[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
When you ask writers whom they write for,
some will say they write for themselves.
Those are the ones you don't want to read.
Others will say they write for the reader.
Great, but who exactly is your reader?
That's not an idle question mind you.
A friend of mine who writes books of critical prose
and who labors over his sentences in order to give them exactly the right tone and texture.
Once told me,
"Sichurne kripapu ju sipalapin."
If you don't write for God, it's really not worth the pain.
In other words, only a reader as lasting and discerning as God
makes it worth your while to expend so much effort,
perfecting your phrases.
My friend has a point there.
As for me, I can't say that I write for God
because even if he does exist,
I figure he won't have much to learn from what I struggled
to put down on paper.
I can't say that I write for future generations either
because I'm not sure that reading,
I mean deep deliberative reading has much of a future.
Does that mean I write for my contemporaries?
Well, yes, in a way,
but not only, if truth be told,
I write mostly for the dead.
The dead know best what I'm writing about.
They're the ones best suited to read about their legacies
and they're the ones who have most at stake
and being remembered in the way I try to remember
the ones I'm writing for and the ones I'm writing about.
If you don't write for the dead,
sipalapin.
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♪♪
Just because you're dead, it doesn't mean you can't read.
And if what I hear is true,
entitled "Pinnions" can be heard beyond the grave.
I'm told that Martin Heidegger was quite taken with the shows we did about him,
with guests Andrew Mitchell and Thomas Chien.
Georges Batte on the other hand was bummed out by the one we did on him a couple of years ago.
Bummed out by me that is, although he was full of praise for my guest Laura Whitman,
who defended him valiantly.
Plato, Virgil, Epicurus, Alexander the Great, Dante, Hagel, Keats, Melville,
Beckett, Schrodinger.
These and many others have given us high marks for the shows we've devoted to them over the years.
As I've said before, it's all about the listener.
Dead or alive.
♪♪
The dead Dick guitar solos, too.
♪♪
The one departed soul who I know will be tuning into our show today from the Great Beyond is Francesco Petrávica,
or Petrác, as he's known in the Anglophone community of scholars.
While he was alive Petrác was always intensely interested in anything that had to do with his posterity.
And here we are, devoting a show to him today over six centuries after his death in 1374.
Petrác could have authored my opening remarks himself since he was one of those people who regularly addressed himself to the dead.
And what's fascinating about him, among other things, is that he related to posterity by way of dialogues with his predecessors.
As he writes in one of his letters, I quote, "Meanwhile here, in my library, I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland.
Here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.
Where in I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits, or at their customs and lives, or at their eloquence and genius. I gather from them every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see the traces of their stale breath in the frosty air."
A century and a half later, one of Petrác's spiritual descendants, Nico Lómácavelli, wrote a famous letter to Francesco Vittóri, describing his life, "an internal political exile after the fall of the Florentine Republican government that he had served."
In a paragraph reminiscent of the Petrác passage I just quoted, "Mácavelli describes how he spends his evenings."
On the coming of evening I returned to my house and enter my study, and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtily, and re-clothed appropriately.
I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where received by them with affection. I feed on that food, which only is mine and which I was born for,
where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions. And they in their kindness answer me, and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom.
I forget every trouble. I do not dread poverty. I am not frightened by death entirely I give myself over to them."
Sounds like entitled opinions to me.
Now, dialoguing with the dead is not an exercise in antiquarianism. By interrogating the ancients and asking them the reasons for their actions,
Mácavelli became the founder of modern political science. As for Petrác he became the first truly modern European, as well as the first truly modern poet,
Not by breaking the old rules, not by repudiating the past, not by promoting any kind of futurism, but by retrieving the ancients and projecting their legacies into the future.
It was above all as an inheritor of the past that Petrác became the father of modern humanism and the founder of modern European lyric poetry.
One does not inherit the future by plunging oneself blindly into its novelties and futurity, one inherits the future by re-inheriting and renewing the past.
The Italian poet, Giuseppe Omegette, who was an heir of both Leo Paddian Petrác and who remodernized Italian verse in the 20th century, had this to say about the Latinate elegance of Petrác's poetry.
I quote, "A language recovered from the grave, such is the miracle of the Canzoñédé. Through Petrác's merit, Italian suddenly became an ancient language, an efficient mode of speech that would serve as model for the tongues of adolescent Europe."
