The Muted Lover and the Singing Poet:Ekphrasis and Gender in the Canzoniere*

ZHONG Bili

Abstract:Ekphrasis, a poetic genre termed as the “verbal representation of the visual representation” that reflects the relationship between word and image, plays an important role in the field of gender study.In ekphrasis, word/the male is said to dominate over or to suppress the silent image/the female.Petrarch's ekphrastic description of Laura has a strong tendency of fetishism in the Canzoniere.Laura is always presented in the poetry as some fragmental parts:pearl, gold, rose, snow, etc.This obsessively ekphrastic writing shows Petrarch's ambition and desire to “objectify” his lover, making her forever stagnant as a mute artwork that bears the gaze from the male.Unlike a lively lover that can interact with Petrarch, Laura is turned into an idol, an object out of reach but is always seized by the erotic gaze of the poet.In his project of objectifying Laura, the poet created his sol una donna1 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, a cura di Marco Santagata (Milán:Mandadori, 2004), CXXVII, vv.12-14:“Dico che perch'io miri/ mille cose diverse attento et fiso/ sol una donna veggio e 'l suo bel viso.”.However, realizing the insubstantiality of language, he found that his empty words of poetics could never bring Laura to her presence.The forever absence of Laura, in turn, stimulates his desire to create an infinite number of sign-substitutions that eventually distort the feminine image.

Keywords:ekphrasis; Petrarch; Canzoniere; gender; poetics

Ekphrasis in Gender

“Paintings, like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry.Paintings are confined to the narrow sphere of external display of their bodies and of the space which they ornament, while poems are free to range over an infinite realm of potential action and expression, the domain of time, discourse, and history.

J.T.W.Mitchell, (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 110.

”

The well-known expression of J.T.W.Mitchell has pointed out the sharp antagonism between painting and poetry, and how such an antagonism has been turned into a canonic battlefield in the studies of gender.Painting, long assumed to be deprived of voice, has been forced to remain silent and to be fixed in space; while poetry, based on the power of words, is endowed with the ability to “speak out” and to reach out for its desired object.Being an art of time, poetry is able to transcend the spatial limitation that imprisons painting.As always, man is the side that owns the power of voice, while woman has long been petrified as a beautiful artwork, or as a stagnant, silent object which has to tolerate the erotic gaze from man.Simone de Beauvoir had a famous description of how woman is “objectified”:

While the boy seeks himself in the penis as an autonomous subject, the little girl coddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams of being coddled and dressed up herself:inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.By means of compliments and scolding, through images and words, she learns the meaning of the terms pretty and homely; she soon learns that in order to be pleasing she must be “pretty as picture”:she tries to make herself look like a picture, she puts on fancy clothes, she studies herself in a mirror, she compares herself with princesses and fairies. Simone de Beauvoir, , trans.Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York:Vintage Books, 2011), 138.

In the process of objectification, woman is guided to image herself as a “picture” that makes no sound.Falling into the obscure silence, the identity of woman, at the same time, is generally fading away, making space for the controlling voice of man.According to Beauvoir, woman not knowing what she “l(fā)ooks like,” only knows what she “should look like” in the definition by man.The image of woman is made instead of born, and this has become an innate consciousness rooted in woman's mind that it seems almost “natural”—one is hardly aware that it is “man”-made.Thus, the outlook of woman, whether historically or socially, is, to a large extent, based on the description by man:she could be a “petrified” lady who is cruel and cold-hearted; or she could be an angelic creature with docile voice and flowery face.No matter in which form, or in which figure, woman hardly has any right to speak for herself.The narrative system, suggested by Derrida, is controlled by a “male-center” from the very beginning.

The aesthetic antithesis of word and image has further revealed a more drastic literary competition between spoken language and silence.The presence of the self is said to be established through narrative.Petrarch's opening sonnet is a good example:

Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il

suono

di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core

in sul mio primo giovenile errore,

quand' era in parte altr' uom da quell ch'i'

sono

(

Can

.I, 1-4)In the narration of “I cry,” “I suffer,” “I sign,” the self—“sono”—is made manifest by the voice —“suono.” The spoken language, placed on the top of the Platonic hierarchy of aesthetics, guarantees the presence of the author himself, from whom all its credits are derived.In the first poem of the

Canzoniere

, readers cannot find any traces of Laura, and what leaves to them is an impressive image of Petrarch—a penitent man who is always crying and sighing.Not until the Sonnet V does the name Laura appear, but in the form of fragments:

LAUdando s' incomincia udir di fore

il suon de' primi dolci accenti suoi.

Vostro stato REal, che 'ncontro poi,

raddoppia a l' alta impresa il mio valore;

ma:TAci, grida il fin, ché farle honore

è d' altri homeri soma che da' tuoi.

Cosí LAUdare et REverire insegna (

Can

.V, 3-9)

Like Diana who scattered Actaeon, he scattered Laura.But when it comes to the song LII, we find that it is Petrarch who took the role of Actaeon, peeking the nude body/the veil of Laura, but he escaped the tragedy of being scattered and suffered no punishments.Therefore, Petrarch is at once Diana who made Laura fragmented and Actaeon who satisfied his desire without penalty.This is the advantage of the speaking voice.Laura's fragmental identity is not capable of possessing a voice in the Petrarchan textual dimension.Only Petrarch the author has the absolute control of speaking.Though Laura's image is omnipresent in the poems, such a fact cannot produce the real presence of the woman since she is too weak to announce herself.

