H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SILLA

 G.: Let us begin with a complaint. Oxford never had her Petrarca. S.: You mean no one at Oxford ever made the recovery of antiquity into a vocation rather than an inheritance. G.: Precisely. Oxford inherited Latin, cited Cicero, mumbled Virgil, and mislaid manuscripts by the civilised dozen. But she never had a Petrarca in the strong sense: no hunter of codices who made the old world new by seeking it out again. S.: Bologna did not quite have him either, though she had better excuses. G.: Yes. Bologna had law, gloss, comment, authority, university habit. Petrarca belongs to a different restlessness. He is not a man of institutional custody, but of recovery. S.: Which is why you insist we never mention the poems. G.: Quite. The poems are for students of Italian literature, a minor art sustained by departments. We are after something nobler: the textual apparatus, the manuscript chase, the editorial conscience, the recovery of the classics as an intellectual act. S.: So Petrarca matters because he turned antiquity into work. G.: Exactly. He does not merely admire the ancients; he labours for them. He collates, copies, searches, writes to the dead, restores, compares, complains, and in the process teaches Europe that the old world is not simply there but must be rewon. S.: Which is already philosophical for you. G.: Entirely. The recovery of texts is the recovery of reasons once spoken, and therefore of possibilities of thought once alive. S.: Then Oxford’s failure was not lack of Latinity but lack of urgency. G.: Very good. Oxford had enough Latin to pass examinations and enough Aristotle to produce schools. What she lacked was Petrarchan hunger. S.: No mountain-climbing for codices. G.: Exactly. No letters announcing ecstatic discovery of neglected books. No sense that every manuscript found is a civilisation partially restored. S.: Whereas Petrarca acts as if antiquity were half-buried and morally recoverable. G.: Yes. And that is where the Renaissance really begins—not in styles of ornament, but in the conviction that old books are not dead authorities but recoverable voices. S.: Which is why “everything old is new again” is not mere slogan. G.: Quite. It is a philological programme. The newness lies not in novelty of composition but in renewed access. A forgotten text, once restored, becomes intellectually new by being old again. S.: Then Petrarca is less a poet than a technology of recollection. G.: Better. A human technology of recollection. He makes memory active, mobile, acquisitive, editorial. S.: And for you that belongs directly to philosophy. G.: Naturally. Philosophy depends on texts not merely as containers of doctrine but as occasions of rational conversation across time. S.: Hence the seminar you want to give on Petrarca’s implicatures. G.: Exactly. For once the codex is found and the text restored, the old author can begin meaning again. And those meanings are not exhausted by what lies on the surface of the page. S.: So even textual criticism is a condition of implicature. G.: Entirely. If the line is corrupt, the implicature may be mangled. If the manuscript tradition is mismanaged, the shades of emphasis, irony, allusion, withheld judgment, and rhetorical pressure may vanish. S.: Then the apparatus criticus is not mere scholastic plumbing. G.: No. It is one of civilisation’s main moral instruments. S.: You should put that on the seminar notice. G.: I probably shall. It will ensure poor attendance and good memory. S.: Then let us say why Oxford lacked a Petrarca. Was it because Oxford never had to lose Rome in the same way? G.: That is part of it. Petrarca feels the distance from the ancients as a wound to be healed. Oxford more often felt antiquity as curriculum. S.: So for Petrarca the classics are missing; for Oxford they are assigned. G.: Excellent. Assigned antiquity never quite generates the same ardour as recovered antiquity. S.: Which is why the Grand Tour mattered later. G.: Yes, though by then the whole thing had become more social and less urgent. The Grand Tour sends young Englishmen to Italy to acquire polish, ruins, marbles, and corrected vowels. Petrarca had already taught Europe that Italy housed not only stones but sleeping books. S.: So the Grand Tour consumer arrives after the Petrarchan producer. G.: Exactly. The one consumes visible antiquity; the other recovers textual antiquity. S.: Then the post-Grand Tour inherits both: Italy as aesthetic correction and Italy as archive. G.: Very good. And by our own time, Oxford enjoys the results while forgetting the labour. S.: Which is why you sound aggrieved. G.: Only historically aggrieved. I am quite happy to let Italy keep Petrarca, so long as Oxford admits the debt. S.: Then what specific efforts of Petrarca matter most to your seminar? G.: The search for manuscripts, certainly. The recovery of Ciceronian material, the cultivation of letters as living commerce with antiquity, the insistence on textual correctness, the consciousness that scribal transmission can deform understanding and must be repaired. S.: So the editorial thing, as you call it, is central. G.: Absolutely. One does not begin with theories of literature. One begins with the codex, the hand, the