It knew was Ezra Pound's rallying cry for poetry, but what was new about Petrác's language was precisely its antiquity, only the source in its latent futurity dispenses the power of renewal.
By retrieving and purifying its Latin ancestry from out of its future, Petrác turned Italian into an ancient language and thereby into the first modern language of Europe.
In this score one might compare Petrác to Shakespeare, who did something similar to the English language, although in a contrary sense.
Rather than purify its idiom, Shakespeare expanded to the point of exploding its genetic legacies by marrying English to its distant Roman cousins.
In doing he helped make of English the legitimate, adoptive heir of Latin and the romance languages that contaminated its Germanic ancestry.
One could say that he claimed an expansive Romanic Latin ancestry for English.
In that sense, Shakespeare was, like Petrác, a genuine modern.
The genuinely modern does not chase after the new, it finds ways to make the old new again.
The guest who joins me in the studio today has a great deal to say about Petrác's relation to antiquity, his dialogues with the dead and his sense of history as an accumulation of ruins that in their vestigial fragments call on us to recover what is recoverable of the past.
Andrew Huey received his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton in 2009, and since then he has been a postdoc fellow here in Stanford's iHUM program,
where he has been teaching courses in collaboration with yours truly, as well as with several other former guests of entitled opinions like Jean-Marie Aposolides des Zep Gumbrecht, Laura Whitman and Joshua Landi, as well as Dan Edelstein.
In July he will join the inaugural faculty of the new Yale NUS College, which is a joint collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore in creating a liberal arts college in Asia.
Meanwhile, he has hard at work on a book manuscript entitled The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature in which our friend Petrác figures prominently.
Andrew, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much Robert, it's a real honor to be here.
I want to congratulate you first on that job that you're going to be starting next year.
Can you tell us something about this venture between Yale and the NUS College in Singapore?
Sure, well the ambition is to create the Borer Arts College that's adapted to the needs of a 21st century global world, especially in the context of Asia, where it's taking as you know a more predominant role in this global age.
And to go back to your Ezra Pound statement, make it new.
Interestingly, this was also a Confucian principle.
In fact, Ezra Pound was a great reader of the ancient classics, and he actually kind of rips that from Confucius.
And he's saying make it new as in, make the ancient rituals new.
And I'm saying this because the liberal arts is a medieval tradition, something that Petrác knew very well.
But the trubium and the quadriform and our project, if I may speak kind of politically or philosophically, is to make this old liberal arts new.
That's great. And Confucius had a word for that?
Well, it's called Fugu, it's the revival of the old.
And in fact, the exact, almost exact word exists in Latin, the Reinovati, right?
And later on we'll talk about Reinovati and the Renaissance, Reinovati's a rebirth.
But it's not a rebirth or a renovation, and I don't imagine that Confucius intended it as a mere kind of mechanical reproduction of what has been.
It's a renewal in the sense of a rejuvenation and renewing the old in a way that it's given a new life.
Right. It's a way of metum psychosis, the transmigration of the soul.
So our show today is devoted to Petrác, and why don't we begin with you kind of reminding our listeners who Petrác was?
What he wrote and why he's such a central figure in European cultural history.
Sure. Well, Francesco Petrác is life. It encompasses virtually the entirety of the 14th century.
He was born in 2004 and died in 1374.
He lived at generation after Dante, and he was contemporaries and friends with Poccaccio and they corresponded.
And he was a generation or two before the full-fledged high Renaissance, as it were.
And the humanist movement with figures such as Machiavelli, who you just quoted,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, and later on in France. We have Montaigne and Rabele and England.
We have Shakespeare and Spencer.
So he was the author of several different works, many of them in Latin, but some in Italian, no?
Right. Yeah. He was most famous for the consulñére or the Rímeé Sparchese in English, the scattered rhymes.
And in Latin, which is how he titled it, it's called Varum Bogarium Fragmenta.
And later on, we might want to talk about why it's called Sparchese, scattered rhymes or leaves and fragmenta fragments.
So this poetic cycle, this poetic collection, anthology, was enormously influential in the 15th and 16th century.
So much so that there was a term for it, which is called Petrácism.
It's the stylistic imitation of Petrác's poetry. So in France, we have a group called The Playad, which included people like Homestead and Du Bolet,
and in England, Shakespeare himself, Spencer, and Milton.
They all wrote these long, poetic narrative sequence in 14-line verses.