Also in this sonnet, Petrarch first introduced the mythology of Apollo and Daphne.We know that Daphne, unable to resist the severe pursuit of Apollo, has been transformed into a laurel, from a living woman to a fixed tree.The end of the story is characterized with intense fetishism:Apollo makes Daphne into a symbol, an icon that only belongs to him——claiming to exempt the tree from any thunder strikes, Apollo is at the same time claiming his sovereignty of the laurel.Daphne, after being transformed into a fixed tree, has lost her voice to make a reject and to ask for help.Reluctant as she is, she can do nothing but finally become a dead symbol for her lover.Similarly, Petrarch, in the place of Apollo/male power, has iconized Laura, rendering her as a cold sign instead of a living life.The diffusion of Laura's image lays foundation for her further reification.Though Petrarch seemed to be forbidden to make a sound about Laura in

Sonnet

V, he did not stop but let his desire to grow wilder:“Sì traviato è ‘l folle mi desio/ a seguitar costei che 'n fuga è volta” (

Can.

VI, 1-2).When the story reaches

Sonnet

VIII, readers found that Laura had already been parted:“A pie' de' colli ove la bella vesta/ prese de terrene

membra pria

.” (

Can

.VIII, 1-2) Laura is depicted not as a complete woman, but as something scattered beneath her beautiful dress.The process of dispersion continues, until Laura is reified entirely:in

Sonnet

XI, Laura has eventually been replaced by her

veil

.Our poet exclaimed that the veil alone could arouse his desire:“si mi governa il velo.” (

Can.

XI, 12) The veil has completely replaced Laura the person:in the song LII, Petrarch was able to “see” Laura's nude body at the sight of her veil:“posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo / ch'a l'aura il vago et biondo capel ciuda” (CII, 5-6).In the following sonnet, the XII, Petrarch continued to amplify his project of objecting Laura, substituting her with “things” such as gold, silver, garlands and clothes.During the whole process of reification, we cannot hear a word uttered from Laura, nor can we know her feelings.Like a silent artwork, she has been displayed, depicted and conquered.

Petrarch's description of Laura with various objects has brought our attention to the ekphrasis, perhaps the best medium to display the conflict between “male/voice vs.female/silence.” It is more generally known as “giving voice to a mute art object,” or offering “a rhetorical description of a work of art Jean Hagstrum, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1958), 18; Wendy Steiner, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42-43.”; when viewed from the perspective of gender, it is often described as a process in which the masculine voice of poetry tries to dominate the silent painting.As said by Heffernan, the contest staged by ekphrasis is:

often powerfully gendered:the expression of a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative striving to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space. James A.W.Heffernan, (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1.

Admittedly, poetry can compensate the absence of voice within painting; however, it is hard to define whether poetry is speaking

of

painting or

for

painting.More problems are produced rather than solved:for example, what gives the authority to poetry to speak for the painting? Does the activity of speaking authentically reflect what the painting is? In other words, is the poetic language, the art of time, fully capable of mastering the art of space? While the activity of speaking seems to be an aggressive transgression that invades silence, and an ineffaceable desire to control and to represent painting, the painting in turn is considered as a negative force that quenches the voice:

Medusa is the perfect prototype for the image as a dangerous female other who threatens to silence the poet's voice and fixate his observing eye ...Medusa fully epitomizes the ambivalence that Keats hints at:instead of “teasing us out of thought” with a paralyzing eternity of perfect desolation, she paralyzes thought itself, first, by turning “the gazer's spirit into stone,” and then by engraving the lineaments of the Gorgon onto the beholder's petrified spirit. Mitchell, (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 172-73.

In this way, the domination of the speaking voice over the painting is justified and moralized.The justification of such a domination has its counterpart in the theological realm.The impulse to represent the nature is derived from the primitive desire of human language:to return to the status before fallen.As is termed by Krieger, this is “the semiotic desire for the natural sign”:

The desire, that is, to have the world captured in the word, the word that belongs to it, or better yet, the word to which

it

belongs.This desire to see the world in the word is that, after Derrida, we come to term the logocentric desire.” Murray Krieger, (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 11.

It is because only the Word of God can be “thing,” while human language is nothing but “signs”:

The author of holy Scripture is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do) but by things themselves.So, whereas in every other science things are by words, this science has the property that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. “Auctor sacrae Scripturae est Deus, in cuius potestate est ut non solum voces ad significandum accomodet (quod etiam homo facere potest) sed etiam res ipsas.Et ideo, cum in omnibus scientiis voces significant, hoc habet proprium ista scientia quod ipsae res significatae per voces etiam significant aliquid.” Thomas Aquinas, , I, i, 10.The English version is from , 8th Edition, ed.Steven M.Cahn (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Company, 2012), 466.

God created the world by his Word, and from the Word all creations were born out of nothing.Ekphrasis, by seeking to recreate an artificial object with its verbal activities, fulfills its inveterate desire to be a “thing.” By rendering an illusionary, living artwork in front of the readers, ekphrasis creates a counterfeit immediacy, a fake presence that endeavors to rival with the true presence of “things.” However, such a presence cannot compete with the real artwork:“even if that illusionary presence, however “picturesque” it may be, is not “picturable.” Krieger, , 49.

