This is the substance of the book, or at least what emerges from a first reading, for those who are reluctant to look for further hidden meanings beyond those that the narrative immediacy of the images, offers. But there are infinite subtle correspondences still to be pointed out! Think of the presence of the Unnamed, who suggests with such force the figure of the stranger in the mackintosh in Ulysses! And the parallel between the episode of the library and Mr. Magee (again in Ulysses) and the library of Don Ferrante! Or between the argument of Bloom in the tavern and that of Renzo, both men victims of a «law-abiding citizen»! Or between Lucia’s night in the castle of the Unnamed and Stephen Dedalus’s night in the brothel of Bella Cohen (who corresponds also to the figure of the «old woman» who receives Lucia)!
Such observations might lead us to speak of I promessi sposi as a minor work, a clever rehash of themes and images already exploited in previous works, but the novel, clearly demanding these back-references, becomes instead the summation and conclusion of all the preceding oeuvre. Must we then say that it represents the apex of the Joycean canon?
Perhaps not, but it does represent its fulfilment.
As we live in an odd country, where common sense occasionally assumes the eccentric forms of madness, there will surely be those who try to read this book in a thousand different keys, one more absurd than the next. Father Noon, S. J., will no doubt offer his interpretation, as he has interpreted Mr. Joyce’s previous work, seeking again to put this volume in a religious context, perhaps essaying (if we may prophesy) a definition of I promessi sposi as a novel of Providence.
Worse still, there will be no dearth of pseudointellectual interpretations that attempt to see these archetypal symbols as so many «narrative characters,» even ref erring to a so-called Joycean realism. And we strongly suspect that there will be those who dwell on the beauty of the language without bearing in mind that every expression, every image here is «beautiful» because it connotes a richer symbolic reality. But the temptation to aesthetic distortion is always present in criticism as in contemporary poetry, and thus it is difficult to know how to read a book. We therefore conclude this review of ours, which is also an invitation to direct and immediate contact with the text, by citing a statement made a few years ago by Ezra Pound when he commented on some verses of a -little poem printed by the firm of Faber & Faber, The Divine Comedy: «Rarely is clarity a gift of the poet, and for one vorticist like Cavalcanti we will always find ten academics bloated with culture like Burchiello. This means that Usury nests always in our midst, but there is always the lucidity of a phanopoeia that can save us. Why then spend four complex words — dolce colore d’oriental zaffiro-where it would have been so much more immediate and comprehensible to use the corresponding Chinese ideogram?»
1962
