Semiotics of Re-Reading: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, Italo CalvinoAnthony Julian Tamburri
Anthony Julian Tamburri’s volume provides us with both a theory and paradigmatic examples of its possible critical applications. The rereading of early works by Gozzano, Palazzeschi, and Calvino in the light of the ‘chronological reverse influence’ exerted on them by the later works is informed by a subtle, but crucial, variant of the model of the implied reader, the ‘retro-lector’. The opening chapter of the book is thus devoted to the definition of retrospective reading, and the discussion of its function within the semiotic process. Tamburri’s foundations lie firmly within the theoretical and critical developments of reader-reception theory, and theories of intertextuality. Allowing for (not insignificant) variations of premises and approach, these have provided literary criticism with two major, interrelated interpretative axioms: that reading is the protagonist of the semiotic process, and that texts are indeed always generated by other texts. What Barthes, Iser, Gadamer, Eco, Lotman, and others have given us, through the notion of implied or model reader, is a powerfully complex ‘function’ of the semiotic process: irrespective of chronological reader process’ (p. 29). The critic is, in this respect, the retro-lector par excellence. Not only does he/she bring to the reading of literature a more complex intertextual repertoire (the knowledge of other texts by other authors, contemporary, earlier, and later than the text being reread) but his/her knowledge of the complete oeuvre of any individual author (the toing and froing from earlier to later text) provides a further, crucial function within the semiotic process. This function is defined by Tamburri as ‘chronological “reverse influence”’ (p. 23): later texts become crucial intertexts for our interpretation of the earlier ones. By approaching the earlier text through the later one(s) we can become aware of potentiality, latency, budding intentionality of set ideas, themes, formal solutions, etc. This ‘bi-directional’ reading, says Tamburri, helps us in particular to make sense of those texts that display a deliberate estrangement with the canon that preceded them. The remaining chapters of the book but this new ‘function’ to the test precisely by focusing on early works by Gozzano, Palazzeschi, and Calvino—authors who are normally perceived as sharing a discourse of avant-garde experimentation. Each of them, writes Tamburri, at one point in their career informed their texts with certain ideas and codes which offered the contemporary reader no previous intertextual set of referents. Gozzano’s self-portraits, arguably one of this poet’s most innovative features, benefit from a bi-directional reading that explores their development chronologically, from La via del del rifugio (1907) to I colloqui (1911)—and back again, in reverse. What this yields is the realization that the ‘seeds’ of Gozzano’s most corrosive discourse, his refusal of D’Annunzio’s ‘stile altisonante’ and his self-portrait as self-isolated rebel, are already visible in the earlier texts. Tamburri goes on to explore two major autobiographical texts by Palazzeschi: riflessi (1905) and Il codice di Perelà (1911). In both cases, he argues, we are confronted with antecedents, anticipations of Palazzeschi’s later ‘manifestos’, Equilibrio and Il controdolore (1914), which only the intertextual repertoire implied in a retrospective reading will allow us to perceive. In particular, retrospective rereading is declared to be instrumental in ‘breaking the code’ of Palazzeschi’s subversive allegria, from the earlier playful leggerezza of ‘La Fontana malata’ to the subversive denial of ‘approfondimento’ in Perelà. Calvino is the third and last author tackled by Tamburri. Here we are on semiotic territory par excellence. ‘La città smarrita nella neve’, one of the stories from Marcovaldo (1963), where the protagonist is suddenly empowered by a heavy snowfall to attempt to redesign or rewrite the city, is shown to be an antecedent of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) through a retrospective reading informed by the latter text. Through a nimble toing and froing between the two texts, a remapping of Calvino’s semiosis is skillfully and convincingly accomplished. Calvino is shown to be pursuing as early as Marcovaldo that metaphor of authorial desire that informs and sustains his ‘anti-novel’. The ‘tentative conclusions’ as to the ‘necessity of re-reading’ (p. 102) and the status of the retro-lector are on the whole less convincing than the studies on the individual authors. We are left to wonder whether perhaps retrospective reading is not actually so deeply implied in the interpretative act as not to require such an occasionally cumbersome theoretical framing—but grateful for the insights it has yielded through such expert writing. Emmanuela Tandello, Christ Church, Oxford, MLR, 102.2, 2007
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