Gianfranco Contini, an adventure «à la recherche» by Dante-Corriere.it

It was a captivating intellectual adventure that Gianfranco Contini, the maximum philologist, undertook from his youthful training between Domodossola, Pavia, Turin and Paris, passing through Freiburg during the war years and finally arriving in Florence and Pisa. An adventure ride the title of a recent anthology of Contini’s essays edited by Uberto Motta (Carocci editore), which obviously collects, with other studies, some of the most important writings on Dante, considered without any doubt and without comparison by Contini the greatest poet of the modern world (to whom he dedicated about forty interventions). Capital writings that changed the way of reading Alighieri, starting with the Introduction to the edition of Rhymes, released in 1939 for Einaudi and remained a cornerstone of Dante’s exegesis. Motta explains why well, accompanying each essay with a premise, very useful for clarifying methods, philological junctions and exegetical perspectives on which generations of university students have sweated, committed to tackling the Maestro’s stylistic hermeticism with their bare hands.

The corpus of about sixty missing rhymes, i.e. the poems not included in the New life n in Banquet, therefore does not form a coherent book but contains the traces of an ideal chronology. The introduction by the young Contini is based on the distinction between a collection of extravagant, i.e. scattered poems (those of Dante) and songbook (that of Petrarch): the first refractory to unification, in favor of plurality and “discontinuity”; the second aimed at a unitary and absolute design (the novel of a soul). Plurality, which is expressed in multiple styles and genres (between stilnovism, comic and stony realism, moral and doctrinal approach, resentful and burlesque duel), the sign of that process of permanent restlessness animated by an experimental and violently contradictory temperament on which Contini always insisted. In that idea of ​​Dante the experimenter, the hypothesis that even the Flowerthe poem with much-discussed authorship, was a link in the great chain represented by Dante’s work and in particular an anticipation of the major poem: the attribution to Dante of that allegorical journey is a hypothesis that today appears increasingly questioned.

Returning to Rhymesthe fact stands out that the numerous registers that we find there, unrelated to each other, will be put to good use in the Comedy. Contini maintains that for Dante technique is instrument and investigation of himself, one with the feeling of love and life. this the essence of danteit for the critic-philologist, this is probably also the essence of continuity.

The famous interpretation exercise (absent in Motta’s choice) on the sonnet Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare is linked to the same phase of studies, where Contini proposed a semantic analysis explaining the lexicon, apparently clear and simple for the modern reader, and placing it in the context of courteous technical language. Still following Dante’s itinerary undertaken by Contini, one cannot disregard (and Motta does not disregard) another luminous stage: the wise Dante as a character-poet of the Commediapreceded in 1953 by a reading of canto XXX of theHell: from this emerged three firm points on the Comedy: 1. the coexistence of structural strength and expressive and representative imagination (Motta’s words); 2. the systematic character of the poem for which each part is strictly functional to the whole; 3. the contaminating taste of the poet who combines history and news, sacred and profane mythology, invention and document, assigning the whole a value of univocal truth. These conquests would be enough to make Contini a dantist-prince. But there’s more.

If today it may seem like an even trivial approach, it was not so in 1957, when Contini, then at the head of the Dantesque Society, introduced a key distinction in studies on the Comedy. It alludes to the dual role of poet-author and character, protagonist of the story, that Dante occupies in his otherworldly journey. The extraordinary critical intuition from which Contini starts his approach to his beloved Research of Proustwhich reveals itself to the scholar as a conceptual skeleton or cognitive scheme (Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo dixit) to interpret Dante’s poem. On the other hand, while it is true that, as Motta points out, Contini never abandoned the profound conviction that it was useful to read past works in the “present”, in the cone of light that backwards projects the most recent results of artistic and literary research . It is enough to remember how the reference to Mallarm sheds light on the study of Petrarch’s variants and how, starting from the Cognition of painContini manages to identify a Gadda function (that is, an expressionist trend) of Italian literature in the previous centuries up to Contrast of Cielo d’Alcamo.

Following Croce’s principle, Contini reiterates that every true story is a contemporary story. Therefore, it should come as no surprise if the philologist, dealing with authors of the past, summons not only Proust and Mallarm to the page, but gradually Eliot, Pound, Melville, Kafka, Joyce… For Contini it is not a gamble to refer to current events to illuminate dormant or remote cultures, and even less if one thinks of Dante. Here is the ambiguity of the narrator who acts in the Research and who is sometimes called Marcel comes in handy to read the Comedy. The size of the microscope (the individual anecdotal one) and the size of the telescope (the absolute, exemplary one of the view from above) in Proust’s novel they condition each other. There are two I’s talking. Will it be like this also in Dante’s poem? Let’s try and see, says Contini. And he concentrates on demonstrating the mechanism that presides over Dante’s invention: the detail that becomes universal, the anecdote that becomes a symbol, sealing, through various passages, the idea of ​​the poem as the story or rather the autobiography of a poet. Ultimately, this is how Motta paraphrases the meaning of Contini’s essay: Each stage of his journey among the spirits ofHell and purgatory for Dante an opportunity to confront a possibility of guilt that he himself, as a poet and as an intellectual, has experienced and which he is therefore called to overcome.

1965 was the seven hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. And Contini signs in the Corriere della Sera an elzeviro entitled Dante oggi in which he returns to the irrepressible experimentalism of Alighieri. In years of roaring neo-avant-garde, perhaps Contini speaks to his daughter-in-law because his mother-in-law intends to underline how much theengagement Dantesque, nourished by formal innovation and ideological passion, was also total unscrupulousness towards reality. There are two monumental essays of the celebratory year: An interpretation of DanteAnd Dante’s philology and exegesis. The first shows examples of the intensity of purely formal values ​​(whose charm not even Petrarch was able to escape). But he also insists on the prodigious memory or mental library thanks to which Dante achieves an extreme realism, which Contini considers necessarily comical, being the sum of all traditions, the contamination of all thematic and formal registers. the famous plurilingualism, which contains the maximum excursion from the grotesque to the sublime. In the second essay, decidedly more methodological, Contini calls into question (polemically) Croce to claim the need for a dialectical relationship between philology and criticism, the first being the most objective foundation of the second (judgment, interpretation).

Ultimately, the volume of selected essays by Contini, which also includes studies on Petrarch, Ariosto, Leopardi, Manzoni, Pascoli, Ungaretti, Montale, Longhi, Gadda, Pasolini, as well as portraits of Croce and Mattioli, a guided re-proposition of the greatest Italian philologist and critic, who was undermined more than by his stylistic harshness, by his own blindly emulating followers. The possible traces of reading are numerous and all incredibly intertwined with each other. Always inspired by an indispensable principle: the morality of a scholar is all there: knowing how to punish yourself when you run too fast and, at the same time, not refusing enlightenment. So Contini answered a question from Ludovica Ripa di Meana, not surprisingly titled in the book-interview Diligence and voluptuousness. These two extreme terms, co-present in him, allowed Contini to grasp Dante’s nature, enjoying it to the fullest degree: an omnipenetrating nature, penetrating all realities and all psychological realities. With this certainty he also invited the less cultured public to let themselves be surprised by the Poet’s visitation: Here, there is only one thing as great as the truth of reality: the perception that Dante had of it, and that he transmitted to him his verses.