Orlando's madness

The episode of Olando's madness, which begins at the end of Canto 23 and occupies the entire beginning of Canto 24, is the central episode of Ariosto's epic. It gave him his name.

How to represent madness ? Madness does not manifest itself as discourse inhabited by the loss of meaning; madness is furia, the unleashing of a brutal, mute and savage force returning man to the state of beast. We need to distinguish between Orlando's " pain ", which manifests itself at the end of Canto 23 in his lament, and Orlando's " fury  ", which leads him to tear off his clothes, scatter his weapons, slaughter peasants, eat with his hands indifferently raw and cooked food, and fight hand-to-hand with wild beasts. Each of these acts targets the chivalric code, turning the knight's distinction into bestial indistinction: clothes and weapons are the knight's first distinctive mark. It's because he has seized the clothes and weapons of the chevalier vermeil that Perceval, in Chrétien de Troyes, can be knighted by Arthur.

The selection of adversaries is the second hallmark of the knight : the knight must never fight a villain ; exterminating the peasants is a villainy (we remember Roger's scruples when faced with Armide's villain in chant VIII) ; is to become a villain oneself, just as fighting bears hand-to-hand is to become a bear oneself (as depicted in the engraving by Gustave Doré). Orlando returns to the land and to nature, leaving behind culture and chivalric distinction.

Participation in banquets is the knight's third distinctive mark, by which his membership of the community is signified. Eating raw, in deserted homes, is the very negation of this courtly sociability, this mark of distinction.

Several illustrated editions highlight a particularly atrocious detail of this furious rampage: Orlando decapitates a peasant and, taking his body by the foot, uses it as a club (editions Valgrisi, Valvassori et Franceschi). This image of Orlando brandishing the body he has seized by the foot merges with that of Hercules, the other great " furieux ", slaughtering Lichas, his fabled friend whom he no longer recognizes (the sculpture of Canova's Hercules is apparently inspired by the furious Rolands of the Renaissance). Hercules' fury, burning under the effect of the poisoned blood with which Nessus' tunic was dyed, was a fashionable exemplum among fifteenth-century neo-Platonists : for them, Hercules burning as punishment for his sins of the flesh allegorized the spiritual quest of the soul, which must rid itself of the body to gain access to the world of ideas : the furia is an asceticism.

Nothing of the sort in Ariosto, who seems to seek precisely to radically reverse such a reading : Orlando's madness does not elevate him in any way  on the contrary, he becomes a pure body, he sheds of /// humanity. " Caught in the amorous glu ", like a bird caught in the glue of a peasant trap, Orlando struggles but makes no sense.

The allegorical reading of fury is therefore no longer operative here, while the recuperation of madness by language (the baroque discourse of the madman) is not yet the order of the day.

The rest of Canto 24 seems unrelated to Orlando's madness. In the text, moreover, the narrative break is very clear: we move from Orlando's story to that of Zerbin. Yet the two characters are not unrelated, and it is no coincidence that the narrative device consists of juxtaposing Roland's madness and Zerbin's death. Both knights are characterized by a scrupulous respect for the rules of chivalry and courtesy. Zerbin, who pardoned Medor at the chant XIX (but to no avail since he then receives a spear blow from one of Zerbin's companions, a spear blow which by reference to the Passion of Christ signifies treachery par excellence), who here forgives traitors, Odoric who had tried to rape Isabelle at the chant XIII, and to Gabrine who had denounced him in chant XXIII to Anselm. Finally, it's Zerbin who, piously picking up Orlando's weapons scattered on the ground, gathers them into a trophy that he defends to the death against Mandricard, when the latter seizes Durandal.

The fates of Orlando and Zerbin are closely intertwined in this song XXIV : Zerbin's inscription on the trophy, ARMATURA DI ORLANDO PALATINO, responds to the inscriptions of Angelica and Medoro, found by Orlando in the same meadow; it makes up for the lack of chivalry, it repairs the deconstruction of the epic genre into pastoral, of the epic gesture into Orlando's madness. But the trophy itself echoes the mausoleum of Rodomont, which Orlando reaches at the end of his wanderings, a mausoleum that is not named in the text (we'll have to wait for the chant XXXI), but that the illustrations in the Valgrisi et Franceschi représentent explicitement. Rodomont accumulates the weapons of the knights facing him, in reparation for the death of Isabelle, whom he sequestered after Zerbin's death. Isabelle died of despair, and Rodomont's mausoleum is an attempt to make amends for her loss, to make amends for his breach of the code of courtesy. Orlando's trophy and Rodomont's mausoleum thus face each other like two impossible monuments, two illusory reparations for the epic's failure. Here we touch on the very foundation of the narrative device: the narrative does not string events together linearly  it juxtaposes sequences destined to respond to each other, to form a network.

.

See the chant XXIV.

///