Un uomo d'ingegno - an ingenious man, a man of wit
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Vico, metaphor, and the origin of language
By Marcel Danesi...The ingegno - "ingenuity," "invention" - emerged as the faculty the conscious mind required for organizing the meaning-making units produced by the fantasia into new units and structures. Whereas the fantasia is an epiphenomenal product of brain activity, the ingegno is a derivative of the fantasia - a kind of "epi-epiphenomenal activity. It is thus not connected directly to bodily processes, operating totally within mental space as it concatenates meaningful units to form context-free models of world events. Primordial "meaning" was a product of the ingegno as it sought to impose pattern onto the units that the fantasia had stored into memory. The ingegno is, therefore, the source of syntax in language and of narrative structure in verbal discours. It generated the earliest myths that humanity literally invented. Laws, scientific theories, fictional narrations, etc., are all traceable to the ability of the ingegno "to beget" - the word ingegno derives etymologically from Latin in "in" + gignere "to beget." (p.51)
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But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. --William Shakespeare
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"Concupiscence of Witt": The Metaphysical Conceit in Baroque Poetics J. W. van Hook
Modern Philology, Vol. 84, No. 1. (Aug., 1986), pp. 24-38.
The error of the approaches represented by both Mazzeo and Gilman is their insistence that the metaphysical image be measured against external reality. Referential standards, in fact, are more associated with the neo-classical reaction which, on the Continent as in England, cast disfavor on the baroque lyric style during the second half of the seventeenth century. F. Vausseur's _Orations_ of 1646, perhaps the earliest example of such a neoclassical objection, derides the metaphysical image as "une trahaison de la nature," which is not occultly connected but rather "droite, simple et bien proportionee."
On the other hand, baroque treatises like Peregrini's _Delle acutezze_ (1639) or Emanuele Tesauro's _Cannocchiale aristotelico_ (1654) begin by distinguishing the metaphor from all other tropes in terms which make this resort to external criteria irrelevant. 'Because it must form objects intended to be viewed by the mind with delight, " says Peregrini, a metaphor's "rarity and power will come from the appearance it gives of a reciprocal suitability between the elements it is working with, a suitability which must be created artificially" by the writer's own imaginative faculties. It is finally the status of these imaginative propositions that divides baroque theorists from their neoclassical opponents, who saw value only in empirical and rational statements. For Tesauro, on the other hand, metaphors' imaginative leaps brought into compelling focus the very objective realm his opponents were appealing to. Metaphor is "the most acute of the figures," he says, because it alone strives to "penetrate and investigate the most abstruse notions in order to JOIN THEM TOGETHER. The result is that, whereas the other figures dress someone's ideas in words, *metaphor clothes the words themselves in new ideas.*"
The production of such an unfamiliar sort of image was the responsibility of a mental faculty called the ingegno (wit, ingenuity). In its broad outlines, the faculty psychology inherited from Aristotle seemed as adequate to the baroque as it had to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. As Tesauro explains these outlines in his _Filosofia Morale_, the processes of thought take place in three stages: "The intellect begins as a tabula rasa, but finds itself naturally inclined to receive images and impressions of material things. It links these images together in FORMING propositions, and from these it eventually deduces consequences, the ultimate products of our intellectual powers. In traditional faculty psychology, the mind cannot form its propositions without making use of such Aristotelian "predicaments: or "categories": as an object's "qualities," "actions," "causes," and possible "relationships." Analysis along these lines is a learned behaviour, and the categories it depends on are presumed to name actual functions or properties of things in the natural world. The propositions that analysis discovers thereby bear on objective experience in direct and uncomplicated ways. At the heart of the baroque aesthetic, on the other hand, lies a fundamental rejection of such a cognitive model, one which ultimately calls into question all empirical truth claims by denying that the "predicaments" of analysis uncover real truths about phenomena. Peregrini goes so far as to propose that these analytical categories are instead mental projections inherent in the structure of our cognitive faculties rather than in the world these faculties interpret: "I say that there are within the ingegno all things, existing there as ideas, images, phantasms. And they are not piled up there in heaps,...but arranged, like the merchandise in stalls in some great piazza, with each item in its proper storage space...similar compartments are found within the human mind for the ideas or phantasms we hold of all kinds of things."
