The Worth of the Imperfect Memory: Allusion and Fictions of Continuity in Petrarch and Spenser

Literary imitation in the Renaissance was a practice both codified and controlled. A systematization of vast discursive networks, imitatio distilled the world in a word. It has been suggested that we consider imitation in poetry as a compressed historical fiction in which the citing text imagines and creates its own version of its affiliation with source texts (Greene 16-17).¹ Yet, if allusion closes a temporal gap between past texts and a present one, it also creates a semantic gap between the present text and the source that is evoked but absent. That gap, in turn, creates a space for—and can even tempt if not demand—interpretation.

What is more, poetic memory and the interpretation it inspires is exquisitely vulnerable, particularly when it relates to the narrative of literary history that an imitation tacitly communicates. This vulnerability is linked to the fact that the history which allusion conjures up is a carefully crafted fiction, an imperfect record full of lacunae and concealed references. Thus, when armed with a suspicion of allusive itineraries, an implicit challenge to the study of Renaissance imitatio emerges.

The pages to come, focusing as they do on the ruptures rather than sutures of poetic memory, constitute the beginning of a response to that challenge. This proposal to explore the imperfections of poetic memory is not a call to muddy waters that were previously assumed to be pellucid. The process of literary imitation has never been considered a simple or straightforward operation. Nevertheless, the complexity of concealing sources in allusion can be as staged and disingenuous as any other intertextual process and holds just as much interpretive promise.

In short, I argue that the study of intertextuality has followed too faithfully the ideal itineraries plotted by Renaissance poets. We must also explore how poets conceal as much as reveal certain debts to sources. Here I identify and evaluate two methods of such concealment. In the first of these methods, allusions are employed so conspicuously that they mask less obvious referents. In the second, the overt invocation of convention—the invocation, in other words, of a literary gesture that seems to discourage rather than invite interpretation—threatens to overshadow the specificity of allusion. When we attend to these less conspicuous—and even disguised—allusions, larger questions about continuity with the past both literary and historical emerge.

The discussion falls into two parts. I begin with Petrarch's Canzoniere 189, "Passa la nave mia colma d'oblio" ("My ship laden with forgetfulness"; I Canzoniere 821-23; Petrarch's 335), which is a poem that is axiomatic of just how fruitful a consideration of those ruptures—and how misleading the sutures—of poetic imitation can be. I contend that Petrarch's poem elicits doubts about how much we can trust allusive genealogies. The wariness that Canzoniere 189 provokes about the allusive pedigrees that a poem displays is not a phenomenon limited to one sonnet, though. In the second part of my discussion, I will treat the afterlife of Petrarch's poem in Edmund Spenser's 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. There, Spenser uses Canzoniere 189 to introduce questions about how stable the events of the fictional past fashioned by poetic narratives can be in Book III of his poem. Spenser's imitation allows for a negotiation of the very slippery paradox of when forgetfulness becomes mindful, and encourages us to question how to determine the point where a fictional narrative seemingly begins and ceases to know itself.

Hidden Itineraries: Contextualizing Epic and Canzoniere 189

With its blunt reference to Homeric epic and heavy-handed use of allegory, Canzoniere 189 offers a deceptive intertexutal and interpretive transparency to its readers:

Passa la nave mia colma d'oblioper aspro mare, a mezza notte il verno,enfra Scilla e Caribdi; et al governo siede 'l signore, anzi 'l nemico mio.A ciascun remo un pensier pronto et rioche la tempesta e 'l fin par ch'abbi a scherno;la vela rompe un vento humido eternodi sospir' di speranza et di desio.Pioggia di...