The Age of Secrecy by Daniel Jütte
Author:Daniel Jütte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00
Who Was Abramo Colorni?
In the drafts to one of the most enigmatic works of modern literature, there is an entry that is as surprising as it is cryptic: âscotographia/-scribia,â wrote James Joyce in one of the notebooks for his last great work, Finnegans Wake (1939).698 Was this a coincidence, or did Joyce know about Abramo Colorni, the Jewish professore deâ secreti whose 1593 treatise on cryptography was titled Scotographia, a neologism not found anywhere else? We do know that Joyce liked to take cues from Jewish history, as in Ulysses, a work containing various allusions to Jewish Renaissance mysticism.699 It is entirely plausible that Joyce learned of Colorniâs work, or least its title, from the secondary literature or a library catalogue. After all, Joyce lived briefly in Italy after 1900. In the case of Finnegans Wake, the authorâs familiarity with the world of early modern Italy is strikingly revealed in the way the novelâs basic setup is influenced by the philosophy of Giambattista Vico.700 Moreover, Finnegans Wake also contains a wide range of allusions to Judaism. One can read this equally witty and experimental opus, which has no plot in any conventional sense and uses words from almost seventy languages, as a âfarced epistol to the hibruwsâ (Joyceâs words)âa wordplay that borrows from the New Testament (âfirst epistle to the Hebrewsâ).701 If our hypothesis is correct, however, it does not necessarily mean Joyce was interested in Colorni as a Jew. If he came across the Mantuan Jewâs cryptographic treatise, he was probably intrigued by the idea of a âdark writing,â which is how the word âscotographiaâ would be translated. Symbolic imagery revolving around darkness and dreams plays an important role in Finnegans Wake, as Joyce himself acknowledged.702 Joyceâs interest in the concept of a âdark writingâ has to be seen against this backdrop, even though he did not return to the term he had entered into his notebook when it came to putting the novel in writing. But even if the notebook entry was entirely coincidental, it is tempting to speculate about a link between Colorni, the professore deâ secreti vaunted by contemporaries, and the very novel that has been called an unsurpassed literary âcompilation of arcane materials.â703
Secrecy and mastery of the arcane are keywords for understanding Colorniâs biography. His career exhausted the entire spectrum of activities in the economy of secretsâfrom military inventions, to trading in curiosa and dealing with divinatory practices, to magic and card tricks. This could easily create the impression that Colorni chose his activities aimlessly and that he was indeed the kind of opportunistic charlatan that some historians suggest he was. Colorni is certainly not to be envied for his posthumous reputation in historical scholarship. This is not just because he has largely fallen into oblivion. (He is not even mentioned in the authoritative works on Jewish magic, alchemy, and esotericism.) When Colorniâs biography actually does get mentioned, it is often written off as a curious episode.
We can distinguish three different approaches to Colorni in previous scholarship.
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