Analogously, Petrarch's ekphrastic description of Laura cannot guarantee her

presence

:no matter how real the image of Laura is, Petrarch still sensed her absence, which drove him to search, wandering restlessly from mountain to mountain, from river to river.Perhaps the long canzones CXXVII and CXXIX are the best examples.In

Canzone

CXXVII, Petrarch showed a picturesque description:Spring, flowers and Laura's body that were surrounded by these things.He constructed a Spring that was bound to lose, fading with its green leaves, violets, roses, vermillion, the velvet sky and stars:“In tamo fronde o ver viole in terra/ mirando a la stagion che 'l freddo perde/ et le stele miglior acquistan forza” (

Can.

CXXVII, 29-31).Everywhere he looked at and everything he watched reminded him of Laura, and in the water as well as in the grass, he could see her face:“I' l'ò più volte (or chi fi ache mi 'l creda?) / ne l'acqua Chiara et sopra l'erva verde” (

Can

.CXXIX, 40-41).Though seeing million things in the world, his mind was fixed upon the very lady:“Dio che perch' io miri/ mille cose diverse attento et fiso, sol una donna veggio e 'l suo bel viso” (

Can.

CXXVII, 12-14).Each stanza of

Canzone

CXXVII is ended with the poet's wanting for Laura:“veggio lei giunta a'supi perfetti giorni” (ibid

,

28); “che ricopria le pargolette membra/ dove oggi alberga l'anima gentile/ ch' ogni altro piacer vile” (ibid

,

36-38); “et del caldo desio/ che quando sospirando ella sorride/ m'ingiamma si che oblio” (ibid, 52-54); “parmel veder quando si volge altrove/ lassando tenebroso onde si move” (ibid, 69-70).Petrarch admitted, to his eyes, Laura was always there:“perch' a gli occhi mici lassi/

sempre è presente

, ond' io tutto mi struggo; et così meco stassi” (ibid

,

94-96, the italic is mine).However, ironically, Laura was never

there

, and all Petrarch recalled were only his memories:“torna a la mente il loco/ e 'l primo dì ch' I' vidi a l'aura sparsi” (ibid

,

82-83).He already realized this was an illusion, a mistake, as he called it, but he would like his error to last:“in tante parti et sì bella la veggio/ che se l'error durasse, altro non cheggio” (

Can

.CXXIX, 38-39).Petrarch's constant desiring for Laura reveals the fact of her forever

absence

:his poetics, though picturesque, still cannot rival with the true Laura.However, her

absence

seems not to effect anything, since the reification of Laura has accomplished.A small part of Laura or her wearing is enough to make the poet burnt with desires:“I capei d'oro ond' io sì subito arsi” (

Can.

CXXVII, 84).The Petrarchan fetishism has expelled the

presence

of the

vera

women.

From Petrarch's descriptions, we can see the overwhelming power of speaking voice possessed by ekphrasis.The speaking voice, transformed into the violence of male, forces the feminine artwork to be silent.But why voice is considered more essential than silent object? And why the invisible voice can be the most valid evidence for the presence of self? If we were to understand the revolution brought by the ekphrasis to the realm of art, literature, history and even of ideology, we have to re-consider the text-image relationship in the complexities of the relations of individuals, classes, genders and cultures, and we have to investigate the historical conditions that sustain those relations.By observing the word” material”, we find that it has a similar origin with the word “mother”—mater.According to Levi Strauss and Freud, the relationship between mother and child is more of material:the child knows his own mama through the physical contacts such as touching, sucking and hugging; and his needs for mother are, principally, food and warm dwelling.On the contrary, his relationship with his father is more inclined to spirit and mind.In many story-telling archetypes, a father teaches his son how to be a strong man and how to be excel from the peers.The father acts more like a mental tutor for the child.Analogously, through Mitchell's arguments, we can also see how Burke linked sublimity and beauty with the stereotypes of gender.For Burke, sublimity, based on pain, terror and vigorous exertion, is the masculine aesthetic mode while beauty, usually associated with littleness and sensual pleasure, is considered as “feminine”.His emphasis on the power of sublimity is paralleled to his strategy of “visual deprivation” in which “The father is remote, the mother intimate and accessible.”

The two questions above will lead to a more appealing one:is it necessary for the silent painting to speak since there seems to be no definite privilege of ears over eyes? However, such a privilege does exist in history.The triumph of ears over the eyes, again, can find its origin from the Platonic aesthetics.The spoken language, not needing for the medium, can affect the audiences directly; while the written language, based on the non-transparent medium of signs, is regarded as dependent and has no autonomy.

Theuth:And you now, father of these letters, have in your fondness for them said what is the opposite of their real effect.For this will produce a forgetting in the soul of those who learn these letters as they fail to exercise their memory, because those who put trust in writing recollect from outside with foreign signs... Plato, , trans.Benjamin Jowett (London:Forgotten Books, 2018), 70.

In Socrates' opinion, the written language is an invented sign system which only encourages laziness of our memories and makes us alienate from ourselves, while the spoken language is the most immediate method which can get rid of the efforts to re-present.The Platonic tradition eventually results in the superior status of the speaking voice.

