So structure is absolved, but on the grounds that it does not harm the poetry, not because it too is poetry. Structure functions as a buoy to which the poetic swimmer clings: it is good that it is there, but only to let us catch our breath before we start again on the crawl of lyric effusion. As if to say that Dante, who could not see at every step “the sweet colors of the oriental sapphire,” or Beatrice’s “smiling eyes,” took long rests by discoursing on theology and digressing on the composition of the heavens.
This concept of structure had nothing to do with the sense we would give to the term “structuralist” today; even though in this respect Pareysons theory of the totality of form could be reread in a structuralist way, his inspiration came from organicist aesthetics of Kantian and Romantic origin, not through the post-Saussure axis.
However, by opposing so decisively the poetry/structure dichotomy with his notion of the totality of artistic form, Pareyson risked falling into an organicist rhetoric.
It was one thing to say that in the complete work (and in fact right from the first moment when the initial spark starts the creative process) “tout se tient, “and that therefore theory must affirm and interpretative activity pick out the organic design supporting it, the individual rule, the “forming form” that in some dark way precedes the work, directing it as it is created, and appearing as the result and revelation of the formed form. And quite another thing to celebrate this “unity-totality of the work” in tones that frankly, forty years on, seem to us to belong more to a rhetoric of the Beautiful than to a phenomenology of forms. Just one example:
This dynamic character of the unity-totality of the work of art can explain the relations that exist within it between the parts and the whole. In a work of art the parts have a dual kind of relationship: each part with the others, and each part with the whole. All the parts are connected among themselves in an indissoluble unity, so that each one is necessary and indispensable and has a specific and non-interchangeable place, so much so that the absence of any part would disrupt the unity and any variation would return it to disorder … Each part is set up as such by the whole, which itself has summoned up and arranged the parts of which it is made up: if changing parts leads to the dissolution of unity and disintegration of the whole, that is because the whole itself presides over the coherence of the parts among themselves and makes them work together to form the whole. In this sense the relations that the parts have among themselves do nothing but reflect the relation that each part has with the whole: the harmony of the parts forms the whole because the whole forms their unity (page 107).
Too neat. Here—as elsewhere—Pareyson seems to be seized by a Pythagorean raptus, and one day it might be worthwhile tracing the sources of his aesthetics that he does not own up to, by going back beyond Romanticism to Renaissance Neoplatonism, or Cusanus. Not to mention some readings of the mystics, with whom he was familiar even though he did not write about them.
Is it possible that a theorist so sensitive to the moment of actual reading of works of art could think of it as an experience so overwhelmingly totalizing, of almost Panic raptus, never disrupted by moments of perplexity or dissatisfaction, either on the part of the artist (who, when rereading, revising, or relistening to the work, may wish to correct himself) or on the part of the critic (who might be tempted to correct the artist)? The good interpreter, who has penetrated the work, is also he who, even at the peak of his enthusiasm for an author, says every now and again, “I don’t like this,” or even “I would have put it better” (then, perhaps out of modesty, he does not actually say anything, but is straining at the leash all the same).
Yet Pareyson was the first to think of interpretation as an exercise that can also accentuate, attenuate, and put into perspective the work’s various aspects, and therefore—out of loyalty to the spirit of the work—also correct it. But it is immediately after writing the passage quoted above—and I chose that passage from the many I could have chosen precisely because of its closeness to the amazing “about-turn” I am about to discuss—that Pareyson confronts the problem of so-called inert moments, or “structure.” He confronts it in order to redeem structure, to make it part of the creative project, an essential, not a marginal or extraneous, moment: if “the whole emerges from the unity of its parts to produce something complete” there can be no trifling detail or irrelevant minutiae; and if in interpreting the work some parts are less important than others, this happens because in the organized form a distribution of functions takes place.
Pareyson is not saying—for this would be to read him as though he had written thirty years later, or had come from a different background—that The Divine Comedy is more beautiful for its theological construction than for its famous poetic pearls, which instead represent something accidental, not essential; but he certainly is saying that the Homeric structure underlying Joyce’s Ulysses is as important in an aesthetic sense as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which could not produce the effect it does were it not inserted into that structure, so that the reader must find in the monologue a whole host of infratextual quotations that necessarily refer back to other hints, apparently irrelevant and pointless, which have appeared over the course of the other chapters. Pareyson does not express himself in these terms, of course. He writes, rather, that “the really perspicacious observation of a work … is aimed not so much at contemplating the detail in itself as at inserting it among other details … in order to examine its irreplaceability in that living nexus where it appears as essential to the whole as it is revelatory of it, and is ready to evoke all the other parts in the very act of being invoked by them.”
And it is at this point that Pareyson realizes he has to come to terms not only with structure as framework but also with the irregularities, weaknesses, patches, mends, slips, drops in tension, and even actual faults that at times spoil the much-vaunted harmony and necessity of the structure.
Stopgaps, in fact. “Stopgap” (“zeppa”in Italian) is an inelegant word, like the flaw it alludes to, and in its sound “zeppa” conjures up cough, sneeze, regurgitation, and hiccup, whereas semantically it suggests a clumsy intrusion, an obvious repair job.*
And yet Pareyson, who is also an almost elevated writer, does not avoid this terminological stopgap when referring to an aesthetic stopgap. He uses it to describe works that appear “inconsistent and uneven, without thereby being open to the accusation of lacking poetry” (and we will allow this indulgence in the Crocean terminology to which he is so opposed; he means that certain works appear uneven and yet give an impression of great breadth and consistency of form), works in which the stopgaps function as crutches that are necessary for the whole work to proceed, they are bridges, bits of welding, “in which the artist works less carefully, less patiently or even with indifference, as though he were just getting through these bits, as though they were passages that, precisely because they are obligatory in order to move on, can be left to convention without prejudicing the whole” (p. 111).
Nevertheless, stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position. Let us deconstruct these metaphors (Pareysons aesthetics abounds in metaphors, and if we read it without bearing this in mind we risk not noticing how it questions fundamental problems of organization of systems); let us forget a personalized Whole that requires something. Pareyson is telling us that the stopgap is an artifice that allows one part to be linked to another, and thus that it is necessary. If a door has to open gently or majestically it has to have a hinge, however mechanical its function may be. The bad architect, obsessed with aesthetics, gets irritated because a door has to revolve around a hinge, and redesigns the hinge so that it appears “beautiful” while carrying out its function; and often by so doing he manages to create a door that creaks, sticks, does not open, or opens badly. The good architect, on the other hand, wants the door to open in order to reveal other rooms, and he does not care whether, having redesigned everything in the building, when it comes to the hinge he has to resort to the eternal wisdom of the ironmonger.
The stopgap accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows us, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
I would give as an example of stopgaps what contemporary theorists have called “turn ancillaries.” These are the phrases found in novels after quoted speech:
“The murderer is the viscount,” pronounced the police chief.
“I love you,” he said.
“Some saint will help us,” replied Lucia.
Apart from a few authors who take particular care in varying their “turn ancillaries” (choosing at different times between “he retorted,” “quipped,” “sneered,” “added thoughtfully”—and I am not saying that these are the best), the others, from the greatest