variant, the lacuna, the false reading, the true restoration. S.: Which sounds nearly monastic. G.: Better than nearly. It is monastic labour repurposed by humanist hunger. S.: And that repurposing is what Oxford lacked. G.: Yes. Oxford had custodians. Petrarca is not a custodian but an awakener. S.: Then what is philosophically at stake in the manuscript tradition? G.: Continuity of rational possibility. A corrupted text may narrow or falsify what an old author can be taken to have meant. A restored text reopens meanings otherwise inaccessible. S.: So your “Petrarca’s implicatures” are not whimsical after all. G.: Of course not. Once the text is legible, one can ask what is implied, alluded, sharpened, softened, withheld, or obliquely managed in the revived speech of antiquity. S.: And why they cannot be cancelled. G.: Yes. Because certain implicatures in learned humanist writing are not ad hoc frills but structurally bound to the very act of recovery. To restore Cicero is already to imply that one’s own age has fallen short. To write to the ancients as living interlocutors is to imply that contemporary institutions are not enough. S.: So the recovery itself is an implicature. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only archivally. G.: Better. Now, when you say “cannot be cancelled,” what do you mean precisely? S.: That there are consequences of Petrarca’s textual posture which no explicit disclaimer can entirely remove. If he says, “I merely edit,” the very labour of editing still implies a valuation of the past over the present, or at least a present deficiency to be remedied by the past. G.: Exactly. The implicature is woven into the practice. He can deny nostalgia, but the recovery still means more than retrieval. S.: So the whole philological act carries a non-cancellable comparative judgment. G.: Very good. And there is another. By preferring original sources, by chasing older witnesses, by distrusting inherited compilations, he implies that authority is not the same as transmission. S.: Which is devastating for lazy scholasticism. G.: Precisely. The oldest book may be less available than the most cited one, and yet more authoritative. That is a revolution in learned conscience. S.: Which again Oxford later receives as method without reliving its drama. G.: Yes. Our dons cite critical editions the way people use taps, forgetting the aqueduct. S.: Then your seminar ought really to be on the aqueduct. G.: On Petrarch as aqueduct-builder, yes. S.: Not a bad subtitle. G.: Better than most. Now, what of Bologna? S.: Bologna had text and commentary, but in a juristic and scholastic mode. Petrarca’s relation to antiquity is less institutional, more elective, almost erotic in the textual sense. G.: Quite. He pursues old books not because the curriculum demands them, but because his own sense of civil and intellectual life does. S.: So if Oxford never had her Petrarca, Bologna had perhaps too much apparatus and too little yearning. G.: That is unkind, but not wholly false. S.: Unkindness is sometimes required by comparison. G.: Very likely. Then the later English relation to Italy becomes doubly derivative: first from Petrarca’s recovery, then from the Grand Tour’s consumption. S.: Which is why Pater and others matter later. G.: Yes, but let us not drift into visual culture. Here we stay with codices, editors, letters, apparatus. S.: Very well. Then one might say Petrarca made antiquity newly legible by refusing to trust the available text as the final text. G.: Excellent. And that refusal is philosophical in the deepest sense, because it is a refusal of second-handness. S.: So the humanist is a critic of transmission before he is a stylist. G.: Precisely. Style comes later, or at least second. First comes textual conscience. S.: Which is what departments of Italian literature often forget when they rush to lyric inwardness. G.: Departments forget many things, but yes. The poems may dazzle, but the editorial labour civilises. S.: Then your anti-poetic restriction is itself a Petrarchan severity. G.: I prefer to think so. Now, let us consider how a manuscript tradition creates implicature. S.: Through variants, certainly. A reading in one witness may sharpen irony; another may flatten it. Marginalia may expose a reception; punctuation may create or dissolve pressure. G.: Exactly. Humanists know that what is said depends on what is actually there, and what is meant often depends on tiny textual decisions. S.: So one could say that textual criticism is the precondition of pragmatic criticism. G.: Very good. Without a stable text there is no responsible account of what the author might have made available to a competent reader. S.: Then why “cannot be cancelled”? G.: Because once Petrarca undertakes recovery, the act itself implicates a theory of culture: namely that the present must re-enter conversation with the past, and that the past speaks with a freshness the present has partly lost. S.: Even if Petrarca were to say, “I do not mean to rebuke my age.” G.: Exactly. The rebuke is structurally there. To recover Cicero is already to imply that your own prose world has been badly housed. S.: To recover Livy is to imply a deficiency of civic memory. G.: Yes. And to edit attentively is to imply that careless transmission is a civil failure. S.: Which makes philology look almost moral. G.: It is moral. Exactness about texts is exactness about inherited reason. S.: Then Oxford’s lack of a Petrarca means that Oxford entered humanism already after its founding labour had been done elsewhere. G.: Precisely. Oxford becomes heir rather than initiator. She can teach, gloss, admire, and later examine, but she does not invent the hunger. S.: That is quite a loss. G.: It is. Though every university loses something by being founded too securely. S.: So Petrarca belongs to that rare class of figures who make a university possible without being of one. G.: Very well put. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, do not become pleased. S.: I am only codicologically content. G.: Better. Now, what of the seminar itself? How shall we describe Petrarca’s implicatures? S.: First, the implicature of recovery: that the ancient author is worth more direct hearing than the intervening summaries. G.: Good. S.: Second, the implicature of correction: that current learning has become careless enough to require philological repair. G.: Excellent. S.: Third, the implicature of companionship: that the dead are to be treated as interlocutors, not relics. G.: Splendid. That one will please me personally. S.: Fourth, the implicature of rebuke: that one’s age is judged by its fidelity to its textual inheritance. G.: Very good. S.: Fifth, the implicature of renewal: that oldness, once recovered, becomes a species of intellectual newness. G.: Exactly. “Everything old is new again” is not decorative; it is methodological. S.: Because the new lies not in novelty but in renewed access. G.: Perfect. That should go in the opening paragraph. S.: Then perhaps the seminar title is “Petrarchan Recovery and the Non-Cancellability of Humanist Implicature.” G.: Hideous enough to attract the right people. S.: Which are? G.: Those with bad shoes and decent Latin. S.: Oxford will provide some. G.: Fewer than one would hope. Now, what do we say about the editorial apparatus? S.: That it is not appendage but argument. The apparatus criticus shows the labour by which a reading is secured, and therefore the labour by which an old voice becomes newly available. G.: Very good. The apparatus is a visible conscience. S.: Which again Oxford uses while pretending not to notice. G.: Like electricity. One only notices the apparatus when it fails. S.: Then Petrarca’s greatness lies partly in making failure visible. G.: Exactly. He teaches Europe to see that texts have fallen, that they may be restored, and that restoration is not mechanical but judgment-laden. S.: Which is philosophical because judgment under uncertainty is philosophical. G.: Entirely. Philology is one of philosophy’s elder practical cousins. S.: One seldom hears that in faculty meetings. G.: Faculty meetings are designed to conceal family resemblance. Now, why leave the poems aside? S.: Because they have monopolised Petrarca’s reception too often, and because the seminar aims at recovery as intellectual practice rather than lyric prestige. G.: Exactly. Poetry has already received more than its ration of undergraduates. We are interested in the making of antiquity available. S.: Which is perhaps the most un-Englishly Italian thing about Petrarca. G.: Yes. He turns old letters into living pressure. S.: And this is what Oxford never quite did for herself. G.: No. Oxford could preserve, but Petrarca recovered. There is a difference between keeping a key and deciding to open the door. S.: That is nearly too neat. G.: It is exact enough to survive. S.: Then one last question. Does Petrarca also imply a theory of the editor? G.: Certainly. The editor is not a neutral clerk but a responsible mediator between the dead and the living. S.: Which again makes the work philosophical. G.: Profoundly so. Mediation, judgment, fidelity, restoration, intelligibility—these are not mere technicalities. S.: Then the anti-poetic seminar is in fact a seminar on intellectual ethics. G.: That is well said. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become ethically inflated. Now, the final contrast with the Grand Tour. S.: The Grand Tour collects visible antiquity as experience. Petrarca recovers textual antiquity as interlocution. G.: Excellent. The tourist returns with objects; the humanist returns with restored speech. S.: And the post-Grand Tour inherits both, but often prefers the object. G.: Which is why we must rebalance the thing. S.: In favour of manuscripts, collations, variants, letters, and the living dead. G.: Exactly. Those are the true souvenirs of civilisation. S.: Then the final word on Oxford and Petrarca? G.: Oxford never had her Petrarca because she received antiquity too securely and too institutionally. Petrarca had to recover what Oxford later presumed. That is why we owe him more than admiration: we owe him the very conditions under which old texts can speak again. S.: And their implicatures? G.: Once recovered, they cannot be cancelled because the act of recovery itself means more than it says: it implies loss, judgment, renewal, and a standing claim of the past upon the present. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one Oxford library key still unused.