Obviously, Petrác did not invent the soniform, but in a way he perfected it, and he perfected it so much so that this would be the predominant
vehicle or engine of poetic expression for the next two, three centuries.
That's true. And it's interesting for us and our discussion about renewal that the person who was most obsessed,
about recovery of the ancient, especially Roman literature and wisdom, not so much the Greek he lamented the fact that he didn't...
Exactly. Like Dante, he didn't know the Greek language.
But nevertheless, this person who looked more backwards and he looked forward is the inaugurator of a new modern kind of medium.
So we can talk more about that. I read from one of his letters in the Fambilliades to start with, and then to follow it up with...
Yes, yes.
...with...
...muckivities letter, do you want to say something about those that one or the other?
Yeah, those are really my two favorite passages in all of the literature.
Let's start with the Petrác, right? It starts with...
He says, "Meanwhile here I've established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland,
here I gather all the friends I have now or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and so forth."
So to contextualize this a little bit, this letter was written during one of his habitual solitary and valkus, which is in southern France,
and Petrác gives an extraordinary account of this self-imposed exile.
And the way I read it is that from the depths of his contemplation, Petrác conjures a utopia of sorts,
and it's this spellbinding summoning of spirits, ancient and modern, far and near, and it can be positioned between what happens in Dante's infernal
when the poet himself inducts himself into the spectral circle of ancient poets, which included Homer and Horace and Virgil, Luke and Eustace.
And later on with what you just read with Muckivelli, he has an nocturnal communion with ancient authors.
But I think Petrác is closer to Muckivelli in the sense that Dante banishes the worthy pagans into the kingdom of shadows,
whereas Muckivelli revivifies them.
And Petrác is even more expansive than both of them, because he commingles not only the Agust thinkers of antiquity, but also recent intimate friends.
And the way he gives birth to the humanist movement is that he isolates nearly forgotten moments in the human past and the present,
and he endeavors to establish a communication with them.
And there's also even a bit of a self-aggrandizing rhetoric, right?
Because he thinks that he's the only one to recognize his imaginary societies true genius.
And so he says, "I gather," right? And the Latin is contrejo.
And so in this sense, he gathers all signs of what we call the historical abyss, the traces, ruins, fragments, and even death itself, right?
It's filled up with -- it's completed by the pointitude of friendship and tradition.
Well, there's a lot of issues in what you've just said.
So a few questions, I agree with you, that Dante gives us a different kind of model of a retrieval of the ancients.
On the other hand, let's not forget that, you know, in his moment of crisis, who comes to his rescue in the dark wood, but Virgil?
And he's a poet. He's a pagan poet. He's been dead for 1300 years, and he will be --
Dante's guide through not only in Ferno, but also up the mountain of Purgatory.
So there is a retrieval of pagan wisdom in that gesture.
And you -- I think you're -- you're loosing to the moment in Ferno IV, where Dante visits the souls in the circle of -- in limbo,
and there he meets the ancient poets, which that's their domain. So Dante has his own relation to Greek and Roman antiquity.
Petrarch has a very kind of different one, because Petrarch is also famous as the not for the term "dark ages" that he believed that medieval period that preceded him did not have a very worthy appreciation and gratitude.
And actual appreciation for the ancient authors, right?
Yeah, so Petrarch is, as you said, famous for inventing this term of the dark ages, which is a historical concept.
And whereas medieval thinkers, like, for example, Thomas Aquinas, or Dante thought that antiquity was the pagan dark ages,
because they were lived in this age, be knighted, or blind, because they did not know the light of Christ, right?
Petrarch, what he does is inverts and says, well, in the Middle Ages, meant neglected the wisdom and the philosophy of the Greek and Roman thinkers.
What he wanted to do is a renovatiel or a renewal of classical ancient cultures.
But to go back to your point of how Dante retrieves the ancient pagan poets, he retrieves them only up to a certain point, right?
So, this is Virgil is only his guide to the top of the mountain of Purgatory, right?
So at the beginning, Virgil saves him from the dark woods of confusion and spiritual crisis.
But then at the end, Virgil himself is banished, right?
He's not allowed to go into Patadizo because he does not have grace, he does not have Christian grace, right?
Well, okay.
Two issues there.
One, I would maybe not go along with the word banish because I think what Dante dramatizes is Virgil reaching the outermost limits of its limitations as in pagan.
