A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

Chapter Six. Chiasmus, Italian Style: Rhetoric and Ideology in The Leopard and The Conformist

C h a p t e r S i x Chiasmus, Italian Style Rhetoric and Ideology in The Leopard and The Conformist In her study of Italian identity after political unification in 1861, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg explores the traits that impeded the formation of a national self, including the Italians’ supposed lack of interiority, their scioltezza or elasticity in acting and thinking, and their love of rhetoric (1–19). The latter quality brings all three together: the rhetorician must be sciolto in his nimble movement from one idea and topos to the next, and his use of words as performative agents tends to elide inquiry into such matters as authenticity and an interior self. For example, the Nazi officer Bergmann’s claim in Rome, Open City, “Voi italiani siete malati di retorica” (“You Italians are addicted to rhetoric”), is intended as an insult that decries the lack of inner resolve and character that he believes renders Italians inferior to his master Aryan race. However misguided Bergmann’s diagnosis—the Resistance fighters he interrogates do not speak, even under torture, thereby refuting his ascription of their “rhetoricity”—the stereotype of the suspiciously rhetorical nature of Italian political culture endures. In a related vein Angela Dalle Vacche explores how Italian filmmakers’ continual preoccupation with the past led to the projection of “corporeal entities [that] became metaphors for the Italian body politic” (Body 3). She goes on to argue that these “shapes of history” are not “images of social reality” but rather “reflections of an imaginary, national self” (Body 3). Following Dalle Vacche’s cue, we find that it is not only in the manifestations of human corporeality that the “shapes” of Italian history emerge; it is also in the rhetorical figures employed by filmmakers exploring this national self. In Italian aesthetics one such figure that bridges the rhetorical and the political is the chiasmus. Derived from chi, the Greek letter for x, chiasmus indicates a crossing over of the elements of two phrases or clauses that are parallel in syntax but whose word orders are then reversed. In Italian literary history a celebrated example of the trope comes from the opening lines of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando 108 Aesthetic Corsi and Ricorsi furioso (1516), which switches the normal word order to link donne to arme and cavellier to amori, instead of vice versa: “Le donne, i cavellier, l’arme, gli amori,/le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto” (“The ladies, the knights, the arms, the loves/The courtesies, and the brave deeds I sing”) (1.1.1–2). Ariosto thus creates a verbal irony through a coincidentia oppositorum that scrambles the usual ordering in this parallel structure. For all its prominence as a rhetorical figure of speech, chiasmus also plays a prominent role in the visual arts. A staple of neoclassical aesthetics, chiasmus in painting and sculpture of this style uses counterbalancing gestures or forms to create a sense of order and harmony. For example, in Antonio Canova’s Venus (1817–20) the bending of the goddess’s left arm in the opposite direction of her gaze creates a visual x reinforced by her body listing in counterpoise to the right, also on an axis complementary to her gaze (figure 25). In less systematic fashion Titian’s Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1540) creates a visual cross between the gaze of his subject’s face and the pointing of his hand to establish a sense of balance suited for the paradigmatic Renaissance man, Bembo, one of the age’s most influential writers, politiFigure 25 Canova’s figure forms a visual chiasmus with her counterbalancing limbs (Venus). Chiasmus, Italian Style 109 cians, and clerics—a polymath whose creative energies swirled in different but mutually reinforcing directions (figure 26). A later visual artist, Andy Warhol, was able to create chiastic effects in his multipaneled paintings and silk screens by reversing elements from one visual unit to the next, a hybrid practice that draws on ancient traditions in the plastic arts while pointing toward the frame-by-frame exposition of film.1 As we will see, the film medium combines literature’s capacity to create chiasmus through the coupling of syntactic units articulated in temporal sequence and the visual arts’ ability to set in dialogue the compositional elements of a single image. The uses of chiasmus became an important tool for Italian artists and writers seeking to express the complexities and contradictions of...