In the Middle Ages, the superiority of the speaking voice has been transformed into a Christian doctrine that celebrates the invisible/ears and distains the visible/eyes.Burke noted that “Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship.” Edmund Burke, (1757), ed.James T.Boulton (South Bend:Notre Dame University Press, 1968).Quoted from Mitchell's ,130.This privilege was further solidified under the movement of iconoclasm:

The invisible god of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with all his attendant prohibitions against visual representations, is simply the abstract perfection of this theory of sublimity.The word, the indirect verbal report, not the direct accessibility of the image, is the appropriate medium for this god. Mitchell, , 130.

In the Christian context, the invisible Word of God, by repelling the visible image of the pagan gods, has confirmed the whole hierarch of aesthetics.The mute artwork is thus made inferior or even idolatrous.

The most prominent example is the contract between “spirit and word,” which is originated from the difference between New Testament and Old Testament.The New Testament is figured as the spirit in heart, while the Old Testament, compared to the New, is word on the stony tablet.The spirit can give life while the word leads to death. In Pauline tradition, it says“ for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” (II:3.6).Therefore, the invisible, transparent spirit, like the speaking word, guarantees lives; on the contrary, the visible word inscribed on the tablet, is petrified and leads eventually to stagnant fetishism.The Christian tradition has emphasized so much the belief in “invisible” that God never appears in any concrete forms.Neither will he show up in any figures:only his voice can be heard.Moses heard his God at the Mount Sinai, and Saint Augustine completed his conversion after hearing the sacral voice that asked him to “take and read.” Ironically, after his conversion, the life of Monica, Augustine's mother, came to an end.The mysterious voice became the principle guide for Augustine's soul, while the female effect from Monica met its termination.The Christian mythology, highlighting the importance of speaking voice, tries to wipe out any tendency towards the love of image that may leads to idolatry.

The authority of the speaking voice comes from its immediacy that simultaneously creates and confirms the existence of speaking subject, that is, the presence of God/Father.Silence, or the absence of voice, is given to female/mother, who performs with visible contacts.Just as argued by Freud, boy's gaze finds the female image threatening because woman, who lacks penis, is by nature jealous of man who owns it.The threat is crystalized in the light that woman will threat to castrate man's penis. “Fetishism” (1927), in , trans.James Strachey (London:Hogarth, 1961), 21:152-57.The risk of castration is paralleled to silence:in the mythology of Medusa, we could also discover that the woman/painting/silence, who lacks the ability to speak, is threating to castrate the speaking voice of man.In the

Canzoniere

, Petrarch, indulging himself in the flame of love for Laura, always found himself under the force of robbing him of his sound.In

Canzone

XXIII, the poet described Laura who can took his heart away with just a glance (“col mirar,”

Can

.XXIII, 72), and who suffocated his speaking:“dicendo a me:‘Di ciò non far parola.'” (ibid, 74) Laura, being the symbol of Medusa, becomes a threat to Petrarch's poetry.But ironically, even such a threat is a poetic strategy by the male power, in which Laura is nothing more than an object:beautiful, cruel, cold-hearted, fierce, always running from the poet or putting the poet in the vulnerable silence, but always passive in her own autonomy and dependent on Petrarch's voice to exist.Ekphrasis then becomes the literary realization that allows the speaking voice to prevail over the silent painting.In this logic, ekphrasis, a counterpart to the female threat, shows a fantasy of masculine masturbation and a verbal rape of the image.

Petrarch's Ekphrastic Description of Laura

Love or conquest? Ekphrasis offers a new standpoint to look at Petrarch's poetic creation of Laura.Do these love poems contribute to Laura herself or just a verbal satisfaction for Petrarch's imaginative masturbation? Throughout the

Canzoniere

, we only hear Petrarch's voices and his crying, but Laura the lover, the female figure, is always kept, or forced to be silent, and even made fragmented.The deprivation of voice is very interesting in the Petrarchan context.If we look into other Petrarch's works, we can find that being silent means invisible or absent to the consciousness.For example, in the prologue of Petrarch's

Secretum

, Saint Augustine was silent at first.Although he came into Francesco's room with the Truth, since he did not speak any word, Francesco could not even notice his presence.Only after Francesco's first conversation with the Truth was finished, did he discover there exist another person.The effect of silence is thrilling:even the person himself is present, as long as he cannot speak, it is absent to other's consciousness.That is, the presence of the body cannot equal to the presence of the self.The phenomenon of silence also can be found in Petrarch's writing about his climbing of Mount Ventoux.Having read the paragraphs of the

Confessions

, Petrarch, unlike Augustine who immediately shared his reading with Alypius, refused to talk with his brother and refused to let him hear what he had read.His forceful silence has at the same time muted his brother, and on his way down the mountain, they never exchanged even a word, as if Gherardo was not with him anymore.The silence forced upon Gherardo makes him withdraw from Petrarch's writing project and being expelled from the presence, as if he were made to remain forever on the mountain.The relationship between voice/presence and silence/absence can also be referred back to the Christian tradition.God never shows Himself in any particular form of physics, for his speaking voice alone is enough to guarantee His

presence

.The presence of God is in fact the presence of his voice.The presence of body is confined to space, while the presence of voice is omnipresent, diffusing through the passage of time and through the transition of ages, ensuring that His faithful people of every age can hear the calling of their God.The embodiment, or the physical/visible presence of body, under such a narrative and intellectual system, is made inferior to the invisible speaking voice.The invisible voice triumphs over the visible presence of the physical form.This is the phenomenon of the

