Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Page 265

‘analytic’ treatises). In Considerazioni al Tasso the narratee is rep-
resented by Tasso himself, but it is also represented by the public
of the readers galileo explicitly addressees and even by that sort of
‘fictional narratee’ the characters of Jerusalem Delivered embody.
In The Assayer the formal narratee is obviously Mr. Cesarini, but
galileo’s references to Sarsi/grassi as narratee are also very fre-
quent, as well as the direct aforementioned appeal to the narra-
tee/public and the references to the authorities of the classic Latin
and greek world (to some extent ‘indirect narratees’) that Sarsi’s
theories hark back to.
This multidimensional presence of the narratee is associated
with the presence of a narrator who, by contrast, is never fictitious:
galileo. But the contrast to narrative works is just apparent. In fact
galileo properly activates his own dialogic performance, for he
constructs himself and refers to himself also as an ‘actor’ who
talks, makes others talk, interacts with his own characters, or nar-
ratees. In other words, the narrator galileo puts his word ‘on stage’
by turning it into a rhetorical word. In order to do that, he employs
different registers – just like narrative and theatre do – according to
the setting and to the variable addressee (his opponents, characters
in his opponents’ works, his public, or a generic implied reader).
By starting with Considerazioni, what could be defined as
galileo’s stylistic-literary hallmark is developed through the
exploitation of extremely heterogeneous linguistic material, but
this hallmark focuses on a characteristic which also belongs to
galileo’s later works and is particularly evident in The Assayer: a
constant interaction and alternation between components of high
culture and refined writing on one hand, and popular and ‘living’
elements of oral expression on the other. Little by little critics have
shaped the image of galileo as a man of letters on this basis, that
is, on the continuous switching between an educated and a popular
code; hence they have sometimes represented him as an author
strongly influenced by the Italian scrittura aurea (‘golden writing’)
of the fifteenth century’s renaissance yet immersed in the creative
flair of a baroque aesthetic. as andrea Battistini states in his sem-
inal essay on The Assayer, galileo was undoubtedly formed by the
culture of the fifteenth century, while the influence of the baroque,
with its demand for renewal, is undeniable. Other factors also mat-
STEFanO rOSaTTI
265
Milli mála 2011_Milli mála 1-218 6/28/11 1:39 PM Page 265