Making a concerted effort to grasp the so-called plot, asking oneself, while reading a story, what is happening and how it will end-asking oneself, en fin, as the academic does when reading a mystery, who did it-takes three quarters of the pleasure from the reading of a novel, and robs the art of four quarters of its raison d’etre. So we would consider our purpose as critic achieved if we succeeded in convincing the reader to return to the fresh spontaneity with which the primitive reader-and with this term I mean the «natural reader,, that modern industrial civilization is fast destroying-catches immediately, in the reading, all the allusions to the latest findings of structural anthropology or to Jungian archetypes without trying to superimpose over intellectual explanations, and understands without travail the links between a character and the mystic figure of the Indian schelm according to Kerenyi.
With the simplicity of leafing through an old family album at home, such a reader enjoys every correspondence-so immediately perceptible-between the syntactic structure and the structure of the universe according to the Zahar. He is not confounded, in the thrall of false scientific conceit, by a wish to see in the novel, at all costs, the story of a marriage opposed, but, rather, accepts in all its perspicuity the free engagement of Freudian submeanings playfully stratified in the connective tissue of the work, with no cultivated, Byzantine concern.
For this reason we would warn the reader against any ambiguously philosophizing interpretation that uses several hundred pages to explain the novel as, in fact, the story of a young man and a young woman anxious to celebrate their wedding but suffering obstacles placed in their path by a villain. It is impossible not to see in this hermeneutical superfetation an attempt to reduce all the dialectic of the work to a sexual foundation, identifying the relationship between the two characters as (vulgar and tediously trite!) erotic polarity, and therefore complicating outrageously the comprehension of the novel.
Whereas with great clarity and the simplicity that only the great artist possesses, even the least prepared reader can readily observe a whole series of symbols pointing to the textile industry and matrilocal residence, and the constant presence of Agnese as a basso ostinato expressing the reality of the M utterrecht (even the most innocent reader will note the explicit influence of Bachofen in the figure of this «mother» who bears such weight in the book’s conclusion, carrying around the children of Renzo and Lucia and «implanting kisses on their cheeks, which left a white mark for some time»!).
The «diriment impediments» to which Don Abbondio symbolically alludes to dissuade Renzo from marrying are obviously a mere transfiguration of the customs of avoidance expounded by Tylor. Here the poet rediscovers them as archetypal probability, recurrent and profound, betrayed by the superficially canonical expressions with which the pastor conceals his intention to prevent a relationship between kin (kin in that they are «promised»), and you therefore cannot fail to understand the words «Error, conditio, votum, cognatio, crimen, cultus disparitas, vis, ordo, ligamen, honestas, si sis a/finis . . . «
Similarly, despite the rivers of ink that have been spilled to place in a complicated and preternatural light Padre Cristoforo’s farewell to the now reunited betrothed (end of Chapter XXVI)-«Oh, dear father, will we meet again?» «Up above, I hope» how easy it is for the simple and spontaneous reader to catch the obvious reference to the Corpus Hermeticum and its basic dictate, sir:ut inferius sic superius, as anyone who in his childhood has so much as glanced at the works of Trismegistus will know.
Now, it is precisely the «gestural» immediacy of these images, their deployment according to a shrewd communicative strategy, the spontaneous emotive pattern, that stimulates and provides the reader with the enjoyment proper to reading. Thus he can follow, for example, the demure yet bold play of plot in which an opposition unfolds between the two poles of sexual congress and impotence as existential situation. It will be seen how through the character of Renzo the theme of castration as non-congress is handled, beginning with the capons he takes to the lawyer, a symbol too obvious to require commentary, then continuing with the young man’s escape across the lake (escaping, he evades sexual commitment, and he does this through the archetype of exile, a clear reference to Thomas Mann’s Joseph) and his flight to Bergamo, in which a great quantity of revealing symbols is condensed.
Renzo’s castration is opposed by the phallic figure of the mountain, which dominates Lucia’s stream of consciousness, her interior monologue as she crosses the lake at night. Here we find a free association of images counterpointed by the presence of water, which assumes the form of a furrow continually closing upon itself then opened again by human intervention: «The measured slap of those two oars that sliced the blue surface of the lake, abruptly emerged dripping, and plunged in again.» Here is an image that while patently sexual at the same time suggests in explicitly Bergsonian terms an elan vital that, striking at the marrow of being and then passing on, is realized as psychic duree, as furrow: «The wave marked by the boat, meeting again behind the poop, traced a wrinkled stripe, which was moving away from the shore.» Now Lucia’s monologue, made possible by the presence of the water as duration, as psychic texture, a storehouse of elements (Thales) of a being reduced to memory, focuses almost exclusively on the image of the mountains, whose loss she regrets and which, in a process typical of the unconscious with an arguable manifestation of an Oedipus complex, are identified with the paternal image («unequal peaks, known to those who have grown up in your midst, and impressed in her mind, no less than the aspect of her closest family . . . «).
Deprived of the union symbolized by the mountain as phallic reality, Lucia-in a succession of images that at times achieves the impressive power of Molly Bloom’s nocturnal monologue, of which this is admittedly a minor but not unworthy copy-feels «disgusted and weary»: «The air seems to her burdensome and dead as she advances sad and absent in the tumultuous cities; the houses after houses, the streets opening into other streets seem to take her breath away.» Anyone can see the evident expressionistic derivation of these last images (Kafka is one of the first names that come to mind) as well as the distinct influence of the most recent descriptive techniques of the nouveau roman (the description of those houses after houses and streets that become other streets all too clearly shows the mark of the Butor of L’Emploi du temps and the Robbe-Grillet of Le Labyrinthe).
What now happens to Renzo, fleeing to Bergamo?
The calembour contained in the name of the city is self-evident: the word has two roots, one Germanic (Berg, mountain) and the other Greek (gamos, wedding). Bergamo represents, in fact, Renzo’s final attempt to restore his lost sexuality, as he yearns for symbolic marriage with the very symbol of it-but in so doing, in desiring that same symbol of his potency, he redirects his travail in an ambiguous homosexual ambiance, a clear and harmonious antistrophe to the equally ambiguous rapport that at the same time Lucia is establishing with the nun of Monza. Nor must we forget that Mr. Joyce, who lived for such a long time in Trieste, could not be ignorant of the sexual significance of the root mona, which we encounter once more, note, both in monaca (nun), with whom Lucia deals, and in monatti (the removers of corpses from the hospital, surrounding Lucia, when Renzo finds her there).
It is obvious, then, that with the greatest simplicity of means Mr. Joyce has managed here to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the human spirit, revealing its secret contradictions and realizing (triumph of ambiguity) in both leading characters the archetype of the androgyne. It is Lucia who in Chapter XXXVI accepts with joy the proposal of Padre Cristoforo, or, rather, his perceptive insinuation («If it ever seemed to me that two people were united by God, you two were they: now I do not see why God would wish to separate you»), and, asking to be united with Renzo, she realizes in modern form the myth of Salmakis, which takes on further implications if we recall that in this same chapter Padre Cristoforo, uttering the above hermetic declaration, undoubtedly refers to the neoplatonic divinity, whereby the union of the two characters becomes the figure of a cosmic union, a kabbalistic cingulum Veneris, in which the- very personality of the characters and their sexual individuality are joined in a higher unity. The unity is achieved, the author suggests, because in straightforward neoplatonic terms every impurity ceases; and in fact the decease of Padre Cristoforo (etymologically christos fero, and therefore «bearer of the anointed»), who comes to stand for impurity (there is in Padre Cristoforo the burden of an original sin, a youthful crime), coincides with the rainfall and therefore with water, the generating and enveloping principle, the