Canzoniere

in which readers find Laura's body/parts are scattered everywhere, strung in the line of narrative by the voice of Petrarch.The fragments of her body are transformed into gold, pearls, diamonds, flowers, creating a beautifully ekphrastic scene to readers' eyes.At the meanwhile, Petrarch has muted Laura, making the

Canzoniere

a book of Francesco:

Insomma, l'oggetto d'amore è assente, ma il soggetto è onipresente.Il messaggio implicito ma non nascosto è che il libro che segue sarà il libro di Francesco. Marco Santagata, '' (Bologna:Il mulino, 2011), 11.

The forever absent object/Laura has made these songs suspicious in their intention:it reveals that Petrarch, though claiming to write a songbook for Laura, actually aims to establish an identity of poet for himself.For readers, the image of Laura is never displayed or fully shown.Her flesh, her face and her presence are totally substituted by the fragmental metaphors that are “picturesque” by nature.It is difficult to perceive a complete outlook of Laura but one only gets the impression of a series of signs that are indistinguishable and ambiguous.One cannot tell if he is “watching” Laura the woman or a collective of “things”

Laura acquista fattezze fisiche:non un ritratto a tutto tondo, che mai Petrarca dipingerà, ma

una serie di riferimenti

, ovviamente elogiativi,

a singole parti anatomiche

, dalle bionde trecce sciolte sul collo (?le bionde treccie sopra' l collo sciolte?) alle labbra che spiccano vermiglie sul candore del colto e si approno in un sorriso e in un saluto scoprendo i denti bianchi come l'avorio (?e le rise vermiglie in fra la neve/mover da l;oram a discovirir l'avorio?), fino al ?bel fianco?...

In fact, it is the absence of Laura that makes possible the repetitive reification of her.Contrary to the logocentric universe, this Derridan universe makes possible the proliferation of the signs, leading to an endless game of reference and substation, and to a non-stopping figuration and disfiguration that again and again pulls Laura out of focus.

The repetitive reification, rather than promising a complete image of the lover, actually deconstructs her:

Deconstruction is created by repetitions, deviations, disfigurations. Jonathan Culler, (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2014), 228.

The reoccurrence of Laura through these vertiginous images ironically highlights her emptiness, which drives the poet to describe her more intensely.Laura's absence is, in fact, at once the reason and the result of Petrarch's endless writings.Petrarch created the image of Laura, but its literary nature can never endow it with the real substance.As argued by R.Waller, Laura was unable to stand outside and to transcend the literary systems she was made from, therefore she could never be an ontology like God:

Like Petrarch's comments on the history of the world, his history of the self lacks the ontological grounding, the center, which would allow relationships between events, or even between moments, to emerge.Laura, as the desired center of the lover's existence, manifests the same inadequacies as Rome, taken as the center of human history.She is mortal and she is absent. Marguerite R.Waller, ' (Amherst:The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 21.

The inadequacies of Laura, or more precisely, of the poetically created Laura, in turn stimulates and encourages the exceeding generation of more literary signs.The more Petrarch reifies her, the more she is alienated from her true form (vera forma), which draws the authentic her further from Petrarch.Perhaps the two long canzones XXIX-XXX are the best examples by which Petrarch made manifest his ekphrastic “capture” of Laura.The theme of both canzones is to display how Petrarch's crazy love for Laura drives him to wander restlessly “mi tira sì ch' io non sostegno/ alcun giogo men grave” (

Can.

XXIX, 6-7), “sospirando vo di riva in riva” (

Can.

XXX, 29), and both of them start with the verses describing Laura's beauty:she was dressed in finery clothes “Verdi panni sanguigni oscuri o persi” (

Can.

XXIX, 1), with long, golden hairs “d'or capelli in bionda treccia” (ibid

,

3), and her face is whiter than snow “vidi più Bianca et più fredda che neve” (

Can

.XXX, 2).To display her cruelness, our poet pictured her as a “hard laurel” (“duro lauro,”

Can.

XXX, 23) made of diamonds and gold “à I rami di diamante et d'or le chiome.” The only presence of Laura's name—“L'auro”— in the final stanza is also incorporated in the metaphor of gold, and we readers, instead of knowing what Laura is like, only see a fine collection of jewelry.His idolatrous love for Laura subjects her in an oppressive poetic space which is like an art object imprisoned in the frame.Laura never allows to speak, or to express her own emotions towards these praises forced upon her; her beauty is inert, just as how Petrarch described her in this very poem:a quiet, cold lady sitting under the shade of laurel “Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro/ vidi piú biancha et piú fredda” (

Can.

XXX, 1).Her coldness, symbolizing her cruelty, in turns highlights her lifelessness—a stagnant artwork to be gazed upon.