One corollary of the epistemological model that the baroque theorists drew was that the analytical categories necessarily delimit, in the very act of structuring, the scope of human awareness. "Without the right kind of access to these sources," as Peregrini continues, man "inhabits a grand palace, stocked with every sort of provision...but without knowing where the wine cellar is, nor which key will unlock which door." Since Tesauro believes that the categories with which our minds process raw-sense impressions determine what we are able to be conscious of, he expresses skepticism about the ultimate objectivity of all knowledge. Hence the need for the active new cognitive faculty of the ingegno, which, as he explains it, can be taught how to handle the mind's intrinsic categories in a new way. Instead of merely assuming the priority of the categories, we can learn by means of the ingegno to "penetrate those things which lie obscured withing the separate categories, and to bring them together for comparison."
(snip)
Metaphor, understood as the product of such a wide-ranging faculty (wit, ingenuity) is the record of the speculative explorations by which the ingegno probes experience and fuses it into intelligible wholes. The trope's characteristic effect is to "send our minds flying between one sort of thing and another, so as to make more than one idea appear in a single word." Since the ingegno apprehends things prior to and independently of the rational judgment, its metaphors will be neither true nor false: in this, Tesauro is something like Sidney, whose poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth." Instead, metaphor can only suggest intuitively appealing configurations of meaning and will be considered "more acute and ingenious as the insights it captures are the less superficial" and self-evident. "In fact," says Peregrini in his most extreme formulation of this view, "the more an expression has of appearance and the less of substance, the more admirable it will be." The baroque image, which Tesauro insists should be kept "unencumbered by questions of objective truth," is thus the potential vehicle for a uniquely grounded version of reality which translucently "shines through" the metaphor's paradoxical assertions. By identifying the realm of experience and connectedness man is capable of imagining, such an image celebrates what one postmodernist critic, Giuseppe Conte, calls "man's limitless prerogative in the act of signifying" by offering access to a distinctly post-Renaissance world "which is not the epiphany of any far-off and immutable realm, but rather is built up out of the signs we offer up and transform: a world which only by means of these signs succeeds in coming into being at all."
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Amorphus. That's good, but how Pythagorical?
Phi. I, Amorphus. Why Pythagorical Breeches?
Amo. O most kindly of all, 'tis a CONCEIT of that fortune,
I am bold to hug my Brain for.
Pha. How is't, exquisite Amorphus?
Amo. O, I am RAPT with it, 'tis so fit, so proper,
so happy. --
Phi. Nay do not rack us thus?
Amo. I never truly relisht my self before. Give me
your Ears. Breeches Pythagorical, by reason of their trans-
migration into several shapes.
Mor. Most rare, in sweet troth.
(Cynthia's Revels, Jonson)
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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels - Prologue
IF gracious silence, sweet attention,
Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,
(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;
Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.
And therefore opens he himself to those;
To other weaker Beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,
To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,
In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath,
She shuns the print of any beaten PATH;
And proves new ways to come to LEARNED Ears:
Pied ignorance she neither loves nor, fears.
Nor hunts she after popular Applause,
Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jaws:
The Garland that she wears, their bands must twine,
Who can both censure, understand, define
What merit is: Then cast those piercing Rays,
Round as a Crown, instead of honour'd Bays,
About his Poesie; which (he knows) affords
Words, above action: MATTER, ABOVE WORDS.
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"For , let your soule be assur'd of this (in any ranke, or profession what-ever) the more generall, or major part of opinion GOES WITH THE FACE, and (simply) respects nothing else. Therefore, if that can be made exactly, curiously, exquisitely, thorowly, it is inough" (2.3.53-57) Amorphus, Cynthia's Revels
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"Appearances constitute one of the great themes of (Montaigne’s) Essays. In the world of paroistre, a mask sits upon the face of all things, and humans are forever beguiled by titles, speech, and gestures. There can be no excape from the tyranny of the visible , of course, because humans judge the world through their senses and the senses are corrupt. In his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne established our radical ignorance of the world, and later, in Book III, he repeated nearly verbatim a passage form the “Apology” on the weakness of the senses: (The senses act as the proper and primary judges for us, and they perceive things only by their external accidents.”) If humans are capable of seeing only surfaces, how then can they distinguish true being from mere art? The essay “Of physiognomy” addresses this question by challenging the absoluteness of categories (e.g. nature/art) used to demarcate boundaries that are in fact fluid. "
The Face in the Text: Montaigne's Emblematic Self-Portrait (Essais III: 12), by Hope H. Glidden Renaissance Quarterly © 1993 Renaissance Society of America.
