Liberata on the conflict for hegemony between opposing systems of values, a conflict that "is rooted in late Renaissance Italian society, within the crisis of humanist values that had supported Ariosto's reformation of the chivalric genre" (140) and the limits imposed by the Catholic Reformation. Zatti also attributes the frequency of simulation and dissimulation in the Liberata to the increasing fracture between being and appearing, typical of court life where Tasso spent most of his troubled life and which had been theorized in books and treatises describing survival mechanisms for the courtier and control mechanisms for the prince.

In the first chapter Zatti demonstrates that the interdependence between the narrative technique of the entrelacement and the quest, two characteristics of the romance genre that assume a direction in space and time and obey an epic closure at the end of the text, is Ariosto's original contribution to the genre's development. The Furioso's balance of romance and epic models "is still an act of faith in the narrative possibilities of a pluralistic, subjective world compatible with the world of epic grounded in history" (37). In the second chapter Zatti furthers his analysis of the quest, arguing that it becomes synonymous with "cognitive investigation" (43). The third chapter analyzes "the connection between truth and fiction" (62) through the role played by the auctores of the romance and epic genre (Turpin, Virgil, and Homer). The fourth chapter interprets the relationship between Tasso and Ariosto based on the Bloomian notion of the anxiety of influence "without Bloom's excessive psychological implications" (96). In the fifth chapter, Zatti convincingly argues that in the Cinque Canti Ariosto moves from the multiple perspective that characterized the Furioso's first edition to both a more archaic and chivalric romance and to "contemporary issues . . . in terms of religion and politics" (120). In the sixth chapter Zatti argues that in the Liberata the centrifugal system of values linked to the romance genre such as plurality, pagan religion, and deviance is repressed by the centripetal system of values linked to the epic genre like unity, Christianity, and obedience, but it is still able to seduce and to emotionally stir the readership. The seventh chapter focuses on how Tasso considers his poem a way of creating an "itinerary from the weak and fragmented identity of the wanderer to the authoritative and solid identity of the lord and master" (163), even though the repressed subjectivity of the poet emerges through the characters of Tancredi, Rinaldo, Erminia, and Clorinda and in the conflict of system of values discussed before. The final chapter is dedicated to the notion of dissimulation, which "underlies the conception and the very structure of the Gerusalemme liberata...