Petrarch's laurel, contrary to Augustine's fig tree, is a self-referential or auto-reflexive sign leading back to itself, that is to say, it does not refer to any higher ontology such as God or moral principles, but only to its own existence:

The fig tree was already a scriptural emblem of conversion before Augustine used the image in his Confessions to represent the manifestation of the pattern of universal history in his own life.Petrarch's laurel, on the other hand, has no such moral dimension of meaning.It stands for a poetry whose real subject matter is its own act and whose creation is its own author. John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel:Petrarch's Poetics,” 5, no.1 (1975):34-40.In the article, Freccero says that the laurel is:“...the emblem both of the lover's enthrallment and of the poet's triumph, is the antitype of Augustine's fig tree, under which the saint's conversion took place...,” 34.

The fig tree of Augustine, on the other hand, is an allegory that eventually points to God:his conversion has made it a symbol of God's Grace.If the signifiers stop referring, they stop functioning as metaphors for the signified—Laura.At this very moment, these signifiers are created to substitute and to engulf her.The self-reference signifiers produce an enclosed space in which the presence could be counterfeited to make possible the infinite substitution.Here Deleuze's explanation why Kafka is able to create such a weird world seems to hit the point:in his literary dimension, it is “not dog like man, but as man, becoming man.” Gilles Deleuze, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press), 22.Following this logic, such gold, diamonds and pearls are not “l(fā)ike” Laura, but they “are” Laura, or are becoming Laura.

Laura, lacking the ability to speak for herself, is vulnerable to the invasion of verbal violence.Beautiful as she is, she has no “autonomy”—the self.Even the decoration of her body, instead of the person herself, is equal to

presence

that can arouse Petrarch's sexual imagination:“ch' a me la pastorella alpestra et cruda/ posta a bagnar

un leggiadretto velo

” (

Canzoniere

, LII, 3-4).Though serving as the covering of her naked body, the veil is “as at times her

only reality

,”because the real body of hers could never be present:the metaphor has lost effect since the poet, endeavoring to erase the distance between signifier and signified, attempts to bring out the most immediacy of his own language, to make it “transparent” like the Word.However, if Laura is actually and authentically present, the whole poetic telling will immediately be brought to death since the impulse of writing originates from the endless desire of the poet who is in constant wanting for his lover.Desire always refers to, but can never reach the absent object:it is the distant time and space between desire and the desired that keeps this intensive emotion alive.The desire will perish once the desired object is brought to be present.It is an emotion dependent on lacking.To certain degree, Laura, through the description by Petrarch's verbal endeavor, is present; however, this presence is nothing but an illusion which could only survive within the field of verbal words, resulting as an alienation of the real Laura.The tension between presence and absence reflects a universe of infinite signifiers suggested by Derrida's deconstructionism:

it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being,...that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. Jacques Derrida, , trans.Alan Bass (London and New York:Routledge, 1978), 278-94.

The absence of both the center and the concrete identity is the essential precondition for the infinite sign-substitutions; in the same case, it is the lack of Laura that permits Petrarch to substitute her for so many “othernesses,” which conceals her real form and makes her into a cold “otherness.” The crying and calling of the sad poet is like an empty echo, striving to reify itself, but in the end is drown in the sea of overabundant signifiers.

By substituting Laura with countless signifiers, Petrarch has successfully transformed Laura from a woman into a doll that is indulged in her vague image in the passage of Beauvoir mentioned above.

Sonnets

XLV-XLVI display Laura's enthrallment of her image in the mirror, causing the miserable exile of poet the lover.Her narcissistic love, rendering herself as the self-referential sign (“a voi stessa piacendo”

Can

.XLV, 11), generates an enclosed space that refuses any emotional projection from Petrarch.The poet, unable to bear Laura's self-obsession, has cursed those “murderous mirror” (“i micidiali specchi”).The metaphors of gold, pearl and flowers (l'oro, perle, fior vermigli e bianchi,

Can

, XLVI, 1) —the most frequently used objects in the

Canzoniere

—have pictured a “flower” most beautiful in the world that no grass would fit “sì bel fior sia indegan l'erba” (

Can

.XLV, 14).The mirror that attracts Laura puts her in a status of forgetfulness (l'eterno oblio,

Can

.XLVI, 13), like Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection on the water.Their common mistake is that both misinterpreted the “self” as the “otherness,” someone alienated from their “egos.” Such an alienation makes the self forget its subjectivity but regards itself as an “object.” The image in the reflection, in this way, becomes a seduction that lures the self to be lost in the maze of reification.This astonishing effect of Laura's beauty in turn robs the poet of his voice “si tacque veggendo in voi finir vostro desio” (

Can

.XLVI, 10).However, is it not the poet himself that reifies his lover and makes her into an object? The more he blames the mirror, the more he should blame himself by objectifying his woman.It is his male gaze that has totally alienated Laura, which makes her more focus on the “object-side” in her “self.” Or put it in another way, the poet's singing has exaggerated the “image-like” character of the woman (Laura), which leads the woman to self-indulge that ironically voids his desire.In the ekphrastic description of Laura, we can see the conflict and tension between image and voice, picture and word:while the verbal words attempt to capture Laura's beauty and make her the most splendid artwork in the world, the female enchantment in turn paralyses such a verbal “invasion” by silencing the poet-lover.Objectifying the woman requires the “frame,” and Petrarch created an extraordinary frame of flowers in

Canzone

CXXVI.The canzone starts with a scene that evokes an erotic scene of the naked Laura who was showering, and the sweet water gently wets her body:“Chiare fresche et dolci acque, /ove le belle membra/ pose”(

Can.