Sure.
He's beyond, he's outside of his own element in a large part of Purgatory, even in the Garden of Eden.
He's beyond where he should be as a pagan.
So he reaches his limits of his kind of pagan natural wisdom and it's true he doesn't go up to paradise.
But more importantly, when we look at the career of Petroc, at least if we read his Tanzania and his Sigkritum, which is a conversation with St. Augustine,
and Augustine keeps harassing him about his excess of self-love and his refusal, willful refusal to undergo the kind of Christian conversion that the would have led him like Dante up to paradise up to God.
And he is too attached to worldly glory, his immortal fame as a poet and so forth.
So in a certain sense, could you say that Petroc, even though he was fully aware that he's born to the Christian era and Christian salvation as an option for him, he stubbornly wants to remain within a more pagan framework where going to, yeah, he's along with Virgil, Horus and the others.
He has a great admiration for what they have called.
Yeah, that's a great insight and when we say that Petroc is one of the first modern men, modernity also means a secularization, right?
The succulent in the Middle Ages just means earthly time, right?
But we can look at it retrospectively in the what the Renaissance and early modernity brought was a separation of the church and state, right?
Whereas in the Middle Ages it's inconceivable to think of any political system without theology, right?
And what that also brings is the emergence of the individual, right?
And one kind of negative side of this sense of individualism is a present to them or a meism or even an egoism.
So what you're saying about his desire for fame and his desire for being famous, it's this kind of earthly desire which in his imaginary dialogue, the secretum, Augustine, chastises him.
And would you agree that so many of the poems in the Rima Spatzer or the Canzoneer they are about this dilemma of knowing that he really should convert and give up the worldly and embrace God, but that he can't get himself to do it so he's always lamenting the fact that he's neither on one side or the other?
Sure, right.
We can talk about that more, but on the question of his relation to the dead Andrew, he is someone who cultivated in a very active way, his relation to his predecessors.
Would you like to say something about the, for example, the letters?
Sure, right.
So, you know, we just read this letter from the Melyades and basically at a certain point in his life, Patrick decides to collect his own correspondences, right?
He wrote thousands and thousands of letters and, you know, as you know, communication through the, in the middle ages was one of the, one of the epistolary.
So, but the interesting thing is that he not only collects letters, he's written to various friends, but he writes imaginary letters to the dead, right? And I think he is the only person in European letters that I know in which he stages this imaginary dialogue and for the ancients, why do you call it imaginary?
Why can't it be a real dialogue?
Well, well, I mean, because you're not getting an answer.
Right, he's not getting an answer, right? And I mean, what's interesting is that, I mean, it's imaginary dialogue because for the ancients, letter writing or correspondence is one half of a dialogue, right?
And it's also correspondence in which there's a time delay and there's also a geographical distance.
So, as example, like me and you, you know, we're sitting here on the Stanford campus and we're communicating live, right? And I see your face and you see my face and there's no types of we're in the same space and same time.
For Patrick and, and for any letter writing, even if we send a text message or, or email, there is a time gap as well as a geographical distance, right?
This geographical and temporal distance is in a way allegorized for Patrick because he's righting letters to authors like Quintillion or Homer or Livy or Cicero.
And he's lamenting how that the fact that he doesn't know Greek, so he can't read Homer in the original.
He receives the manuscripts of Quintillion and he describes it very hauntingly as the scattered limbs, right? This, the lacerated body, you know, the corpus, the Latin word for text and body is as corpus and he, so even Patrick himself very hauntingly attests and very point in such a poignant way that it's impossible to speak with the dead.
Well, yeah, he's intensely aware of how much, how many gaps there are in the historical record and the archives and our access.
He's also fully conceding that it's through a textuality that the relation to the dead is a textuality, right?
But of course he is mostly a textualized person when we talk about Patrick, we talk about an author talking about someone who wrote books.
He writes letters, it's true to Cicero and so forth, and he's aware that there's a distance which separates him from these ancients. In fact, people have argued that the reason that he's the first modern or he has the first, let's say modern consciousness of antiquity as other is because he's one of the first to realize that there's a huge abyss or rupture that is taking place in the form of a sentence.
So he is sending letters across an abyss and whether the responses he gets are in the form of pistols, we don't know.
Like Evellie who says, "I speak to these guys, I ask them the reason for their action." They answer me.
Right.
