Emotional Ambivalence across Times and Spaces: Mapping Petrarch’s Intersecting Worlds

Abstract

Petrarch stands at the top of Mount Ventoux and proclaims his longing to return home. His soul turns toward Italy. Yet Petrarch has no “home” as such, and Italy does not exist except as a post-imperial territorial designation. There certainly is no Italian nation. How can we understand these paradoxes? How does Petrarch’s passion relate to the question of nation formation? Through an exploration of Petrarch’s emotional responses to Italy, and by tracking his variable senses of space and time, this essay explores the tensions expressed by a deracinated intellectual caught between two different but contemporaneous ontological formations: the traditional and the modern. Here, the concept of “the traditional” is not treated as being the same as “the pre-modern.” Rather the essay works with a post-binary method of ontological valences or orientations. The colliding valence­s of Petrarch’s evocations are used to illustrate the ways we can open up alternative lines of inquiry into a crucial period in the life of Italy. The essay seeks an alternative to the mainstream tendency to either to make contentious overstatements or to slide into overcautious interpretative ambiguity.

Keywords:

• emotion
• nation
• tradition
• modernity
• writing
• intellectuals
• abstraction

Notes

1 The following discussion of Petrarch’s ascent of Ventoux draws heavily upon Bishop and Gebser, chapter 2, though I do not always agree with the conclusions they draw. On broader issues of Petrarch’s work the essay is indebted to texts such as Kohn, Mann, Mazzotta, Trinkaus, and Hainsworth.

2 Here the term “valence” comes from the Latin valentia meaning strength or capacity. It comes to us via chemistry where from the nineteenth century it has been used to refer to the “combining power of an element.” More recently it has been used in social theory and psychology to express an orientation. This is how it is used here — as a social orientation.

3 The term is defined in a broader sense as the concept “Messianic time” (derived from Walter Benjamin through Benedict Anderson), but without the Christian infection of that term. That is, it is a form of space that connects presence and absence through something beyond itself; space that is meaningful in its sacred connectedness; space that is subjectively totalizing.

4 The use of the Latin word confine is, in confirmation of Anthony Giddens’s thesis of a transition from frontier to boundary during this period, best defined in terms of the former. See Lucien Febvre on the concept of fronti_re.

5 Relevant to this issue, Charles Trinkaus writes that Petrarch “signalled the beginning of a shift in religion from public communal expression to private relationship with the deity” (83).

6 The allusion here is to Norman Jacobson’s thesis in Pride and Solace, with particular reference to his discussion of Machiavelli’s vision of a united Italy (chapter 2).

7 Cited in Bloch (435). It is significant that the bishop so argues, even though Italia at the time was a land of disparate languages and dialects. It was not until long after Dante’s influence that there slowly developed a dominant vernacular literary language.

8 See Baum. To anticipate a possible response to the abstraction argument in relation to language, it should be noted that though the vernaculars were more concrete both in form and concept, they were abstracted from their face-to-face settings as a means of exploring secular (abstract) truths, love, passion, power and so on. That is, the vernaculars were drawn upon (abstracted) rather than lived within. In the same way that the thirteenth and fourteenth-century peninsular poets gave the vernaculars new levels of meaning, they drew heavily for a time upon Ultramontane languages: Langues d’oc, and d’oil and Provençal. See Joseph Kennard, A Literary History of the Italian People, 1941, chapters 3 and 4.

9 Letter to Francesco Bruni, probably 1368, reproduced in Bishop, Letters, 261. Bishop cites as his source Francisci Petrarchae opera omnia (Basel, 1581), but does not cite the Latin original.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul James

Paul James is Director of the UN Global Compact, Cities Programme (Melbourne and New York) and Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity, University of Western Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (London), and an editor of Arena Journal. He is author or editor of twenty-five books, including Nation Formation (1996) and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (2006).

Correspondence to: Paul James, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. Email: [email protected]