Modica deals at length (pp. 147-69)

Modica deals at length (pp. 147-69) with a number of objections raised in Italy to della Volpe's conception of paraphrase, but there seems to me a further point to be made. If the function of criticism is paraphrase, the comparison between a literal-material base and a poetic context, how is it possible to identify critically a particular discourse as an "organic context" in the first place? Linguistics can offer no real help, and in fact della Volpe admits that such identification is finally an exercise of "taste": "This task can only be accomplished by a precise perception of the semantic locus of the text (and this perception is the condition for the exercise of 'taste' or sense of 'style') -that is by seeing whether the text, as a whole or as an element, is something organic-contextual or even omni-textual" (p. 127). Once granting the perception of taste, "the rest," as della Volpe argues, may well "follow of its own accord" (p. 127), but it is a lot to grant to an aesthetic that proposes to go beyond Croce's identification between the "genius" of artistic intuition and the "taste" of the critic. Paraphrase thus remains in a sense an after-the-fact comparative operation, contingent on a "taste" which mysteriously perceives the organically contextual, and dependent for its own value on the value of poetry identified in the exercise of taste. Paraphrase, that is, may be able to determine the artistic truth value of a poem in relation to its socio-historical moment, but the value of poetry, specifically the organic-contextual model of poetry, as ideal recomposition of material contradictions, remains in a real sense self-confirming. This may account in part at least for a striking comment in an interview in Avanti! only two years before his death in 1968: