The Orlando furioso: A Stoic Comedy.

Clare Carroll, Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997. x + 246 pp. $26. ISBN: 0-86698-215-9.

This study of Ariosto's Orlando furioso in the light of Stoic ethics and cosmology makes strong claims for itself as a comprehensive reading of the poem, in opposition to the supposedly anachronistic tendencies of criticism. In a chapter on the "Limits of Theory," Professor Carroll dismisses those, like CarneRoss, Parker, and others, who, she says, have seen in the Furioso a poetics of "fragmentation." She argues instead for understanding the poem in relation to the very different world view of its time and place, which she posits as coextensive with Senecan and Ciceronian Stoicism. Invoking Foucault, she positions Ariosto on the other side of an epistemic chasm, where the binary signifier-signified opposition brought to bear on the poem by its (post-)modern readers is not applicable, and instead the prevailing model is a tripartite Stoic concept of symbolic signification. She then reasserts the Croce-Durling model of the poem as image of a dynamically harmonious microcosm, acknowledging and subsuming the world's multiplicity in a unifying order.

A second chapter sketches Ariosto's Stoic world view, broaching but not resolving received wisdom that an articulated Stoic cosmology (as against a Stoic ethics) was not available in Europe until the second half of the sixteenth century. She then creates a limited "Stoic" context for Ariosto through heuristic readings of three contemporaries: Pomponazzi, Leonardo, and Machiavelli. The next six chapters present a structural-thematic reading of the Furioso whose aim is to show the ordering of the poem as analogous with the Stoic microcosm. Carroll claims to have identified a series of eight canto units, each of which is preceded and followed by a single-canto divider, for example: canto 1 / cantos 2-9 / canto 10 / cantos 11-18, and so on. Each eight canto sequence, she claims, is composed of four pairs of parallel cantos ordered concentrically as follows: abcddcba. In a closing coda she meditates briefly on the circular imagery which she believes pervades the poem and symbolizes its harmonious form.

The heart of Carroll's argument is her exploration of the Stoic dimension of Ariosto's project. However, a reader may be frustrated by the fact that a variety of Stoic sources and analogues for specific passages are scattered through her text, so that the full weight of her evidence is not easily assessable. Another problem is that she does not acknowledge the eclectic multiplicity of intellectual currents upon which a writer of the "high Renaissance" could draw, or the likelihood that these tendencies would have been fused and compromised by such writers. Various Neoplatonisms, Piconian syncretism, Paduan neo-Aristotelianism, Vallan neo-Epicureanism, not to mention various Christian adaptations of these and others, make up the rich cultural context upon which Ariosto drew. In fact, Carroll does not "historicize" Stoicism except in the most abstract, even "theoretical," way. No attention is paid to the circumstances of Ariosto's education, reading, and conversation in the dynamic context of Ferrara and surroundings (including interlocuters as diverse as G.F. Pico, Equicola, and Bembo); no suggestion is entertained that Stoic ideas might be transformed when put into a specific text by an individual author under a definite set of contingent circumstances.

More generally, Carroll seems not to understand what a complicated business "historicizing" a text really is. By a curious fusion of Foucault's concept of epistemic "rupture" (which even Foucault rejected) with a traditional history of ideas, she avoids an obvious characteristic of Ariosto's time and place: its position on the threshold of enormous intellectual, social, and cultural changes, where traditional concepts are put into play only to be transformed into something radically different (e.g., Machiavellian "virtu"). She herself unintentionally makes this point by choosing as "Stoic" exemplars three of the most innovative, and proleptically "modern," writers one could hope to find.

As for her readings, Carroll is right to affirm the poet's elaborate control over his structures, though she is not unique in this. As a heuristic exemplification of how order can be found within the multiple plots and formal divisions of the Furioso, Carroll's scheme is intermittently convincing. It would be more so, however, if she kept her promise to show how this structure evolved into its final 46 canto form from the original 40 cantos of 1516 and 1521, where her numbers don't add up. And she will persuade no one that this is "the" form even of the 1532 Furioso. The poem's power, in fact, consists precisely in the many, "overdetermined," structural avenues the poet opens for the emergence of significance: a point which might have been more evident to Carroll if she had seriously considered the many other efforts made in this direction (e.g., Wiggins, whom she does cite, and Elissa Weaver, Giuseppe Dalla Palma, and Sergio Zatti, whom she does not). Paradoxically, several of the so-called critics of "fragmentation" have contributed much to understanding the poet's controlling artistry, a point Carroll misses becauses she mistakes the critics' discussion of a thematics of crisis and fragmentation for claims that the poem is fragmented and confused.

Readers will find useful things in this book: a worthwhile attempt to privilege Stoicism as a category for understanding Ariosto's poem; a heartfelt reiteration of the poetics of ironic moral vision articulated by Durling, Giamatti, and others; a passionate insistence on reading the Furioso as a whole. But they will also find that there is far less to Carroll's claims for the comprehensiveness and originality of her study than meets the eye. And in particular they will find all too many examples of issues and even individual interpretations of passages (e.g., those concerning Ariosto's supposed critique of the Este, his use of Dantean intertexts, the defining imagery of the circle, and even the language of "armonia") presented without reference to relevant earlier treatments. Here again Carroll's "historicism" falls short: in attempting to define the specialness of her own contribution she consistently overlooks the valuable scholarly and interpretive context which surrounds Ariosto's work, and her own.

ALBERT RUSSELL ASCOLI University of California, Berkeley