Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue

Renaissance Quarterly, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Braider

Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-Francois Vallee, eds. Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue.

Buffalo and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xxiv 292 pp. index. bibl. $65. ISBN: 0-8020-8706-X.

The collection under review aims to advance the study of what it calls "the Renaissance culture of dialogue" by adopting a comparative approach that focuses on the genre at large rather than on the dialogues of a specific author, group of authors, or field--philosophy, natural science, or conduct literature. Though a majority of the essays do settle on a single writer or work--More's Utopia, Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano, the dialogues of Aretino and Hobbes, or Barbaro's De re uxoria--the volume as a whole covers dialogues in English, French, and German as well as the standard exemplars drawn from the Italian and Neo-Latin canons. Moreover, several contributions, and in particular the two framing essays, Francois Rigolot's "Problematizing Renaissance Exemplarity: The Inward Turn of Dialogue from Petrarch to Montaigne" and Eva Kushner's "Renaissance Dialogue and Subjectivity," propose synoptic overviews that touch on most if not all of the national literatures involved. Yet while the book's assembly of a wide variety of texts, contexts, and traditions successfully evokes the international flavor of the culture in question, it doesn't capture "the Renaissance culture of dialogue" its subtitle promises.

Part of the problem lies in the defects of the genre of the essay collection. Seconded by the frame Rigolot and Kushner provide, the introduction gestures toward the desired synthesis by reminding us how pervasive the practice of dialogue was. However, this synthetic ambition rarely informs the chapters that make up the book's main body. Nina Chordas's "Dialogue, Utopia, and the Agencies of Fiction" comes closest in that, with More, Tasso, Campanella, Castiglione, Spenser, and Bacon as examples, the author attempts to tease out the intimate links between the fictive "nowhere" of utopian imagination and the utopia of humanistic discourse enacted by fictional dialogue as such. Similarly, Jean-Francois Vallee's "The Fellowship of the Book: Printed Voices and Written Friendships in More's Utopia" touches on issues that, developed on a wider canvas than More supplies, could go far toward explaining just why humanists found the dialogue so compelling. But all of the other essays are limited by the special interests of the people from whom they happen to have been asked. A number of essays propose readings of considerable intrinsic interest. In addition to Chordas's and Vallee's convergent explorations of the humanist ideal of reading as a form of both learned and friendly colloquy, I enjoyed W. Scott Howard's analysis of the intertextual dialogue between Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" and Luc Borot's review of Hobbes's evolving practices as a writer of dialogues. Still, these disparate pieces couldn't yield a convincing picture of the global culture of which the dialogue was a distinctive expression.

But the root of the problem lies in the premises borrowed from the two framing essays. Rigolot's argument that a clear thread runs from the reinvention of classical dialogue in Petrarch's Secretum to Montaigne's Essais assumes two things: that Montaigne's notoriously polyphonic style of writing amounts to dialogue even if the essays aren't literally composed in dialogue form; and that the underlying logic of dialogue favors the "inward turn" of which Montaigne is taken to be the preeminent exemplar--a viewpoint shared by Kushner's essay in that, for her too, the ultimate "subject" of dialogue is less the intersubjective "fellowship" Vallee describes than "subjectivity" as such. However, though Montaigne's dense patterns of citation, his deliberate embrace of colloquial modes of expression, and his celebrated foregrounding of the multiple voices informing the articulation of his own shifting and often eccentric opinions are unmistakably dialogical, the Essais themselves are still not dialogues. Nor can dialogue be seen as fundamentally given over to increasing inwardness and subjectivity except on condition of overlooking its specific properties as dialogue. Even if the Secretum's Petrarch may be said, as Kushner claims, to "fragment" himself in order to speak in the two opposed persons of the "Franciscus" who desires the worldly fame derived from secular learning and the "Augustinus" who condemns those desires as inimical to the cure of our immortal souls, the very fact of dialogized opposition bespeaks an inner orientation toward an irreducible other undigested by the discourse of the self. Self indeed, like the Burckhardtian "individual" on which both Rigolot and Kushner implicitly draw, is the product of a fundamental relation. In Burckhardt, for all its salience, the emergent Renaissance self depends on the emergent artificial states that provide the setting for what he calls not just "the individual," but "the Italian." Similarly, in dialogue the underlying "subject" responds to alternate voices that can never be reduced to the status of mere facets of the author, however deeply they may resonate in that author's founding consciousness.