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Heere Shakespeare lyes whome none but Death could Shake
and heere shall ly till judgement all awake;
when the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes
the wittiest poet in the world shall rise.
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But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
REASON as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
*Oft in her absence* mimic FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; *but MISJOYNING SHAPES,
WILDE WORK produces oft*, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:
Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_
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Milton, L'Allegro
139: Or sweetest Shakespeare, FANCY'S CHILD,
140: Warble his native wood-notes WILD.
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Beware the Sonnets:
SIGNIFYING NOTHING
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 1667
The ill effects of this superfluity of talking have already overwhelm'd most other Arts and Professions, insomuch that when I consider the means of happy living and the causes of their corruption, I can hardly forbear recanting what I said before, and concluding that ELOQUENCE ought to be banished out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners. To this opinion I should wholly incline, if I did not find that it is a Weapon which may as easily be procured by bad men as good, and that, if these should onely cast it away, and those retain it, the naked Innocence of Vertue would be upon all occasions expos'd to the armed Malice of the wicked.>>
From _Milton and Empiricist Semiotics_, Daniel Fried
When Hobbes (...) discusses reason, he finds that reason fails and falls into absurdity from seven separate causes - tellingly, all seven are due to semiotic abuses, and most are part of Hobbes's anti-scholasticism. The problems include the lack of clear definitions of words, the naming of concepts and qualities as if they were physical realities, the use of metaphor, and the use of non-signifying words, such as "hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now, and the canting of Schoolemen". He goes on to conclude, "The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity (...) And on the contrary, METAPHORS, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like IGNES FATUI, and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities: and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt." Putting aside the bizarreness of Hobbes's metaphorical excoriation of metaphor, the choice and treatment of the trope are exactly the same as Milton's famous usage:
Hope elevates, and joy
Bright'ns his Crest, as when a wandring Fire
Compact of unctuous vapor, which the Night
Condenses, and the cold invirons round,
Kindl'd through agitation to a Flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends
Hovering and blazing with delusive Light,
Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer from his way
To Boggs and Mires, and oft through Pond or Poole,
There swallow'd up and lost, from succour farr.
So glister'd the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve our credulous Mother, to the Tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe;
Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake.(9. 633-645)
Bright'ns his Crest, as when a wandring Fire
Compact of unctuous vapor, which the Night
Condenses, and the cold invirons round,
Kindl'd through agitation to a Flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends
Hovering and blazing with delusive Light,
Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer from his way
To Boggs and Mires, and oft through Pond or Poole,
There swallow'd up and lost, from succour farr.
So glister'd the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve our credulous Mother, to the Tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe;
Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake.(9. 633-645)
The fact that Eve's end was, in fact, contention, and sedition and contempt suggests that Hobbes’s metaphor may have at least partially inspired Milton's. But even if there was no connection, there are enough formal similarities to suggest that, in analyzing Satan's rhetoric to Eve, one ought consider the extent to which his deceptiveness takes advantage of the EMPTY linguistic SIGNS Hobbes rails against.
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Following from: Courtly Performances Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier ,Wayne A. Rebhorn
When the courtier's audience claps enthusiastically in response to his performance and rewards him with the grace of its praise, Castiglione defines its characteristic reaction with a most important term: maraviglia. For instance, Ludovico da Canossa urges the courtier to use sprezzatura to hide the effort involved in difficult or unusual feats: "Because everyone knows the difficulty involved in matters that are rare and well done, whence facility in them generates great marvel". Later, in Book II, Frederico Fregosa sums up his own advice to the ideal courtier, again focusing on maraviglia as the response he should seek in his audience: <
These key passages leave no doubt that marvel or wonder is the basic response the courtier seeks to arouse in everyone about him and that it is essential for his social success.