So there is a certain-
How much of that is fictive? How much of that is staged, right? Because what's interesting is that Dirk, kind of a couple of things happening, right?
So he is speaking to the dead in his nocturnal library and then he's recapturing that, representing that in his letter to his friend, Vittory.
Right. Or Vittory.
So what do you think we do when we read Petroc or we read Dante or we read any author which is what our profession is, literary scholars and as teachers of literature,
every time we open a book authored by the dead, we are entering into some kind of conversation.
And so far as we're interrogating their texts, we're asking them to give us answers.
Now, their response might be in a different mode than that of the spoken word or you might have to listen to the response differently.
But if there were not this possible, let's call it a communion.
Right.
And I don't see why we would spend all, you know, so much of our lives, you know, reading these books.
Well, I think there are a couple of reasons why we spend so much time reading books and we never read, or at least I never read an isolation.
I want to read these books. I want to read Montaigne or Spencer or Petroc.
So I could also have- not only conversations with them but also with other people in my age.
So for example, when I talk to you about Dante or talk to others about Shakespeare and Milton, right?
And we're also not only scholars but also teachers in that we're in the arts of transmission.
So we're cultivating the next generation of readers, right, into this chain of what's known as the classic tradition.
And interestingly, Petroc himself, and this is kind of his quotes plot, like he writes letters to posterity.
And so he's immensely obsessed about his own survival into the future.
And of course we know that this is utterly contingent, right?
If we stop reading him, then the voices die, right?
If we don't open the books, it's only a physical object.
If we don't read Gilgamesh and Avid and Virgil and Dante with the next generation of students like what we do in IHOM,
they will be ghosts that are silenced.
They will, but at the same time as Tia Seliot wrote in his essay on tradition and individual talent when modern writers are that the predecessor presses his claims in their works there where maybe the author might least suspect it.
So even in there's a covert life to authors of the past in the presence in the ghostly presence of other literature.
So even if we want to read Dante anymore or Avid or think, even if we're reading modern poets, 20th century poets, those predecessors, their voices are still being transmitted through the voice of a descendant or the posterity as such.
So I think that Petrick was intensely aware of the need to take stock of a tradition as a whole.
And to see the predecessor and the posterity as part of a continuum and that he as poet was a link in the chain.
So to go back to what you're saying about he saw the need to see the tradition as a whole and the continuum, he also saw the tradition as deeply fragmented with ruptures and fissures.
And there are lots of lost poets.
I think for to take ancient Greek tragedy for example, you know, Sophocles wrote hundreds of plays, right?
And there are only seven that survive, right?
What if, and Petrick was intensely mulling-colic about all the things that's been lost, right?
And for later thinkers, for example, like Nietzsche, this loss might not be such a bad thing.
And I know you're a deep reader of Nietzsche and one of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche is that he says,
"For a new temple to be built, an old one must be destroyed."
And I think my interpretation of this is that just like with T.S. Eliot, the poet needs to assert his own voice.
He can't be drowned by the voices of tradition, right?
Because who can be equal to Homer or Virgil or Dante, right?
But sometimes we need to smother the voices, right?
Unless we be affixiated by it, right?
And this is the continuity of this kind of competitive rivalry, right?
And I think it's in the same spirit in which, again, Dante, maybe he doesn't banish Virgil, but he leaves him, right?
And then for now he says, "Well, if all of it and Luke can do this, right, I'm going to do him, you know, twice as good."
So there is this myth of competitive rivalry, which means a silencing of the voices.
It's a...
Dante was a genius at incorporating and transcending his sources.
And let's face it, so much of our reading of Dante revolves around his appropriation of his predecessors, and what he does with Virgil, and what he does with Avid,
what he does, even with his own contemporary influences.
Guido Guido, Guido, Guido, Céli, Cavalacán, you know, the troubadour poets.
I agree with you that literary history can become so dense with...
It can be so overpopulated that you need to...
You can understand the desire or the futurist to burn down the libraries.
And sometimes things like the great fire of Alexandria, although it could be a horrible tragedy from one point of view,
it makes room like four or six weeks. Exactly, exactly.
And we're probably lucky that all those great tragedies have come down to us, because we have enough to deal with...
Right.
Okay, so, Petroc does lament all the gaps and the losses, but that makes...
What makes the remnants all the more precious, no?
Exactly, right.
And, right, and Petroc was deeply invested in thinking about fragments and ruins and the remnants of time.
