But a stopgap is not just this. It can be a banal opening, which can be useful for finding a sublime ending. It was one night, at three in the morning, on the Colle dell’Infinito (the hill where Leopardi wrote “L’infinito”) at Recanati, where the first words of one of the finest almostsonnets of all time have been carved, that I realized that its opening, “Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle” (This solitary hill has always been dear to me), is quite a banal line, which could have been written by any minor poet of the Romantic or other ages or movements. What can a hill be, in poetic “language,” except “solitary”? And yet without that banal opening, the poem would not take off, and perhaps it needed to be banal, so that the Panic feeling of that shipwreck at the end, which is so memorable, could be felt.
I would go so far as to say, perhaps just to pursue my thesis, that a line like “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (In the middle of the journey of our life) has the singsong dignity of a stopgap. If it were not followed by the rest of The Divine Comedy, we would not have attached much importance to it, perhaps we might have thought of it as just an idiom.
I am not saying that the opening phrase is always a stopgap. There are openings to some of Chopin’s polonaises that are certainly not stopgaps. ” Quel ramo del lago di Como” (That stretch of Lake Como) is not a stopgap; nor is “April is the cruellest month.” But let us consider the end of Romeo and Juliet and then tell me whether it would not have ended better without the last sentence (in italics):
A glooming peace this morning with it brings, The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head. Go hence to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished: For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
However, if Shakespeare decided to conclude with this moralizing banality, it can only be because he wanted to allow the spectators to catch their breath before allowing them to leave in peace, after the bloodbath they had just witnessed. So it was right that there was a stopgap there.
“It was Leo who was the first to fall asleep” is not bad. But then Moravia adds: “Carla’s unexpected, if inexperienced, assault on him had exhausted him.” Come on, what can an adult who has been subjected to an adolescent’s amorous assault be except “exhausted”? Does not that “unexpected, if inexperienced, assault” sound as if it had been taken from a judge’s verdict? Nevertheless, without this rather clumsy but essential passage it would not be possible to begin chapter 10 of Moravia’s Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), where the sad truth is made evident that “omne animal triste est post coitum.”
There is no need to belabor the point: “Examples of this are so widespread as to embrace the whole history of the arts” (Estetica,). Certainly. Moreover, it is by arguing how stopgaps can be compensated for by the whole that Pareyson gradually moves on to talk of mutilations, of the action of time on things, of rubble, ruins, fragments, and the wastage that the work is subject to, and how despite all of this we can reconstitute its intimate legitimacy. A section that would not be clear unless we also saw the central value of the stopgap, and the appreciation for something that is not complete, because only if a work can be appreciated in spite of, and even because of, its imperfections can it be enjoyed in spite of (and perhaps because of) its weakness.
Thus, counterbalancing that kind of Platonic optimism that led Pareyson to celebrate form in its adamantine perfection, his remarks on stopgaps (inspired by concrete experiences of reading) lead his phenomenology of art back to more human dimensions.
If, however, we reexamine the problem of the stopgap in the light of Kant’s doctrine of the reflecting judgment, it may become less marginal than it seems at first sight—both in the sense that the stopgap cannot be a marginal element in the work of art, and in the sense that the question of the stopgap is not so marginal in Pareysons aesthetics. For Pareyson, the reference to Kant is obligatory: his theory of form as autonomous organism stems from his reflections on the third Critique and on the aesthetics of German idealism.
Let us review Kant’s position: the recognition of organicity emerges in the reflecting judgment; the organicity of nature is postulated as an order that has to exist in things but which things by themselves do not exhibit; it has to be constructed, projected, as if. It is only because we cannot fail to see nature as an organism that we are then able to turn to art in the same spirit. But a judgment of organicity will be, like all reflecting and teleological judgments, a hypothesis: nature is sampled through its primary patterns and is more and more subtly subjected to interpretative activity.
This must be due to countless other influences, but the weight that interpretation assumes in Pareysons philosophy is also due to Kantian aesthetics.
Interpretative activity involves (and this is a central point for Pareyson) a kind of “perspective.” Now, in pronouncing verdicts on organicity in things of nature, one finds elements that seem to contradict the postulate of the perfection of form: namely, stopgaps. They remain as a record of evolution, elements that at first seem not to work together with the whole but to exist in a natural body like records of a failed attempt. In studying the work’s form, and subsequently in categorizing it and inserting it into the architecture of genus and species, sometimes these elements are dropped, or kept in the shade while the beam of interpretative attention shifts to illuminate other elements it considers central.
One might wonder to what extent this criterion intervenes or not in the assignment of internal legitimacy to a work of art. The latter is given shape by the interpretative act, which sees it as a completed organism, and is stripped of apparently nonessential aspects, which are sacrificed in favor of others, and only in a further or parallel interpretation do these aspects come to assume a more prominent position. This is exemplified by the history of Dante criticism: theological elements that were seen by Romantic criticism as stopgaps (if they were defined as such) become fundamental in the light of a criticism that has injected greater familiarity with the medieval cultural world (dealing with a Dante that is reread not only after, say, Gilson, but also after Eliot), become the essential grain of the poetic architecture, just as much as the vaults and windows do in a Gothic cathedral. The perspective of Dante’s cantica is thereby reversed: one discovers that Dante is sometimes more of a poet when he is talking of the planetary spheres and the flashes of light than when he is moved by the love affair of Paolo and Francesca.
The stopgap then becomes relative, surviving like a remnant of a stage of interpretation, and as such remains in reserve, ready to assume a different light in a new “reading,” for which it will no longer be accidental.
We looked at the example of turn ancillaries: we accept them as stopgaps, and as stopgaps we “skim” them. That someone said, sneered, insinuated, or replied does not seem to us to be essential to the dialogue’s progress or the narrative universe that it illuminates. They are almost casual support posts. Then, suddenly, for another reader these “points” (in the railway sense of the term) become fundamental, for good as well as for ill: if for some authors they are pure elements of a “gastronomic” strategy (at times the fact that someone “sighs” rather than “says” can produce effects that are actually pornographic), for others these interjectory mechanisms become instead an element of rhythm, an indicator of harshness or restraint, or of extraordinary inventiveness. The stopgap is then redeemed, and becomes a structural element; from essential but inelegant it becomes inessential but graceful, or even supremely necessary. The work as organism has been examined from a different point of view.
If this were the case, it would mean that in Pareysons aesthetics a stopgap acts as more than a prudent corrective to the Platonic or Neoplatonic triumph of Form in all its metaphysical purity, and as a recognition of the material life of “forms,” which are also accepted as impure and imperfect; it is also something that interpretation sets aside, keeping it as a latent opportunity or stimulus for later interpretations, a potential signal capable of calling the interpreter back to renewing with each reading his faithful commitment to the works promises. Thus interpretation is reconfirmed as both free and faithful at the same time, capable of many indulgences as long as in the end it comes to rest in the recognition of a form,