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Marvelous \Mar"vel*ous\, a. [OE. merveillous, OF. merveillos, F.
Merveilleux. See Marvel, n.] [Written also marvellous.]
1. Exciting wonder or surprise; astonishing; wonderful.
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our WONDER and ASTONISHMENT
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the WONDER of our stage!
My SHAKSPEARE rise !
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Rebhorn, (con't.)
During the sixteenth century, maraviglia (which also appeared as the verb maravigliarsi) embraced a wide variety of meanings, including marvel, wonder, surprise, the unexpected, the extraordinary, the monstrous, and the supernatural, and it indicated an intensity of response ranging from mild surprise to total astonishment. Marvel was the typical response elicited by displays of virtuosity, technical feats, and witty word games like the double entendres that Bibbiena declares "cause marvel rather than laughter" (II, 58, 278). On a deeper level, marvel could also involve vibrant impressions of beauty, revelations of unimagined aspects of reality, or startling flashes of insight into the strange truth of things. In either case, it meant not only a delight in being surprised, but an enthusiastic admiration for the cleverness, intellectual inventiveness, and profundity of the performer. Hence, it was a reaction that Renaissance artists especially sought to produce by creating unusual, fantastic, bizarre, and surprising works. In his Cortegiano, Castiglione uses maraviglia in just this sense on several occasions, praising the marvelous music produced by voice and viol playing in concert (II, 13, 209) and lauding Sannazaro's poems 'con le maraviglie' (II, 35, 245). Since he presents his ideal courtier as nothing less than the artist of his own personality, a virtuoso actor who has perfected his art to the point where he can toss off the most demanding roles with the most assured ease, it is singularly appropriate that his audience should respond to him with maraviglia, just as they would marvel at the incredible beauties and ingenious creations of Raphael and Michelangelo.
(snip)
Another way to understand yet more fully the response involved in Castiglione's concept of maraviglia is to remember that from antiquity through the Renaissance, it was the expected and desired reaction to paradox. Both Cicero and Quintilian translated the Greek term paradokson (paradox) appropriately with words derived from the Latin verb 'admirer', meaning to wonder or marvel at, and later in the sixteenth century, the English rhetorician Puttenham, when considering
paradox as a figure of speech, instructively called it "the wonderer". For all of them, paradox was a species of serio ludere, a playing with words, concepts, or value systems that could be a gay, frivolous amusement, and engrossing pastime, or a profound experience intimating truths and realities far beyond normal experience. Thus, although paradox always depends on an audience's delight in surprise, the reaction of wonder it produces may include a number of different emotional intensities and involvements, from raised eyebrows to openmouthed astonishment. Upon closer scrutiny, the marveling response to paradox actually turns out to be two-fold: the paradox akin to bafflement; then it stimulates the puzzled mind to an exploration or questioning of what it has experienced, thus intensifying its involvement in the experience and in some cases, at least, leading to the perception of deeper truths. The wonder produced by paradox is itself ultimately paradoxical: the simultaneous experience of mystification and revelation.
As the preceding analysis would suggest, the maraviglia aroused by the ideal courtier's performance might productively be considered a response to paradox, especially since it invites definition in paradoxical terms, whether it is considered a matter of disciplined spontaneity, the easy resolution of the difficult, or the artful imitation of nature. Moreover, Castiglione's courtier himself can be read as a creature of paradox: while he is a man like all men who has neither transcendent authority nor superhuman abilities, strives hard to appear average, and values 'mediocrita' as his chief virtue; at the same time, he performs with an ease and mastery that suggest absolute superiority to the physical and social restrictions that bind ordinary mortals. To such a paradoxical performer, as to his paradoxical performance, the response of marvel thus seems most fitting indeed.