CXXVI, 1-3) Such an arousing scene further provokes the poet's painful signing:“date udienzia insieme/a le dolente mie parole estreme.” (ibid, 12-13).As the song goes on, readers find Laura has been placed in a space circumscribed by flowers:

una pioggia di fior

sovra 'l suo grembo;

et ella si sedea

humile in tanta gloria,

coverta già de l' amoroso nembo.

Qual fior cadea sul lembo,

qual su le treccie bionde

,

ch' oro forbito et perle

eran quel dí a vederle;

qual si posava in

terra

, et qual su l'

onde

;qual con

un vago errore

girando parea dir:Qui regna Amore.(

Can.

CXXVI, 40-52)

Through the meticulous and delicate description of Petrarch, we are brought to a lively experience as if Laura were indeed in front of our eyes:we see how flowers are falling upon different parts of Laura's body:on her breast, on her laps, on her hairs.Some on the ground, some on the water, while others are flowing in the air.With these flowers, the ground and the water have been connected, rendering an enclosed space in which Laura was placed.Petrarch seems to inject in these flowers of his desire to touch and to kiss Laura, and following the falling traces of the petals, our eyes are able to “touch” the parts of Laura's body.In this way, the reading experience, by turning into visual experience, finally is transformed into tactile experience—it is like our sight, following the fallen flowers, is “touching” and “feeling” Laura's rested body who is bathing in the clear, crystal water.Laura is made silent for such an eroticization—all she did was sit in the frame of flowers like a painting.We readers now are forced, as well as Laura herself, to view her in the lens of a man.Also, by depicting how beautiful Laura is, and how wonderful her naked body is, Petrarch is, in some implicit way, obsessively demonstrating the sexual body of his lover to others.Petrarch seems to have become the director, with a camera in hand, who is live showing her nudity, trying to publicize it, exaggerate it and to mythologize it.Laura, on the other hand, unable to project any objection like Daphne (who has become a silent tree), has to endure this eroticization of her own image.

However, the beautiful illusion is soon scattered.No matter how real it seems, it is no more than a collection of signifiers that tries to compensate the vacancy of the center.Petrarch, in realizing this empty dream, has cried out:

il divin portamento

e 'l volto e le parole e 'l dolce riso

m' aveano, et sí diviso

da

l' imagine vera

, (

Can.

CXXVI, 57-60)Petrarch's scattering Laura finally lead to his own division:he was separated from the “real image” (l' imagine vera), no matter how hard the poet attempted to bring Laura to the

presence

.But we should not neglect one thing:even though the poet's endeavor is in vain, he is still the one who controls and directs the whole love drama.Laura is brought to stage in parts:her face, limbs, words and smile, but never in completeness.

Petrarch's ekphrastic description of Laura is the origin of his forever thirst.According to Lacan, desire is produced by the insubstantiality of the verbal signs because no signifier can ever substitute the signified.The gap between signifier and signified can never be fulfilled.In order to compensate this emptiness brought by his imaginative masturbation, Petrarch has to keep inventing abundant figures to counterfeit the presence of his lover.However, even in this extreme situation, Petrarch refuses to give any voice to her; by making her forever silent, Petrarch has realized the possession of her, alienated as she is.

The Smallness of Female Beauty and Emptiness of Spoken Language

As is mentioned above, Burke's aesthetic theory on “sublimity and beauty” offers a new standpoint to look at the relationship between word and image in the lens of gender.Petrarch's Laura, obviously, belongs to the catalogue of “beauty.” Her beauty, created by the enumeration of small objects such as gold, pearls, flowers, is a counterpart to Dante's Beatrice, who serves as the medium for the mediation upon God, and who is the philosophical and theological configuration of Ethics and Love:

Dante, who has found consolation after the death of Beatrice in

la donna gentile

, discovers, as he gradually penetrates the significance of

Sapienza

, that la donna gentile is now assuming semblances similar to those of Beatrice.She brings him to the Empyreal where he finds the deceased maiden, who is in eternity alive and the first cause of his moral redemption and intellective ascent.Where

Convivio

ends,

Comedy

begins. Eugenio Garin, , trans.from Italian and ed.Giorgio Pinton (Amsterdam:Rodopi, 2008), 107.By the configure of Laura, the best analysis, I think, is Freccero's article“ The Fig Tree and the Laurel.”Dante's

Divine Comedy

is a poem that eventually transcends itself, striving to display the heavenly visions denied to ordinary people.On the contrary, Santagata commented that the

Canzoniere

is a record and the memory of the small things and trivial events in the life the young poet. Actually, in his book ', Santagata has been emphasizing that Petrarch tries to collect the scatters of his past, which Petrarch himself considered to be “bagatelle” (small things).According to him, Laura is, in certain way, unable to reach the highness of Dante's Beatrice.She is more related to details while Beatrice to structure and metaphysics:

Beatrice è più strutturata e più riccamente dotata di capacità simboliche; la sua solidità di personaggio le più elevati al punto da farsi lei stessa, non solo segno del divino, ma angelo, miracolo, incarnazione della Grazia.A questa sfera Laura non può assurgere, e Petrarca lo sa bene. Santagata, '208.

Neither is Petrarch's laurel like the fig tree of Augustine, the allegorical symbol of the saint's conversion.Therefore, Laura's beauty has nothing to do with grandness or sublimity.

