The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books. (Reviews).

Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xiv + 267pp. $55. (cl), $18.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8047-3904-8 (cl), 0-8047-3905-6 (pbk).

If I understand it correctly, Harry Berger's argument in The Absence of Grace goes something like this: Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and della Casa's Galateo define certain courtly values "under the appearance" of embracing them, but they also "distance themselves from what they represent" (5). Sprezzatura, "an art of behaving as if always under surveillance" (12), defines the new role of a courtly aristocracy that is overtaking the old feudal nobility. The latter based its claims for status upon the materiality of "blood" and the myth of "grace," both signaling a "divinely bestowed (that is, inborn, inherited) superiority" (13). The "technology" of sprezzatura, on the other hand, could allow any upwardly-mobile self-achiever to attain status in the absence of blood or grace. The resulting problematic generates a culture of suspicion in which good manners and art might resemble and replace transcendent virtue and in which speaker and writers, whether as fictional narrators or authorial personae, might a rticulate one set of values while also espousing another. This is precisely what happens in the discursive practice of the Courtier and Galateo. Berger asks early on, "Can we trust in the narrator's reliability?" (27), and he pursues his analysis with regard not just to the authorial personae but also to the individual interlocutors in both dialogues.

A host of complications affects the outcome, chief among them representations of sex and gender performance that reveal gynophobic tendencies: "The text depicts the double-bind of profeminism in narrative terms by placing increasing emphasis on the effect of gynephobic motives" (92). Because authors and readers might take the implications of this view more seriously than do the interlocutors, an element of structural irony disturbs the text and the fiction that it represents. In Castiglione's Courtier "the view from within Urbino is countered by a view from abroad" (163). In della Casa's Galateo dissonant notes of cynicism, irony, sarcasm, and resistance expose "competitive and anxiety-ridden practices ... under the silky elegance of the courtly ideal" (213). In the resulting semiotics of male self-subversion, good manners appear founded on fear and loathing of the female body.

I recognize that I have truncated a subtle and complex argument. But I have also tried to confer an order and direction that the argument does not always have. The principal problem appears to be the density and specificity of its author's references both to the primary texts of Castiglione and della Casa, and also to secondary texts of theory and criticism. Berger's discussion evokes Freud, Mauss, Lacan, Elias, Foucault, Bourdieu, and others but rarely engages them head-on. He saves his close-up engagement for a dialogue -- generous and respectful and collegially inspired, to be sure -- with North American academic criticism of the past two decades, summoning the estimable work of Wayne Rebhorn, Constance Jordan, Thomas Greene, and others for further refinement and particular nuance. Berger's microscopic readings of the primary texts invite what the author himself calls an "overattentive scrutiny" (31) or what he also calls "the oddly restrictive New Critical effect [of promoting] the irony and complexity of the fiction" (83). Berger wants to preserve the mid-twentieth-century virtue of close reading and wed it to the late-twentieth-century virtue of cultural criticism. I believe that both virtues simply do not exist in such pure forms. The Absence of Grace goes at close reading by seeking to explicate with geometrical precision a narratorial standpoint refracted by several speakers within the text, often violating the principle of "parsimony" (208) that Berger would endorse about an author's representation of his narrator(s). At the same time it approaches cultural criticism with a curious lack of reference to social, cultural, historical, and intertextual derail. Some contextual allusions to Boccaccio, Ficino, Machiavelli, and others occur, but on the whole the extended discussions of critical concerns and methodological procedures overshadow them. Berger must be commended for the acuity of his presentation, for the rigor of his thinking, and for the evident generosity of his citations to colleagues. Few of hi s peers have gone to such great lengths to respect the achievements of his predecessors and to build upon them with such honest admiration.