At times, this response seems little more than a simple pleasure in wit and inventiveness; the courtier's audience admires without intense involvement his ability as a performer to play with words and entertain them with stunts and clever stories, just as they admire Bibbiena for his comic performance during the second evening. At other times, the response seems far deeper, and *it derives its intensity precisely from the fact that the courtier represents for his creators the realization of their profoundest needs and desires*. The image he creates unites the culture's ideal of witty sophistication and urbanity, the artful refinement of civilization at its height, to its happy dream of prelapsarian innocence, simplicity, and nature. The courtier is both the first citizen in the City of Man and an image of Adam reborn in Paradise. In fact, all the major attributes that define his style have a basically double character, expressing both the conscious ideals and the unconscious dreams of Castiglione's culture: his dignita del gentilhomo corresponds to his worldly position and the values of civilization while it recalls Adam's more fundamental, God- given dignity; his grace reveals an easy mastery of social forms and at the same time invokes the state of grace man enjoyed in Eden; his simplicity and naturalness indicate the civilized man's perfect taste, which is free from affectation, but they simultaneously suggest Adam's innocence and harmony with nature. The observers wondering response to the courtier thus testifies to the pleasure they experience as he fulfills their dreams. Moreover, in doing so, he satisfies two even more profound needs: their need to find order in the world and to feel that man is truly free. In effect, the courtier provides his audience with a sense of congruence between what they deeply hope to see and what they actually do see; he creates the vision of the ideal achieved in the midst of an imperfect historical world. The courtly performer momentarily obliterates the gap between 'is' and 'ought,' between reality and desire; he gives a taste of Eden to men who still eat the fruit of a fallen earth. Moreover, in addition to this intimation of order, he gives them a glimpse of freedom. For Castiglione, as for most others during the Renaissance, freedom did not come from rebelling against the law, but from mastering and fulfilling it perfectly and thus rising above it to what constitutes man's only real independence (see IV, 21,473). This is precisely the freedom the courtier manifests as he creates his image of total mastery over limitations of every sort and plays every role he undertakes to absolute perfection. He is thus a perfect expression of order and a perfect expression of freedom - one final paradox to arouse the ecstatic wonder of his audience.
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The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature
David M. Posner
Edmund Spenser summed up the aspirations of a class and an age when he described, in the Faerie Queene (I, v, 1, 1-4), the state of mind of the Redcrosse Knight on the eve of a great tournament:
The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest, until it forth have brought
Th’eternal brood of glorie excellent…
This image of nobility – as something pure, unmediated, even innocent– is one which late Renaissance nobility liked to hold of itself, at a time when the possibility of artless, unconstrained public self- presentation seemed as if it were rapidly being foreclosed. The historical position and identity of the nobility were being threatened by the rise of the modern nation-state and the new power and importance of the princely court. A nostalgic yearning for a Golden Age of artless self-presentation thus formed an important part of the ideology of nobility in this period. Spenser’s text itself executes a double movement of optimism and despair; even as these lines enunciate the idealized image of the “noble hart,” they simultaneously suggest the impossibility of its realization. This comes about both through the self-conscious archaism of the Faerie Queene as a whole, situating itself in a nostalgically viewed and no longer accessible past, and through this passage’s insistence on the inability of that “noble hart” to rest, to be content, until it has attained the “eternal….glorie” – that is – the public fame, the perfect reputation always still to be achieved – that will render it immortal. In Spenser, internal virtue in not enough for the noble soul; that soul cannot rest, indeed noble identity cannot be said to exist, until it is confirmed in front of an audience. It is this imperative of display, of the public performance of nobility that is the subject of the present work.
The link between theatricality and ideas of nobility and courtly behaviour in the late Renaissance, hinted at here in Spenser, is made far more explicit by other Renaissance writers, who regularly use the metaphor of the theatre to describe both the court and noble identity. To be sure, this usage is in part just another version of the ancient commonplace of the theatrum mundi; but for authors and readers of the period, who are often themselves players on the stage of the court, it seems to acquire a particular urgency. The present inquiry will investigate the reasons for this urgency and its futility. (pp. 1-2)
(snip)
The theatrical discourse of which the Caracteres (La Bruyere) are a kind of culmination is set in motion, in the early sixteenth century, by Castiglione’s Cortegiano. Its dazzling aestheticized vision of courtly behavior, dominated by metaphors of performance and theatricality, engenders a seemingly endless proliferation of texts on questions of nobility, courtliness, and identity, all governed to a greater or lesser extent by the same topos of the theatre. The Cortegiano can in some sense be held responsible for the entire range of such texts, from the sophisticated critiques of Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld to the compound platitudes of Cammillo Baldi or Eustache de Refuge. While these texts vary widely in complexity and sophistication, they all work within a *discourse of public identity* whose terms and conditions are largely established by Castiglione. This is not to suggest that Castiglione invents the problem, nor that he is the first to apply systematically the metaphor of the theatre to the question of public identity. On the contrary, the notions of public life as a kind of theatre, and of the individual-as-actor are already commonplaces for Cicero, from whom Castiglione borrows not only the quasi-theatrical form of his work, but also a number of key metaphors. But Castiglione’s artful reformulations of classical topoi of theatricality have resonances for his Renaissance readers that even Cicero cannot always match.
