Ariosto polifonico. Un’idea dell’«Orlando furioso»

As early as 1928, Werner Günther had highlighted the singular modernity of Orlando furioso’s narrative style in relation to the preceding tradition, attributing to Ariosto a self-conscious and distinctly literary use of «erlebte Rede», or free indirect discourse, in which the narrator’s voice enters into resonance with that of the character. According to Günther, it is precisely the unprecedented conjunction of «lyrische Form» and «metaphysische Ironie» that makes Ariosto the first narrator capable of using free indirect discourse as a poetic and expressive instrument. This stylistic achievement would find no true imitators before La Fontaine and would remain for a long time an isolated phenomenon, without further development in the Italian literary tradition. Can one, then, properly speak of a «polyphony» in Orlando furioso? Or, to put the question differently, does the narrator in the Furioso reproduce the feelings and words of the characters through a process of imaginative identification characteristic of modern polyphonic fiction? If so, one might discern here a multiperspectival exercise of literary imagination that becomes the most effective means of cultivating a new moral sensibility and a sharper consciousness of the self. If one accepts this line of interpretation, the Furioso emerges as a crucial point of transition between the medieval chivalric romance and the modern European novel, and truly appears, as Francesco De Sanctis wished to see it, as a «luminous pillar in the history of the human spirit».