Ottava Rima and Novelistic Discourse

Abstract

Ottava Rima and Novelistic Discourse Catherine Addison (bio) In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin goes to some lengths to distinguish novelistic from poetic discourse. And yet, as noted by Neil Roberts (1), he uses a poetic text, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, as one of his prime examples of novelistic discourse (Bakhtin 322-24, 329). Bakhtin's theory is that poetic genres are monologic, presupposing "the unity of the language system and . . . of the the poet's individuality," as opposed to the novel, which is dialogic, "heteroglot, multivoiced, multistyled and often multi-languaged" (264-65). This paper contends that, by Bakhtin's own criteria, some verse forms are especially well designed for novelistic discourse. The form chosen for particular scrutiny is ottava rima, a stanza that has been used for narrative purposes for many centuries, originating in the Italian oral tradition of the cantastorie (Wilkins 9-10; De Robertis 9-15). Clearly, ottava rima could not have originated as an English oral form, for it requires too many rhymes for this rhyme-poor, relatively uninflected language. Using a heroic line—in Italian the hendecasyllabic, in English the iambic pentameter—the stanza's rhyme scheme is ABABABCC. Thus it resembles the English sonnet in a sense, for it begins with an alternating structure and concludes with a couplet that is alien to both the rhymes and the rhyme pattern that precede it. As with this type of sonnet, a potential appears for a rupture in the discourse between the alternating structure and the couplet. Alternating verse tends to lean forward not to the next line but [End Page 133] to the line after that for the echo or completion of a rhyme, encouraging the discourse to proceed apace with narrative or description; but a couplet is a closed, circling structure, that faces inward rather than onward. Even the crudest improvised ottava rima narrative will display some fluctuation between telling the story and reflecting upon the story as its unfolding discourse pulsates between alternate and couplet rhyme. By the time of the high Renaissance in Italy, ottava rima was well established as a written form, though it still persisted in the oral tradition of the improvvisatori—some of whom still use it today. The form had become so much the standard for poetic narrative that Dante's invention of terza rima for his epic, La Commedia, was little less than a revolution. Dante may well have had a Bakhtinian suspicion that epic poetry required more unity of voice than ottava rima would allow. Whereas ottava divides discourse into discrete little eight-line packets, terza rima is a continuous form, rhyming ABA BCB CDC DED . . . etc. It is a kind of unchecked alternating pattern, each tercet unclosed and forever hearkening forward towards as-yet-uncompleted rhymes in the next tercet. It thus permits long strophes and paragraphs of unbroken utterance, though not quite as freely as Milton's epic blank verse. In order to achieve formal closure at the end of a canto, Dante adds to the last tercet a single line that rhymes with the tercet's enclosed line. Thus this final structure is an alternating quatrain, a more symmetrical and complete verse form than a tercet: . . . VWV WXW XYX YZYZ. The two most famous Renaissance ottava rima narratives are Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Like their English successor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, these poems are long, magical, episodic and multifaceted, possessing a great many characters and strands of story. As early as 1876 the Italian critic, Pio Rajna, declared that they were not epics but novels—mainly because he saw ottava as the perfect medium for modern narrative (18). But, even earlier, and more explicitly than Dante, Tasso had expressed similarly Bakhtinian ideas about genre. Tasso desired to create an epic and believed, as he argues in his prose essays, that epic poetry possesses the virtue of unity—a unity that, since Homer, has not been simple but compound: "composta unità" (Prose, 390, 438). This crucial feature of unity Tasso must have felt that his Gerusalemme liberata was lacking, for he rewrote the poem in 1593 as the austere Gerusalemme conquistata, with many of...