Abstract
Reviewed by: Rossella Riccobono, University of St Andrews, UK
This volume comprises a short foreword, where the author explains and justifies the chosen method of research for the reading of ‘Iride’ (May 1945), followed by three chapters and a coda, and finally a bibliography of works on the poem under examination.
In the foreword, Comparini discusses the formation of the ethical-moral nature of Montale’s concept of art, which was not only influenced by the early 20th century philosophy led by Benedetto Croce (New-Idealism), and by other philosophers such as Bergson, Boutroux and Schopenhauer, but also by Montale’s early readings of the works by Giuseppe Rensi, to whom Montale made reference in two of his essays, ‘L’arte spettacolare’ and ‘Il giudizio estetico’, now contained in Eugenio Montale. Il secondo mestiere. Arte, musica e società. Rensi was a professor in Moral Philosophy at the University of Genoa in the 1920s, known to the young Montale most probably through his sister Marianna’s university studies. Rensi’s philosophical thought and works (Interiora rerum, 1924), Comparini maintains, may be original milieu through which the need for a salvific interlocutor (the dialogic ‘tu’ or visiting angel) would have been conceived as a necessity pre-existing Montale’s poetic texts. Furthermore, Rensi’s work seems to have been at the origins of the concept of a resisting poetry, out of which firstly Clizia’s and then Iride’s ‘occhi di acciaio’ were conceived. This first short section of the volume, therefore, plays a central part in the book as it prepares the reader for the following chapters where the Montalean female interlocutor is analysed, and where finally, in Chapter 3, the exegesis of ‘Iride’ is fully expounded.
Chapter 1, ‘Dagli Ossi alla Bufera, tra teogonia e teologia’, offers a review of all the transformations in the first three poetic collections of the female figures that embody initially a proto-religious ‘salvific tu’ (e.g. Annetta, Arletta, Gerti) all the way to the introduction of Clizia and the figure of the goddess-angel, Iride of La bufera e altro, who bring the poetry to a fully pagan religious dimension. While the salvific ‘tu’ is conceived as having an inherent function to save the Montalean ‘io’ from the universal chaos through an escape to another dimension, it is the little miracle coinciding with Arsenio’s cupio dissolvi and with the esoteric event of an object which accidentally touches or falls next to the poetic persona that brings forth the possibility and vision of a higher dimension which adds an escatological significance to Montale’s later poetry from Le occasioni.
Indeed, Chapter 2 follows quite closely the itinerary along which the figure of Clizia turns from a carnally loved woman with human traits, in the first phase of Occasioni (1933–1937), to a visiting angel who starts assuming magic and goddess-like connotations in the second poetic phase (1938–1940), and finally is transformed into a Christ-like figure who chooses to sacrifice her love and life not only to save her lover (as Alcestis offered to do for her husband Admetus), but also to redeem all of humanity. If Clizia’s transformation into a visiting angel promised a possible escape from the bleak and death-like reality of contemporary history through a transcendental celestial flight, the figure of a Christ-like Clizia, mainly coinciding with the Finisterre phase, the one referred to in ‘Il giglio rosso’ for example, or ‘Gli orecchini’, directly pre-announces ‘Iride’ (originally included in the first edition of Finisterre): Iride is described as a more terrestrial half-human and half-divine pagan Christ figure who will save humankind by suffering and traversing the tenebrous historical reality of the Second World War and its horrors.
Comparini’s continuous return to Rensi’s moral philosophy to further study its supposed influence on the cosmogony organised by Montale through his poetic vision of the world which, as Montale stated, history only confirms, fully justifies Clizia’s progressive transformations into the final metamorphosis: the Christian Saviour through whose sacrifice not only may God ‘correct the world’ but through whom he may ‘bring back the ancestral order lost in the human heart’ (p. 64).
Chapter 3, ‘Iride. Il sincretismo religioso di Montale’, completes the study by offering an in-depth exegesis of the poem ‘Iride’. After locating the significance of the name ‘Iride’ within Hölderlin’s philosophy and as a further extension and completion of it, and having also clarified the context in which ‘Iride’ was placed as the text opening Silvae in La bufera e altro, Comparini deconstructs ‘Iride’ stanza by stanza, to recompose each of them within a dense intertextual network of influences that unveils a very deep and original reading of the whole poem. The volume’s coda, ‘Il mio sogno di te non è finito’, shows how ‘Iride’ is indeed a poem that completes the cycle of Clizia, but is also a text where new themes originate that will traverse new transformations of the female salvific interlocutor (principally those of the Volpe) through La bufera e altro all the way until its provisional conclusions where the footprints of Iride are still watermarked in both ‘Il sogno del prigioniero’ and ‘Piccolo testamento’.