Fragmentational Poetics: Staging the Crisis of Oratory in Petrarch's Political Canzoni

Petrarch is many things to many people, but one thing on which we generally agree is that he is diffuse. This is especially clear compared with the usual account of Dante as an orthodox and rigorous—one might say, rigid—thinker; in contrast, Petrarch fits neatly into his assigned role as anti-Dante: modern as against medieval, lyric as against epic, relativist as against absolutist. Yet many of Petrarch’s apparent self-contradictions can be shown to be purposeful gestures that illuminate the poet’s philosophical instability less than his rhetorical sophistication. In what follows, I will apply this principle to the case of Petrarch’s political canzoni, suggesting that these three poems compose a kind of narrative within the larger economy of the Rime, a narrative in which the chief point at issue is the ability of the poet-narrator to exercise his putative public function of moral suasion unto virtue. The manner in which he conducts this rhetorical narrative brings him into remarkably close alignment with Dante, and his conclusion, while still partial in the context of the Rime, gestures in a very Dantean direction, implying the exchange of human rhetoric for divine. Let us begin by rehearsing the case for Petrarch’s incoherence. To call the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta “fragmentary” is to remark upon the defining feature of the text. It begins by suggesting a narrative in the confessional mode, then systematically refuses to submit to the narrative’s demands. Whether in the misleading and obscure chronological relationships between individual poems, the instability of the lyric io that reduces potentially sanctifying progress to errancy, or the mere fact that one must stop reading and begin anew some 365 times in order to make it through, Petrarch’s Rime seem to reject the very possibility of organizing his experience into a cohesive