(snip)
Castiglione’s emphasis on the persuasive effectiveness of performance is therefore a development of something already present in Cicero, rather than a radical turning away from the Ciceronian ideal. The direction of this development is nevertheless significant and revealing. Castiglione recognizes the danger of persuading an audience of something they do not want to hear (a danger equally real for Cicero, although he was perhaps less willing to recognize it), and therefore moves away form the idea that the purpose of persuasion, and of its attendant delectation, is to present potentially uncomfortable truths with overwhelming rhetorical force. The aesthetic pleasure brought to the audience becomes, for Castiglione, more of an end in itself; rather than being in the service of forensic persuasion, it is part of a larger context of princely otium, and functions for the performer primarily as a means of attracting favor and onore to oneself, and as a means of self-protection.
Posner, (con't)
Even and especially when the noble courtier is performing that function most proper to his class, namely making war, that activity becomes above all a performance designed not so much to serve the interests of the State as to impress one’s employer. One should be sure, when in battle, to perform one’s heroic deeds as visibly as possible, and if it can be managed, right in front of one’s boss. The practical results – if any – of this martial performance, and of other, less overtly dangerous forms of showing off, are vastly less important than the perception therof by the princely onlooker. In the discussion in book II, section 11, of masquerade (“lo esser travestito”), and of its great utility for showing of one’s true (noble) identity through disguising it, Castiglione emphasizes that the success of the courtier’s performance is determined by the audience reaction, and particularly by whether or not the audience “si diletta e piglia peacere” (“is delighted and pleased”). Control of that reaction, through controlling the pleasure experienced by the beholder, thus becomes paramount. This pleasure arises not from the audience’s experience of the showing forth of some Truth, a la Cicero, but rather from its being deceived. Castiglione shows that the essence of the courtier’s performance is a kind of multi-layered deception, in the form of a performed concealment – a concealment that pretends to be the opposite, to be an intentionally incomplete concealment that instead reveals, with a wink and a nudge, the “truth” behind its supposedly consensual pretense. Through performing "con abito disciolto,”: in a disguise meant to be seen into, the performer invites the audience to feel as though it is in on the joke. The audience’s pleasure arises from its accepting that invitation, from being fooled into believing that , rather than being fooled, it is seeing beyond the mask (representing e.g. a pastor selvatico, a peasant) to the “real” (i.e. noble) visage underneath. The precise locus of this pleasure, as Castilione makes clear, is the tension between what is actually seen and what is artfully hinted at, without however being revealed in what Bacon will call the “Naked, and Open day light” of Truth. Nor could that shadowy something-hinted-at ever be thus revealed, as it is neither presence nor substance, neither essence nor Truth, but rather the reflection of the desire of the beholder, at the very moment of “l’animo…(chi)…corre ad imaginar…” (“the mind which rushes to imagine”)*. In this specular performance, there is always something more – Castiglione’s “molto maggior cosa” – than can be seen, or indeed be present; the desire for that shadowy cosa is the delectation proper to this masquerade, and it is the eliciting of that desire that is the object of the courtier’s performance.