So, the book I'm writing right now is, I argue that, you know, Petroc began what might be called the "Runisons,"
or the "Birth of Ruins" as objects of contemplation, right?
And the Middle Ages Christians were fascinated by relics and relics were the bodies and parts of saints.
And what's interesting in the dawn of humanism is that...
...thinkers became intensely interested in the relics of antiquity, right?
So, these relics, as you said, not only has an antiquarian purpose, but also one of spoliation in which you rip parts of the past,
and you use that to adorn and ornament your own monument.
Right.
So, there is this kind of creative destruction that happens when every imitate and ancient author,
even in Palladio imitating, you know, Vitruvius.
Right. So, you've used the word "remnant," and we've talked about fragments, but in your chapter on Petroc, in the book that you're writing,
the word that you zero in on is vestigium, but the vestigium, which has a very obscure etymology.
Right.
But why do you favor vestige as the... this sort of type of remnant when talking about Petroc?
Oh, purely for idiosyncratic reasons.
But, no, I mean, we could take half a dozen words to think with.
And what's interesting is that you quoted Ungarret diem, right?
And the reason why I use vestigium is that it has a very interesting word history, and as you said, even...
it means traces or remnants, right, but it also means models of invitation, but footprints.
And footprints, exactly. And also the paths of planetary orbits.
Yeah.
But bodies.
This is interesting because the difference between us kind of remnant of ruin is that the ruin is the fragment of something.
In its presence as a material thing, whereas a footprint, a vestigium is the trace of something who's body was there, but it's not just a remnant in that sense.
Exactly.
So it's the difference between matter and form, right?
The footprint is the form without matter, and a remnant or a relic is basically matter without form.
We can think of that like that.
But what's interesting is that words can also be ruins, right, or relics.
So to read something from Ungarret diem, right, he says, a word that has lived for centuries, that through so much history reflects so many different things that returns us to the presence of so many people whose bodies have disappeared from the earth, but whose spiritual presence remains when their words are operated within us.
So we hear kind of the shadow of Petric and Machiavelli here, right?
And he continues to say, such a word that Leor Parndi had seized upon with such truth and beauty of fight could still suggest to the part of today the best means of enriching himself, both morally and in his lyric expansiveness.
So there is a sense in which we can look at the remnants of the past, both materially and whenever we walk in the Roman forms and kind of longingly gaze at the ruins, or whenever we pick up a text and ponder on the semantic richness and the historicity of a word.
So Remnant in short is both material as well as linguistic.
What's Petric, one of the first tourists, modern tourists of Rome, where he has a famous letter about wandering around with his friend and they're going really as the modern contemporary tourists would do.
The Trasian here and the baths there of a space here in the Pyramids and all that.
And he's looking at it really as with this sort of veneration for the bygone that becomes a trademark of the later modern era, especially Romanities, the romantic say go to Rome and the Greece and so forth.
And of course, this is because you come from a multicultural background. This is a distinctly western kind of reverence for the past and the preservation of things.
Is it that unusual if you look at a country like China for sure, you know a lot about new speaking Chineseism?
So, okay, let's go back to your first point and let's give a working answer to your question. Was Petric the modern tourist?
So what did tourism mean in kind of the Christian Middle Ages?
What that meant was pilgrimages, right?
And that you go visit a site, whether it be Canterbury or Jerusalem because it has to venerate the bodies of saints, right?
He goes to Rome, which is the capital of the Holy See, even though at this time the papacy was in what's called the Babylonian captivity in Avignon.
So he goes there and as you said, he gazes, you know, I'm going to use a historical word, romantically on these ruins and it completely overwhelms him because he's not a native Roman and it was first time to Rome.
This is a moment in which text and context coalesce, right?
The text that he receives a Roman letters is in fragments and the physical places that he sees is also in fragments.
So, and ruin is a site in which it's the intersection of the visible and the invisible, right?
So, both the absence of presence and the presence of absence.
So, as you said, then this becomes a huge romantic movement, right?
It is like the symbol of Romanticism and I think it's a symbol of Romanticism because Romanticism has this longing for the whole, right?
But it recognizes that in our mortal time everything is fleeting and everything vanishes and I mean, and I'm using Romantic here not only the historical period, but also as what is up in the
the shtimon, right? The mood, right? This is a disposition, you know, an individual disposition. So, the sense of ruin makes him an affable, right?
