Spitzer’s antidote to half-hearted stylistic criticism

At the beginning of the 20th century, idealism supplanted positivism in European culture. In Italy, this shift is associated with the name of Benedetto Croce. And Croce is, in this sense, ambiguously linked to the new stylistic criticism, which sought to unite linguistic studies with literary ones. This is the critical approach of De Lollis and later Contini, Vossler and, above all, Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), of whom Riccardo Donati now presents "Un profilo intellettuale", published by Carocci. Having grown up in Vienna within a well-to-do Jewish middle class that was nevertheless threatened by anti-Semitism, Spitzer taught in Germany until Hitler’s rise to power, which first forced him into exile in Istanbul and then led to his emigration to the United States. His critical approach champions the value of the hermeneutic circle: it begins with a ‘click’ – an unpredictable overall intuition – then seeks to ground it in individual textual clues, before returning to an overarching view, in a ceaseless back-and-forth.

For Spitzer, a work of art is an organism with a fractal-like appearance: wherever one looks – in a syntactic detail or an ideological leitmotif – one always finds the same lifeblood, the author’s form or etymology. But no less than inventive geniuses, the critic is interested in collective expressions. After commenting on Rabelais, as a Habsburg censor during the Great War, he recorded the circumlocutions with which the poor Italian prisoners tried to allude to their hunger. Gradually, he combined stylistics with ‘historical semantics’ – that is, a history of the words and concepts that have influenced all the major languages of Europe, which for him, as for Curtius and Auerbach, constitutes an indivisible civilisation. At his death, Spitzer left behind an unfinished book on the idea of ‘harmony’ – first in the classical sense and then in the Christian sense – which certainly reflects its etymology more than any other concept. When analysing texts that appear to be torn by a rift, such as the ‘Canticle of Brother Sun’, he almost always manages to find a ‘harmony’ within them, perhaps provided by a rhythm that smooths out the contradictions in the discourse. He, of all people, who so keenly recognised the ‘chaotic enumeration’ as a distinctive feature of modern poetry, tends to discern beneath the chaos an eternal possibility of recomposition.

One of his most famous definitions concerns ‘classical restraint’, which, in Racine, sublimates the Baroque excesses of tragic themes. Donati is right to point out just how much fruitful irrelevance there is today in Spitzer’s approach to reading and re-reading texts without ever reducing them to flat ethical documents. I would add that Spitzer also acts as an antidote to those scholars who would like to practise a half-hearted stylistic critique, that is, one entirely focused on works in which the deviation from ‘normal’ language is all too marked. This cult of the easy transgression, in fact, renders one deaf to the subtler formal phenomena: ‘La Fontaine is a refined poet who artificially achieves the impression of the childlike quality of a (second) naturalness’, wrote Spitzer. ‘Certain critics, who immediately equate artistic elaboration with natural genius, lack any understanding of such things.’

Rabelais and La Fontaine, Dante and Whitman can only be discussed with equal credibility if one rejects the ‘Single Method’. The critic must remain versatile, and ‘research that seeks to bring to light the “individual” and “intuitive” elements of poetry must itself remain individual and intuitive, without degenerating into a formula’. Out of insatiable curiosity, the Italian intellectual who most resembles Spitzer is perhaps Giorgio Pasquali. But this Viennese intellectual – vitalistic, liberal, and driven by a profound nostalgia for a cosmic order capable of weaving together the most varied voices without homogenising them – seems almost to have stepped out of a novel by Bellow. Perhaps with an epigraph by Sandro Penna: ‘The world that seems to you to be bound in chains / is in fact woven from profound harmonies’.