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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
My postulate is that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical. Everything is poetic that confesses, that gives us a glimpse of a destiny.
--Borges (1)
I
A major tendency among recent interpretations of The Prince has been to raise serious doubts about whether the text adequately established (even in Machiavelli's own considered judgment) what, in Thomas M. Greene's question, was "a calculus capable of scientific coherence." The view that The Prince was simply an exercise in practical political wisdom rooted in an historical theory of imitable examples can no longer be treated as indisputable. Greene's answer to his own question can stand for what has come increasingly to be the contemporary view of Machiavelli's exemplary reckoning. "The determination," he writes, "proves to be negative: analysis leading to precept is progressively abandoned ... scientific pretensions are quietly withdrawn as the semblance of conclusive law fades from the text." There emerges, in Greene's reading of Machiavelli's text, "a disturbing gap between example and precept." (2)
From each of several quite different points of view, recent students of Machiavelli's use of examples have all concluded that the connection between the historical materials that Machiavelli narrates and the maxims he announces is not at all the close one he so frequently indicates. "The best Machiavelli can do," John D. Lyons concludes, expressing the general view common to these critics, "is to write a hypothetical history of Italy." (3) The text seems to be presenting "itself as a meditation on history, that seems to be drawing examples from history and analyzing them inductively from specific case to general principle," in Barbara Spackman's words. That, however, is a premature judgment, she goes on to insist, because "Machiavelli is not arguing from example, inducing from particular case to particular case in order to arrive at generalizable truths." Machiavelli's actual procedure remains so far from the ideal rhetorical model of exemplarity that "it is as though, when events fall short of adherence to the directions given by the maxim, the fault is in reality, in history itself." (4) "The narrative fragments seem to function as examples," Nancy Struever writes, "eventful instantiations of generally accepted rules, but the narrative scaffolding economically embodies an armature of counterintuitive conclusions." (5) In the end, Machiavelli makes "simplistically direct imitation of exemplary actions" impossible: "His strategies of characterization and emplotment leave nothing to imitate; he enjoins naive imitation of the tortuous, inimitable." (6) And Timothy Hampton, in his compelling study of exemplarity in Renaissance literature, Writing from History, argues that "Machiavelli's insistence on the contingency of all action undercuts the pragmatic value of this type of exemplarity," that is, the type in which one seeks to isolate "what is necessary for a specific situation from the actions of various predecessors." (7) Agreeing with nearly everyone who has lately reexamined Machiavelli's strategy of examples and maxims, Hampton observes that, "in Machiavelli's model of history, difference undoes repetition, the similitude linking exemplar and imitator is rendered at the very least useless and at the most a dangerous illusion." (8)
A second critical tendency in contemporary Machiavelli criticism argues that the text of The Prince somehow reveals Machiavelli's "state of mind" in reaction to his sudden change of political and personal status in 1512 and 1513. Musing on its origins, Machiavelli's biographer, Roberto Ridolfi, had no doubt that The Prince had issued from misfortune: "He owed the Prince, the Discourses, and many other of his immortal pages to the Medici, who drove him out of office, interned him, and left him for a long time in poverty and neglect." (9) More recently, Wayne A. Rebhorn has traced the connection between Machiavelli's experience and his ideas in what he sees as a "vicarious participation in politics," where the author of The Prince sought directly to re-enter the active political world "through his intellect and imagination." (10) Rebhorn takes this line of reasoning a step farther than Ridolfi had ever intended, however, suggesting that we even look for the meaning of Machiavelli's texts in the facts of his biography; his opinion is that "practically all the works he produced during the rule of the Medici, literary as well as political and historical texts, can be seen as direct or indirect expressions of his frustration and in a variety of ways they represent attempts to deal with it." (11) The Prince, in particular, was an effort in "psychological release," in which "speculation substitutes for the combination of action, observation, and analysis that marked his former life." (12) And Hanna Pitkin, in her influential Fortune Is a Woman, although she is careful to avoid the dead-end of what she calls "psycho-analyzing the texts," nevertheless wants to understand the "psychic meaning of the images" found in those texts. Like Ridolfi and Rebhorn, Pitkin views the pain of Machiavelli's situation after 1512 as both context and motive for his writings. "Once Machiavelli was out of office," she writes, "his situation must have been even more difficult, both psychologically and in external circumstances." (13) That situation comes into focus psychologically: "Personally as well as politically, practically as well as symbolically, Machiavelli had been unmanned. This was the context in which he began to rebuild in theory what had collapsed in practice." (14) And the pressure was felt in the substance of that theory. "The political realities of Machiavelli's situation," Pitkin says, "were extraordinarily troubled [and he] was sometimes forced into utopain fantasies and enraged distortion." (15) And, that is the upshot; the life experiences and the resulting psychological tensions had their undoubted effects. In the end, the force of experiential and emotional struggles appeared as cracks in the edifice. "The very metaphors and images he employs to convey his thoughts," she writes, "repeatedly distort or destroy those insights." (16)
Certain serious exegetical problems arise when we bring the view that the examples in The Prince neither generate nor sustain the text's general teachings, together with the recognition that Machiavelli's personal experiences (the post-political as well as the officially political) account for much of both the act of writing and the contents of the book. Chief among these problems, of course, is the need to find a way of reading the exemplary historical narratives (especially the contemporary Italian ones) that is consistent with the idea that their strictly practical value as imitable examples may have been only of secondary importance in determining their inclusion in the text.
The present interpretive effort seeks to bridge between the skeptical and the personal approaches, to find a plausible explanation for the text's exemplary details in its poignant autobiographical design. Rather than construing the personal allusions as evidence of psychological tension or disturbance, or accounting for the exemplary material in altogether practical terms, a more deliberately poetical focus will allow us to discern symbolic and redemptive features of the book. While Machiavelli's The Prince can be (and has been) read from any number of perspectives, of course, my argument is that it must also be examined as his impassioned attempt to account for, encompass, and transcend the horrible ways in which his career strategies had gone wrong.
In this connection, the text of The Prince is made up almost entirely of two separate but overlapping discourses. In the first, we find passages that alternate between the admonitory and the apodictic and which proclaim distinctive and often counterintuitive political dogmas, such as "no government should ever imagine that it can always adopt a safe course" (17) (74), and "whoever is responsible for another's becoming powerful ruins himself" (13). These declarations may or may not be accompanied by evidence and they are as likely to be lengthy and drawn-out as brief...
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