He says, I see here and I fall silent because I've been overwhelmed by the vastness of the time which is so diminished, right?
So, now turning to your point about this consciousness about ruins, and I think, I mean, there were kind of two ententemies or two kind of paradoxes that we can think about.
ruins are everywhere, right? As soon as you kind of think about it, the studio in which we're recording who knows what's going to happen in 500 years, right?
Now, is I take it what's behind your question is that is this a particularly European frame of mind, right?
Well, we know that it is definitely European, whether it's solely European is the open question, and given that it is definitely European, that is petrox somehow the pro, not the pro-genitor, but is he emblematic of something that really arises in the modern era.
It's not the kind of variety that was endemic to the dark gauges, they had no reference for these ruins as we know.
Right, so let's go back to your invitation to think about cross-culturally, right?
I've never been to Japan, but in at least in Japanese architecture, they, instead of building with stones and marbles, they used wood most likely.
And what's interesting in that the sacred temples of Japan, each building would be periodically, richly renewed, right, in which the form would stay the same, but each plank, each wooden plank, and each pillar would be replaced.
Right, and so there are no ruins as such in the landscapes of Japan, right?
There isn't like the abbeys, right, like in England, like that famous words worth poem, right, tinteron abbey, right?
There's no like Japanese equivalent to like tinteron abbey, but that's not to say that Japanese, as well as Chinese poets were immensely kind of fascinating that, you know, what is a beautiful field of greens now was a monumental castle, was a magnificent castle of a lord.
So they were conscious of ruins, but then interestingly, there are no vestigia of ruins in the Asian traditions.
All right, now you weren't you telling me once it's been a few months back that when you were in Rome, you were wandering around with a friend.
That's right, yeah, Japanese friend. So this is how my dissertation and now my book manuscript got started, that was the inspiration.
So some of your listeners might know this famous passage in Gibbon where he's inspired to write the decline and fall of the Roman Empire because he was sitting in the foot of the, I think, the capitaline hill, and he sees the friars during their Vesper service, and
he is inspired to write. And so to compare the great with the small, I was inspired to write my first book.
When this was a summer after I took my PhD generals and I was learning Italian obviously as you can tell my Italian is non-native.
And after Italian lessons one day, I was walking in the Roman form with a Japanese friend, and it was really hot and, you know, I was sweaty and you know, we're eating gelato or something.
And she suddenly turned to me and asked, Andrew, why are there ruins here? Why are they not destroyed or rebuilt? And this question kind of astonished me, right?
I was completely kind of discombobulated because, you know, I'm, I'm Chinese, but you know, I've received my education here and ruins are just part of our vocabulary.
And it was the first time where I thought, yeah, why don't they kind of rebuild this, like what they do to Japanese temples, or why is it not made into like Disneyland or something like that, right?
And I think the answer I have for her is basically, you know, what I told you before, and it's encapsulated in the Nietzsche quotation where, you know, in order for a new temple to be built and all to be destroyed.
So we want the Roman form to be in ruins, right, so that we can create other stuff, right? Because if we were only trying to preserve and restore it, it would be what Nietzsche called an antiquarian culture, an Alexandrian culture, right?
You're talking about the Library of Alexandria, it wouldn't be a creative one, right? There would be no Frank Yuris or, you know, no Santiago Calatrava or, you know, or rim co-house.
Right. What couldn't you have the Frank Yuris without this piety towards the ruin? Couldn't you just, it reverently demolish everything and then just build, you know, the futuristic?
And we don't do that, thank goodness. Right. Now to go back to Petroc, it's true that he sees all these ruins as, you know, leftovers or remnants and there are parts of a hole in the imagines a hole.
Would you agree that his practice as a poet was not fragmentary the way he presumes by titling his collection, you know, about the Frank Yuris?
But that actually he, like all of the Renaissance, aspired towards the kind of integrated coherent hole, right?
Where the Canzo Niede, although it talks about dispersion scattering and so forth, it's actually an extremely resolved harmonious polyphonic totality, if 366 poems, absolutely, one for every day, plus the introduction.
And Petroc became the founder of two centuries of Petroc, is not by chance, because he offered a model that was completely self-incosant and coherent and with great resolution.
So I think what you're saying is absolutely right, right, there's something so lapidary and exquisite and polished in each of the Sonnet, right? If you move one word, you know, the whole thing is going to be destroyed, right?