In Mitchell's analysis of Burke and Lessing, he has summarized several antithesis that can help us further to clarify the relationship between image and word from the standpoints of gender, philosophy, aesthetics and theology:

Painting Poetry

Space Time

Natural signs Arbitrary (man-made) signs

Narrow sphere Infinite range

Imitation Expression

Body Mind

External Internal

Silent Eloquent

Beauty Sublimity

Eye Ear

Feminine Masculine Mitchell, , 110.

Such a tablet displays clearly various relations and conflicts that are generated from the imagetext relationship.Female beauty is made contrary to the masculine sublimity, and the right to speak is given to man rather than woman.Now the interpretation of the relationship between image and text cannot be satisfied with the investigations on the relations between space and time, between the natural sign and arbitrary sign, or between body and spirit:it must be put in the field of gender in order to perceive the deconstructive power behind it.That is to say, while ekphrasis celebrates a triumph of speaking language over image, it also leads to the deconstruction of the logos-center on which the voice is based.

The speaking voice, as well as the

logos

-center, is now facing challenges from the postmodern deconstruction which, in these decades, keeps casting doubts on the

center

.Is the speaking voice legitimate enough for a real presence of the self/the author? Should the “his”story dominate over and make silent the “her”story? By revealing the illusion of priority given to the spoken language (the voice) originated from the Platonic tradition, Derrida has shown that the spoken language cannot be the equivalence of the presence:

En effet quand j'écoute autrui , son vécu ne m'est pas présent ?en personne?, originairement.

Je peux avoir, pense Husserl, une intuition originaire , c'est-à-dire une perception immediate de ce qui en lui est exposé dans le monde, de la visibilité de son corps, de ses gestes, de ce qui se laisse entendre des sons qu'il profère, mais la face subjective de son expérience, sa conscience, lès actes par lesquels en particulier il donne sens à ses signes,

ne me sont pas immédiatement et originairement présents

comme ils le sont pour lui et comme lès miens le sont pour moi. Jacques Derrida, (Paris:Presses universitaire de France, 1968), 41-42.(the italic is mine)It is just like watching a far-away star:when the

image

of a star has travelled thousands of light years between an unknown galaxy and earth to reach the eyes, the star itself might have already terminated its life.But to the one who is watching it, it is still alive.This is the same illusion of presence produced by the spoken language.The voice of man, upon reaching an audience, has already lost its intuitional immediacy that guarantees its full presence due to the distortion of time and the attrition of historical narrative:

c'est dire que le langage qui parlé en présence de son objet efface ou laisse fonder son originalité proper, cette structure qui n'appartient qu'à lui et qui lui permet de fonctionner tout seul, quand son intention est sevrée d'intuition.

All that is left are only traces, signs and coded information.Therefore, the authentic presence is not a natural product of the spoken language; rather, it is invented by the

logos

-center which intends to suppress and to make marginal the silence.

Actually, the precondition of narration is the absence of narrated objects.It is not hard to understand:if the thing itself is present, there is no need to narrate or to describe it.Narration means something missing and it also becomes a trace that signifies such a missing.Hence, the existence of Petrarch's ekphrasis is made possible by Laura's silence, not the way around.Silence is like a frame that characterizes the voice, without which there is no way to make any distinction:

Parerga

have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only, as Kant would have it, from the body of the

ergon

itself, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, the space in which the statue or column stands, as well as from the entire historic, economic, and political field of inscription in which the drive of the signature arises. Jacques Derrida, “The Paeregon,” trans.Craig Owens, 9 (Summer, 1979):3-41, the cited passage is from 24.

The suppressed margin/woman/silence is actually proved to be essential to the center/man/voice, because without the former, the latter cannot survive alone.

Language, being the sign itself, is insubstantial to replace the “thing.” The emptiness of language has drawn Petrarch to realize the vanity of his poetic project, the inutility in his desire to capture Laura, and most importantly, the hollowness in making himself “immune” from the transformation of time and space through the ekphrastic creation of a muted woman.Petrarch's satisfaction from his self-referential “sign” turns out to be “un sogno breve” (a short dream).On the one hand, the voice that depicts Laura has recreated her as an alienation by making her into an idol; On the other hand, in seeing his poetic result, Petrarch is frustrated by his never-fulfilled desire.The

Canzoniere

, witnessing the silence of Laura, is entirely and exclusively a songbook of Petrarch's voice, a proof of his desire to transcend the limitation of poetic language and a manifest of his masculine violence underneath of such a heartbreaking love story.However, Petrarch may not realize that his proliferation of metaphors of Laura is generally deconstructing the

logos

centered universe that sustains and powers his poetic “voice.” The ekphrasis of Laura is at once a celebration and an elegy of Petrarch's poetics.

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The Second Sex

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On Deconstruction:Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

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Writing and Difference

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.La voix et le phénomène

,

introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Hussel

.Paris:Presses universitaire de France, 1968; Paris:Epimethée, 1993.——

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“The Paeregon.” Translated by Craig Owens.

October

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5, no.1 (1975):34-40.Freud, Sigmund.“Fetishism” (1927).In

The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

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Iconology:Image, Text, Ideology

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Canzoniere, a cura di Marco Santagata

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I

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frammenti dell

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anima:storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca

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