VI

Current criticism of the Furioso is divided as to whether Ariosto's poem is a monument to stability and transcendence or an attempt to evade the nightmare of history.^[49] Is Bradamante the product of social custom, or does she become a producer of it? One might as well ask whether Ariosto lived on the margins of society or within it. He did both. Currently the Furioso is regarded as a poem of crisis in faith, politics, and culture. It is also seen as an evasion of crisis. Albert Ascoli questions studies that "tend to assign priority to one source or another in a given textual circumstance" without considering the poem's proleptic reading of the "possible responses it will call forth."^[50] He adds a crisis of referentiality to the question of what is historical and subjective, remarking that Ariosto also defeats such a clear division. The bitter harmony he hears is that of a poem which both confronts and evades crises in faith, politics, and culture, of a poet who is neither distraught nor complacent. Walter Binni, dissatisfied with what he characterizes as a series of oxymoronic reactions by critics to Croce's conception of an Ariosto of cosmic harmony (e.g., "la tempestosa armonia" or "le dissonanze del-

l'armonia"), finds Ariosto not a solitary dreamer, but a man who needed social contact.^[51] The critical consensus has long been to identify the ironic or satiric pole of Ariosto's fiction with the author himself.^[52] Yet Wiggins argues convincingly that Ariosto's ironic voice emerges from one who studied to design an ideal picture of himself while at the same time finding an urbane way to express social discontents, "the pathos of his alienation."^[53]

There is enough negative capability in Ariosto's art that I would not want to add Bradamante to the list of characters like Atlante and Astolfo who have been proposed as figures for the poet.^[54] The image of an inveterate tinkerer left to us by his son reconciles, for me, the tension between the individual and the social actor. Ariosto was a man who "would not leave anything he planted for more than three months in one place," writes his son Virginio, "and if he sowed peaches or any kind of seed, he went so often to see if they were sprouting, that at last he broke the shoots."^[55] In his last year Ariosto received a pension from Alfonso d'Avalos, and did not fail to reward his patron with an extended encomium in the Tower of Tristan panels (OF 32.27 and 48)—creating, in his final flourish, one of the least interesting sections of his poem, unless we can see such flattery as one of "the multiplicity of force relations" that Michel Foucault defined as power: "the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses" relations such as those that define the Renaissance courtier, poet, and family man.^[56]

At the end of his life, in the final edition of his poem, Ariosto drew upon the old romance convention of the custom of the castle to dramatize the response of an individual to an institution that lacks integrity. The Tower of Tristan represents, in terms suitable to a Renaissance epic, what Robert Rodini has identified in the theatrical comedies Ariosto wrote during the socially unsettled era from 1490 to 1530 as a questioning of "humanistic certainties and . . . institutional norms."^[57] Bradamante's magnificent counterpressure creates a picture of one who is both a producer and a product of the social order. For Ariosto's image

of discord is not a haunted forest or male rivalry for a cold queen or even Bradamante's jealous belief (based on the twisted report of a Gascon knight) that Ruggiero intends to marry Marfisa, but Bradamante's struggle within a social convention. As the Furioso concludes, it seems that Bradamante ultimately submits to Ruggiero's greater prowess, and to marriage. But most readers would agree that she stoops to conquer, outmaneuvering the circumscriptions of space and propriety and custom. The theme of the Tower of Tristan is the practice of submission— the uses to be made not just of an asymmetry of the sexes but of an individual's tactical deference to social convention.