So every part kind of fits into the hole, but interestingly, you know, not to be pedantic, but so in order to answer this question, we have to think about the compositional history of the Canzo Niede or the fragment, right?
But he began it, I think, you know, quite young in his twenties, but he spent basically the rest of his life almost obsessively organizing, editing, you know, recompiling and putting into different orders, even at the very night of his death, right?
So he wants to make an anthology, but it's always a work in progress, right? And what you're saying about Renaissance aesthetics as in the search for the whole, I believe that they searched for the whole, but interestingly, if you think about the, you know, big name Renaissance writers like Montaign,
and Roblai, Shakespeare, Spencer, even Michelangelo and Leonardo, they had tons of projects that were unfinished, right? So, and we usually think of the category of the unfinished like Schubert's unfinished symphony or as a romantic idea, right? But even in, in Renaissance aesthetics, you have this idea of the unfinished, right? Because if life or if art is a mimises is a representation of life, life is something that's always progressive, that's never finished.
So we can think of the 366 poems, not only, not liturgically, as isn't that it recaptures a lost time, but it's a continuous ongoing, right? It's a grammatically a past progressive as an imperfect instead of a perfect verb.
Well, that's true, although I would argue that the aesthetics of the unfinished that you're referring to are symptoms of the end of the Renaissance, the giving way to a new age so that when Michelangelo has all those tortured,
the slaves or when his poems are unfinished, it's already manneristic, it's not a Raphaelo and it's not some other kind of film, but you sell this.
So, precisely in the Quattrochento, like Piero de la Francesca or Alberti, as you said, Raphael or Frangelico, there is this quintessence of the harmonious order of the geometrical proportion, especially in Alberti, right?
But that, so, I mean, obviously, I think Petar, I mean he sells it in some ways is the figurehead of that ideal in his poetry as a practice, not in his poetry.
That's true, but again, we have to think why does he self title it for like meant, right? So, I mean, to write, fragmentarily, it's not the same as writing about fragments, right? You can write very coherently and lucidly about fragments, or you can write very fragmentary in a confused way about,
you know, philosophical things. And so, that's kind of the paradox of a particular in poetics.
Yeah. Well, you know, there's two different kinds of wholeness, there's the wholeness of the divine comedy, but it's a medieval, it's a barbaric wholeness from the point of view of the Petar, or let's say the French classes, because they will say although it's 100 Kantos, although it has a beginning and then,
Dante combined so many heterogeneous and incommensory elements and therefore it did not correspond to a certain kind of later concept of, right, this kind of scene sense of the classic, whereas Petar, the French love and they loved it much more than they loved and he had much more of an afterlife in France, I think because first thing he was divinely artificial.
Right. Right. And also, I've always suspected because Dante didn't have much room for France in his providential history. That's true. Yeah.
The emperor had to be German, the Pope had to be Italian, the French were left out in the cold. Right, look at Brunetto Latini, right? He writes in French. And he condemns them.
I mean, going back to what you were saying about the wholeness, I think the closest analog would be something like Thomas Aquinas, you know, the sumo theologia.
Right. This is kind of his poetic sumo, right? And this ambition to be humble is, as you said, I wouldn't say barbaric, but let's say Gothic, right? Like the divine comedy is the poetic equivalent of a monumental Gothic cathedral, which towers above every of it, edifice in a major European capital.
But would you say that from Petrox point of view, the Gothic is barbaric or whatsoever? Right. Right. For Petrox, definitely. But then in one way, you could say, you know, Petrox loved his grandparents more than his parents. Right. And this is that his parents were in Dante and others, you know, in Greedo and in Cabacante. And he loved the grandparents' resiliacistro in Virgil and Luca and, you know.
Well, Andrea, I can't believe that we've gotten close to the end of our hour without actually having read-upon,
that's our own day, but next time, you know, we're going to have to do that next time. Right.
So we've been speaking here with Andrew Huey, soon to be professor of Yale and National University of Singapore next year.
And scholar of early modern literature, Renaissance literature, as I prefer to call it.
And I come fellow here, you know, here at Stanford. So I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for coming on, Andrew.
Thank you so much for having me back in the future. Take care. See you later.
See from the start, left to depart, finding the pleasure of the wind in his heart.
Loved in the rush, no need to rush. Tired winds for him, who creates with the brush.
Come, love the brush.
[Music]