The success of that performance, of its come-hither pseudo- revelation, is in turn dependent on a sort of meta-deception, another layer of pretense that likewise attempts to disguise itself as its opposite. The courtier’s performance must persuade, but that effort at persuasion must itself be covered over by another persuasive effort, on that “demonstrates” to the audience that no effort at persuasion is being made. One cannot be seen to be doing what one is in fact doing, namely working very hard to persuade one’s audience of a noble identity which – if it actually were what it claims to be – would need no rhetorical helps to impose its intrinsic veracity, its mathematical Identity with itself, on the minds and emotions of the audience. That such an effort of rhetoric is in fact needed suggest that the Identity being performed is not what it professes to be, or at least that the person laying claim to it has no intrinsic, “natural” right to do so. Effort must therefore be disguised as its opposite; one must persuade the witnesses to that effort of its absence. This is asprezzatura.(pp. 9-12)
(snip)
Castiglione appropriates from Cicero the notion of artful artlessness, as well as its seductive effect: that the audience, finding what it beholds “sit venustius sed non ut appareat,” is incited to suspect, and desire, the presence of something more than what is actually seen. (While Castiglione’s rewriting of diligens negligentia jettisons the explicit comparison with the woman made more beautiful and attractive by her non-use of external adornments, the model of a seductive delectation is everywhere implicit in Castiglione’s idea of the courtier’s relationship with his or her audience.) But the Cortegiano expand the field of application of diligens negligentia well beyond the narrow limits of a single style of oratory; sprezzatura governs all courtly behaviour, and indeed is its essential defining characteristic. Upon it depends grazia, grace, which must be seen to accompany the courtier’s every action; *upon it depends above all the crucial ability to persuade one’s public of the presence of the “molto maggior cosa,” that Something Else, always just beyond the reach of clear perception, which is the key to noble identity*.(p.13)
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Pierre Spriet, _Hamlet: The End of the Innocence of Language_
"Hamlet shakes the foundation of the social contract, for to say that words lie and that everything is just show is to declare war on society. One must not say that reality is theatrical and that falsehood is everywhere because coincidence between words and things is impossible. To survive, the group must believe in words and pretend that it trusts the show. The tragedy presents a Hamlet who does exactly the reverse: he is mad because he thinks that the veil of 'differance' might not exist and that its existence is a disgrace. He grows desperate and questions the basis of a social game that demands deviation and reflection but also implies that the people remain unaware of this deviation. The gap between words and things must remain veiled; society exists by refusing to accept that the word might not be the thing: it builds communication on the coincidence that it demands between the sign and referent. Society considers noncoincidence as a deplorable accident that does not endanger a contract founded on the adequation between words and things and on the conviction that reality is not a show. "
"Fortinbras takes no part in what might be called the quarrel about signs. He does not fight with words; he does not pervert communication. On the contrary, Hamlet is only words and show: "You are welcome, masters," he says twice to the players. He is the only one to greet them as masters of words - that is, of lies. What the text calls madness in Hamlet is definitely the impossibility of reading as one reads Fortinbras. Everything about Hamlet is enigmatic, open to multiple readings. The transformation of Hamlet is first of all his new nontransparency. The tragic hero is constructed in such a way that he becomes incomprehensible; in him signs become opaque. The play establishes Fortinbras as a character who ignores that opacity. Contrary to Claudius and Laertes who die for it, Fortinbras does not act. He is confirmed in innocence that he is not even aware that he is acting. This is precisely the innocence demanded by the social contract that affirms a strict correspondence between things and signs, a necessary condition of communication. Hamlet refuses this correspondence after trusting it too much. Without any transition, he shifts from an excess of innocence to an excess of deceit; he realizes that language exist in a state of absolute uncertainty and refuses to live in the precariousness of relative uncertainty.
(snip)
Those who are masters of words are eventually the masters of things. Hamlet is the provisional end of the innocence of language, followed by the restoration of the empire of words. (Fortinbras). It is absolutely normal - that is, cultural - that the protagonist of the tragedy who proclaims the end of the spectacle should be strong, powerful Fortinbras, an actor who is so good that he does not even know that he is acting."
(snip)
"Words lie indeed, but we only have words to bring things into existence. To exist is to speak and therefore JOIN THE GAME, but this should not be said. We must believe that words are not just play and spectacle but fragments of truth. As in Hamlet, ironically some of our contemporaries pretend that they do not believe in words but they are eventually reunited in their mystical, necessary belief in the truth of words and signs. They too, if they want to live, must proclaim the end of the spectacle and assume the innocence of Fortinbras that assures the survival of the group". (Spriet)
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